Same topic as in your other thread: the is no "rational player" stereotype.
I myself know that i have become much better over the last years. Experience does have a certain influence.

Based on your logic, chess would be all about puck too, as there the your opponent can make mistakes too.

Well yes, chess is often about luck. You choose an opening, the opponent chooses an opening, and it depends on whether or not you have enough attention allocated the right way to anticipate your opponent's future possible maneuvers.

Experience helps to reduce the demand for anticipation since you don't have to allocate as much attention when you've experienced possibilities, but having experience is luck as well since some players start playing before others, and people have other things in life to do besides playing the game.

As for the "rational player", we're talking about the ability to finish games efficiently. There does come a point in many games where the game is locked down, and you just have to make the right moves to control all possible maneuvers.

Before this lock happens, you're trying to maximize the chance of it happening by expanding as quickly as possible while maintaining advantageous positions to break opponents' lines.

...and then you learn that expanding as quickly as possible causes everyone to ally against you thus minimizing your chance of long-term victory.

Well yes, that's because a lot of people playing are irrational.

Stupid people gang up against smart people since they anticipate smart people having more skill and believe that stupid people only have a chance at winning if they gang up, so people end up trying to disguise themselves as stupid.

Basically yes. Guessing the moves of three players mightn't be a problem, but guessing how they will all interact, what they will tell eachother, etc. Perhaps one of them is a tactical or diplomatic genius and the others will all follow his direction to kill you even if it leaves them vulnerable to one another. So while predicting the probable moves of other players might be reasonable, they might form alliance structures, or one might make a good-but-less-than-optimal move... there are variables you can't properly account for.

I look at the game as a combination of Risk, chess, and poker. So, while there's an element of luck, e.g., drawing a central or smaller power, or having three players who signed on first form an alliance against you, I think there's a lot more skill involved, e.g., how you choose to expand, who you attack and when you attack them, "bluffing" your position so a larger power won't attack you, how you build functioning relationships, how you handle press... So, I would say luck is 20% or less of a factor.

Diplomacy is probably the main game in which luck does *not play an integral role. Your friends were probably just too young and inexperienced to understand diplomatic reasoning and negotiation.

Diplomacy is not based on luck, it is based on skill. That is the reason it is my favorite game, it involves more strategy than games like risk and it has no dice rolling, card picking, etc.

"My father said Azula was born lucky. He said that I was lucky to be born. I don’t need luck though. I don’t want it. I’ve always had to struggle and fight and that made me strong. That made me who I am." Zuko.

"Chance favours th prapered mind" Louis Pateur.
"Audentes fortuna iuvat" Virgilio.

To test your theory, try playing a game of full diplomacy against active diplomats, but refuse to view or answer any messages. I bet your success rate would plummet.

Luck only plays a part in pure tactical situations. As soon as diplomacy is introduced, luck is no longer the predominant factor. Also, a superior strategy can often defeat superior tactics. Even in pure tactical situations, knowing how to predict the opponents moves, can often improve the likelihood of success. This also takes skill.

Even negotiations are based around luck though. They depend on your fellow players' initial attitudes when approaching them which is out of your control. A lot of expert Diplomacy depends on making looks appear deceiving too so people trust you more than they should as well as implicitly counterbalancing the negotiations of other players to make them coincidentally advantageous.

The same goes for unpredictable tactics, and expert players will understand how to coordinate strategy with tactics too. It's easy to predict a repetitive player stuck in a pattern. It's not easy to predict someone who knows how prediction works.

hogwash

You have a flawed understanding of luck.

The oxford dictionary's definition of luck is: "success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions."

There is no argument that would convince me that words in a negotiation were arranged by chance.

By the way, regarding your earlier claim that "chess is often about luck". Once the initial color is chosen, there is no luck whatsoever in chess.

yes, it's all luck, just like chess!
the fact that we have no dice, no cards, no element of chance would of course tell you this game is one of pure luck!?

"The problem is that yes, people make decisions as to how to play, but even among rational players, the choice to move, support, or hold a position is basically like rock, paper, scissors."

I once went 11 victories in a row playing RPC against different opponents in sets of 3 games apiece.

Raro, you can't seriously expect us to believe you used rpc on each and every move for 11 straight games.

no, not playing Diplomacy, actually playing RPC. I was just trying to make a point.

Oh. That makes more sense.

There could be a few different points that could made with that. What point were you trying to make?

I don't know, I just wanted to brag about my impressive RPS (correction) streak.

I thought you might be a mentalist, or psychic or something. Perhaps you are and don't know it. Was that 33 wins altogether?

many went 3-0, but there was a smattering of close matches. The key is knowing when and how to use the dreaded "scissor-opening" move.

That would have gotten me for sure. I might expect the cisssor opening, but never the scissor. :-)

There is some element of luck in diplomacy but less than in almost any other aspect of life.

+1 Scuba

Guessing moves have little to do with luck since its a combination of reading the opponent and doing a risk-reward analysis. Unlike rock paper scissors, there is always a smarter move, the 'luck' moves are about adequately measuring the risk and reward of both your opponent and your situation as well as being able to read his personality to get a feel of which one he is more likely to do.

The best players on this site are able to out predict me in most games I play with them, while players that I think that I am better at this game I am normally able to out predict. I will acknowledge though that there is some luck involved, however as I have alluded in your earlier threads, good players chose their own luck. If you are good enough at the diplomacy aspect, you'll rarely find yourself in a situation where you rely on the luck of strategy to determine your fate. So while there is a luck component, it is rather minimal.

The only board game I know of that has no luck whatsoever is Imperial;
Like diplomacy, there is no dice or anything, its a bigger army always wins.
Unlike diplomacy there is no simultaneous turns, so giving orders never requires guessing. There is a currency aspect of the game and to determine who plays what country people bid on the countries. The object of the game isn't to conquer the world, but to end up with the most money, having your country win on the board will give you money, but you can easily win the game even if your country doesn't.

Its by far my fav board game, and I don't know of any sites that play it online, so I haven't played it in years though.

There is NO luck in the game, nor in any game nor in life.
Every action is a result of another person's action. And that latter action because you cannot control it, or see it or know it is coming, we choose to call it luck.

The fact that a car run over you is because the driver was stupid, drank etc and because you chose to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Small tiny decisions of lfe are still decisions and not luck

Even in a game of Risk or card drawing like poker there is no luck. The deck is there and everytime is different because SOMEONE shuffled it! yes, because you shuffled 5 times and in that particular way of movement the cards ended as they are; and because you are sitting in that chair you get the cards you get.
ergo, other factors gave you those cards, not luck.

another example since you talked about stupid people. Stupid people signed up in my game of dplomacy. and their stupid reasoning results in attacking me. It is my fault for joining a game where I cannot control the situation or negotiate it because their reasoning does not much at all with mine.whatever moves I do I will still end up fighting another idiot who does not think beyond his finger.

*match sorry about the grammar. errors am.typing too fast for my non english brain.