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Diplomaps is played in semi-real time. Orders are applied immediately but most effects take place at updates, which happen every 5 minutes.
Movement and action points
Each army gains 6 action points (APs) per tick, up to a cap of 72 APs. Moving is instantaneous and spends APs.
Over land, travel costs one AP per 100 km of weighted distance:
- within the same country: real distance × 0.5;
- between adjacent (land-bordering) countries: distance × 2.0;
- if your alliance controls every city in a country, moves between cities of that country cost half as much again (the cheapest applicable rule wins).
Costs are rounded up to a whole number of APs and are never below 1. By sea, any coastal city can ship to any other coastal city for a flat 24 APs, which resets that army’s APs to zero; land and sea legs are never combined in a single route.
Visibility
The world runs on fog of war: you see an army only when one of the following is true:
- it is yours
- it belongs to your alliance
- it stands in a city you control
- it stands in a city one of your armies is
- it stands in a city you could reach within a move
- it stands within 72 distance of one of your cities
- it is suffering attrition (oversupplied or in enemy and neutral territories)
Armies with more APs can see further. Watch out not to overextend your armies, and be careful when making a coastal move, which completely depletes the army's APs.
Creating armies
Armies are created with a specified target strength. They start out with zero strength and reinforce over a number of turns.
Resupply and reinforcement
Every city has a supply limit, set by its population and fixed for the whole game. It caps how many troops may sit in the city without starving. When the combined strength of the armies in a city exceeds its limit, each 1000 troops over the limit costs one percent of attrition per tick, split between the armies by their share of the city’s total. Standing in an enemy-controlled city adds 1.5 points a tick, and an unclaimed city an extra 0.5.
Cities hold reserves: manpower spent on reinforcements and regrown a little each tick. A drained city refills by at least 1,000 troops a tick and is back to full within roughly 36 ticks. An army below its target strength reinforces out of the reserves of the city it stands in — at least 1,000 troops a tick, a full reinforcement within roughly 12 ticks — but only while that city is controlled by its own alliance. A newly raised army targets at least 1,000 troops, never more than its city’s supply limit.
Combat
Each tick, armies of opposing alliances that share a city fight, regardless of who controls the city. Combat damage for the turn is calculated through a single round of "Risk-like" dice rolls:
- an army rolls a 6-sided die per 1,000 troops it fields (at least one), and no more than if it fielded 10,000 troops — that cap is the combat width (at most 10 dice);
- each army picks one random enemy in the city as its target. Both sides’ dice are sorted high to low and paired; every pair where the attacker’s die is strictly higher than the defender’s deals 1,000 damage to the target. Ties and losses do nothing, and the attacker takes no counter-damage in the same round;
- an army at 0 strength is destroyed. A survivor knocked below 20% of its pre-combat strength is routed: it retreats to a random adjacent city its APs can reach (allied-controlled first, then neutral, then enemy) and is destroyed when no such city exists.