The Intimate Diplomacy (ID) mini-adjudicator is intended to be used with a Judge. It takes most of the extra effort out of GMing ID games. It will adjudicate bids, set proxy for controled mercenaries, order holds and disbands for uncontroled mercenaries, check victory conditions, and will correctly process stalemate conditions if you tell it a stalemate has occured.
It handles controled mercenary movement via PROXY commands, and controled mercenary retreats and adjustments by setting their passwords to a value known to the players who control them. More info is available from the players perspective.
The mini adjudicator is a Bourne-shell script front end with a "nawk" script back end, and is therefore firmly wedded to Unix (or Linux, etc).
A game of Intimate will be recorded in a directory with the same name as the game. There will be always be a master.file and bid.file. You should put a Judge listing file for the current phase into judge.list. After the adjudicator runs for each season, there will be a commands file.
The master.file contains over-all the information about the game, as well as the year and season. The file is divided into 2 parts, game-wide and turn-specific, separated with "---". The following statements will appear in the game-wide section:
GAME game JUDGE address PASSWORD password DUMMY address YEAR year SEASON season PHASE phaseThe season-specific section will contain POWER and 0 or more CONTROL statements describing the current turn. CONTROL statements will never appear during Thaw, and will appear in other seasons only if a player power controls a mercenary. The formats are:
POWER power password reserve CONTROL power mercenary ...An example master.file:
GAME ideg JUDGE usvg PASSWORD passWord DUMMY dummy@yahoo.com YEAR 1901 SEASON Spring PHASE Movement ----- POWER Italy Itali 10 POWER Russia Russiya 12 CONTROL Italy Austria CONTROL Russia France CONTROL Russia Germany CONTROL Russia Turkey
The bid.file will contain bids for each mercenary. Any mercenary not bid on will have a bid of 0. The format of the bid file is:
BID power mercenary amount BID power mercenary amount ...
For example:
BID a g 6 BID a i 6 BID f e 3 BID f g 3 BID f i 3 BID f r 3
The judge.list file contains a listing, as produced by the Judge, for the current season and phase.
The file 'command' contains Unix "sh" scripts to give the Judge commands. The exact content varies depending which season/phase has most recently been processed. For Thaw it should contain a financial report. For Spring Movement it should contain bid results, proxies for controled mercenaries, and hold orders for uncontrolled mercenaries. For Fall Movement it should contain proxies and holds. For Spring and Fall retreats and Winter Adjustments it may contain disbands.
Before you start, you need a Unix/Linux account account with e-mail access, and a "dummy" e-mail account to which you don't mind a lot of mail being sent (i suggest using yahoo.com or msn.com). Register both e-mail addresses on the Judge you'll be running the game on. Next, determine which powers will be player-powers (via preference lists, or whatever).
To create a new game of intimate, when you've determined the powers, use the command:
shorthanded -n game judge password dummy power1 power2
Once both your players are signed on, generate the first financial report. Save a judge listing to judge.list (the storelist utility may help), then use the command:
shorthanded game
If your next phase turns out to be Fall Movement, that's OK: the mini-adjudicator will assume no retreats were needed. Otherwise, when you get the Spring Movement results, save a Judge listing (not the results) to judge.list, and run shorthanded again. Disbands for any dislodged uncontroled mercenaries will be ordered, and the master.file will be updated to expect Fall Movement.
At the start of Fall Movement, save a judge listing and run shorthanded as usual. Proxies and holds will be ordered, and the master.file updated to expect Winter Adjustments.
When you get the adjustment results, you know what to do by now. Disbands for uncontroled mercenaries will be ordered and the master.file updated to expect Thaw. At this point you follow the same procedure until the game ends.
During every season and phase, the mini-adjudicator will check the victory conditions. Remember that in ID victory can come after any movement or retreat phase, and stalemates can be declared during Adjustments. To end the game in a stalemate condition, use the command:
shorthanded -s game
The mini-adjudicator can reprocess one season/phase without editing files. This allows you to fix bidding errors and so on as required. Note that this is applicable only to the mini-adjudicator. To actually reprocess a game phase, you have to use the Judge rollback command. To reprocess the previous season/phase, use:
shorthanded -r game
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© 1998 Jon Stewart-Taylor, all rights reserved. Send comments or questions to
Jon Stewart-Taylor