This is a little write-up about one of my favorite variant maps, Fall of the American Empire. It's a 10-player brawl set in an alternate history where the United States, Canada, and Mexico collapse, leading to several rump states, pretender states, and new empires to fight for control of North America. Below is the map as it looks on webDiplomacy/vDiplomacy which are, unfortunately, some of the last couple platforms that support this wonderful variant. Nowadays, Modern Diplomacy II serves as more of a flagship for the both of these sites, while Youngstown Redux is the premier big map on Diplicity. Why are these 10-player maps so much more popular than Fall of the American Empire was in its heyday?

For reference, the playable countries are: British Columbia in yellow, Quebec in dark green, Heartland in dark blue, New York in purple, California in red, Texas in gray, Florida in orange, Mexico in light green, Cuba in light blue, and Peru in pink.

You might be surprised because of how much of an evangelist for this variant I am, but I don't believe it's due to any sort of conspiracy theory against FotAE in particular. I just think it's because it's not the best version of itself! There's a lot of balance problems and design problems that limit how much fun you can have here compared to other maps this size. I'll be going through them to help make my case that we need another edition of Fall of the American Empire.

On Balance

Some say that trying to "balance" a variant is approaching the problem in the wrong way completely. They argue that optimizing a map's balance is equivalent to optimizing the fun out of it. From their perspective, players will do the job of balancing a map themselves by observing which countries have natural advantages and responding to them by limiting their influence early on. Some people also really enjoy cave diving and swear that they would never end up dead from it because they're just built different. Not every opinion is equally valid.

I'm approaching this article from the perspective that variant balance is important and is necessary if you want to maximize a map's quality. To counter the argument that players should adapt to imbalances inherent to a map: being obligated to play in a certain way so you can barely stay in the game is counter to so many fundamental ideas about Diplomacy that I can't even list them all. You should be able to ally with or at least make deals with anyone as long as you trust them. You also should be able to approach every game differently; playing the same card every time should be penalized, not rewarded. Imagine if every game on the Classic map had to start with an Anglo-German alliance to counter France. Do you think playing France would be much fun? And to be clear, I have no problem with a constantly shifting meta where different strategies have their time in the limelight, but a stale meta means the death of a variant to me.

As it turns out, Vincent Maus, the creator of this variant, would agree! What we have come to know as Fall of the American Empire is really Fall of the American Empire IV. It has gone through several iterations, mostly addressing the balance between the different countries, until the fourth edition was released sometime in the 2000s (Unfortunately, all the resources online about this map's history have expired. I'm basing this off my memory from looking into it several years ago. Sorry!) and ended up sticking. Again, the fourth edition is fantastic! Some of the most memorable games of Diplomacy I've played are all thanks to Maus for refining the original map to this point. However, twenty years has been more enough time to recognize sore spots that a fifth edition needs to address.

Quebec (and New York)

Obviously, imbalance in the form of asymmetry is just fine. Balance problems exist when that asymmetry means that certain countries are so powerful that it's at the expense of others, and on FotAEIV, the real wellsprings of power are the two way up in the northeast: New York and (especially) Quebec. Why is this?

Conventional wisdom says that center powers, to compensate for their lack of security, should be entitled to more neutral centers early on relative to corner powers. For example, Austria on the Classic map normally gets both Serbia and Greece in the first year, while Turkey can't get more than Bulgaria without someone helping them out. France is so strong because it has it both ways: it's a corner power that's entitled to the two neutral centers in Iberia. Obviously, there's other reasons France dominates, but this is an easy one to point to. Following this too religiously can lead to problems, a good example is the variant Known World 901, but it's as good a rule of thumb as any.

On FotAEIV, corner powers normally get two centers in the first year, while center powers get three. However, Quebec and New York, both of which are functionally corner powers, get three centers in the first year. It's not always a guarantee, I should be clear, but they can only fail to double if someone else forfeits an opportunity at a center just to screw them over too.

