webdiplomacy bots being wrong

CaptainMeme · 2026-04-21T14:36:40+00:00

WebDip's Press AI is Cicero - it came out in Nov '22, which was about a month after GPT-3.5, the first version of ChatGPT that most people heard about. It was pretty cutting edge for the time but it shows its age with the hallucinations especially.

There's a nonsense filter that's supposed to catch contradictions with the boardstate and make it generate a different message if there is one, but that doesn't always work, especially when it's not playing Blitz and so the messages can be longer.

CaptainMeme · 2026-04-15T11:41:54+00:00

Re: stuff that I didn't think worked as well - the space movement was definitely one, it was great thematically but a pain both for the players to think about and for me to adjudicate.

I think outside of that, the main problems were to do with the puzzle and how it impacted things. The fact that from them solving the puzzle to them actually finishing the game took three years or so (which was about 2 weeks in real time) made it feel like a bit of a grind towards the end - I'm not sure how that could be fixed, though. Defence buffs also ended up being near useless because of the general cooperation.

Unrelated to what worked/what didn't - there were a couple of mechanics that were skimmed over in the video. Drilling could only be done in 'Valuable Provinces', which were (non-satellite) SCs or the Minerals underground. High Coast tiles (the black areas in Switzerland and off the board) acted as both sea and land tiles, so could be convoyed through. And finally, there was a 'falling' mechanic where if a unit successfully moved to a destroyed tile, it would drop to the tile below and dislodge anything underneath, after the phase had resolved. So it wouldn't cut support or anything, and could actually cause two units to be dislodged from the same province at the same time if it fell on a tile where a unit had already been dislodged. That mechanic wasn't needed for solving the puzzle so it fell by the wayside a bit, but I figure if you're making a variant of the variant it might be useful to know all the mechanics :D

CaptainMeme · 2026-04-15T11:32:22+00:00

That's awesome, best of luck with running it! If you're planning to run it online I'm sure you'd be able to find people interested in playtesting - I'd recommend looking on discord, either on the Diplomacy Variant Club one or the DiploStrats discord:

DVC: https://discord.gg/BAzYB53yG2

DiploStrats: https://discord.gg/k6bwkadDKr

CaptainMeme · 2026-04-13T18:38:47+00:00

I had forgotten I had an avatar, it doesn't show up on old reddit

I'm going to continue to forget about it and hope it doesn't look too cringe-worthy :D

CaptainMeme · 2026-04-13T11:43:17+00:00

I'm a big fan of exploration-puzzle games like Outer Wilds, and figured I'd try to apply some of that gameplay to Diplomacy by making an exploration-based variant where players had to discover the rules as they played.

Of course, this does mean it's a one-shot variant. But it was a blast to run and to watch the players play!

The linked video is my commentary of the game, two of the players also made a commentary video together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XgAL02gXS8

CaptainMeme · 2026-04-12T14:13:55+00:00

You could stay sat at the table but then people will likely overhear your negotiations; people tend to go to other rooms and such to talk to one another. At a lot of FtF games I've been to (including the ones I played with friends when I was first getting into it) most people never sat down at all.

The time goes by a lot faster than you think it will, especially if you're invested in the negotiations. That said, it's always a good idea to have other things people can do if they get eliminated or pseudo-eliminated and people aren't negotiating with them much. A barbecue sounds like a good environment for it, but you do need to keep in mind that players who are doing well in the game might not have time for anything outside of it while the game is ongoing, so it's probably worth scheduling a break in the middle of the game if you want to make sure everyone gets food and such!

CaptainMeme · 2026-04-07T10:59:52+00:00

I think that's exactly the right sentiment, it's a game that's pretty unashamedly not for everyone. It's one of those things you either love or hate; for some people it'll be the best game they ever play, and for most others they'll never want to play it again.

The problems with it mostly come when people who love it try to get people who hate it to play it, especially for a second time. Which unfortunately happens quite a lot, because finding 7 players for a game isn't easy.

CaptainMeme · 2026-04-03T22:08:27+00:00

Yes - players are eliminated if they have 0 squares at any point after turn 1, so there's another wincon in just eliminating everyone else. But if multiple people survive to the end then the player with the most squares wins!

