That’s not the point of my rhetorical example with chess. Of course I’m aware that chess is not even weakly solved. My point is that players are clearly not perfectly rational since games don’t always end in the same outcome. If a draw is the outcome under perfect play, then any chess game that ends with a win must have resulted from the loser playing irrationally in failing to stop the winner. If the outcome under perfect play is not a draw, then the players must be playing irrationally even more often, since draws are the most common outcome under top play.
The whole point of the chess analogy is to undercut the assumption that players are even capable of always playing rationally. Diplomacy and diplomatic go challenges the ability to play rationally even further, since moves have to be made simultaneously and the games precisely revolve around communication and psychological manipulation to get others to play irrationally.
Look, I’m not saying that the game isn’t drawish, but just that it may be a lot harder to achieve than you think, especially with a 5-player draw outcome that you conjecture. I think if we played many games of 5-player diplomatic go, on any board size from 9x9 to 19x19, then 5-way draws would be relatively rare and wins would be observed more often than any draws.
Note that I think this specifically because the victory condition only requires controlling a plurality of the board area. I think this would completely change if the victory condition was changed to requiring a majority of the board area. In normal diplomacy, where a majority of SCs is required to win, I do believe that rational play should yield a draw, probably with 3 or 4 players, since many players seem to prefer to make the draw as small as possible, or at least try to eliminate some players in order to give themselves the best shot of going for the win, should the opportunity arise.
However, in diplomatic go, it’s harder to preserve the draw, since stopping the leader requires more than just preventing everyone else from controlling over half of the board, but rather requires preventing everyone else from having the largest score.
There are two ways for diplomatic go to end in a draw, either everyone votes for it before scoring, or there is a tied score after scoring.
Your earlier conjecture about reaching a 5-way stalemate seems to revolve around the players completely preventing each other from even building a living group and some sort of cycle-ish pattern where people continue to cut each other down if they start to show they might have an advantage. For this to lead to a draw, players must eventually establish stably equal scores or decide to eventually give up playing and vote for the draw to end it. However, I think this is unlikely, since this type of cycling is bound to be unstable, with some players at risk to be eliminated along the way, and it just being generally difficult to get everyone’s scores to balance. I think voting for a 5-way draw is also unlikely unless the players are all incredibly risk adverse. When people play such a game, and commit weeks to it, settling for 5-way draw where everyone gets the same result may seem anticlimactic to some, and I think people will often try to eliminate some players in order to feel that they accomplished something.
HHG and 
Vsotvep have good looking positions from a 1v1 perspective, to the detriment of 
Haze. I have to re read the logs again to see what went wrong.
李建澔2 and
le_4TC fight will be interesting to see how it plays out.
