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Re: Diplomacy
I'll see what I can do for an EOG, may as well start it now.
Pre-Game
AKA the section where I explain why I picked Turkey.
It's not much of an explanation, though. I wasn't sure how much time I'd have to actually play, so I wanted to make sure I didn't get one of the powers in the middle. I didn't think I'd have the time to manage negotiations as intensely as playing Austria, Italy, or Russia would require, and I didn't want to re-play France or England. Of course, playing particularly well would require wide-reaching diplomacy work regardless, but on the way to get there from a starting position of playing badly I decided I could at least settle for playing okay.
Kinseth also posted some pretty helpful early game guides for each power, so I studied up on Turkey and other nearby powers for a bit before the game started.
1901
So here I am in the corner I've chosen, first order of business is to decide whether I should ally with Russia or Austria. I was pretty set on that ally being Austria from a fairly early point. I prefer to side with the underdog, and I didn't like the idea of siding with Russia and having to constantly tiptoe around their southern fleet and the possibility of them selling me out to Italy. This somewhat preemptive choice may have worked against me, but hindsight's 20/20 I suppose.
My initial impressions of everyone:
Austria: We seemed to hit it off early and made some pretty detailed plans. They agreed to working against Russia with me, and also hinted at having had fairly extensive conversation with Italy.
Russia: Was also willing to commit to fairly detailed plans, to the point that I felt kind of bad about the knife I was holding. Still, if Austria had been a bit more reticent I probably would have changed my gameplan to working with Russia.
Italy: Fairly uncommunicative, beyond suggesting briefly that we should team up against Austria together. I became convinced quite early that they were out to remove me as well.
Germany: Seemed like a solid player, and seemed less and less in a position to cause problems for me as the year went on. I would have very much preferred to keep them in the game if possible, but my ability to manipulate England or France was fairly limited.
England: Obviously wasn't having any of my nonsense, and shut down my attempts to nudge them into aggression against Russia or France fairly emphatically. Clearly I wasn't going to make much progress here.
France: Agreed to an alliance of information early on, which I believe was more or less honored for the first few years. Neither of us had anything that useful to give to the other though, other than France letting me know that me choosing my power has got people a little nervous.
One part of 1901 went off without a hitch, as I was able to allay Russia's fears about my Spring move to ARM and get my fleet into BLA in the Fall. Unfortunately, Austria lost TRI to Italy, which was a major hit to our momentum.
I'll do more of this later, hopefully these will get shorter further in the game heh.
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