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waffles
Tactician
Posts:5
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| 29 Jan 2008 8:00 AM |
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Some of my friends and I are working on a way to change the battle system in Risk. We aren't big fans of the two sides always being about equal, even if one side has 50 more troops than the other.
What we're thinking is something along the lines of this:
Even #s - d4 (smaller side stays with this throughout fight)
+5 - d6
+10 - d8
+15 - d10
+20 - d12
+25 - d14
+30 - d16
+35 - d18
+40 - d20
+5 means the side with more troops would have at least 5 more than the smaller side.
The dice used would be changed during the fight as needed. But there are still a few wrinkles that need to be worked out.
How would we make the d14, d16, and d18 with a standard set of 7 dice? I'm thinking we could just use a d10 and a d6, d8, or d10 as needed to make what we need and subtract one. But then would you roll again if you got all 0s with the two d10s that would make our fake d18?
Also, should this system stay the same if I want to attack someone who has more troops than me? Or should there be a way for the attacker to still have the advantage, or at least have the defender have not as large of an advantage?
Those d4s can be a pain, should we maybe not use them and work from a base of d6?
Finally, do the number of troops needed to move up to the next die need to be adjusted at all?
I'm really liking the idea that we could make a game of risk go infinitely faster since you would be limited only by the number of die you have. |
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Dan12
Diplomat
Posts:81
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| 31 Jan 2008 4:21 AM |
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Can you please explain a bit more on what you mean by d6, d8 , ...
I also didn't quite follow what you mean by "We aren't big fans of the two sides always being about equal". Are you intending to make the dice probability unequal! That doesn't make sense.
Besides are you using the standard 5 dice provided in Risk or are you using more with special dice that have more than 6 sides. Basically, please explain more. |
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waffles
Tactician
Posts:5
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| 31 Jan 2008 12:01 PM |
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Yes, we are looking to make the dice probabilities unequal. Our line of thought is that in real life having more troops gives someone an advantage, especially in a British Imperialistic style of warfare which is the way I see Risk battles.
d6 is a die with 6 sides. d8 one with 8 sides, and so on. We bought sets of dice like people use playing Dungeons & Dragons and that sort of game. |
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Dan12
Diplomat
Posts:81
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| 01 Feb 2008 1:31 AM |
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OK, I understand. Let's consider a typical fight with say 15+. So the attacker is throwing three dice d10 and the defender 2 dice d4. The attacker can get anything between 3 and 30 while defender gets 2 to 8.Huge difference. The defender will have little chance to do any damages to the attacker. This reminds me of another variation that tried to make the game simpler. The attacker will declare an attack and you just remove equal amounts from the attacker's and the defender's armies from the game. No need to throw dices.
Of course you can stretch this rule to just remove armies from the defender as your dice setup is extremely biased towards attack.
Interesting system, but I am still wondering what is your motivation behind this mod other than using fancy dice. In what way is it going to make the game more enjoyable? Have you actually played it? How does it feel?
Besides, I always thought when it comes to explaining Risk to a new player, the dice throwing was the most confusing/time consuming part. They get the hang of it eventually though. But the simpler the system the better. Your approach seems to be the opposite. So, would be great if you could expand on this. |
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waffles
Tactician
Posts:5
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| 01 Feb 2008 7:12 AM |
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Not as unbiased as that. With what we're thinking it would always be 1 dice thrown no matter what. So in your example the attacker could only go 1-10 and the defender 1-4. There are some times when the attacker would have to roll 2 dice (like to get a d16), and in those cases we're thinking an automatic -1 so that the attacker always has a chance to roll a 1.
There are a few reasons for wanting to make changes. 1 is that we think that having more armies should get someone more of an advantage than having an extra die in each roll. We're also thinking that more sets of these die can make the game go faster since more than 2 armies could be removed each time (although I do know that just buying more six sided die would do the same thing).
There's another advantage that I just thought of after reading your post. Since these sets of dice come in different colors, you could say that dice of the same color battle against each other instead of high going against high the way it is now. Maybe that would make it a bit simpler.
We're playing with these rules this weekend in a game whose sole purpose is to find out what works. The thing that I think will change the most is where you would move up to the next die. I'm thinking that 5 might be a bit low and that 10 would be a better place to start, but I'll keep track of how things go so I can analyze those numbers. |
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Dan12
Diplomat
Posts:81
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| 02 Feb 2008 3:52 AM |
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Interesting, thanks for the explanation. One of the elements of a fight is to know when to stop. So incremental removal of armies is always better than just removing a large number of them in one go. How are you going to handle this with large die such as d16. What if a player just wanted to remove up to 5 armies from the other side, something an attacker can do easily with the current system.
