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[Lady Duke]

Exactly.

[Brentai]

It is entirely possible to win at Risk by simply being lucky.

Of course you need to be very lucky for a very long time.  It's probably fairer to say "one who does not play as strategically as his opponent at Risk can still win by offsetting it with luck."

On a macro level the game will very very probably go to the player with the better strategy (meaning the one that best accounts for the inherent randomness) but on a micro level small wins can easily be won through no fault of the winner's own, and this doesn't seem to have killed the game's popularity by much.

[Kazz]

Last time I played Risk, we started the game with random territories, and I drew Siam, Western Australia, and New Guinea (as well as a bunch of other shit that I ignored).

I placed every starting soldier into Siam, took over the rest of Australia, and then took one territory per turn (solely for the card), then I turned in a set and eliminated Ocksi and took his cards and then I turned in two sets on my next turn, GG.

Did I have the best strategy?  Maybe.  Did I deserve to win?  Maybe.  Was it a decent strategic exercise though?  Fuck no.  Siam is an insurmountable chokepoint.  If you hold it, which is not difficult, you can win.

[Brentai]

Oh.  I was under the impression that Risk was regarded as a generally unbroken game, but I can understand if you disagree with that.

(I personally don't like the game very much so my experience is limited.)

[Royal☭]

Also that's why there's usually house rules of one set per turn.

[Zaratustra]

TF2 purposefully tilts the balance towards the winning team, so that the round ends faster.

I've considered an 'auction' model, where weapons and items used more frequently by winning sides start costing more and more.

[MadMAxJr]

I'm debating with Kazz over vent.  Too much stuff to cough back up here.

[Brentai]

TF2 purposefully tilts the balance towards the winning team, so that the round ends faster.

Not really.  At least, none of the official maps do; the game itself sort of does but only to prevent rounds from becoming an almost assured stalemate.

There's a reason why most rounds tend to bog down on the last CP, or the last checkpoint for Payload.  The terrain gives a huge advantage to the attackers in the beginning and a huge advantage to the defenders near the end of the course.  Whoever's getting their asses beaten will end up with the terrain advantage, and can almost always use it to mount a turnaround if they get their shit together.

Of course if you're talking about CTF (or straight CP to a degree) then there's no tilting at all, which is part of the problem with those modes.  They're fine on their own but TF2 was specifically built for a specific attack/defense dynamic and modes where both teams are doing both just don't mesh.

[Friday]

Re: Risk

Risk is one of my favorite games, and I consider it very well balanced.

Yeah, it has an element of luck, but I equate it to about the same level of Poker. (Almost all the time, the best players will win.)

Australia is overpowered, though, especially in a five or six player game. Not every game is perfect. South America is actually just as good despite having two defense points, because it goes directly into NA and Africa, which are fuckloads easier to control than Asia.

... which still doesn't solve the problem of having only two countries that are good for at minimum four players. (I refuse to play Risk with three or less because it is gay.)

Anyway, the game rewards players for winning by giving them more dudes, HOWEVER, this comes with the cost that people will focus fire on you, if they even remotely know how to play. I have made an art form of hovering around second or third most powerful so as to avoid player aggro until I have the cards and position to chainkill the game.

... please note that the preceding paragraph also applies pretty much directly to Settlers.

[Romosome]

not to imply it's a pinnacle of balance, but funnily enough, WoW's lead dev just today said that its arena system was more like poker than chess.

[Brentai]

Poker is a game designed by people who are good at Poker in order to take advantage of people who are not good at Poker.  Not only is it unbalanced by design, the purpose of its design is to be unbalanced.

[Romosome]

Not that I know much about poker, but most well-balanced games would reward players that are good at the game.  That's where skill is involved.

Rewarding a player that is not good is what makes Mario Kart what's been already stated.

[Brentai]

Well, if you look at what Kazz is talking about, the person who has the advantage in Poker pretty much controls the pot.  They can match any bet at all without worrying about going out, and everybody else has to just hope they can catch him with a series of good hands.  Also, implicit psychological advantage, which is what the game is pretty much about.

[Guild]

chainkill the game.

