I love Diplomacy (I played many games over the email judges some years back), and think variants are interesting. However I think that the dynamic offered by the mix of armies and navies is kind of key:
- It adds dynamism to the game
- the requirement to split a powers forces between navies and armies helps prevent an early lead from become too influential (either you divide evenly and are not so strong in either, or focus on one allowing another power to possibly dominate the other sphere)
So I'm not sure how you balance those issue in land locked Dragon Pass?
As for factions, I'd be inclined perhaps to use:
- Esrolia
- Heortland
- Sartar
- Grazers
- Alda-Chur (stretching a bit for that one)
- Kingdome of Tarsh
- Imperial Army
With neutral spots for the Telmori, Pavis, Muse Roost, the shaker temple, city of 10k magicians... possibly for certain chaos nests, with special rules applied to that?
I prefer to think of the shaker temple as a neutral dot, given its central location, and difficulty in assigning it multiple starting supply centres....although the same argument could be made about Alda Chur. Could replace it with praxian nomads?
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> If I were going to make a Diplomacy variant for Dragon Pass during the Hero Wars I think I would focus on the human factions, splitting them into 7 as follows:
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> Old Tarsh
> Prince of Sartar
> Far Walkers
> Grazers
> Sir Ethilrist
> Imperial Army
> Kingdom of Tarsh
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> leaving the Dragonewts, Androgeus, Beasts, Dragons, Tuskriders, Barbarian Horde, The Dwarf, Hydra, Giants, Cragspider as forces of nature outside the scope of human diplomacy (and the game).
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> Does the group have any alternative suggestions that are reasonably balanced?
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> Keith
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