EPT
After writing this, I feel like I just covered a lot of boring stuff. Don't worry, this is just laying the foundation for the better parts of my diplo series!
If you were around during BW, you might have remembered seeing Diplo games hosted from time to time on US East/West. There was a small community of players that played this map religiously. And they got very, very good at it. A clan called "Soviet" (named after the USSR country in the map) became the central hub for diplo.
So what is diplo? Diplomacy 7.7 was loosely based on the board game diplomacy (I've never played it myself.) You select a single country from several different mostly European nations and attempt to conquer the world! The diplomacy map looked like this:+ Show Spoiler +
![[image loading]](http://repdepot.net/img/minimap/1024/803.jpg)
In the top left you can see the beacons used at the start of the game for country selection, as well as a bunch of stacked up buildings (a set for every potential play in the game, used for upgrades). Looking then south east towards the main part of the map, you see a bunch of buildings on the landmass. This is what the map looks like before anybody has selected a country. The photon cannons on the map roughly outline the nations (as the cannons are usually only at the border of your country. Once you select a country the game will give you control over all the pre-placed buildings and units in that country. In a 6 player game for instance, the map could look something like:
+ Show Spoiler +
![[image loading]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/HD1pjzIyqqE/hqdefault.jpg)
So how does the game function? Basically the game gives you somewhere in the range of 500-1000 minerals per turn (every 4 minutes game time) for each city you control. Take another look at the above screenshot. Next to the command center, there's a big grey silo-looking doodad. That map doodad indicates a city (that one in particular is a capital), and to claim it you have build a building next to it. Another example is just southwest of the armory. Scattered throughout the map are these doodads. Your objective is to claim as many of them as you can, so that you can build an army to conquer the world.
Once the game has started and the players have picked countries, the buildings of all the other countries disappear, save for the defenses (cannons and turrets). Using your units, you kill the defenses around the map to claim cities. Your army generally will consist heavily of infantry, built out of barracks. Using your command center to build scvs (that build in about 2 seconds) you can construct additional barracks on top of the barracks you start with, allowing you to produce more troops. You can also build factories to produce significantly more expensive but stronger mech units, and starports to build air units (though for the most part the air units in diplo other than dropships were terrible). The real fun came in with the unique units. Every country had a "unique unit" that would replace the default one. For instance, Syria's unique unit was a more powerful marine. If you controlled Syria's capital, your marines would be upgraded into Syrian marines.
The unit's stats were different than the BW units stats. Generally, higher damage and slightly higher health. The king of the infantry was the ghost as it had the furthest range. However because of damage types in broodwar, ghosts were terrible against mech units (doing 1/4th the damage). Marine type units would bring just about anything down quickly, though not at the range of the ghost. The melee type units generally had higher health and were great if you could ever get them on top of the enemy (though without dropships the chances of this were low. Ranged units dominated 7.7).
Though it was originally designed and played as a 6 or 7 player game, Diplo evolved into a 1v1 game. The best players would challenge each and fight it out, one nation vs another. Though there were a lot of nations to choose from, it quickly became apparent that some nations were better than others. The top tier nations were (in no particular order):
France
Italy
Germany
Romania (Geographically inaccurate, as the spot it occupies is actually Ukraine)
USSR
Yugoslavia
Greece
Certain matchups began to define players, and the 1v1 scene. Italy vs Romania, Germany vs Greece, France vs literally anything. In part 2, I'll tell you why these 7 countries began to define the game so heavily!
Thanks for reading part 1! Diplo 7.7 was a really fun game, and the competition in it reached an extremely high level at one point. In part 2 I'll go over the evolution of the game, and how it went from a 6 player fun game, into a 1v1 competitive game.
So we end up playing snipers or some shit which is terrible with lag
