Sorry, I should be clear. I didn't mean to say I was actually going to connect Damascus to Ankara. I was meaning to state that, were Baron still planning to make further changes to 1900, I'd suggest that change.

He's not, and I'm cool with that. I think there's an initial phase where you should keep updating a variant based on playtest feedback, but at some point it should maintain its own identity. I imagine someone will iterate on 1900 in the future; you kind of already have in some ways, Enriador, with your 1913 (?) variant.

But I'd let 1900 stand unchanged, like a book that's been written.

1913 takes a page from 1900's Africa, but I will likely scrap it in favor of Legacy of Versailles' Africa (passable Southern Algeria annoys me). Otherwise it has influences from Diplomacy II, Abstraction III and Milan.

Edwardian (Version 2) also started as a subvariant of 1900; you may recall it from the PlayDip forums.

Now that 1900 is set in stone here, can we dream that Alex "The Magician" Ronke will give us Diplomacy Points - and hence some of Baron's masterpieces like Ambition & Empire and College of Cardinals? =D

Feel free to dream. This project took me far, far too long for what it was. DP variant support would require more than I’m willing to take on right now.

Maybe I’ll come back to vDip dev work in a year or two, but I have some other projects that are higher priority.

A while ago I studied the several possible routes to victory available in 1900, and came up with some interesting information regarding how many supply centers can a power's freshly-built unit reach within four seasons/two years.

POWER: N° of SCs (Difference from Classic)

ITALY: 31 (+4)
FRANCE: 33 (+6)
BRITAIN: 23 (+4)
GERMANY: 31 (+1)
TURKEY: 23 (+5)
AUSTRIA-HUNGARY: 31 (+4)
RUSSIA: 31 (+2)

Amazingly enough, we got four powers tied in reach (Italy, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary), with the Wicked Witches (Britain and Turkey) also tied, and leading the isolated leader being France - 1900's weakest power!

I think these numbers are somewhat telling about how well balanced the base map is. I think I calculated the tempi required as well, if I find it I will post it here.

France isn't 1900's weakest power, FYI. It's Turkey by far. France is either 5th or 6th, roughly tied with Russia, but nearly everyone other than Germany or Turkey is really close performance-wise.

I'll email you a spreadsheet that shows some "next steps" you can take with your tempi calculations.

In a census of 304 full press games (email and web), with no additional variants like fog of war, if you score those games using old-school DSS (what you all call WTA), the overall percentages of points won by each power:

AH 13.2%
BR 14.1%
FR 12.8%
GE 21.1%
IT 15.2%
RU 13.1%
TU 10.2%

Honestly not bad balance-wise.

According to Baron Powell, back in 2014 and considering 203 games, France *was* the weakest power. Source: http://uk.diplom.org/pouch//Zine/F2014R/Powell/france2.htm

Does PlayDip make these statistics freely available somewhere? Never saw them.

Your data puts Turkey as the weakest, France as the second weakest. Both powers suffer from having isolated home SCs (Marseilles & Damascus), as we discussed previously. Coincidence? =O

We can see how small the sample size (still) is. I hope automating 1900 to vDip (maybe webDip in the future; 1900 is quite proven already) will shine some extra light on how the powers truly perform.

Feel free to email me! I am quite intrigued.

My data set included his 203 games, plus 101 more. I used a web-scraper and a lot of Excel trickery to get those results from PD. For a Dip variant, it's actually a halfway decent sample size. I wish vDip broke down its results to be able to filter by full press v. gunboat and so on...

France is second-weakest, but I wouldn't overstress that. The five countries in the middle are all huddled close to one another, particularly when you normalize those figures according to the standard deviation.

I agree that the isolated SCs hurt France, though I'm not sure I'd call Marseilles all that isolated. It's definitely disconnected from other home SCs, but it's part of a massive SC network.

Turkey and Germany are the distinctly different ones.

The Sick Man & the Hegemon. I think it's very fitting!

@nopunin10did, will the variant have Interactive Map support?

I’m not sure what is involved in that, but my understanding is that it requires the artwork to be much simpler in order to handle region detection (since there’s no polygon definitions for the spaces)

The interactive map requires a smallmap-file with the sea-territories colored in different colors too. It's named "IA_smallmap" and put in the directory "interactiveMap".

Basically that's it. If you want to adjust the icons for the interactive map or add additional orders you need to add some javascript. But the map is enough.

Feedback: Austria-Hungary's font color is blinding! Can we have a nicer shade of yellow? Like #A5A500 or #C48F00.

@Oli, @nopunin10did, would this IA_smallmap work?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pjne1rkonobob0l/IA_smallmap.png?dl=0

@Enriador

Where does the font show up yellow? I can come up with a similar, darker shade for the given hue, but I'm not sure where you're seeing text come up that way.

@nopunin10did

The font shows up in yellow whenever Austria-Hungary writes something.

nopunin10did: Awesome to see this live!

I have been meaning to help you with "Are there any locations whose unit placements make the map harder to read?", but unfortunately the "Map info" page doesn't seem to work.

I've tried accessing http://vdiplomacy.net/dev.php?variantID=1900&tab=Map from several browsers over the past couple weeks and I always get an error.

I have noticed that the arrow in Gibraltar is poorly placed. It's almost invisible in front of the Union Jack in both the small and large maps.

