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Original post by Sammie22 You could restrict this by putting a limit on the amound of forces movable from one region to another in a single turn.

Added to the list of ideas. I'm leaning towards forcing soft penalties instead of hard limits.

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Original post by Sammie22Also, the map/world could be designed with more choke points, and allow defenders to focus in those areas for some predictability. A good map design could probably fix a lot of these issues.

Many of the maps will simply not be able to have enough chokepoints and since I'm letting players make their own maps I need something besides just good map design.

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Original post by lithos You could try something like transport or planning costs. Essentially when attacking the units you are attacking with are "held" in transport for one turn, meaning that after declaring an attack it happens the turn after next. However to move armies within terrain you control it happens the next turn, meaning that defenders can respond.

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Original post by Talroth Another option could be after attack penalties. After invading a territory you are locked there for one turn, giving the other player time for a counter attack

Both of these options are great in their simplicity and would probably solve this problem. Weighing the two in my head I'm not really seeing a big advantage over one versus the other. One seems to give the game more of an aggressive feel over a defensive one. Choosing which one might also depend on how powerful any pillaging/capture events are. If an army instantly blows up everything in a conquered territory I would lean to lithos's option. Thanks very much for these ideas, I'm surprised I missed them.

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Original post by Steve132 Your "Problem" is NOT a problem. It is how every strategy game of this nature I have ever played works. Risk, Axis+Allies, DiceWars, even Chess, (sort of) has this problem. Even the real world, that is how it works. Defenders are incentivized to minimize the amount of territory they have to defend along their front line, because they cannot predict where and how the aggressor will attack. The aspect of surprise is the primary advantage given to the agressor in any battle.

Your problem is that you didn't even bother to read the title or the first few lines of the post. The games you listed are all turn-based and are in no way simultaneous. All of those games involve your turn happening after you observe the other player's move. Read the link if you are still confused.

Regardless of what system I use defenders will always want to have chokepoints. None of the options suggested here change that. Similarly, attackers will have plenty of advantages no matter what, namely that enemies will be reacting to you and not the other way around). Attacker/defender bonuses can always be tweaked to get the right feel and meet player expectations.

Speaking of player expectations...

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Original post by Steve132I would HIGHLY recommend against changing it, because it is not only unrealistic and unfair to the attacker, but (most importantly) it COMPLETELY violates player expectations about how the game works, and violating player expectations will lead to people not wanting to play your game.

This is entirely wrong. Players expect their troops not to be zombies that only respond when directly attacked. They expect that they would be able to react if thousands of troops started marching on a province. (This is even more true in the setting of my game as it is sci-fi and communications, satellites, etc. are very advanced).

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Original post by Steve132 Even if they are open-minded enough to try to strategize around it (I wouldn't be), you will find that players will realize that attacking isn't worth it unless you have nearly perfect map design and/or a massive boost to attackers to balance the crippling blow you would be giving them.

The Hearts of Iron series uses both of the systems I suggested and it is extremely successful. It is probably the best representation of warfare on such a large scale of any game using a risk-like map. Frontlines make sense as does attacking and defending. Virtually every tactic you can think of works in this system. Defenders have a slight defense bonus, but attackers still are still fighting on their terms.

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Original post by NateDog This seems to be along the lines of what you're suggesting, but maybe a bit simpler for both the player and programmer because it's just an automatic effect of attacking/defending and not something that needs to be specified/managed...

Simpler for the player is my main goal here as I don't mind doing the legwork on complex behind the scenes coding, though it is always nice when things are simple.

Preventing the player from having to do too much ordering every turn is a big priority though. The Hearts of Iron series has some pretty complex AI that will do as much of that kind of ordering for you if you want, but my game will not have such a thing. Therefore, minimizing tedious webs of orders is something I want to avoid.

Should I use a support attack/defense system I would try and make all the default orders the logical ones and also to have a lot of those orders remain from turn to turn so you don't have to reissue them.