You are playing with house rules where you can hold more than five cards at a time, I presume? Or are you talking about chain-eating the other players from weakest to strongest to combo-stack forced turn-ins?

ps risk rules

[Guild]

On the issue of rewarding good playing:

I think that games where the winners are rewarded for doing well need to also have a strong luck element. See: Poker, chess and backgammon.

I think that the rewards should never be greater than roughly 15% (if you can even quantify an advantage in percentages).

I also think Kazz is awesome.




That is all.

[Kazz]

Thanks, Guild.  You, too, are awesome.

Let me describe a game called Wesnoth.  The game isn't bad, but it does a lot of very bad things.

The combat mechanic of the game is simple: a unit has an attack damage value, and then a number of attacks (followed by damage type and other details).  For instance, a unit may have an 8-3 weapon, which means it attacks three times, and each time it hits it will deal 8 damage.  A unit typically has about 35 hit points.

Problem number one is how the game determines to-hit.  An attacker's chance to hit a defender is determined entirely by the type of terrain the defender is standing on.  Mostly these are values between 40-60%, which is reasonable.  However, there are many extreme examples; for instance, an elven unit in a forest can only be hit by 20% of the attacks that target him.  The vast majority of the time, the attacker will miss.

Problem number two is the total miss.  I don't think that there should ever be a situation in a strategy game where an attack has zero effect.  Even if some form of protection prevents damage to the defending unit, that protection should be very special.  In Wesnoth, it is quite possible for every attack on a defender to miss, and for the defender to be totally unaffected.

Problem three is counterattacking.  Each time a unit is attacked, that defender counterattacks fully.  For instance, if a 6-4 unit attacked an 8-3 unit, the attacker would strike once (perhaps dealing 6 damage), then the defender would strike once (perhaps dealing 8 damage), and then the attack would strike again, and so on, the attacking unit having the last attack (because he has 1 more).  Let's say this defending unit is surrounded and attacked from all six sides; he has the potential to deal 166 damage this turn!  That's greater than he could possibly deal on his own turn!

Problem number four is the XP system.  In Wesnoth, units level up as they engage in combat; each time one unit slays another, that unit gains 8 XP.  For each combat the unit survives, the unit gains 1 XP.  Once the unit gains enough XP, he levels up.  The problem with this is that the unit gains experience on other player's turns as well as his own, and as soon as that unit levels up, he regains all of his health.

So, let's put all of these problems together: a rather dangerous unit has invaded your territory and you want to kill it before it causes any trouble.  Not taking any chances, you send six units to attack it!  However, the unit is sitting on an advantageous piece of terrain, granting it 70% defense.  "No matter," you think, "for with so many units, I'll make short work of him."  So you order them all to attack.  The dangerous unit counterattacks your units, leaving many of them brutalized, but taking quite a bit of damage himself.  However, you fail to notice that his XP bar is slowly filling; after a bad string of rolls, one of your attackers dies to the defender's counterattacks, and the defender suddenly turns into a monster with far more dangerous attacks, 50% more HP, and no damage done to him at all.

This.  Is.  Bullshit.

Point 4: An attacker must always do harm, no matter how small, and never the opposite.

[Guild]

I think when it becomes obvious you've lost, both parties should decide whether or not that game is worth continuing to play.  A great example is monopoly.  That could take 400 fucking years to finish a game and it's just too time consuming to sit forever and try to beat it, so once you know there's no end in sight, maybe decide who won and end it there.

Edit: I'm not saying people should bitch out early once they think they're losing.  I mean when it's blatantly obvious to everyone playing who has won the game, then decide to call the game over.

My cousins and I play speed Monopoly. Everyone has a calculator instead of money and if you take longer than fifteen seconds to roll, move your piece and read your card/buy your damn property already Jesus fuck it's only 300 fucking bucks you cheapskate SOMEBODY THROW AN UNOPENED SODA AT HIS HEAD RIGHT NOW ...yeah.

Big pimpin' (that's me) and his crew can finish a full game in two hours or less.

[Kazz]

it really shouldn't be difficult to.  Monopoly is really, really simple.

honestly I think they should cut out the Rent prior to houses, or just make them a blanket 10-20-30-40 bucks depending on board side and fuck all the bills smaller than $10.