It doesn't end there. On paper. this really shouldn't be a problem because these countries would just end up taking each other out in an epic Monsterverse-style battle. This doesn't happen for the same reason that the relatively central New York is actually effectively a corner power: Quebec and New York aren't incentivized to fight each other. The Northeastern US+the Canadian Maritimes are extraordinarily barren and just not worth fighting a large-scale war over. The whole strip contains only two supply centers that can't be contested in a year's time. Put yourself in the shoes of one of these countries; why would you ever even try to stab the other when it would be so telegraphed and would net you such little gain? It leads to a situation where the New York-Quebec alliance is like FotAEIV's Juggernaut alliance, in that it always forms and is always a massive threat to the rest of the board's security, especially Heartland's. A lot of people walk away from this variant thinking that Heartland is a weak power, when the truth is that it just doesn't happen to be absolutely busted like its neighbors who always conquer it together.

B.C. Stands for Boring Country

While we're on the topic of Quebec, we should talk about its Canadian compatriot, British Columbia. I kept alluding to the idea that Quebec is stronger than New York, and the reason for that is that BC doesn't act as a good counterbalance to Quebec in the extreme north of the map. British Columbia is the singular power in this variant that's only really entitled to one supply center in the first year. It has to declare its intentions with its other units, especially its fleet, where it can either go south and try for Hawaii in the second year, or bounce Quebec out of Greenland. (Theoretically, Greenland can and sometimes does go to BC, but it's only ever out of the goodness of Quebec's heart. It never makes sense for Quebec to allow this unless something really weird is going on and Heartland is letting them take Manitoba from Ungava. Please, let me know if you've ever seen this happen in the comments, I desperately want to hear that story.) In either case, BC is not doing a lot to slow down Quebec's advance, because even if they do bounce them out of Greenland, Quebec can go Nova Scotia-North Atlantic Ocean next year and force themselves in. Now, all that BC accomplished was being a thorn in Quebec's side.

That's ultimately the problem with BC. I don't even think it's that bad of a power, but the fact that it only really exists to be a nuisance for either California or Quebec means it's quite an unfun country to draw compared to the other 9 on the board. And obviously, a ton of this stems from the fact that BC can never make a compelling argument to New York to abandon their alliance with Quebec and help them with a joint attack. BC has a lot of promise, but no intrigue.

Florida and Cuba

The Caribbean cousins of Florida and Cuba have all the opposite problems of Quebec and New York. They start way, way too close to one another. There's only one way on the entire map for two countries to directly conquer each other in the very first year, and it's either of Miami or Havana entering the Sea of Florida and taking the other. It's the classic problem on the Classic map of Venice and Trieste being too close for comfort, just off by one.

This is an easy problem with the map to identify, so easy that a lot of people see it and chalk up all of Florida and Cuba's woes to this and only this. I'd like to dig a little deeper and point out that while this war is definitely far too easy to trigger, it's also not really worth it in the first place. The massive Sea of Florida bottleneck and lack of other centers to fight over or other countries who can directly support either in this war means it's often just crabs in a bucket.

Each country has their own individual problems too, of course. Florida's is that they're usually the next target of the Quebec-New York alliance after Heartland, and by then, Texas is happy to help them to get some easy profit in the Gulf of Mexico. Florida also has a super set opening to go after specifically Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. This expansion route leaves Florida very exposed, not only because it's so obvious what they're going to do in the first year, but because holding these and holding their home peninsula at the same time is quite difficult if they end up fighting more than one person at a time. Cuba's problem is a little simpler: being an island nation, their ability to mobilize units on the mainland is, to put it bluntly, crap. Cuba is always going to have a harder time expanding and/or soloing compared to someone like Quebec or Texas.

Shortlist of Changes

That covers pretty much everything I wanted to go over in detail. I'll summarize everything below in a solutions-oriented manner, as well as introduce a couple other points I couldn't find a place for elsewhere. Basically, if someone was working on the next version of FotAE, these are the changes I'd want to see. Please comment other changes you would be interested in below, I love talking about this map and I love the concept of a possible fifth edition!

