great-powers/README.md

Great Powers

A browser rebuild of the classic seven-power negotiation game: one human against six computer powers, in one sitting.

Not the name you expect, and NOTICE.md will make the argument at length once there is more to notice. The short version is the one the starship game already made on this site: the rules are free to rebuild, the trademark and the published artwork are not. "Great Powers" is what those seven were called at the time.

What this is, and what it is not

One human, six computer powers, one sitting. The original is seven people over weeks. A hub with no traffic cannot deliver that, and nobody is going to wait months for six strangers — so the other six are played by the machine and a game is finished in an evening.

It still has to be a negotiation game. A version where you simply write orders is a good movement puzzle and not this game. So:

• Both sides open. Bots approach you with proposals; you approach them. Neither waits for the other.
• On real terms. Offers are concrete and about this turn or the next few — support this move, keep out of that province, no attack until 1903 — and are accepted or refused on their merits, not by a die roll.
• Betrayal is a move, not a bug. A bot can agree to support you and then not do it, and so can you. Bots remember who kept their word, tell each other, and price you accordingly. That is the game.

The press is structured rather than free text: typed offers, deterministic reasoning, and no model anywhere in it. That makes betrayal auditable — you can read exactly why a power turned on you — and testable, which free text would not be.

The look and the sound

Cartoony. Flat cel fills and one heavy outline, the same house style the other three games use, on a map generated from the topology in src/game/map.ts rather than traced from anybody's board. The coordinates in src/game/layout.ts are placed by hand -- roughly where each province falls in Europe -- and everything else is drawn from those and from the adjacency rules.

Territories, with the rules kept out of the picture. The regions are Voronoi cells -- every point belonging to the nearest province -- which divides the board with no gaps and no overlaps and looks like a board.

What it cannot do is reproduce every adjacency in the rules, because provinces here interleave: the Adriatic borders Venice with Trieste sitting between their centres, and the Atlantic borders North Africa round the outside of Spain. Convex cells cannot say that.

The wrong lesson to draw from that -- and the one I drew first -- is to give up on regions and draw the adjacency graph instead. It is unimpeachable and it is not a map; it is circles joined by lines. The right answer is to stop asking the picture to carry the rules. Click a province and exactly the provinces its unit may legally reach light up, taken from the adjacency graph itself. The picture is a picture, and the rules answer for themselves when they are asked.

It gets the whole screen. The other three games live in a four-by-three cabinet because the machines they are rebuilding did. This one is not rebuilding a machine, and seventy-five provinces plus somebody trying to talk you out of Galicia do not fit in a letterbox. The map takes the viewport.

The music is not cartoony, and that is the point. It is 1914: serious, and intense. The joke of this game is that something charming to look at is the cruellest thing on the site, and the score is what says so.

And the turn should be heard. Orders resolve in silence in every online version of this game, which is a waste of the one moment anybody cares about. Armies grinding into each other, guns at sea, a convoy escorting something across, a unit being built, a unit falling back -- each of those is a different noise, generated by the synth like everything else on this site.

The endings get their own. This game does not end in a win or a loss, it ends in one of four things, and they do not sound alike:

• the solo -- eighteen centres, and the only unambiguous victory there is;
• elimination -- your last centre gone, which can happen in 1903 and leaves you watching;
• the draw -- nobody reaches eighteen and the survivors agree to stop. This is what actually happens most of the time, and it is neither a win nor a loss, so it cannot borrow either of their tunes;
• somebody else's solo -- you are still on the board and it is over anyway, which is the bleakest of the four and should sound like it.

The board

Seventy-five provinces, two adjacency graphs — an army walks the land, a fleet follows the water — and three provinces with two coasts that do not connect, where a fleet has to say which one it is on.

The topology is a fact about a published game and free to use. The artwork is not, and there is none here: the map this game draws is generated from the data, the way the cave game's dodecahedron is.

npm test checks the board against itself. The one that earns its keep is symmetry: an adjacency list this size is typed by hand once and wrong in three places unless something looks. It found the Skagerrak wired to the Baltic on the first run — which would have quietly opened a back door into the Baltic and made Denmark worthless.

The published test cases

tools/datc.py turns the Diplomacy Adjudicator Test Cases into src/game/datc.json -- the orders and their annotated outcomes, not the document's prose, which is Lucas Kruijswijk's writing. Every one of the 176 published cases is parsed and run.

Section		Passing
6.A - 6.G	movement	133 / 139
6.H	retreating	18 / 18
6.I	building	7 / 7
6.J	civil disorder	13 / 13

They are the reason this adjudicator is worth trusting: they found that orders were never validated, that the paradox rule did not terminate, that civil disorder was measuring the wrong distance, and that five of my own hand-written cases rested on a support Paris cannot give.

Three cases are excluded rather than failed. 6.A.6, 6.B.10 and 6.B.11 state their setup in prose -- "Germany has a fleet in London" -- and the fixture is built from order lines, so it cannot carry a unit nobody ordered.

Six are known deviations, written down so they are not rediscovered as surprises:

Case	What it is
6.A.5, 6.D.8	The document distinguishes an invalid order from an illegal one, and the two cases disagree about whether a unit whose move was refused keeps its hold support. Guessing at the distinction cost four passing cases to buy one, so it is left until it can be read properly.
6.F.22, 6.F.28, 6.F.29	Second and sixth order paradoxes. The resolver settles them by Szykman's rule and reaches a different answer than the document's. These are positions nobody assembles by accident.
6.G.19	Whether an unnecessary fleet in a convoy chain signals intent. The document notes this one depends on which edition of the rules is used.

Sections H, I and J -- retreating and the winter -- have engine code but no harness yet; their cases are shaped differently and need one.

The bots

src/game/evaluate.ts prices a position and src/game/bot.ts plays it. Everything a power does comes out of two numbers, and they are deliberately few: when a power turns on you, you are entitled to know what it thought it was getting and be furious about the price rather than confused by it. chooseOrders returns its reasoning as a list of sentences for exactly that.

Centres are the only thing that counts. Units are how you get them and are worth nothing in themselves -- a power with eight units and four centres is losing, and will have four units by the winter.

Two things the tests had to teach it. It garrisons a threatened centre it is already standing on, because scoring only moves had it defending Berlin by marching the Munich garrison there -- abandoning one centre to save another of identical value. And it never shoves at its own countryman, which has no strength at all and is two units wasting a turn on each other.

The price of breaking a promise is how far this power trusts the partner, not how far the partner trusts it. Pricing it the other way round gives a power that has been lied to four times a high cost of retaliating, because it has been scrupulous itself and is still well thought of, which is exactly backwards. An ally who has already betrayed you is worth nothing to protect.

Bots open negotiations rather than only answering them. propose() works from the plan the power has already made: it decides what it wants to do this turn, notices where that will not work alone, and goes looking for somebody who could make it work. Help taking something defended, first; then a quiet border over ground neither of them owns; then peace outright, when a neighbour is over your centres and your ambitions are elsewhere. Three approaches a turn at most, because six powers all talking at once is a mailstorm rather than a negotiation.

Each overture carries what the power actually says, so it can be put in front of a human as a message rather than as a form.

A power will offer a quiet border to somebody it is attacking somewhere else, and that is deliberate. Germany marching on French Belgium while suggesting both sides leave Burgundy alone is not a lie and not incoherent: a promise about Burgundy is a promise about Burgundy, and it will be kept to the letter by somebody who is robbing you at the same moment. A bot that refused to make that offer would be playing a politer game than this one. It will not, however, ask the power it is attacking to help, or offer it peace while the orders say otherwise.

Still to build

• the map, the orders, the music, the battle sound, the four endings