myers@uwmacc.UUCP (Latitudinarian Lobster) (06/27/85)
> > After 1901, it was all fairly absurd. Austria, after his colossal > reaming by Italy in S'01, dropped out in the fall. At this point, I'm > willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and accept that network > problems are what caused him to leave the game. However, a replacement > should have been found to try and salvage the position. Things got worse > when Turkey dropped out a year latter for the same reason. Since his was a > perfectly viable position, the fact that no replacement was found just made > no sense at all, and made the rest of the game totally meaningless. > As I thought I had made abundantly clear, neither of our two alternates nor anyone supplied by any of the players submitted moves in time to prevent either of these two countries from going down the tubes. In future games, I'll allow a Disorderly country to be picked up at any time, rather than causing permanent Disorder after two turns NMR. I'm not going to strongarm people or go walk the streets looking for certain replacements. > > At this point, it became painfully obvious that unless we all did > something soon, Russia was going to win. In one of the most amazing > quick-form alliances I have ever seen, Italy, England, and myself banded > together to beat back the Russian. The degree of cooperation between > England and myself must have had the Russian staring shitfaced at his map. > The endless succession of supply-center trades and foreign supports, with > 100% trust on both sides was a wonder to behold. > It was indeed! > > And now, a few comments about procedure. In addition to the problems > with the network, this game was also plagued by a GM (Jeff Myers) who seems > to delight in altering the rules in all sorts of strange ways. For example, > the idea of making retreats/builds/removals conditional on moves instead of > the other way around is bizarre. It doesn't speed the game up any, and it > makes things far more confusing. > I'm still somewhat fond of this procedure, but in the next game I run, retreats and builds will be submitted conditionally with the previous turn. As I made clear from the outset, I had never GMd a game before, and was bound to make mistakes. If I was unclear at points, I'm sorry. If I was inconsistent at points, I'm sorry again. > Jeff also wanted to make it mandatory for all the players to send > copies of all their diplomatic communications to him, so he could keep track > of what is going on. I don't know how other people feel about this, but I > flatly refused. > In fact, I received a very few messages early in the game. In the grams Dippy game currently going on, most messages (including mine) are ccd to the GM. What are you scared of, Roy? Or is it the additional phone charges involved? > At one point in the game, it wasn't clear who all the players were. > One of the turns included a note to the effect that the GM wasn't even sure > himself who was playing Turkey! > That's because I wasn't sure. Maybe God will grant me omniscience some day. > As in regular PBM games, I think it is a bad idea to have more than > one person playing from the same area. In PBM, this usually means state or > province. In PBEM, this would probably mean site or group of closely > related sites on a campus. In this game, we had 2 players from pur-ee and > two players (and the GM) from uwvax. Probably a good idea. But next time I'll be sure to supply more inside information to any buddies in Wisconsin who are playing :-) > > Oddly enough, with all the strange things that went on in this game, > the 3-way draw that I ended up with is the best I've ever placed. To top it > off (and not unexpectedly, given everything else that has gone on in this > game), it is not even 100% clear if the final result was a draw! As far as > I can tell, all the surviving players agreed to it, but from reading the > last move report, it sounds like Jeff is trying to either declare Italy the > winner or declare the game over with no official conclusion one way or the > other. > -- > allegra!phri!roy (Roy Smith) > System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute Who cares? Everyone is, I think, in agreement that Italy would have won, but a draw was agreed to. Perhaps you should listen to an old Monkees tune, *Shades of Gray*, and stop taking a game quite so seriously. jeff m