Diplomacy is Not an Option review — of physics and food

Diplomacy is Not an Option, by Door 407, is an old-school RTS that will challenge seasoned players and frustrate anyone new to the genre. I mostly loved it and sometimes hated it. It kept me on the hook for over 50 hours so the good outweighs the bad. Let’s get into it.

The game features multiple modes. There is a lengthy and branching campaign, challenge missions, and custom games. I spent most of my time in the campaign and still didn’t manage to discover everything. There are three different factions in the game. The Lord’s Troops, the Sarranga, and the Undead. Players are forced to make choices on who they will support at various points in the campaign that will impact the story, the missions, and even the units they have access to. If you want to experience it all, you’ll need to play through multiple times. In the 52 hours I spent with the game, I completed the campaign once and then went back to an old save and chose to join the Undead and continued on through that campaign. 

Each mission starts from a familiar place. Your base, town center, castle (you get it) starts constructed. You have a handful of military units to begin exploring and clearing out the locals, and a pile of resources to start spending. Buildings and units cost wood, stone, iron, and eventually gold. All of your people need to eat. All of the infrastructure to build and sustain your growing kingdom requires space. A lot of space. The more your lovely little kingdom spreads out, the more space you have to clear of baddies and protect from waves of enemies. Mastering choke points and making the best use of the terrain is key. Trying to build and protect the Great Wall of China all the way around your kingdom is a fool's errand. 

When I first started playing, the resource demand was a big obstacle. It’s difficult to focus on exploring and clearing the map while remembering to jump back to base and keep up the constant expansion of resource production. Late game buildings and units require gold which can only be obtained via trading. The exchange rates are absolutely criminal so keeping up a hefty production of wood and stone to trade is critical to success. Wood and stone are limited resources until the very late game so that’s an additional problem to deal with. Those of you that have mastered this micro and macro juggling operation in other RTS games won’t have a problem. 

When it comes to combat, Diplomacy is Not an Option has a diverse range. Each map is seeded with bad guys that you’ll need to hunt down for either objectives, to claim space, or just to prevent them from joining the enemy waves that throw themselves at your walls. Speaking of waves, they are the main event. Every few game days growing waves of enemies will assault you from one or more directions. You’ll have warning and time to prepare, but you better prepare. Learn from my mistakes, building a sick set of walls and towers and channeling your inner Gondor isn’t going to cut it. At least not in the beginning. Late game wall upgrades are seriously strong but expensive and an array of archers and catapults can hold off any onslaught if built right. Until then though, you need a ground force to sally forth and hit the enemies in the field. Flanking cavalry and a strong force of armored infantry are your friends. This is where I think Diplomacy is Not an Option really shines. You can throw blobs of units around but the game rewards actual tactics and strategic positioning. With real-time pausing to reorder and maneuver your troops, it’s a tactician's playground. 

In addition to the normal enemies and wave attacks, the game does a great job of changing things up and keeping you on your toes. Depending on your faction choices you may find yourself taking on hives of giant bugs, dealing with constantly respawning packs of wolves, giant undead monstrosities, or other armies of humans. Each situation will require you to adapt your tactics and your unit composition to deal with the various threats and attack patterns. Big boss units offer an opportunity to build the assault force of your dreams, arraying them in battle formation to take on a giant threat. 

While you’re planning, building, attacking, and moving troops around, you have to keep an important detail in mind: this magical thing that rarely exists in video games… called physics. Put units on walls and towers? Awesome, now they can shoot farther. Put units behind walls and towers? Oops, the arc of an arrow or catapult shot means you can’t hit the units smashing your walls to pieces. That sweet block of archers raining death on your enemies? It would be a shame if a catapult sent them careening through the air because you had them too close together. Speaking of catapults, if they don’t kill a unit outright, the unit will be stunned on the ground before getting back up and into the fight. Little details like that make you pay attention to your troop positions and attack plans. Again, cavalry is your friend. Get in there and mess those catapults up fast before they mess up all your pretty blocks of troops. 

The gameplay is engaging, rewarding, and hard. Once you put in the time to learn the systems and strategies, this game is a blast, but it does require work. The first two missions teach you the game and lull you into a sense of security before the third smacks you in the face and screams at you to try harder. The ramp-up in difficulty is rather extreme and could easily cause less dedicated players to bounce off and put the game down to languish in their Steam Library forever. The game is worth the effort but you should know going in that it’s going to take effort. Combine the difficulty with missions taking upwards of several hours until you really master everything and the game is asking a lot from the player. 

If the gameplay is engaging and dynamic, the story is anything but. There is some weird stuff going on here. The player character is some kind of drunk lord that serves an insufferable king putting down peasant revolts and engaging in classic colonialism. It’s not really clear why you are the way you are or why everyone is awful. That’s all well and good, if not terribly interesting, but the way the story is told is just painful. For some reason every cutscene of story elements feels like it’s being played on 10% speed. There are multiple stretches of complete silence and inaction in every scene. The awkward pacing puts a spotlight on the thin narrative and makes me want to skip every possible scene. Since I’m doing a review, I watched them all so you don’t have to. However, if you choose to go down the undead path (you should, it’s very fun) there are some really fun rock band scenes that don’t have the same problems, even if they are completely nonsensical. Fortunately, you will spend way more time playing the game than you will watching cutscenes and the game never claimed to be a narrative masterpiece, so the odd pacing and writing can be forgiven. 

For those who like to punish themselves, there are insane and more than insane levels of difficulty to play with. Outside of the campaign there are also a lot of challenge levels and scenarios to really test your tactics and game knowledge. I spent 52 hours on the game and could easily spend another 50 or more getting deeper into the challenges and other difficulty levels. If you are an RTS fan but aren’t into the competitive online side of the genre, I think Diplomacy is Not an Option is a great….option.