The Turkish Lament! If Only I Could Build F ST Pete

Engineer Diplomacy History: Part 1

Back in 2001, when you were about 12, Libby McAfee
proposed a play test of a variant which gave special powers to regular
diplomacy units.  Their main power was to build outside of a countries
home centers.  Before the game was more than a month old I decided
there had to be a better way of doing this without allowing every SC
the power of builds.  That night I woke up with the solution in my
head, and the added thought of Fighter units as well to reflect the
conditions in 1916.  I quickly wrote up a rough draft of the rules
which would govern such units drawing on some of the rules from the
NHww2 Variant I created in the early eighties.  Now a Turkish player
who reached St Pete could use his Engineer unit to create a fleet and
get at England.  An Austrian unit in Rum or Sev could build a Fleet to
take the Black Sea.  Yet the necessity of Home Centers did not go away
because you needed them to build your Engineer Units!  I also thought
what if your Engineer was captured?  I did not want a large surpluses
of Engineer units on the board so I decided you would be allowed one
so long as you had a SC; and 1 Engineer unit for every  4 Supply
Centers after that.  If an Engineer unit was now captured it would
become a 'prison gang' the enemy could use for one season to convert
one of his units.  After that it would be disbanded.  Lastly I wanted
a player to easily move the Engineer/Prison Gang units about, so I
again called on a rule from NHww2 and adapted it to the movement of E
units.  You could now in one season move an Engineer unit from Ank to
StPete.  The receiving Area StPete would have to have a military unit
making this order, any attack upon this unit would defeat the
transport order.  Lastly writing the orders should be easy and stay
within the Diplomacy traditions for writing orders.   So using T for
transport the order is written  A StPete T E Ank.

Now you do not need to be a geek to use this unit the orders are easy
to write even if you are not sure how to use them.
To build a unit were there is an E, same as regular build, the
computer will check for an E so it need not be written.  Turkey Build
F Swe.  To convert a unit write out the word convert or use the &
symbol.  A StPete & Fleet or Convert A StPete to Fleet. Easy!

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