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Original post by NateDogWhen units are in defend mode, if there is no attack against their own territory, but there is an attack on an adjacent territory, then some percentage could defend the adjacent territory (maybe 50%). Obviously they can only defend once so if multiple adjacent territories are being attacked, then they have to pick only one.

One problem I see with this is that if I have two armies on my side, one with 1 unit and another with 1000, I could tie up your main province by attacking it with a single guy, while my 1000 army runs past it so something would have to be done about that. The other problem is that my game uses different unit types and so determining which units would split to the adjacent territories is a huge problem by itself.

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Original post by theOcelotPS: Cool link about simultaneous turn-based-ness. I'm curious about one thing, though. It speaks of "mailing" levels and stuff; is it actually talking about email-based games, or is it just a translation thing, meant to mean "send" in the generic sense?

Though it is primarily referring to email-based games it can easily be replaced with 'submitting your moves' or something similar. Playing by email is really no different from playing most board games.

Risk is a good example of a classic turn-based game. Diplomacy is turn-based with simultaneous execution. It's hard to think of a good example of turn-based real-time execution in a board game. Basically you try to move your pieces as fast as you can until you run out of movement points or whatever (heavily favors doing things very fast).

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Original post by LorenzoGatti Well said. To put this attacker's advantage into perspective, consider that the poor "defender" is expected to be the attacker in some other place, often against the same player that's attacking him. A good player trades easily conquered bad territories for easily conquered good territories, in a sequence of well-planned activity: making attacks harder is simply a form of attrition that makes turns less eventful and games longer.

You're right on saying that making attacking harder does lengthen games and game length is definitely important. However, without any of the suggested changes games are both long and uneventful for a different reason; mostly because army conflict is avoided for so long.

To describe what I mean, I'll use a pc game series called Dominions. It uses a Risk-like map, simultaneous moves and no system for support attack/defense. Here is essentially what happens in most games:

The maps are not perfectly geometric or balanced and it wouldn't make sense if they were. Each province often has many neighbors making predicting where your opponent is going fairly random.

What usually happens is that two large opposing armies inhabit adjacent provinces and most of the time the armies bypass each other because their orders happen at the same time. Once the armies are past each other they proceed to both rampage and pillage the other players territory, essentially just swapping bases. New players will often lose simply because the logical option of "Hey I should stop that guy raping my base" just wastes their time as they try to follow the path of destruction the enemy army creates, never actually catching up to the other. They can't always head the enemy off because of how many potential options there often are for the enemy to go to.

For the visually inclined here are some pictures of how it goes. [For these pictures I'm keeping it very simple and assuming that the each province's defense force is no match for the main army that each player has consolidated.

http://img816.imageshack.us/img816/6483/ex1.jpg
http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/5282/ex2cz.jpg
http://img535.imageshack.us/img535/1879/ex3.jpg

So since good players know how hard it is to guess an opponents move they go for the sure thing of just running around conquering provinces since defense is too hard. Both player's switch bases or race to conquer a capitol. New players get confused at this and fail and/or quit forever.

It's also just not as satisfying to not actually have conflict. I would prefer that you actually have to fight that army that stands right next to you instead of just walking right by, abusing the turn system. If you want to do a sneak attack you can still do it by attacking on a different front on the other end of his territory.

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Original post by Wiggin I am actually working on a game with the same scheme for simultaneous execution of orders, inspired primarily by the game Diplomacy. I agree with the other posters that what you describe as a problem isn't really a problem... at least not until playtesting shows that it is a problem.

I've seen first hand that it is a problem.

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Original post by WigginI think one of the main reasons this sort of system is fun is that there are only a small number of possible orders each unit can be given, and that means that it becomes possible to guess what orders your opponent is giving to his units. And if you are able to guess correctly, you will be able to select orders for your units which effectively counter the enemy. Outsmarting your opponent is fun. In Diplomacy, the possible orders are hold, move, support and convoy. In my game, I refer to the possible orders as incursions (attacks to take and hold territory) and skirmishes (attacks to cause attrition), and draw the given orders on the map as red arrows, with incursions being stippled and longer than skirmishes.

