The Embassy

Before I move on to look at my suggestion for a scoring system I want to summarise the problems with scoring systems that are out there already.  If we can work out what is wrong with them, we can use this to design a system that might address these problems. When I first started playing on online I remember raising a question: Why are draws scored equally? Why isn't the number of supply centres you hold at the end of the game taken into account? The answer that came back from a site mod was along the lines of the argument I use now.  At the end of a game of Diplomacy you have achieved one of three results: you've won, you've drawn, or you've lost.  If you've won, then you get all the points in the game.  If you've drawn, it doesn't matter what number of SCs you've finished the game on, the result is the same.  If you've lost... well. At the time, that site used a game result system to score games: 12 points for a win 6 points for a 2-wa...

The thing with tournaments is that a lot of games end in a draw.  This means that DSS systems aren't necessarily going to produce a great result because a lot of players could well finish on the same score.  An alternative to DSS is a  Supply Centre Scoring  (SCS) system. I'm going to use the game above as an example to explain SCS systems.  (The game is from Playdiplomacy and so the colours are different from those I use for my maps.)  The game ended with the following outcome: England - 12 SCs Russia - 9 SCs Turkey - 8 SCs Italy - 5 SCs France , Germany and Austria-Hungary were eliminated, with 0 SCs each. Supply Centre Scoring systems are based on the number of SCs the players owned at the end of the game.  The basic pattern is: A solo results in all the points available.  No other player scores points. A draw will be scored using the number of SCs the players hold at the end of the game.  In the above game, on ...