Playing online Risk games is always different from playing with the board game. Performing diplomacy with text chat isn't quite the same. Nevertheless, the capability is there and it is possible to use it to perform some limited diplomacy.
In one of my online games, as it turned out, my diplomacy backfired completely. Here is what happened.
The Environment
Suppose I was playing as Yellow and my main aim was to get Africa (Shown above). We started with 5 players, but the fifth player was quickly eliminated. Going for Africa in a 4 player game is usually good. My thinking was that if I stayed out of conflict zones, I should do well and slowly grow. The card distribution was as follows:
My immediate problem was Blue. I was confronted with Blue both in Europe and in South America. Somehow I had to deal with it. Green was not much of a threat yet and I had to deal with him after I dealt with Blue.
Red on the other hand was getting dangerously strong. So I thought the best way to control him was to get him in a conflict with another player. For that, I had an obvious player in mind: Blue. If I could get Blue and Red to start a war of attrition over Central America, then Blue was no longer going to be a threat as he would need to save South America. I was then able to expand into Europe.
My reasoning was that after a few turns Blue could get very weak as he could not compete with Red very effectively. At that point I could also expand into South America and end up with three continents. Hence, now that I knew my short term objective, I needed a way to get to it. How could I get Blue and Red engaged? This is when I resorted to diplomacy. I approached Blue and asked him if we could have a treaty over North Africa and Brazil. To make sure that I could count on it (at least forcing the issue) I also said that the treaty will be valid until only Yellow and Blue were left in the game. As you may know, conversations in Risk are open and other players can also listen to them (or read them in this case).
I then reinforced North Africa to push the deal forward a bit so that Blue would feel under threat if he did not accept the deal.
This worked. Next turn I got several interesting messages. Blue said he agrees. That was good news. However, Green wasn't happy about our deal making. So Green suggested to Red that maybe they should get together against us as well. This was indeed very bad news. The last thing I wanted was two of them ganging against us, or most probably me. In fact that's exactly what happened.
Red invaded South America and made him very weak. Blue was so weak that asked me to eliminate him. At this point I cashed my cards, eliminated Blue, then got both South America and Europe. I achieved my short term objective. Here is the result.
I was strong, but I had one fundamental problem. I was left with two enemies. You guessed it. Next turn they both started attacking me and even though I was stronger than both of them, there was no way I could sustain so much attack from both sides. Eventually I got eliminated and Green went to win the game.
The Question
If you where in my position when I had only Africa and was wondering what to do, what would you have done? What sort of diplomacy would you use to improve your situation? How do you see the game progressing? Assume that the game is played online and you can use a chatbox for diplomacy.