All of Thausler's Comments + Replies

One reason Harry might not use the killing curse is that he wants to avoid the slippery slope that Mad-Eye warned of--once a wizard has used the curse once, it becomes easier to do so in the future.

7Qiaochu_Yuan
Moody said the slippery slope was due to killing, not due to casting the curse, and Harry still killed the troll. Quote:

The Grand Alliance gambit pretty much forced the hand of the RG. I think that you did the right thing in attacking me, given the ranking system. The convoy was in your self-interest and I don't begrudge it too much, in retrospect. If you had succeeded I could see you as being the third party to the draw instead of me.

Small chat played an important part in the my relations with both you and Italy. It formed a bond strong enough that I chose to continue to support Italy for a while longer even after Hugh signaled strongly that he wanted to ally. This wa... (read more)

If you'd warned me that you were supporting Italy into Serbia to sow confusion, then I wouldn't have been so bothered. But even so, I think you needed to pick sides between Italy and me that season. You looked like you had picked Italy, so I was correct to warn the West about IR.> quoted text

This sums up my mistake pretty well. My deception had no purpose and I gained nothing from it. I attribute this to the way that I was compartmentalizing negotiations at the time. The agent in charge of Turkish negotiations considered us as already allied, and ... (read more)

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.

0AlexMennen
Info - yes; Logs - no

Part II

In the South, my general plan had been to ally with Turkey until Italy was reduced to four or five centers and then offer to save him from the Juggernaut by offering him a place as a junior partner in a Russian-Italian alliance.

This was a strategy that I had used often in my high school, where the players are generally of lower caliber and don’t use TDT. Once I have reduced an enemy to the size when he can no-longer fight as an independent power, I offer him survival in return for the use of his units. In our group we call this “puppeting”. Thi... (read more)

1HughRistik
While I was trying to create trust with which to get more concessions, my main motive was different. Considering that I had raised a large outcry after you stabbed me with Italy in 1903, I feared that you would fear me stabbing you out of a grudge, and that you might stab me first. So I tried to obviously signal that I was forgoing opportunities to stab you. I think that such a problem was inherent in any two of us attempting a three-way, and we all made the right choice.
-1tenshiko
For the record, the "strangeness" of my responses around that time was really more my rather frantic recognition that, oh god, oh god, the alliance structure with Russia is falling apart, I have nowhere left to go, who will I be able to call dearest and darling now, France is a sweetheart but it's ~not the same~ not to mention that it would be impossible for him and I to actually work together in any meaningful fashion. So I was trying to... transition into the end of the alliance with you smoothly? I don't even know. As I've mentioned elsewhere, one of my key problems in this game was/is a reluctance to properly lie. So basically I didn't want to say "yeaaaaaah stabbing you now sorry baby" but I wanted to have meaningful conversations about strategy because, really, you were much more pleasant to talk to than almost any other player in the game. England counteracted it with his actions, France was the chatspeaking one (not that I hold this against him! It has its uses in many contexts and I am perfectly prone to slip into it myself), Italy played angry birds and valued getting revenge against alliance-breakers more than supply centers, Turkey was eloquent and nice enough except for the inconvenience that he communicated solely through emails, and Austria never really talked to me except in rejection of the Anschluss.

I play Diplomacy in the same circles that Alex does, and I agree with his analysis. It never ceased to amaze me how long the Turkish-Austrian and British-German alliances lasted in Game 1.

You were placed in a hard situation by France's builds, not just by your commitment to attack France. I thought it was similar to how Turkey and Italy's fleet builds in the East made fighting me difficult. There was no way you and France could ally against Britain, so he could pick and choose who to ally with.

I was worried early game that you and Britain would kick me out of the North while I was preoccupied in the South, and then gobble up France, but that never materialized as Britain played around in Denmark and Holland.

I have to agree with Hugh's ana... (read more)

Part I

The first half of this post will cover up until Winter 1903, focusing on the East. I will have the rest up by tomorrow night.

