Comments on: The Next Iteration of Diplomacy

By: Paul van der Gun

Paul van der Gun — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 10:18:04 +0000

Nice review. I played this game twice now, once with 6 players and yesterday i played it with 3 players. Both games were very good. At first i thought the 3 player game would be a bit silly as it would just be a 2 vs 1 game. However, you start with a lot of mony and with proper management you can -like you said- take over any hostile nations. The disadvantage is that that nation won’t make a lot of points in the short term as they have a lot of units. In 1 turn i actually moved the armies of Austria (which i controlled) against those of russia (which i controlled as well). After that turn i managed to make a pretty good score.
Only thing i disagree with is that Italy is a weak country. In the games i played it actually was a very good country. The 1 army mopped up the complete african continent and managed to keep the 2 important med seas. Austria was very occupied by being a pain for both Russia and Grmany, which brings me to a final tactic:
Try to control 2 countries. 1 country for scoring the points (i like England best, Italy second) and 1 country for messing everything up. As Austria is directly connected to 5 factory spots (2 Russian, 2 German and 1 Italian) i like this country for that task. But maybe i just not played enough to make a good judgement about these tactics. However, that’s going to be solved, because this game is currently #1 in my group (beating Age of Renassance after being on #1 for years).

By: Dave Knepper

Dave Knepper — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 18:13:55 +0000

Excellent review covering all of the essential points. Our group has completed 3 six-player games of Imperial; two using the basic rules and one dropping the investor card and using the optional starting money variant. While we generally enjoy the game and its mechanics, we have found that at least one player spends a great deal of game time not ‘controlling’ a country. In particular, if a player is cash poor at the time the player loses ‘control’ of a country, there is no real method for that player to get back into the game. In our last game, one player spent virtually the entire game not in ‘control’ of any country and a second player lost ‘control’ of “his country” in the last half of the game, so those players had little to do but watch the rest play (btw, these two players finished 5th & 4th respectively in the game-ahead of one of the players that had ‘control’ of two countries). Also, “Imperial” borrows the rondel and combat systems directly from its “Antike.”

By: NickDanger

NickDanger — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 11:29:47 +0000

Nice writeup! This may have to go on the list of next block of games to order. Aquire w/Guns and a bit of some other mechanics sprinkled in. I think the maps appearence to Diplomacy keeps you comparing Imperial to Diplomacy, but, to me it doesn’t sound too ‘Dippy’ to me.