Gunboat diplomacy is a methodology by which you declare your intentions by your actions.
The boardgame Diplomacy even has a variant called "Gunboat" because you don't have a "talking" diplomacy phase, you just move, and let your actions speak for what you'd say if you were "chatting" about an alliance.
It often consists of doing little things, and is just as often characterized by what you *dont'* do as much as what you do:
(example1: I have Peru, Brazil, Argentina. I take Venezuala, but leave Central America alone even though it has only 1 army, because the owner of C.A. is fighting with another player in upper North America and maybe if I leave him alone he'll leave me alone)
(example2: I have been fighting for Africa while Player2 has been fighting for S.A. I "fail" to attack Brazil when it is momentarily under-defended, and continue my crusade to unite Africa -- and after he gets all of S.A, I continue to "fail" to fortify North Africa except for enough to protect against lesser built up areas in Western and Southern Europe. To me, this is saying "no need for us to squabble and waste one another's resources, we can share for the time being".)
Moving to block (and protect) another player is yet another example. To my mind, this is not entirely selfish on my part, and so I'm thinking he should do me the courtesy of not attacking through my block. It's a real bummer to move to protect someone from being eliminated and having them turn and attack you, I tell you.
And yet for any of this I don't want to POINT IT OUT in game chat because maybe other people don't have a clue either and I don't want to telegraph my/our intentions.
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My questions for you are this:
How much gunboat diplomacy do you employ in your CC games?
Is there a level of play at which more players seem to "get it"? Because in my first 20 games, I'd say that most of the people I've played so far don't have a clue, though a couple of the higher ranked folks I've played so far apparently had at least the concept.
Is this not a concept or "style of play" used on CC much? Am I fooling myself thinking I can communicate in this manner with this group of players? I've notice that there are fairly limited styles of play here so far, including a distinct tendency for players to "turtle" rather than all cooperate to keep overall numbers of armies down by systematically whittling people. (I know *why* there is a tendency for this, but there are reasons for the other style too (more about this in another topic later)).
Just curious,
Yvgni
