Pre-game Diplomacy after Bids and before Gamestart

[twolf11]

I thought others might be interested in this idea.

We made a house rule so we could do diplomacy after selection of countries, so we could still do pre-game Declaration of War (DOW). The way we did this was:

1) Players did initial bids using the GAP, but no additional Declarations of War.
2) Host determined starting countries using the GAP.
3) Host published the starting countries, and determined if there were any ties the computer had to resolve.
4) Host changed any starting bids, which resulted in ties so the new numbers would result in the same countries being awarded to the same players at the same cost later.
5) Players now negotiated with actual player who may possibly be allies or enemies to determine pre-game declarations.
6) Players do NEW bid files with the SAME numbers, except for the numbers changed by the host to prevent ties; and with any pre-game Declaration of War they wanted.
7) Host ran the NEW bid files through GAP, which assigned the same countries and determined the final .txt and .sel files with any pre-game Declaration of War.
8) Host emails the final .txt files and generates the gamestart.pbm with the final .sel file.

We used this in our new Aflame campaign and it seemed to work well. We didn't have Prussia doing a pre-game war with France by themselves without first talking to Austria. Russia knows who is running Turkey and what they might be thinking before he determined pre-game declaration. GB had the opportunity to influence the other MP. I think this method made the startup of the game closer to which one experiences in a FTF game.


r/
J.D.

[Ralegh]

Nice.
 
How would peaple like the process amended so that you don't nominate pre-existing alliances and declarations with the bids, but rather do them in a seperate round afterwards?  Doesn't sound too hard to make as an option for PBEM games...  MARSHALL?

[Jimmer]

It should be really easy to implement: Don't "charge" major powers the political points for declaring war on another major power in January, 1805 (or, the first turn of the game, for when other scenarios are added). Calls to allies would be irrelevant, because there won't be any allies at that point. This would make the first diplo phase be combined with a pre-game diplo phase (officially, to the computer, that is).
 
It would be a little artificial, but the cost to playability and historicity would be minimal.

[Monadman]

ORIGINAL: Jimmer

It should be really easy to implement: Don't "charge" major powers the political points for declaring war on another major power in January, 1805 (or, the first turn of the game, for when other scenarios are added). Calls to allies would be irrelevant, because there won't be any allies at that point. This would make the first diplo phase be combined with a pre-game diplo phase (officially, to the computer, that is).

It would be a little artificial, but the cost to playability and historicity would be minimal.

Don’t like workarounds after the setup phase.

In the meantime . . . until this can be properly addressed, if the host has no problems with file management, edit the sel file before importing into EiANW and cross-index the aggressor (vertically listed) with the major power having war declared on it (horizontally listed) and replace hyphens “-” with “War”.

Vertical and horizontal order
Nation Britain France Russia Austria Prussia Spain Turkey
Britain
France
Russia
Austria
Prussia
Spain
Turkey

Example (from the sel file): Britain declared a pre-existing war against Turkey
-,-,-,-,-,-,War
-,-,-,-,-,-,-
-,-,-,-,-,-,-
-,-,-,-,-,-,-
-,-,-,-,-,-,-
-,-,-,-,-,-,-
-,-,-,-,-,-,-

Three things to be careful with:
1. Do not add spaces
2. Make sure the “W” in War is uppercase and;
3. Do not have a major power declare war on itself

Richard