In regards to Cram, (what was wrong with cumber?) in the simultaneous version of Risk 2, surrounding a territory with 1s has it's advantages and drawbacks.

I think you should try manoeuvering yourself to such a position and seeing how it plays out. There are drawbacks to it (if the defender rolls a number higher than attacking numbers, all of the attacking countries lose an army, though the defender loses an army for every army that rolled higher. In the version I am thinking of there is only one die rolled per place, not 3 sets of dice per attacking country). As well if the defender has a very large army it will have "upgraded dice" with a higher percentage of high numbers.

And beyond that, even if there were no drawbacks to attacking from multiple places, it would be bad strategy to let yourself be surrounded. Even if you find yourself surrounded, you could send that army to attack elsewhere and it would be considered "on the move". So you may think it's great strategy to attack an army of 40 with two groups of 30, but if it attacks towards one of those groups of 30 it will encounter it in a "borderclash" and enter that country if the 40v30 wins.

I find that often people attacked because of the disadvantages of holing up an army due to the fact that it can be flanked, there was also a bonus to attacking if I recall correctly. Encouraging aggression is good and if flanking is powerful, people will use tactics to fight and the board will be more lively.

I confess to not scrolling through Tom's links that far into discussion, there is probably a better description of the game mechanics there after all.

Is all this do-able by the way?

Simultaneous risk is still quite a bit like the original risk, as opposed to BAO.

That said, I still really enjoy BAO.

I enjoy turn-order battles, and I also love the way the dice work - killing when rolling over a certain number. You can set a board so that every attacking army hits and every defending army hits, which is pretty interesting. You have a lot of control as a designer over the flow of the game with these dice Mechanics.

I like the risk 2 version and BAO. In fact, I thought BAO was the risk 2 way when I first joined WF, which is why I didn't like BAO for a while.

If I had to pick between the two, I'd choose BAO, and somehow limit the number of useless moves (10 or so friendly attacks).

Mongrel wrote: I like the risk 2 version and BAO. In fact, I thought BAO was the risk 2 way when I first joined WF, which is why I didn't like BAO for a while.

If I had to pick between the two, I'd choose BAO, and somehow limit the number of useless moves (10 or so friendly attacks).

Another alternative would just be to utilize the "max attacks per turn" variable - set it to a halfway sane value depending on the board (somewhere north of 10 and under 50 should handle it on most boards) and let the designers and players find a value that balances the need to make attacks and move reinforcements against large fronts while discouraging egregious gaming of the move order system.  That alone would keep most of the abuse to a minimum.

Alternatively, requiring all reinforcement to be done during the pre-transfer phase and only allowing physical attacks against opponents in the Attack phase would cut down on some of the squirrelly BAO "I'm going to move an army from one side of the board to another and attack with it thanks to creative chanining" maneuvers, though I personally think they're part of the fun.