TL Diplomacy

On February 04 2014 02:50 Slayer91 wrote:

The objective of the game is to manage to control 18 supply centres. This is just over half the supply centres in the game.
A supply centre is a country marked with a star. To gain a supply centre you must occupy it with a unit (fleet or army) by the fall turn of the year. There are 2 turns per year, Spring and Fall. You may occupy it during Spring is it may be easier to hold for example if you take it one turn earlier. You keep this centre until some other nation occupies the centre with his own unit after a fall turn.

You are allowed 1 unit per supply centre. At the end of the fall turn there is a build phase ("winter" turn). You may build ONLY IN YOUR HOME CENTRES. These are the 3 centres that you start with. For England they are London/Edi/Lvp. You are allowed to build additional units based on how many more centres than units you have. If you have captured 1 centre and you have 4 centres, and still 3 units, you may build 1 more unit in that turn.
If you have less centres than units you choose which unit to disband.

Fighting: There are 3 basic commands. MOVE. HOLD. SUPPORT.
MOVE: You can move to any adjacent territory. The move command is synomous with "attack".
HOLD. You stay where you are.
If you move to a country that some other unit is also moving to, or some other unit currently occupies, you "bounce". That is both units go back to where they started.
The only way to dislodge or force your way into an area is with SUPPORT. A unit that can move to an area, can also support a unit to that area. For example a unit in Tyrolia could SUPPORT a unit in Burgundy to an occupied Munich. A unit in Gascony CANNOT support that unit in Bungundy to anywhere except Marseilles or Paris.
You can also suppoty defensively. An army in Berlin could support this Munich army and since it would be 2 vs 2 a bounce would occur. SUPPORTing units stay where they are, if the move is successfully supported then that unit gets to dislodge the unit that was there and there is a separate retreat phase for where it moves. (The only way to kill units is to take centres and thereby force their disbanding it or to surround it so it has nowhere to retreat)

You can also "cut" support. An Army in vienna could attack the support army in Tyrolia to defend Munich. However if the Tyrolia is the one attacking and Burgundy supporting, Vienna would move into Tyrolia and Army Tyrolia would move into Munich and Munich would have to retreat (assuming no support).

Fleets are like armies, except they can only move along sea or costal areas. In the case that a county (spain, bulgaria, st. petersburg) have coasts to multiple seas, you can only go to the coast that your sea is connected to. In the case of Spain, a Fleet in the Mid Atlantic Ocean can choose which coast to go to. (SC spain can move to Gulf of Lyons and Western Med, NC can move to Gascony).

A fleet has a special command called CONVOY. (can be cut like support). You can use the CONVOY command to move an army across a sea. The way to order it is say you want an army in Edi to convoy to St. Petersburg
A Edi - ST.P
F NWG C A Edi - STP
F BArents C A Edi- STP
You can suppor ta convoy but not with the convoying units

A convoy requires 1 fleet but the chain can be as long as you wish. The advantage to convoying is that if you convoy into a coastal area you have more attacking chances than a fleet just occupying it.

Thats the basics.
Its pretty intuitive actually.

--1 Unit per Centre
--You can only win by attacking with 1 more unit than defending

Since you need more units, its important to make deals and alliances with other countries. You can backstab them later but for at least a good portion of the game you rely on other nations to help you build up an advantage. Often 2-3-4 way draws occur because alliances hold each other off at equal strength.