Colored die is also a good idea. I need to think about this ...
Glad that you are testing this. Keep us posted. |
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Ehsan Honary
Site Admin
King
Posts:268
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| 02 Feb 2008 4:05 AM |
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Thanks waffles for providing this variation. Having followed the conversation, I think it's a good idea to look at the dice system to explore new possibilities. Obviously if this can be implemented in software, it makes everything a lot easier to handle. However while playing a board game it can prove to be difficult if players need to remember what to do every time they want to attack. For example the table you have needs to be easily memorised.
I am curious to know how your games will progress. So I would be very interested to know more about them once you play over weekend. Does the game become biased hugely towards attack. There was another variation discussed in the forums that had almost the opposite effect of what you are trying to do. The defence had an option to flee before getting attacked. That variation proved to be promising. So I am now wondering how an opposite system changes the game.
My guess is that players will be encouraged to attack all the time. It could either make the game random or unstable, or so much fun as players sweep the board from one side to the other.
In any case, let us know your results.
Thanks |
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Ehsan Honary
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waffles
Tactician
Posts:5
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| 10 Feb 2008 7:24 PM |
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Alright, we think we have almost all of the wrinkles figured out.
1 - Start with d10s if there are even troops because standard multi-sided dice sets come with 2 of them, one being 0-9 and one being 00-90. When the 00-90 die is being used we just divide by 10 so that it's essentially 0-9. 0 and 00 are considered to be 10.
2 - For every 5 troop advantage a side has, that player gets 2 more sides on the dice. For example, if Player A has 3 troops and Player B has 12, Player B has a 9 troop advantage and will have a 2 side advantage when dice are rolled. If Player A has 3 troops and Player C has 18, Player C would have a 15 troop advantage and would get a 6 side advantage.
3 - We're still matching high to high and so on down the line.
We're thinking that it doesn't matter which dice are used as long as the higher side has the proper side advantage.
There are still 2 things that we're trying to figure out.
1 - Should the defender still win if there is a tie? We played with those dice being discounted. But I'm starting to think that a tie should still go to the defender.
2 - In order to make the game go faster, we said that you had to attack with the maximum you were able to (either 5 because that's how many sets of dice we had or the lower of either side if someone didn't have 5 troops in a territory). To go along with that, we're thinking that we should get rid of the rule saying that you have to move as many troops as the number of dice you rolled.
I'm wondering if we should have this rule, one saying that you can attack with one less so that you can't lose the territory if you happen to lose every roll, or to not have a rule saying how many you have to attack with. |
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Ehsan Honary
Site Admin
King
Posts:268
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| 12 Feb 2008 1:17 AM |
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These extended rules are good. They certainly add more structure to the system.
As for the rule on army movements, I think you should preserve the reason behind it whatever rules you use. I.e an attacker should never lose the attacking territory no matter how bad his dice is. It simply doesn't make sense and if you are introducing these dice rule to make it more meaningful, then there is no point to remove solid rules such as this.
As for defender winning, I think the attacker has so much advantage now that it really doesn't matter much what happens if there is a tie. Choose an option which makes the system easier to explain and follow.
I am still wondering how the game played. Is it faster, more aggressive and expansionist? Do players use more diplomacy or is the game played more tactically?
Good job so far. |
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Ehsan Honary
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waffles
Tactician
Posts:5
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| 13 Feb 2008 7:42 AM |
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Since you can take off 5 armies at a time, it definitely goes faster. If troops were even you [i]could[/i] take off 17 at a time by using every die we have except one because there's an odd number. But that would get way too complicated to keep track of.
Since we've only played a test game, it's hard to say exactly how the gameplay is different. I do know for sure that it makes sitting back and building up troops a little better of a strategy. But we were going at each other relatively normally.
That will probably change later in the game when it's more likely that people will have more different troop numbers. If I remember correctly we didn't have any situations come up where there was a 4 side advantage. |
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Frisco
Tactician
Posts:5
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| 29 Jul 2009 10:26 AM |
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This is an interesting dice system that Waffles has introduced. It reminds me a lot of the dice system they use in Risk II in the realtime version. It does make for a strong attacker and large army bias in that game, but they balance this by reducing the amount of ground you can cover in one turn.
It's very interesting, and like many Risk players I have often been frustrated by the random, arbitrary nature of dice rolls in the regular game. I feel like there is an improvement out there somewhere -- hopefully some day someone will find it. |
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"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof." V from "V for Vendetta" |
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