An Unnecessarily Detailed Strategic Analysis of Valefisk's Diplomacy Game

Wow - genuinely really cool to have such a high-level, detailed analysis...of an absolute catastrophe ;) Thank you guys so much for doing this.

This is maybe the tenth game of diplomacy we've played as a group. We try to do everything in one night (with people hopefully sleeping at a decent hour), so the turn timer is limited to just 10 minutes. Not just 10 minutes for negotiating, ten minutes total. It doesn't always work out to ten, but keeping it like that keeps what can be a very long game moving (this one ended up being about 5 hours total). While this certainly works, it creates its own chaos...with so many units and negotations everyone ends up messing up a ton and the suboptimal moves always throw a wrench into every plan.

The ChatGPT angle certainly did not go as I was expecting it to. I was imagining it would make terrible decisions and have me throw the game almost immediately. In reality, it meant I couldn't commit fully to doing anything at all and had to flip-flop every other turn. I was trying to work around the AI while still keeping myself within its limits...but all this really did was result in turns like Spring 1905 where I'm forced to abandon a good position against France because it goes "yeah, go attack Germany now, loser" and I had to listen to it. Normally when playing diplomacy I'm one of the people you can trust more often than others, but I think me not being at all like that this game really screwed with how France/Germany/Russia were interacting with me.

Thanks again for making this, it was a really fun watch and makes me want to play more Diplomacy...although, probably not another big video like that for at least a while. This one took me over a month to edit with all the animations involved ( ;-; ). I try really hard with games like this to make it completely digestible for someone who doesn't even know what Diplomacy is, so it's really nice to take a step back from that and actually see Diplomacy as the complex game that I love.

It was definitely the most fun I've had playing Diplomacy. I should play like a total rat more often :)

Do you plan to ever strategically analyze 5D Diplomacy with Multiverse Time-Travel? Just curious!

@14:34 you say its best practice to break a dmz on turn one.... i thought it was better to honor your deals as much as possible? Couldnt tell if you were joking or serious but this hits close to home in my current russia game with ONLY public press where i have a shaky alliance with austria built on a dmz galicia and i deep down really wish i had put an army there on turn one... but then id be fighting austria AnD turkey. AND england. I really hate playing Russia. I feel like theyre always the first target in all my games whether or not i drew them.

Be nice if a certain someone in this video didn't have terrible audio. Now it's not a regular problem of course, just annoying for this video

A reminder one player was drunk and vale was useing chat gpt

56:16 ezio fucking dies

“I tell only the truth” -Teddy

“Yeah too much truth” -Maivi if I’m correct

I’m an hour and a half in and I’ve just realized that I don’t understand how this game works lol

I feel like the guest was a little too mean and mocking at points

If continuous mic problems are seen with your guests, you should sort those out before beginning to record again. A lot of moments are unclear because of mic problems in this video

Your video would be a lot better if you have each host record audio locally, That would solve the dropout issue for the listeners.

Haven’t watched the vid yet, but I was genuinely losing my mind when Vale didn’t try to finish off russia and everyone let Turkey start to snowball with no plan to stop her. At no point did it dawn on most of the players they’d have to set aside their disagreements and turn towards the menace from the southeast. An enjoyable game but also a tragedy.

9:19 ... I'm-I'm sorry, is someone screaming in the background here?

1:03:05 “At this point, you’re cooked” was so much funnier than I was expecting