Realpolitik Manual

Realpolitik is a Diplomacy™ tool for the MacOS and Win32, written by Jim Van Verth (jvsquare@mindspring.com). It allows you to input orders for a Diplomacy™ game via an intuitive point-and-click interface, display them on an attractive color (or, on minimum spec Macs, black and white) map, adjudicate them, print them, and save the results to a game file. If you are a user of the Judge mail servers, you can load Judge results and display them, and also copy orders to be sent back to a Judge.

Realpolitik supports the following variants: Standard, Colonial, Fleet Rome, Crowded, Loeb9, Aberration, Youngstown, Milan, 1898, Britain, Shift Left, Shift Right, Chaos and Modern. Ben Hines has also done additional variants: Crisis, Classical, Hundred, Chromatic and SailHo! Don Hessong has added the Ancient Mediterranean variant. To add your own, see the document Realpolitik Variants for more information.

This application is "DiplomacyWare". You must own a copy of Hasbro’s or Avalon Hill’s Diplomacy™ to use it.

Diplomacy™ is a game of strategy and tactics, and still more cunning and deceit. It was created by Allan Calhamer in 1953 and is based on the shifting alliances found in Europe in the era prior to World War I. Full rules are available from Hasbro through the Avalon Hill Game Company.

Other information (including information on the Judge and other online servers)can be found in the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.diplomacy, and at The Diplomatic Pouch.

Diplomacy™ and Colonial Diplomacy™ are trademarks of Hasbro, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

MacOS: Realpolitik can be run on any Macintosh supporting Color Quickdraw and running System 7.0 or higher. It's only constraint is memory: due to the size of the offscreen map, using Youngstown with full color requires at least 2.25 M.

Win9x: Realpolitik has not been thoroughly tested for minimum requirements, but it should run on any machine that supports Windows 95/98/NT, with at least 256 colors available.

When Realpolitik comes up, you will see a window containing the standard Diplomacy™ map, with icons representing the units. You can change how the map is displayed by checking any of the first four items in the Map menu. Show Supplies will fill each supply center with a pattern (and color if supported) representing the country that owns that center. Show Units displays the unit icons. Show Orders displays the orders, if any. Show Names places a small label on each sector containing its three letter code. The default is to have Show Units, Show Orders and Show Supplies checked.

If you close the Map window, either by clicking in the close box or by selecting Close Window in the File menu, you can bring it back by selecting its item from the Windows menu or by hitting -M (PC users, substitute Ctrl for ).

The contents of the map can be saved to the clipboard by selecting Copy from the File menu, or just -C. You can also save a copy to a .BMP or .PCT file by selecting Save BMP… or Save PCT… from the File menu.

In the lower left-hand corner of the map window is a space showing the current season, and then a small palette:

The palette shows which order types are available, and which one is currently selected. Here we're in a movement phase, so moving/holding, supporting and convoying are available.

In a retreat phase you would see

which gives retreat to and disband.

A build phase gives

which are build fleet, build army, and remove, respectively.

You can change the palette selection by either clicking in the appropriate square, or using the left and right arrow keys to cycle through them. If the palette is grayed out, then orders cannot be added.

The simplest way to add orders to the map is by clicking in the map window. First you select the order type from the palette. To select a hold order you would pick the move icon. To add the move you will generally click first on the unit you wish to give the order to, then one or two more clicks to give a either a destination or suborder. The clicking scheme for each order is:

The representations of the orders on the map are:

move:
support:
convoy:
remove:
build army/fleet:

When inputting orders, you probably noticed that after the first click, the unit is highlighted. This means that the unit is selected, and its order can be either changed (by continuing to click away) or deleted. To delete, you can either hit the Delete or Clear keys, or you can select Clear from the Edit menu. If you are in the middle of a multi-click order you can cancel what you've done so far by hitting -. That will unselect the unit and you can redo the order, if you like.

You can also undo the last move you added by selecting Undo from the Edit menu, or just hitting -Z. This does not always work with build orders, as there may not be a previous order for that sector.

There are three other main windows in Realpolitik – the Order, Status and Info windows. They can be viewed by either selecting their menu item from the Windows menu, or hitting -D, -T, and -I respectively.

