9 July 2003
Without saying anything about plans and the like (I really should have made a Sneakemail address first, because now I’m paranoid) the game I joined is Caviller. I’m playing as Russia. For those not familiar with the geography of Europe, I’m the grey bits over most of the eastern side of the board. Russia’s not as big as it looks in the most important measurement (number of spaces), but it’s still big.
One of my neighbours, who shall remain nameless, has been exhibiting some incredibly strange behaviour. I’ve only engaged in real dialogue with two of the six other players, which is disappointing.
The deadline’s tomorrow morning (for me), so when I wake up I should be able to see how many people have double-crossed me. When planning my moves, I assumed that all of them would (except perhaps one who shall remain unnamed). This is a useful kick up the bum, tactically — you see all these enemy units bearing down on your centres and you try to do the best with what you have.
Moves can be processed before the deadline, if everyone submits theirs on time. Well, they actually have to set nowait as well, to tell the game that you’ve finally decided (with the convenience of the email judges, it’s easy to change your orders). I tried to do that and the judge told me there was no point. I’ve had this error before but always sort of ignored it and carried on, but not this time.
Searching Google for ‘set nowait: no point’ only throws up the C source code for part of the Diplomacy Njudge software. So I rooted about in that, thought I’d found what I was looking for, tried to double-check, and got confused. Then I decided that this was silly, I should just send a lot of messages to the server to test things.
The message ‘Set nowait: no point!’ means that you’ve already set nowait. Apparently the judge sets nowait by default.
(This might seem obvious, but the latter part had me confused. I can’t see that being useful behaviour.)