Czar Thausler and I know each other in real life. We didn't have a metagame commitment to cooperate (in fact, I stabbed him briefly, to little effect), but it did help us coordinate.
Now, a chronological summary of the game from my perspective. I'm sure I've left out something important, but here goes.
I've played France several times before, and always opened by taking the Iberian centers and pretty much ignoring everything else until 1902. I decided to mix things up a bit and go for Belgium in 1901 instead. However, Kaiserin Tenshiko decided that Belgium should go to Britain, which made any attempt on it by me pretty much impossible, so I reverted to the more usual strategy. Tenshiko then further decided that her opening strategy would be to invade France, and she loudly broadcast this desire. This allowed Prime Minister Kevin to play us off against each other, and made life rather frustrating for me for the first three years, during which I had a continuous standoff against Germany in Burgundy, and Britain kept switching sides between us.
I made the mistake of not building a fleet in 1901 in order to appease Britain. Since I had no further room for expansion, I could not build a fleet, and, since it's pretty much impossible to invade Britain with only one fleet, I had no leverage against Britain until I got into Burgundy in 1904, allowing me to build another fleet and crush Britain. Instead of occasionally switching sides between me and Germany without any gain, Kevin should have allied with Germany and crushed me. This is because Germany actually had a possible path of expansion other than towards Britain, meaning that such an alliance would be stable and they could split my supply centers. I, on the other hand, had no possibility of gaining supply centers from Germany unless Britain conquered a large portion of Germany first and decided to hand me the leftovers. This meant that I had great incentive to stab Britain as soon as I got the chance, which he made the mistake of giving me.
Britain was quickly shut out of the continent by a French-German-Russian coalition. We initially planned to split Britain evenly, with each of us getting one British home supply center, but by the time we got to the taking-over-Britain stage, I had the ability to take two British supply centers on my own, aided by Prime Minister Kevin's resignation. So of course I did so.
At that point, Russia was frighteningly large, and I had started taking steps to slow its growth. Czar Thausler had been consulting me on strategy in the South, and I started leaking information to Sultan Hugh Ristik and Kind Alexandros. Additionally, I started coordinating with Germany against Russia. I convinced her to forgo Edinburgh (which I probably would have given her if she insisted on it) so she would have more units to move against Russia.
Eventually, it became evident that my backing of Germany would ultimately have no effect whatsoever on Russia's expansion, so I stabbed Germany, and divided up her supply centers with Russia. Thausler was concerned that I was gaining supply centers earlier than he was, so he supported Edinburgh hold, which I was not terribly concerned about, given that he could not take Edinburgh without my consent either. Russia and I took down Germany before Turkey took down Italy, so we then started arranging a stalemate while we waited.
Sultan Hugh Ristik and I briefly discussed attempting a two-way draw along the diagonal from North Africa to northern Russia, but I was inclined to try to bring the game to an end with three players. Two-way draws are tough to pull off, and it looked like Turkey would be more likely to be able to stab me and turn it into a win than I would. Additionally, I was in a tedious position because Russia had several fleets in the North, but few in the South, and Turkey had several fleets in the Mediterranean, meaning they could each deploy their fleets against me, but not against each other.
In 1906 I wrote a note to myself to remind me to ask if you had leaked our chat logs from that year to Germany. This was around mid-January.
(A full list of game moves and commentary is available here; the game maps are available here.)
Since I was GM, I had a distinctly limited access to private communications, so I've relatively little analysis.
A brief review of the game:
Austria was the first player to get eliminated; in contrast to the sort of min-maxing I've usually seen in Diplomacy, they took a lot of big risks in the beginning, in particular leaving Trieste open to Italian attack, in favor of quick expansion to the east. Although they did manage to take Warsaw and Serbia, the Austrian forces wound up overextended and unable to hold onto their gains, and in a weak position diplomatically; the fall of Trieste didn't help matters. Nobody was willing to help Austria, and so Italy seized all of Austria, with Turkey taking the Balkans and Russia taking Rumania. After that, there was a long period of stalemate in the Balkans, as neither of the three powers was willing to divert enough troops to one front to make any offensive progress.
In the west, Germany initially faced a combined Franco-British attack; they held out surprisingly well, aided by cracks in the alliance and occasional Russian attacks on Norway. Britain was actually the first Power to fall in the West, when France piled on after the fall of Norway; the British player was forced to stop participating in the game at around that time. France wound up with all of the British Isles, and Germany was squeezed between it and Russia until it cracked. (The brief Italian occupation of Munich didn't help.) Germany did manage to hold out for most of the rest of the game; there were only a few months of inconclusive war between France and Russia before the draw proposal.
Meanwhile, in the east, Italy gradually fell back before a combined Russian-Turkish attack. After Russia seized Vienna and Budapest, and Turkey seized Trieste, Russia mostly concentrated on attacking England and Germany, leaving Turkey and Italy in a period of stalemate, broken by the advance of Turkish fleets into the Ionian Sea. Soon after, Italy's player had to drop out, and Turkey soon seized control of Italy. Then the game ended.
One thing I'm curious about is how much communication there was between the eastern and western powers. (In-game, beyond Russia fighting on both fronts and a single, chance retreat by Italy, there was little direct interaction.)