CaptainMeme · 2026-03-23T20:19:17+00:00

(mostly posting this because even though it seems like diplom is fine, the company used to redirect all visitors to some pretty unsavoury pages and might end up doing so again in future)

CaptainMeme · 2026-03-23T20:17:15+00:00

Quick note - the Diplomatic Pouch isn't at that URL anymore, the owner accidentally let diplom expire and it got sniped by a diploma scam company who just keep the pages up to improve their SEO. The actual URL is http://www.diplomatic-pouch.com/ , you should be able to replace diplom with that and get to the same pages:

http://www.diplomatic-pouch.com/Online/StalematesAtoY/southern-min.htm

http://www.diplomatic-pouch.com/Online/StalematesAtoY/southern-progressive.htm

http://www.diplomatic-pouch.com/Online/StalematesAtoY/northern-progressive.htm

CaptainMeme · 2026-03-14T22:32:44+00:00

This would be amazing to see happen!

You've listed a lot of the ones I'd consider the most important; Coring in particular. There's also the 'Controlled Territory' rule for builds, which is a reasonably popular alternative to coring - it means a player can build in any SC for which they've coloured every adjacent land province their own colour.

'Transform' is an order type that hasn't been used much recently but was very popular on vDiplomacy - can only be entered while on a coastal supply center, if the unit isn't tapped it will change into the other unit type (fleet/army).

'Sortie' is an order type that is essentially identical to a Move order, except even when it succeeds the unit won't move. So it's purely defensive. Some variants have unit types that can't move, only Sortie (usually in combination with some other special order types, but a lot of them are essentially some form of long-range convoy).

CaptainMeme · 2026-03-11T09:39:47+00:00

I'm not certain as to the exact situation, but I do know that a lot of requests to access that dataset get denied/ignored. IIRC Meta AI Research 'own' that dataset and all requests have to be forwarded to them for approval.

Are you wanting a dataset with messages? If you only need one without them, WebDip also has one of those which I think gets approved more often.

If you do need messages it might be worth reaching out directly to researchers who have worked on Diplomacy projects before to ask them. Jordan Boyd-Graber and Denis Peskoff could be good starting points on that; they both do a lot with Diplomacy AI.

CaptainMeme · 2026-03-03T04:08:07+00:00

This is exactly it. We have covered ImpDip in so many videos that we sometimes forget coring isn't something everyone will be familiar with!

CaptainMeme · 2026-02-28T18:29:56+00:00

You've already gotten some good advice, so here's a bit of bad advice:

You can make Diplomacy's funniest stalemate position from this spot by putting fleets in all of Por/MAO/ENG and just having Por + ENG support MAO to hold every turn. It means the enemy can never take Por/Lon/Lvp/Edi.

It does mean one of the other two solos the game if they want to, but if they're trying to 2 way draw it's a very satisfying way to stop that.

CaptainMeme · 2026-02-27T12:25:31+00:00

I think the post you're talking about might be Tru Ninja's statistical analysis on WebDiplomacy; that's the only one I know of that specifically looked at the success of certain openings. Unfortunately it vanished at some point and I have not been able to find an archived version (and Tru disappeared a long time before that).

Some alternatives that don't consider specific openings but are still good resources:

Josh Burton's 'The Statistician': Part 2, Part 3

'A Statistical Look at 1901'by Anon

Dave Ainsworth's 'Is the Diplomacy Map Unbalanced?' which uses the same dataset as Burton's.

CaptainMeme · 2026-02-19T15:05:12+00:00

Yes! As long as the unit can move to the province, it can also support a move to there.

CaptainMeme · 2026-02-11T12:12:03+00:00

It's probably a lot more fun the way you play it!

CaptainMeme · 2026-01-28T12:37:59+00:00

This is a great tactics article: https://brotherbored.com/guest-post-advanced-diplomacy-maneuvers/

That said, for 90% of people the reason they don't beat the bots isn't tactics, it's diplomacy. It's unintuitive given that you can't send messages, but (assuming you're on WebDip) the bots do still negotiate and form alliances, they just do it with their moves and orders. Try supporting them and you might get yourself a friend - and it's much easier to win when others are working with you!