• Nerf Quebec by limiting how many centers they can take in the first year.
• Change the corridor of the map between New York and Quebec into a more dynamic front. An interesting idea here could be to connect New York City to Massachusetts Bay and/or make Maine a center. This would make New York more of a center power, so they wouldn't need to lose access to a double in the first year like Quebec.
• British Columbia needs another neutral to go after. Montana, Saskatchewan, maybe even Nunavut could be interesting here.
• Something about the way Greenland is contested needs to change. It definitely can't exist as it currently does where Quebec can never let BC have it because it's too threatening to them.
• Change the Great Lakes around to incentivize fleet action there more. When I play as Heartland, I never feel like building fleets early on to strengthen my grip over the Great Lakes is actually a good idea. Merging Lake Michigan and Lake Huron could be interesting, being able to move from Ontario to Chicago in one year would certainly make freshwater fleets more appealing.
• Redraw the sea borders between Florida and Cuba so that one, they cannot immediately go to war, and two, such a war (that would happen later) would be more dynamic and more winnable for either side.
• Make adjustments to the neutrals in the American South. Florida should have more options for which neutrals to go after. As is, the only alternative would be Florida getting Louisiana and Texas getting Tennessee, but we all know this will never happen without redrawing the borders.
• Cuba needs another center to go after to be able to grow at a healthy rate compared to the other countries. Maybe add a center in the Lesser Antilles that they can contest year two?

I've been thinking about uncharacteristically early good team wins lately, and there's two cases people mention a lot and are, at a glance, in agreement over. Let me explain them.

One is the basis for executing every day, even very early on when little information is out there. A lot of times on scripts with no Undertaker, no Cannibal, no Vortox, no science rolls, nothing that really encourages the good team to execute, someone will ask why they should even execute on the first day. There's so little information out there that whoever gets on the block is likely to just be a good townsfolk and so the only people actually benefiting from that are the evil team, who have a vested interest in speeding the game up. People will then counter that it's always worth it to execute when possible because the demon isn't going to kill themselves, so even the low likelihood of executing them is worth the shot. Fair enough.

The other is a huge part of the analysis done over the Cult Leader. Cult Leaders are very likely to be good on the first day and become increasingly more likely to be evil as they survive longer and longer, so in many cases, the optimal strategy with Cult Leader is to always form every cult proposed on day one. Rarely does anyone contest this, the consensus is that this is a very strong strategy. In fact, people argue that it's too strong. Always giving the Cult Leader the win on day one, even if it is usually liable to result in a good team victory, doesn't result in anyone actually having fun except for maybe the Cult Leader themselves. It's basically equivalent to not playing the game in the first place because it doesn't require any thought or effort other than putting your hand up. I definitely understand.

However, can you see how these ideas don't really coexist together? I have been in plenty of games where the demon was executed on day one, and the first time was really funny, but the rest are just kind of a waste of a bag. The demon is almost never put on the block on the first day because of strong information or decisive social reads, it usually only happens because of bad luck. And even when there is some good basis for that very correct day one execution, I argue that's still not fun for the good team because nothing's actually happened yet. So much of the intrigue in the game has been completely robbed from you, it's like you read only the exposition in a novella.

I am a devout believer in the Goomba fallacy; I am not saying that people who push to execute day one so they can kill the demon also never form cults day one because it's boring. However, these concepts are boosted a ton in online Clocktower spaces without a lot of argument. So, why? Am I missing something and these are compatible ideas?

My group is normally in-person, but we've been doing online over the summer. I'm the one with the paid account on the app, so I usually storytell. On most days, we have time for 3 games, so what I like to do is run a chiller script to ease players into the game, then a much more advanced "showstopper" script as the main event, and then I ask the players what kind of script they want to play. I'm good on the showstopper scripts as there's pretty much no end to these online. My problem is finding good scripts to get people warmed up for those that are also interesting in their own right.

I am NOT asking for good stepping stone scripts because my group is ready to move on from Trouble Brewing. Everyone is a very experienced player, and on the rare occasion that we do have new players, we just play TB. Anything that simple (including TB variations like Strings Pulling) are honestly a little too simple and not stimulating enough. The vibe I'm looking for is more like Trust (probably the gold standard for this sort of script): there's plenty of complex interactions possible, but it's usually not too mentally taxing on anyone and rarely do things go off the rails. I'll list some other scripts I've tried that have worked nicely:

• Bad Moon Rising
• Sects & Violets
• Trouble with Violets (TB good team against S&V evil team)
• Moves like Igor (BMR -Mastermind +Boffin)
• Uncertain Death

So yeah, a lot of scripts with primarily Base 3 characters, but that's by no means required. There's a couple of other factors that would help because we normally get people joining the room as we play. Scripts that can slot in travelers would be nice so these players don't always have to wait, and since it's good to have some time for these people to come in, scripts that usually last until final 3 would be nice. Thanks in advance!