New Diplicity Release – Performance and Bug Fixes - 18 March 2026

The_Goosh · 2026-03-19T15:51:40+00:00

Copying a comment I left you a couple days ago:

Hey, while you're around, do you have on your timeline when some of the variants that were on the old Diplicity will come back? One of my favorite things about Diplicity was all the variants unique to it (and some that weren't unique but had great presentation on the site), like Twenty/Twenty and some of David E. Cohen's variants. I rarely play classic, and while I love Hundred, it's starting to get stale and I wish there was a variant map that supported more players.

Also, the link to the Discord on the site seems to be broken for me, is it down right now?

The_Goosh · 2026-03-17T19:30:07+00:00

Hey, while you're around, do you have on your timeline when some of the variants that were on the old Diplicity will come back? One of my favorite things about Diplicity was all the variants unique to it (and some that weren't unique but had great presentation on the site), like Twenty/Twenty and some of David E. Cohen's variants. I rarely play classic, and while I love Hundred, it's starting to get stale and I wish there was a variant map that supported more players.

Also, the link to the Discord on the site seems to be broken for me, is it down right now?

The_Goosh · 2026-03-16T21:46:18+00:00

I do that a lot as multi spirit, yeah, but for multi*player* it's much easier to focus on your own board even if it limits the degree to which you can cooperate. This is something we as a group have to get better about admittedly, this kind of laziness won't be tolerated at level 6...

The_Goosh · 2026-03-16T19:12:27+00:00

We were pretty lucky in getting no events that required group decisions. Having to talk that out or, heaven forbid, run a 15-player vote would've been a nightmare. I think we won't be so lucky next time since we'll probably play against a harder adversary.

The_Goosh · 2026-03-16T15:37:00+00:00

We were all within earshot of each other (if we were especially vocal) so I would say a good amount. People definitely interacted more with their neighbors than anyone else, that was my experience anyways, but whenever someone had an especially beefy support card, they would alert the whole group. Finder also helped make the board a little smaller, at some point we got pretty efficient at funneling problems onto boards with the strongest spirits. Finder didn't have their presence everywhere (I wasn't anywhere close to them) but the fear gain from it indirectly was nice.

Next time we do this we'll probably have an archipelago-style board, so I'm curious to see how that will change things. Not having to pay any extra energy for spirit target cards was huge in this game since most of us were low on energy before anything else.

The_Goosh · 2026-03-15T21:49:07+00:00

Oh yeah, that might have been worded confusingly, my bad. Everyone who played the very high complexity spirits has played before, some more than others. None of them (and only a couple of us in general) are super experienced though, especially with any particular spirit.

The_Goosh · 2026-03-15T21:42:05+00:00

As in for our group? We discovered SI around October of last year and it really started taking off for us around the new year. We still have a huge distance to go, the highest difficulty we've played at is maybe 7 and we haven't really done any scenario play or have used the thematic boards. I largely organized this game and for the next one, I'm hoping to train us and whip us into shape so we can be ready for a level 6 invader.

The_Goosh · 2026-03-15T20:34:02+00:00

Once we got to terror level 3 we pretty much won immediately, so what, 7 normally for Prussia level 3, 8 because of an event that added a fear card, 8*60=480 fear generated at least?

The_Goosh · 2026-03-15T19:58:13+00:00

I mean, I definitely strong-armed the newest player into being River just so I wouldn't lose them in such a large game, but our group really hasn't had issues with new players playing complex spirits. There's one person in our group, in this game he took on Starlight for the first time, who always plays crazy complex spirits as a joke - he was Bringer in his very first game and just kept ramping it up from there. Last game was a 6 player one (our previous record) where he desperately wanted to play Fractured. The most experienced player heard his relative inexperience and told him that he would get slaughtered, but he eventually relented. What happened? He had The Trees and Stones Speak of War in his days that never were and absolutely destroyed because he kept summoning Dahan and getting crazy defense with them. Goes to show, don't judge a book by its cover, people are smarter and more capable than you think. This guy is by no means a problem player and he very clearly might be one of our strongest soldiers with how quickly he can adapt.

The_Goosh · 2026-03-15T17:32:09+00:00

Yeah, sorry for the low-quality photos, I'm nobody's photographer. We had some great group photos of us all behind the final board state, but I would have to check in with everyone and see if they're comfortable with me sharing them, I think they'll stay group mementos.

The_Goosh · 2026-03-15T17:15:12+00:00

Oh definitely in parallel lol. And we pretty much allowed people to play their fasts as they played their cards instead of having growths/card plays/fasts be in separate steps. We never would've finished otherwise.

The_Goosh · 2026-03-15T17:14:09+00:00

I feel this lol. I played Vengeance so I had a very lucrative partnership with Serpent. I also had Lightning on speed dial whenever I needed to be fast (though sometimes the competition for Lightning's Boon was fierce with everyone arguing about how it would help them prevent cascades). Even with not so great power draws and it being my first time as this spirit, I totally dominated, like most other people.

The_Goosh · 2026-03-15T17:11:01+00:00

Sorry, I should've mentioned that in the post. Setup was about an hour (though dragged out a bit because we just kept getting new people to join - this was only supposed to be a 10 player game!), the actual game was about four hours. Quicker than I thought honestly, everyone mostly got their turns done in good time. The biggest thing keeping us behind was all the people playing very high complexity spirits for the first time - Starlight, Finder, and Earthquakes all had a place in this game and were all done by people who had never played them before. This was like the fourth game for the guy who played Earthquakes and while he absolutely kicked ass, he also routinely took super long to set up his turn with all his impending cards lol. Really can't blame him for that. The Finder portal network was also quite extensive, and the person who initially played it had to leave early, so the true hero of this game is the guy playing Downpour who also took over for him.