"What other graphical issues have you encountered?"
* Karpathos in the Aegean Sea is missing a black outline.
* Lake Inari in Find has a white outline, but no other lake has an outline.
* On the large map, Fehmarn off Kiel is mapped to an English province.
* Various little white areas appear on the borders or coasts of several provinces, sometimes only on the large map, sometimes only on the small map and sometimes on both.

nopunin10did and Enriador:
With regards to the conversation about the red outlines around Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, Bosnia and Bulgaria, remember my suggestion from threadID=70488:

"I agree that Ottoman outlines are not practical in a vDip implementation. But what if they were coded in as skins for additional 'neutral' players (one for Libya-Bulgaria and another for Bosnia)? As soon as a player moved into Bosnia/Cyrenaica, the color would change as any non-SC land space changes color. For Bulgaria/Tripolitania, the color would change as soon as a player occupies the SC at the end of a year, just like any SC would."

It may be a minor point for 1900, but the coding would be exceedingly helpful for other variants that have armed neutral minors.

Finally, while this is probably a decision for Baron, I stick by my comments in the other thread about Sardinia and Crete:

"I do not think that Crete or Sardinia should be colored at all. Kestas was right to leave islands with adjacencies that don't match their 'parent' province a neutral color. To do otherwise could be confusing. If that is unacceptable to Baron then the sea borders should be redrawn, much like the English Channel was expanded to touch Wales proper."

@JECE

Really helpful feedback.

Re: Map Info
I'm not sure what you mean by "Map Info." Isn't that just the variant page?
http://vdiplomacy.net/variants.php?variantID=1900

Re: Gibraltar arrow
Thanks for letting me know. I'll see if I can make that arrow more obvious and not so easy to get covered up.

Re: Karpathos, Inari, and Fehmarn
Good catches. All are slips that I can easily fix.

Re: little white areas
Unfortunately this is harder to fix without more specific examples. Because this platform requires a full color substitution, I had to render the land layer with no anti-aliasing effects. As a result, some corner pixels here-and-there were left empty. If you can collect some screenshots where that's the case, I'll see if I can hand-edit them to look a little better.

Re: Different colors in Bulgaria etc.
It's not a bad idea, but it's not a quick change, and I think it would confuse matters. Armed neutral powers show up differently in the interface, and I'm not sure having a two-power quasi-Ottoman SC count show up would be helpful. As to the coloring for armed neutrals, I think that might already be fairly straightforward. Since armed neutrals are set up as yet another country, can't they just be assigned a color, as other countries are?

Re: Sardinia and Crete
I tried to get Baron to budge on that, but he likes the colors to match. I really wanted to be able to provide at least one website where the map matched his vision and preferences as much as possible, and so I think I'm leaving all of that as-is. Per the rules, only named islands are to be considered passable territory.

I see several of the white anti-alias issues, by the by, but it may be some time before I can clean them all up.

From the variant page, there is a button to the "Map info" page.

I wasn't sure that we had armed neutrals set up at all. I agree that listing a separate country or two on the game panel would be confusing. But if hiding their names is the only code that needs to change to get this right, it sounds much easier than starting from scratch. After all the regular neutrals are not listed separately from the seven Great Powers right now. But even if it were easy to do this, are we set up to assign provinces colors with colored borders (rather than just a solid color with no special border)?

I understand that Baron would want Sardinia and Crete to be colored, but does he care about precise borders for the seas? I don't think so, since he already drew the English Channel as surrounding Cornwall and reaching the Welsh coast. Assuming that Sardinia is mapped to Napes, we could easily redraw the borders so that Sardinia sits entirely within the Tyrrhenian Sea, much like Corsica now sits entirely in the Gulf of Lyons even though Corsica is nowhere near the Gulf in the real world. Similarly, the borders of the Eastern Mediterranean could retreat such that they border Rhodes and Karpathos, but not Crete. Anyway, I guess that I could e-mail Baron myself.

Now what I could do that wouldn't be a dramatic change would be to apply some sort of texture to the islands in question, to note that they are impassable.

As seen here, where there are diagonal lines shaded on such islands:
http://www.ultradiplomacy.com/bigmap.gif

As to the Map Info bug, I'll have to see if I can debug what's going on with that. It appears to be a feature that's not on webDiplomacy, which explains why I hadn't run into it before.

That's always been my favorite Diplomacy map. I wonder where it comes from.

A square map of '1900'! Found it on Google by chance, really useful: https://tinyurl.com/yb9dy7ax

Side note: why doesn't the variant use Avalon Hill's official abbreviations? Can't recall Baron changing them.

Reading 'LVO' and 'GLY' is so weird.

@Enriador
That square map was something I put together a few years ago.

https://boardgamegeek.com/image/2732138/diplomacy

As I note in the comments under the image, I made one mistake in that image: Picardy and Alsace should not be touching, while Belgium and Burgundy should touch.

As for the abbreviations, you have to remember that the Avalon Hill versions currently in use have not stayed the same over all iterations of the game. GLy, GOL, and Lyo have all been used for the Gulf of Lyon in one version or another. Livonia's abbreviation sometimes shows as Liv (which can be confused with Liverpool) and other times as Lvn or Lvo.

Norwegian Sea shows in some maps as Nwg and in others as Nrg.

Much of it's a matter of taste. I prefer to nix as many ambiguous abbreviations as possible, though there are always some that stick around. I've seen "Tyo" used instead of "Tyr" for Tyrolia, but for some reason that just looks wrong even though it's objectively a superior abbreviation (since it eliminates ambiguity with the Tyrrhenian).

I am aware that there are many iterations - that's precisely why I prefer Avalon Hill's latest rulebook...

Can you fix the square map?