Apologies to all for missing the Spring 2001 issue.  Work on my thesis has been keeping me fairly busy of late, and despite a significant game count decrease, contributions to the efforts described herein have taken most of my hobby time. This article is therefore devoted to news- you'll have to wait longer for the endgame.

I am proud to present, in it's first public appearance The New Version Of The Rules!  This new and improved rules document has been heavily revised by the MachFix crew in order to provide clear and detailed descriptions of how judge PBEM should work. Make sure to read the credits at the end; special thanks especially to Sigge for rearranging,  compiling and editing the revisions in more rounds than anyone thought would be needed to achieve a final document. Coming soon to those judges that update their code frequently, we have significant improvements to the judge as well! Millis has coded fixes to most of the Machiavelli bugs, and has added a nice feature to aid GMs as well. Thanks to these efforts, my first article is beginning to enter welcome obsolescence!

In the new version of the rules, a variety of issues that were unclear, and varied depending on GM ruling, were clarified. In addition, the document was completely reorganized, several of the more obscure points were stated more obviously, and additional technical information and examples were included.  In a few cases, we made rulings contrary to the original Battleline rules. These were intended to codify where current practice was superior to the original and improved game play. The most important of these is that a besieged city DOES produce income.

Please report any remaining (or new bugs) when you get a chance to play on an updated judge. Fixed bugs should include: enforcement of bribes and counterbribes being multiples of 3, siege effects, illegal conversions, venice oddnesses, rebellion liberations,  elimination oddnesses, frankenstien's autonomous garrisons, out of bounds rolls, ownership updates, and repeating rolls. Some other bugs have been fixed but not fully tested; for example,  victory may now be detected, and famined cities with garrisons may now produce income as they should.

Judges that are known to have the updates installed at time of writing: DEDO, DEMA, USOS. It is expected that USTX and NZMB will be updated soon, as I hear they tend to keep up with new code fairly regularly. If you want to see which version of the code a judge runs, you can do so with the 'version' command. The new judge version is njudge 0.8.9.

The new command for GMs is "predict". This will send the GM a list of what the results for the current season (complete with rolls) would be if it were processed. This not only allows the GM to satisfy curiosity about how the judge will treat certain situations, but if they need to roll back a turn to fix a bug, they can look at the effects of their changes without causing everyone in the game to receive mail about it.

Also being added to the judges is significant support for Machiavelli variants. The fortress option is now active, and several things that were hard coded before (like Venice being the only area which can have it's special characteristics) can now be described by the mapfile. It is now possible to implement a variety of variants; a four player variant by Neil Barr will soon enter playtesting. Sigge has compiled a list of the variants from the various editions of the board games and some other sources, which are also ready for implementation when someone feels so moved.  There are a number of new features in development as well, and support for other versions of Machiavelli (such as the newest version from Avalon Hill).

Update: The above article was dated August 14, 2001. Since then, I've successfully completed my PhD, and moved to Austin, TX. I've used the delay in publishing as an excuse to put off writing the next article while completing such real life tasks as finding (and buying) a house.

In recent news, the new Machiavelli support code has been exercised on DEMA, and some lingering glitches repaired. Also, variants based on the Machiavelli rule set are now in playest. For example,  Sigge is running a playest of The Age of Communes (version 2) on DEMA, a nine power variant with the new Storms disaster type enabled. While it should be noted that this _is_ a playest, if you'd like to try something different than the normal map it looks like fun. 'list scala' on DEMA for more information; if the game is full, join the observer list, and that will get you on the inside track to find out about the next game. You can also see playests of MachHo , and the second edition (1995) Machiavelli rules. I prefer the traditional judge version based on the Battleline set, but I know there are some fans of the more standard Diplomacy-like newer version.

Bruce Duewer
(beduewer@eos.ncsu.edu)