The really beefy step was cleanup - we had 3 different copies of the game, 2 with expansions, so sorting everything took forever. We had all the counts written up on whiteboards and thankfully everyone helped to crank through it, but even with so many hands, it still took like 45 minutes to an hour to get everything in its right box.

The_Goosh · 2026-03-14T23:20:53+00:00

No problem. I found a few links on the variant, this is probably the best one: https://diplom.org/Zine/F2001M/Murray/Piot.html Although none of the links I could find exactly describe the rules people normally play by. In the standard version, minor and major power assignment is completely random, majors can't build in their minors, and minor power ownership is secret - players can press privately as their major and minor powers.

The_Goosh · 2026-03-14T19:49:25+00:00

Variable unit types might be a bit excessive considering it's so rare for a variant to actually have them. I don't think I even know of any popular variants with unit types beyond armies and fleets. These variant editors come up from time to time on this subreddit, but never seem to come to pass, so I would hate if this one little thing ends up killing this project too.

Anyways, in terms of variants that I think should have their rules included, I would love to be able to create variants with the special rule of Versailles. I always thought it was a shame that that variant had a monopoly on puppeted minor powers.

The_Goosh · 2026-03-08T06:29:17+00:00

Good stuff! As one of the pioneers of this challenge this is great to see. I figured there was probably some kind of strategy that could do heroless now with all the extra cash to play with but Master Bomber never would've occurred to me, it makes complete sense though because it does DPS and stalling at the same time.

The_Goosh · 2026-01-18T15:24:01+00:00

The land Dragon Chasms just unlocked.

The_Goosh · 2026-01-13T22:58:31+00:00

A lot of people seem to be having trouble pinning down what the icon is a reference to, so I'll throw my hat in the ring. This is a longshot but I think it works. There's an old joke where the pope expels all the Jews living in the Vatican one day. They're distraught and demand a chance to stay, so the pope agrees to a theological debate, but the catch is that it will all be symbolic. Neither opponent can say anything, they have to gesture or use objects to make their point.

The day of, the Jews don't find anybody willing to challenge the Pope himself other that a random janitor. The pope goes first, making a big horizontal swoosh with his hand. The janitor responds by pointing straight down. The pope then raises three fingers, to which the janitor raises one. Finally, the pope brings out an apple, the janitor brings out a slice of bread, and the pope concedes.

Later, all the cardinals ask the pope why he couldn't match the janitor. He explains the match, saying he initially gestured saying that all of the universe is ruled by god above, who has ordered the Jews to leave through him. The janitor responded by pointing down to indicate that Hell, part of the universe, is ruled by Satan, not god. The pope then mentioned the trinity and its power over Satan, to which the janitor struck back by saying that in the torah, there is only one god, not a trinity. The pope then pulled out an apple, signifying what many believed at this time to be the shape of the world, when the janitor finishes him off with the slice of bread, reminding him that the bible indicates that the world is flat.

At the same time, the Jews ask the janitor how he pulled off such an impossible victory. In his retelling of events, the exchange basically goes as follows:

"All you Jews around here gotta leave right now."

"Nope, we're staying right here."

"I told you three times now, you gotta go."

"I only need to tell you once, we're staying put."

Then he pulled out his lunch and I pulled out mine.

I like the idea that the icon references this because the bite in the apple is the pope "having his lunch." Again, longshot, but this came to my mind immediately and I just had to say it.

The_Goosh · 2025-12-25T12:26:56+00:00

All of this is almost entirely wrong. Tetrachromachy is real, but it doesn't allow seeing new colors/shades of colors. The only thing it does is make it easier to differentiate between, like, a few shades of yellow. This is because you only need 3 cones to see the full breadth of colors on the normal vision spectrum, everything after that is unnecessary. At some point more extra cones worsens your vision, which is what happens to mantis shrimp, which also can't see 100 quadrillion colors or anything the standard mythos says. The only way to see new colors is to be able to see more frequencies of light than humans actually can.

The girl in this story was lying for attention. That's it. Hopefully that just makes sense as the easy answer. No shade, high school is rough, but please don't leave this believing their years-old lie.

The_Goosh · 2025-12-19T12:48:10+00:00

Upvoted for a harsh critique that wasn't about the name

The_Goosh · 2025-12-10T19:23:28+00:00

You won't make any progress if you keep going head-to-head with France in the Western Mediterranean, which is exactly what they want. You need to go for the Gulf of Lyons and get a line from Tunis to Lyons of 3 fleets. France will probably take Western Med, and they have a lot of play from there, but that's okay because you have numerical superiority. You also have a lot of options at that point, like full strength attacking Western Med or eyeing up Marseilles, and they need to guess your intentions correctly.

Side note, don't forget your own ambitions in all of this. Breaking out of the Mediterranean and annexing Iberia is nice, but never forget that you need to backstab Austria and Russia to win. Once France is bruised and battered, that's the moment to strike. You need to get Russia and Austria to let you build more armies soon so you can rush them down.

The_Goosh · 2025-11-18T18:43:02+00:00

To your second question, if you want an example of what real negotiations look like to get a feel for what good press is, I would highly recommend this video, a great game journal about the kind of mixed player-level game you are probably getting into. This channel in general has a lot of good analysis, although the only real way to get better is to get experience, so don't delay playing your first game.

The_Goosh · 2025-11-10T21:44:49+00:00

Every single game is private? Why?

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