Diplomatic Risk Reflection by Zachary Henry

            In this hybrid diplomatic risk, I was the president of Green and our objective was to warmonger our way to ten provinces that either contained a resource or lay adjacent to one. Our secret power was that we had the ability to attack any other faction at any time during our turn phase, regardless of any diplomatic status including alliances. Most of our efforts regarded the conquering of provinces controlled by our enemy yellow in and around South Africa, which had a resource, or protecting our resource in the Middle East. Eventually later in the game we had managed to get Argentina, another map resource out of our ally blue, before we committed a coordinated plan to prevent them from winning the game. Eventually, this led to the victory of the Black faction, and hence the game ended.

            What I found most realistic in this game was the fact that it emphasizes the difficulty of achieving anything in world politics, especially if all states are in anarchy. Each state wants something slightly different, and one should always be weary of what their true intentions are. I think the rules of the game were very fair and created a balanced and realistic representation of the present world state. Even to the fact of a blue superpower. Each faction’s victory condition is especially made to be hard for their faction. Although red and blue seem to have similar victory conditions, they must each approach it extremely differently. Obviously, for blue the conquest of Ukraine would be very easy given their manpower and resources that dominate the map. But the diplomatic twist makes something seemingly easy for them suddenly very realistically difficult. Red is weaker than blue, so their standard conquest condition seemed like a very fair victory condition. Something else I found very realistic is the variety of political states, movements, and concepts that were represented by each state. For example, the yellow faction being a religious faction bodes well to the diverse types of government in the world, and works effectively to create somewhat of a completely different goal than other colors.

            What I found unrealistic about the game was the complete spread of territories across the map. I think it’s unrealistic that all of these world powers would have sporadic territory and resources spread throughout the world. With that being said, I understand that it is necessary for the game to function properly, and I actually enjoy it better because it forcibly engages all factions to interact with each other, even if they may be ultra-pacifist like black. I enjoyed the fact that many of the victory conditions revolved around central Europe moreover a central point of importance, but I think that spreading out these important victory conditions would more realistically spread conflict throughout the map.

            Some recommendations for change of the game would only be some minor changes, because I think the game did well to fulfill its purpose the way that it was set up. One minor change may be spreading the conflict across the map more, because then it would create more incentive for factions to want to try to get an airlift sanction form the world council, something effective and interesting that did not really need to be used. It would create more strategy in placement of soldiers and more importance in the world council functions. Also, I would highlight the fact that almost anything can be done between factions. There are essentially almost no restrictions diplomatically of what we could do out of the world council/diplomacy phase, yet know one really seemed to fully understand or pursue these options. I feel like many people did not really know that those options were even available. For example, as pink crusaded against yellow after the schism, I was contemplating making yellow one of our vassals after figuring out that pink’s victory would be in their destruction. We would offer our military and diplomatic protection for a turnly tribute of soldiers, or maybe a free extra council vote to use at our digression. I’m also sure that people could possibly have defected to different factions or acted as spies. Maybe giving some examples of these side diplomatic talks would make people work outside of the rigid diplomacy that most people followed in the game. Then again you could argue that this may have been due to the norms that get accepted by each faction and the fear of being ostracized from the international communtiy when not following these norms.