As Alex Mennen has noted, he and I know each other in real life. The major effect that this had on the game was the exchange of information early game and my late-game switch to mainly telephone based communication to reduce the credibility of French leaks. We have played Diplomacy against each other among our high school friends, so we both had a good estimate of each others’ strengths and weaknesses. We had no meta-game c... (read more)

1HughRistik
Interesting. Though I'm not sure I agree that you would have been terribly far behind me. You could have moved into Galicia in Spring 1903 and gotten Budapest in 1904. It's not just that you didn't articulate that you weren't allying me, it's that you blatantly stabbed me. Supporting Italy into Serbia was a stab. Furthermore, letting Italy think he might get somewhere from attacking me was what caused him to gain centers. Otherwise, he would have played Vienna supports Budapest, and moved Vienna to Trieste. To me, your moves only made sense if you were declaring war on me with Italy, which is why I made such a big deal of it. If you'd warned me that you were supporting Italy into Serbia to sow confusion, then I wouldn't have been so bothered. But even so, I think you needed to pick sides between Italy and me that season. You looked like you had picked Italy, so I was correct to warn the West about IR. I deliberately created this situation by preemptively striking Italy in the Ionian, which would have only succeeded if he went for two Austrian builds without telling me. I deliberately burned diplomatic capital with Italy to make it easier for you to work with me without worrying that I would stab you with Italy. That's right. I was a bit confused about why my emails didn't move the West. Did they think that I would stab you myself to get revenge, even though I made it very clear that I wouldn't act alone against you? Did I manage to annoy them with my messages? Did they fail to understand the significance of a strong IR (which switched to an RT in 1904)? Or both: they failed to understand the significance of the growing alliance in the East, which led them to interpret me as being a big windbag?

They don't have the units in place, but they can put them in place rather quickly. South of the Alps they can order:

F Ionian Sea S F Tunis H; F Tyrrhenian Sea H; F Tuscany S F Tyrrhenian Sea H; A Rome-Venice (which will then support A Piedmont); A Piedmont H;

They could stalemate North of the Alps fairly easily. It is impossible to hold St Petersburg. Munich and Berlin may be defensible, if the Eastern Powers guess correctly, but if they can at least hold Berlin they can form a stalemate similar to John Beshera's Position II north of the Alps. A Munich ... (read more)

I retreat to A Denmark to Sweden.

Summer 1907

It probably wouldn't be too hard to create a magical patch for the problem of not being able to carry armor. Wingardium Leviosa is a simple patch to lighten the load, and even if it has limited duration it would be an excellent spell to cast immediately before going into combat.

2Desrtopa
Even if the armor isn't weighing down on you though, it still has inertia, so you have to exert yourself to move the extra mass. Maintaining a wingardium leviosa on it might be more trouble than it's worth.
3Sheaman3773
Doesn't Wingardium Leviosa have to be maintained? I don't think it's a fire-and-forget spell.

I don't remember a clear time when I stopped believing in Santa Claus, but I do remember some of the hints along the way. I especially remember how my parents would ask me what Santa Claus was bringing for Christmas and giving them coy answers, to see if Santa could know what I wanted even if I didn't tell him.

It didn't bother me whether or not Santa Claus was real, and I played along when my sister asked my parents. I knew who the real agent behind Santa Claus, was, though, and in third grade made sure to carefully explain to my parents why Santa should... (read more)

I retreat my army to Vienna.

(Summer 1904)

Assuming that sperm banks are more well-stocked than egg banks, making the first generation all female would have the additional benefit of allowing you to reintroduce more diversity into the population, so the third generation only has 1/4 of your daughter's genes.

It'd also be nice if the next due date was fixed. It seems that this does not get updated as consistently as the rest of the information, probably because it is at the end of the post. I know that I generally skip it when doing my first read on an update and usually have to go back later to find it.

Maybe if the date was bolded it would be more visible and thus remembered more?

Upvoted for allusion to Neville Chamberlain at Munich.

I'd like to play, either as an alternate or in a second game.

If Voldemort's plan was to cause Britain to unite under a Mark of Britain killing Yermy Wibble and his family was a funny way to accomplish it.

Voldemort may have been operating under the same false assumption that Wibble was (that Wibble's martyrdom would legitimize his ideas), but a villain that clever could have at least done some better PR work on Wibble during the seventies.

Thausler110

Furthermore, the major event in Aftermath 2 is that Snape reads students' minds again-something he agreed not to do under his agreement with Dumbledore. Which is further evidence that he has "gone rogue."

3red75
Ch. 18 In Aftermath 2 it seems reasonable that safety of Alissa requires reading her mind. Edit: Thus, the change is that he directly addressed cause of her distraction.
Thausler130

Assuming Snape was genuinely hurt by Harry's interpretation of Lily, I would expect to see a fraying between Snape and the Dumbledore faction as Snape questions why he is so faithful to Lily.

0[anonymous]
Seconded. That's what I wrote right after Ch. 27 came out: "Nice job turning Snape dark, Harry."
8ShardPhoenix
Yes, I suspect that was the point of that scene - to make things harder for Harry by taking away a (secret) ally. That would align with Eliezer's stated philosophy of fanfiction.