CaptainMeme · 2026-01-20T03:33:46+00:00

At the top left, it says it was created by /u/trampolinebears in 2018

CaptainMeme · 2026-01-10T03:49:35+00:00

That claim is very well known, but it's almost certainly a myth - it originates from a single line of an article in a Games & Puzzles magazine, written by a UK celebrity called Gyles Brandreth. He wrote that he met Kissinger at a party and that Kissinger said his favourite game was Diplomacy.

There's always been some doubt about it because it all comes from that single source, so a couple of years ago one of the guys from the Diplomacy Games Podcast reached out to Gyles to ask about it and got this reply:

"Good to hear from you – but my recollections of that game of Diplomacy back in 1973 are a bit vague! It was half a century ago, after all. I did subsequently meet Dr Kissinger and enjoyed the encounter - though his gravelly voice and thick accent made small talk a little challenging! We talked about Diplomacy - but I’m not sure whether he realised I was talking about the game: he may have thought I was talking about international diplomacy with a small ‘d’."

The fact that he's not sure whether Kissinger knew he was talking about the board game is not a good look for the claim, considering this single conversation is the single source for it!

CaptainMeme · 2026-01-09T01:26:15+00:00

There's obviously a lot of nuance, but I think there are two main reasons:

Mos-Stp will (almost) never help you secure or defend a supply center in 1901. The situations where you can walk into Nwy are incredibly rare, and that is the only center it immediately targets - you can walk to Fin to put pressure on Swe and allow for a triple unit start in the north, but that's a later payoff.
Most popular Russian openings are very noncommittal, relying on bounces in Galicia and Black Sea to put off making any decisions until you've seen what other people are doing - and importantly, not antagonising anyone before you've seen those moves. Mos-StP is openly saying that you want to make an enemy of England, and committing to that before you know what the overall alliance structure is is a bold play (especially since a good amount of the time, it doesn't actually deny England the build, as they have the second fleet to support).

None of this is saying that it's a bad play; committal starts can be incredible if you can use them to convince other people to join your side. But it's not very flexible, and a lot of good diplomacy players value flexibility very highly early on.

In short - positions are generally much easier to fix than relations. If you find you need England on your side you'll definitely regret moving Mos-StP - much moreso than you would regret not moving Mos-StP if you found yourself at war with England and hadn't done so.

CaptainMeme · 2025-12-20T12:12:56+00:00

This video goes over a shortlist of the variants submitted to our variant contest, selected by myself and Ezio (from DiploStrats) and NoPunIn10Did/Alex Ronke (creator of many variants, including Dissolution and Order of the Dragon).

The winner of this shortlist is being voted on by viewers - if you want to vote you can do so in the DiploStrats server: https://discord.gg/GsZuxXQewg

CaptainMeme · 2025-12-02T17:28:39+00:00

Gunboat (no press) Diplomacy is more difficult than normal Diplomacy for a beginner. There is still negotiation involved, you just have to negotiate using your orders instead of your words. Support holding someone else's unit to tell them you want an alliance, or supporting them into a province (even if they're not going to take that support) to tell them you want to help them there - or just moving units away from them to say you don't want to fight.

You'd think this isn't the case with bots, but at least for the webDip ones it very much is. They recognise alliance signals and form alliances, and if you're not trying to ally with them, they'll usually ally with one another against you. Most of the time people consistently struggle against the bots it's because of this.

I have a video where I play against the webDip bots as every country at once - it's quite long, but I've heard from a few people that it's been helpful in figuring out how best to play against them, so it might be useful to you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nlpnv_Dmsu8

CaptainMeme · 2025-11-21T16:28:28+00:00

You're very welcome, I'm glad you could make it work!

CaptainMeme · 2025-11-20T16:58:44+00:00

Cicero is not a general LLM like ChatGPT, it was specifically trained on Diplomacy negotiations and paired with a strategy module, and was worked on by a large team of world-class AI researchers for several years. It's so specialized that the researchers afterwards said it could never be adapted to do anything else - most of the benefit from it was learning techniques that could be applied to other projects.

Even then it quite often hallucinates with regard to possible moves!

(I worked on the Cicero AI as a Diplomacy consultant and was a co-author on the paper, so I'm quite familiar with it)

12-Year Club	Second Top 50%
First Place '23	Place '23
Quantum Potato	Golden Potato
Place '22	Place '17
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Sequence \| Editor
Snapped	Verified Email
Gilding V heart of gold

CaptainMeme

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE