Intimate Diplomacy* Mini-Adjudicator

Index: Jon's home, ID home, bottom, about the mini-adjudicator, bid.file, commands file, creating a game, data structures, financial report, handling bids, handling stalemate, master.file, reprocessing, Using the mini-adjudicator,

About the Mini-Adjudicator

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).

Mini-Adjudicator Data Structures

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 phase
The 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.

Using the Mini-Adjudicator

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

This will first create the game directory, master.file, and bid.file. Next it will send the Judge a message creating the game, setting your *nix account e-mail address as the GM, and setting the parameters. After that it will sign the "dummy" address up as all the players, and resign the 2 player-powers. At this point you should tell your actual humans to sign on to the appropriate power, and inform them of their mercenary control password. The paswords are in the master.file on the respective POWER statements.

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

This will send the Thaw pre-bid financial report. The master file will be updated to reflect that the next season will be Spring Movement. When you receive the players bids, save them to bid.file (the bid utility may help). Then run shorthanded again (don't forget the game name). This will adjudicate the bids, and update the master.file to expect Spring Retreats next

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

This will set the stalemate flag for the mini-adjudicator, and the game will be decided based on number of centers owned.

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

To back up more than one season, the master.file must be edited, and appropriate judge.list files supplied. Be careful.



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Jon Stewart-Taylor

Last modified: Tue Feb 3 17:04:45 EST 1998