A curious notion about dice and CC

[detlef]

I've been wondering how dependent upon luck this game really needs to be. In other words, is this game as pure a game as, say chess, where luck has no effect what-so-ever.

Hear me out. One of the odds calculators out there determines the relative "cost" to the attacker of initiate conflict against a defender depending on how many dice each player gets to roll. For instance, provided the odds work out the attacker loses .842 men for every 1 army he takes off the defender if he's attacking 3 die v 2 or 2 die v 1. He loses .681 men per 1 army he takes off the defender if he's attacking 3 die v 1.

Would the game be interesting if every single conflict simply took away the exact amount of armies it "should" from each side. It could either round off or not, that's another wrinkle to discuss. For instance, if you had 10 guys on your territory and attacked an opponents 10, it would just automatically give you the victory but you'd only end up with 1 army on each your initial spot but the one you just took.

I'm not implying that this would be a better game. Actually I'm just curious how this would play out. Obviously, it would be pretty easy to find out if you set up a board game, printed out the pure "costs" of attack and had a calculator handy. If you wanted to, you could use chits to keep track of the armies on each territory and keep decimals rounded off to, say 100ths. Like the real game, an attacker would not need to fight to the death, he could just "lean" on a territory knowing exactly what the cost/benefit would be.

[Larry Mal]

An interesting idea. The math of calculating the costs of attack would be a bit beyond me. I can imagine it would lead to a game in which the accumulation of resources would be of much greater importance, which would later reveal that this game is very basic in that sense.

[bbqpenguin]

i actually tried this with a couple of friends once. it was different, and ultimately not as fun (at last in my opinion) attacks were much more common because the attacker could always be certain whether or not he would win. it also made coming back from behind essentially impossible: that is, if you fell behind, even a little, you were probably stuck there. it usually came down to who could hold any one continent for one round because once they get even a slight army advantage there way no way to beat them. after two and a half short games, we decided to go back to dice

[owenshooter]

ridiculous... real war doesn't work that way... if it did, we wouldn't have held the alamo!!! oh... wait... damn...-0

[detlef]

i actually tried this with a couple of friends once. it was different, and ultimately not as fun (at last in my opinion) attacks were much more common because the attacker could always be certain whether or not he would win. it also made coming back from behind essentially impossible: that is, if you fell behind, even a little, you were probably stuck there. it usually came down to who could hold any one continent for one round because once they get even a slight army advantage there way no way to beat them. after two and a half short games, we decided to go back to dice

Well, there's no coming back from behind in chess either. At least not against a strong opponent who wont let you. If you fall behind in a game with these settings, you'd have only yourself to blame. Well, I suppose there'd be a bad drop as well, which might mean that you should "draft" for initial deployment rather than have it established randomly.

I don't understand why holding a continent early is any more assurance of victory in this format than with the normal game play. Opponents could gang up on you the same way the do normally to bring you back to the pack.

In terms of "coming back", I would imagine that some of the same tactics that one uses normally, like holing up in the corner and grabbing easy spots for cards, hoping the big boys beat up on each other would work in this case just as well.