[JDigital]

In Multiwinia, there are no special units, only en masse generic men who spawn periodically at captured crucibles. The best strategy on many maps is to rush the farthest capture points early on, securing an advantage that soon becomes self-perpetuating.

Team Fortress 2 in instant-respawn mode has the annoying effect of skewing balance too far in favour of the defenders. The points near enemy spawn are almost impossible to take, thanks to an endless stream of defenders.

[jsnlxndrlv]

Let's talk about tactics.

The first element of a tactically interesting game is some degree of resource management: making the biggest gains out of the smallest expenditures.  The exact nature of the resources can vary considerably.  Number of units, available cash, HP/MP, items.  In Heaven and Hell, your actions are resources, because they each have a cooldown period of 1 turn (or 2 if you're injured).  As an evil player in a larger group, you'll probably want to hold off on attacking until an injured player has defended once or twice consecutively.

The second element of a tactically interesting game is the presence of dissimilar assets. Dissimilar assets can be easily seen in modern warfare: artillery is powerful and long-ranged, but vulnerable to almost any attack.  Armor unites power, mobility, and protection, but runs into trouble against certain infantry-defended terrain.  Infantry is slow and light on weapons, but gets maximum use of terrain.  Each asset advertises both a strength and a weakness.

(An aside: dissimilar assets does not mean rock-paper-scissors--which is to say, the use of options which have no in-built reason for picking one over another.  Rock is only preferable if you think the opponent is going to play paper--which is only preferable to him if he thinks you're going to play scissors.  If you wanted to make RPS more tactical, you'd need to imbalance the moves: maybe make one of them an attack, one of them a defense, and one of them a recovery.  Which is where I started when I was designing Heaven and Hell.)

The third element of tactical play is some quantity of maneuvering.  If it takes work to get the right resources into the right position at the right time, you're on the right track.  Thus we see the positional advantage of chess, and the card "programming" of Robo Rally.

How these three elements are executed in a particular game determines that game's "pace of decision".  Pace of decision simply indicates how quickly a player can lose.  (As Kazz pointed out, it's not very fun when a game with a short pace of decision takes a long time to play.)  It's a measure of the importance of each mistake: can you blunder twice before victory is unattainable?  Five times?  RPGs generally have very, very slow PODs: as a resource, your HP serves simply as a "buffer" between your mistakes and losing.

If the POD is too slow, tactical errors don't matter, and it becomes simply a question of who had the most resources.  If it's too fast, though, the battle is often over before it even began, with initial deployment likely determining the ultimate winner.  The ideal balance between the two extremes is one of personal taste, as always.


Okay!  Let's talk about strategy.  (Great fuck, I'm not done typing yet?  No, not yet--food is tasteless until someone posts "tl;dr" in response to something I wrote that day.)

If tactics is making immediate decisions for concrete gameplay advantage, strategy is the metagame consideration of your opponent's nature and how you plan to use it against her.

Broadly, strategically interesting gameplay often requires you to predict your opponent's decisions, deceive the opponent about your own secret decisions, commit resources for purely informational purposes, and (unsurprisingly) make heavy use of tactics.

One of the most important ideas for a strongly strategic game is the importance of causality.  When thinking about a particular course of action relevant to strategy in a specific game, the causal chain is the series of actions, decisions, and time required to bring that course of action about.  In Chess, I might want to get my bishop to G7 so I can threaten my opponent's Rook, or I might want to put a guarded knight on F2, to fork a Rook and a Queen or King.  Engineering such an outcome will probably take between 2 and 6 moves, but possibly more if my opponent suspects what I'm up to and takes steps to stop it.  I can distract the opponent if I first position pieces such that my intermediate steps seem to be supporting a different strategy altogether.

In Heaven and Hell, I intentionally kept the causal chain short: you have one secret action, the results of which are immediately revealed.  I didn't want to obscure the underlying mind game with a complicated, untested strategic superstructure.

So, bringing this all back into thread relevancy (...or, uh, not):

Kazz, it sounds like you want to play Fluxx.