As you said Diplomacy has limited options so predicting enemy moves works well there. My game is a little more complex and there are too many situations I've seen where an enemy has multiple equally good orders and there is absolutely no way I can predict where he will move. Considering that in real life you would simply see which way they were heading and be able to head them off,I find these kind of mind games to be frustrating rather than fun.

Splitting up attacking into "attack & hold" and "attack" seems like it would cause me to use the attack option at absolutely every turn to pick off the weaker provinces. I would prefer players to not feel like they need to play 100% aggressive all the time just because there's so much advantage to doing so.

My idea:
An army cannot move the turn after it has attacked a territory.

I like the sound of the this situation, so I wouldn't try to make it not happen (strong penalties, etc.). My idea gives the defenders a chance to regroup and counterattack. It could simulate the time during which a region is unstable immediately after being "liberated" (many traditional turn based games like the Total War series have a similar situation; a recently captured city could rebel if no army is stationed on it). It prevents the wild-goose-chase that you don't want. Yet it also preserves the attacker's advantage and the necessity for the defender to cut his losses, plan ahead, and keep from being spread thin.

I don't think I like the idea of army reserves being assigned to defend the adjacent attack with the most attackers; it sounds open to abuse to the frustration of the defender. Attack with 6 armies on the secondary target, and 5 with on the primary target. Now the primary target has no reinforcements, and is easily taken. And what happens if a region is attacked and it's neighbor is attacked? Does it send reinforcements? If not, then the attacker is encouraged to send one army into a suicide mission against the potential reinforcements, just to tie them all up. If an attacked region can send reinforcements, then it will be hard to not have that region deprive itself of troops. So maybe that could work, but it would require caution on the part of the developer.

I hope that helps.

(A side question: what happens if one player attacks a region which also attacks? Eg. what if 5 is told to attack 2 in your diagram, and goes after 2. What if 6 is told to attack 2?)

To extend the attack penalty others have suggested and provide an interesting choice to the mix, I suggest a slightly different rule:
- To capture a territory, an army must hold it for a single turn

This gives the attacker some new options, including the ability to hit & run, or blitz through a stretch of enemy territory. It is still possible to take many territories in a single turn, but to do so the attacker must dilute his army.

If you desire, you can add further rules to prevent easy invasions into the middle of enemy territory like a +1 turn penalty to having no adjacent territories, and a -1 turn penalty if the territory is completely surrounded.

Tourresh, since you are familiar with Diplomacy, you probably already know this, but I'll just mention it anyway.

While the standard Diplomacy map is set in Europe, Diplomacy players have made a large number of alternative maps to play the game on. Some of these maps are better than others. It has become clear in the Diplomacy community that the factor which decides whether a map works or not is primarily the number of supply centers (provinces which provide resources for the upkeep of armies).

If you have too many supply centers, the map will become clogged with units, defense will be too easy, and the game will become static and therefore boring. If you have too few supply centers, defensive lines become thin, breakthroughs are easy, and you get the "goose hunts" which you are worried about.

The key of course is to get the right balance between offensive and defensive strength.

[Edited by - Wiggin on June 14, 2010 4:00:53 AM]

How about having the defender have a different type of defensive tactic to use. Have the player able to put their armies into a standard defense where they directly oppose the attacker in a battle (and if the attacker wins they win the territory outright), but, also allow the defender to alternatly put their armies into a Guerrilla defense where they don't directly oppose the enemy (and the enemy just takes the territory) but the defender has a Guerrilla force that can harrase the enemy and might even take back the territory if the enemy does not have a large enough army there (the Guerrilla force would slowly be worn down by the occupying enemy armies).

This way, a player can just put up a standard defense if they think they can hold the territory, but if they think they are going to loose it, they can leave a Guerrilla force behind to tie up the enemy and prevent a "wild goose chase" scenario.

So the responses to an attack would be:
- Withdraw
- Defend
- Guerrilla warfare