What we have here are a number of screen shots from the pre-release version of the Hasbro Interactive Diplomacy product. How did I get a hold of such a thing, you ask? Well, I wouldn't be a Diplomacy player if I couldn't get what I wanted by sweet-talking, would I? In e-mailing Bill Levay and others at Hasbro about getting the hobby and its clearing house and main store of knowledge here at The Pouch mentioned in the in-box literature for the product, I just naturally made myself Bill's best friend in all the world (if you can take my word for it), and the next thing I knew, I was loading the CD onto my computer. With permission sought and granted to publish screen shots for you to see (thank you, Bill!), that brings us up to date.
Note that the screens shown here are not guaranteed to look anything like the final product. The version I ran was raw, and many aspects of the game are unfinished and will be fine-tuned during playtesting. I myself sent a number of constructive comments to Hasbro after playing the game a few times.
For these screenshots, I played a single player game. Multi-player over an Internet connection is of course supported, but well, I don't know anyone with a version of the software yet, so I was able to play only against the artificial intelligence players. (Fair warning: so far, I'm undefeated -- the AI players aren't on to me yet, but that's because they're not yet as smart as they're going to be. In the version I played, they're all still raw newbies.)
Here they are, you and your six opponents. In this release of the software, they're not quite sitting in alphabetical order -- Italy sits between France and Germany, and that's Austria between Germany and Russia. Try as I might while playing, I can't seem to get any of them to show me their backs, dang it! In the rest of the screenshots, you won't see the English ambassador (first on the left), because I chose to play England for this game.
This is the initial screen shown after the main title animation (which I didn't capture, but which is real nice). There is also real nice animation shown between each game-year. I also didn't capture the game set-up screens shown after I clicked "Single Player." On those screens, you can put one or more power into civil disorder, or choose other rule variants.
Here we see the "assembly room," where the seven players sit when they're not busy planning each other's destruction. Notice that some of the chairs around the table are empty. Also notice the "Rooms" list in the upper-left. We see by the flags that the German and the Russian ambassadors are in room 1 (probably brokering my removal from Norway, the fiends!), and that Italy is in room 2. At the very bottom of the screen, in the scrolling area, is found an invitation from Germany to me (England) to step into room 1 -- yeah, probably so that both he and Russia can lie to me about Norway.
Here we are inside a meeting room. This is meeting room 4, and the German player (shown in the upper-left) has just accepted my invitation to join me there. I invited him by clicking on his flag on the right side of the screen and then pressing "Send." (This invitation and acceptance are in the scrolling text area at the bottom of the screen.) With him in the room, I can now negotiate with Germany.
This is the attitude screen. When negotiating with each AI player, the sentences you create are inflected according to whether you are friendly, neutral, or hostile to the power in question. Here we see that I'm neutral to everybody.
Here we are in a meeting room with the Italian. The scrolling area at bottom shows negotiations so far; I invited Italy into this room, he accepted, then I asked him to attack France, then he said yes. I asked him for his help against France by clicking on his face, then on the cannon along the top (for "attack") then on the French flag at right. This put the sentence "England asks Italy to attack France" in the little text area below the map, and then I hit the "Send" button.
When entering orders for your power, they show in the scrolling window and you see lines drawn on the map as well. You specify orders by pointing and clicking on the units and spaces. A pop-up menu that is shown when you click on the unit you are ordering allows you to choose from move, support, hold, and convoy.
Here we see the screen after processing of orders, showing the orders in the scrolling box at the bottom, and with lines representing the orders performed. You also may have noticed that these screen shots show no fewer than three different "looks" for the map. I did this on purpose (there are four "looks" provided with the game) so that you could see the different maps. I changed maps by clicking on the "Menu" button, which is how you change "look and feel" aspects of the game (like adjust the volume of the mood music, etc.).
At the end of each game-year, center and unit totals are shown. I should have captured a screen that showed me in a 21-center victory or something, but well, you get the idea.
Well, that's the extent of the sneak peek. There are other parts of the game that are not shown above, and what you see is in some ways specific to a game against only the AI players. But this should give you an idea of where Hasbro Interactive is with their Diplomacy offering. The line starts here.
Finally, I want to repeat my gratitude to Bill Levay and everyone else at Hasbro for allowing me to have a pre-release version of the game, offer my feedback on the product, and publish these screenshots for The Pouch readership. Thanks very much, Hasbro!
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Manus Hand (manus@manushand.com) |
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