The Orders window gives a text version of the orders in the Map window. The Status window gives the supply center and adjustment information, plus any dislodges, if any. The Info window provides rules and other information specific to this particular variant. In any of these any of the lines of text can be selected and copied to the clipboard. Multiple lines can be selected by clicking and dragging. You can only select an entire line, not part of it.

Once the orders are in, you can have Realpolitik adjudicate them by selecting Resolve from the Orders menu (or hitting -R). Those orders that fail will be grayed out. Also, the reason for the failure will appear after the order in the Orders Window. If you don't like what you see, you can undo the resolution by selecting Undo Resolve (-Z) from the Edit menu.

Note that if a country has been given no orders, then it is in civil disorder. If one of its units is dislodged, that unit is automatically disbanded. For example, you have the units:

and the orders

Then A Warsaw will be disbanded (again, this assumes that Russia hasn't given any orders elsewhere). This is consistent with Avalon Hill rules.

Once you are satisfied with the resolution, you can select Commit (-K) from the Orders menu. This will execute those orders that succeed, place any dislodged units in the dislodge list, and update the map, orders list and status for the new season. Committing the orders cannot be undone.

In addition to clicking in orders by hand, you can load orders from a text file by selecting Load Orders (-L) from the Orders menu. This is particularly handy if you're in an e-mail game on one of the Judge mail servers. Realpolitik will accept either a Judge file, or a plain list of orders. See the file FORMAT for more information on the order format. If there are any syntax errors, a window will pop up showing those orders that failed and why. Note that you may need to change variants (see below) to match the current variant to the variant used by the orders.

Rather than choose Load Orders, you can also paste the orders in. Just copy the orders from another window (a telnet session, for instance) into the clipboard, then bring either the Map window or the Orders window to the front. Then select Paste (-V) from the Edit menu. If you're entering a Judge file this way, be sure and capture the whole thing, including the text above the orders.

Normally, Realpolitik will try and match the loaded orders with the current units/supplies, and report any that don't match. This allows you to keep a running history of the game, and only update those units, supplies, etc. that change. However, if Overwrite On Load is checked, it will erase the current unit and supply sector information and recreate it based on what the new orders are. This is useful if you're starting from the middle of a game, and have a set of orders with basically no context that you want to load in and/or resolve. The default is for Overwrite On Load to be turned off. Don't forget to turn it off after you load the initial set of orders – otherwise you'll overwrite everything you just loaded in.

2.8 History

You can cycle through the previous seasons in the game by using the commands under the History menu. Previous (Shift-Tab) and Next (Tab) will move to the previous and next season respectively. Note that the orders for that season are not displayed – just the current state – and you can only enter orders in the final season. If you wish to enter orders in a previous season, perhaps to see how things might have played out differently, you can use the Branch command. This will remove all seasons after the current one and allow you to enter orders. Be careful not to save this over the original file, or all that history will be lost.

You can save the current status of the game (units, supply centers, orders, history) to a Realpolitik game file by choosing Save from the File menu. Similarly you can save under a different name by using Save As. Revert will return a game to its last saved state. To open a new game, select New. This will close the current game (asking you if you want to save, if necessary) and bring up a new window with the initial set up. To open a previously saved game, use Open. You can also just click on the saved game's icon in the Finder and Realpolitik will automatically load it. If the game is under a different variant than the current variant, Realpolitik will automatically change it for you.

The Variants menu controls which variant you are currently using. If you've modified the current game and then select a new variant, it will ask you whether you want to save it, then will bring up a new game with the initial units of the new variant. To add a new variant, see the document Realpolitik Variants.

Print Map... (-P) under the File menu will print out the map, the game name and season. To print a blank map, go to the Map menu and uncheck Units, Supplies, Orders and Names, and then print the map shown. The page orientation defaults to Landscape, but you can change that with Page Setup. If there are multiple pages, they run from left to right, then top to bottom, i.e.

You can edit the units and supplies on the map during any movement phase. Select the Edit Map (-E) item from the Map menu. The season indicator will change to Editing. To change the unit or supply ownership for a given sector, just click and hold in the sector. A pop-up menu will come up. You can then follow the menu hierarchy to change the unit or ownership for the sector.

You cannot edit the map during a retreat or adjustment phase.

You can edit game files and add variants. See Realpolitik Variants for more info.

The installer for this product was created using Installer VISE from MindVision Software. For more information on Installer VISE, contact: