This is a collection of tools I've created to help play the strategy
game Diplomacy via email.
dipstat is a Python program that shows the status of all your
current games, producing lines such as
foo/USEF: F1902M OW Thu 08/10 11:45 Italy (4/5): Austria Turkey
that show, for each game:
- The name and judge of the game, and upcoming phase (in this
case, foo and Fall 1902 Movement);
- Whether you have orders due and/or 'wait' set (in this case,
both);
- When orders are due (in this case, Thursday, Aug 10 at 11:45am,
in your local time zone);
- What power you're playing (in this case, Italy), along with how
many units and supply centers you own (if known); and
- What powers have written to you more recently than you
have written to them (in this case, Austria and Turkey).
If the deadline has passed, the end of the grace period is printed
instead, with asterisks as an alert.
For input, it requires one or more plaintext files containing all
the messages you have received from the judge, in chronological order.
(The files may have different games all mixed together.) Depending on
your mail client, that may be trivial or a pain. For me it's trivial,
ha ha!
Download dipstat.py v1.05
dip.el contains some Emacs-Lisp code to make it easier to send
mail to the judges from Emacs. You can type 'M-x dip-mail foo', and it
will start composing a message regarding game 'foo' to the appropriate
judge with the correct signon and signoff commands already in place.
Download dip.el v1.0
standard.cmap.ps is a replacement for the file of the same name
used by mapit and Manus Hand's clone, dpmap. (To be
honest, I haven't tried it with a vanilla mapit yet. Please let me know if there are any
problems.)
My version has a bunch of changes that I think make the map easier
to read. In approximately descending order of importance:
- Armies and fleets are squares and triangles instead of cannons
and ships. I find that the cannons and ships are much too busy for
me to parse easily.
- Failed orders are denoted by solid white lines, not dashed
black lines.
- Water is a lighter blue.
- Province names are printed in a less heavy font.
- Borders between provinces are less heavy, so they are more
easily distinguished from orders.
- Arrowheads are filled in.
Maybe someday I'll put some samples up here so you don't have to
download it and run mapit to try it out.
Download standard.cmap.ps
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Last updated 10 September 2000