Best to make these suggestions in the winter, I'm guessing...

Finally sat down and read through it. There are some things I like and some things I'm not so sure about...

I LIKE...
1. Not turn-order dependent. This is good! Everything happens roughly simultaneously.
2. Normal dice. No more 12-sided-dice with +1 modifiers to defense or anything like that. The results should be more intuitive for novice players.

I'M NOT SO SURE ABOUT...
1. The whole flex/attack dichotomy. Near as I can tell, "attack" is "attack with abandon on", while flex is "attack while leaving 1 at home". I don't think this needs a separate distinction.
2. Blitzing worries me a little, though, if it can be turned off on a per-game basis (M57 said in a PM that it can), I think that'll help me personally get what I want out of SimulPlayGearAO or whatever we're calling it these days.

I also think the explanation is a little wordy, though, without playing a practice game, I'm not sure we'll know what can be simplified out of it just yet. Most of the details are technical in nature and may or may not have much bearing on actual strategies.

Oatworm wrote: Not turn-order dependent. This is good! Everything happens roughly simultaneously.

I don't know how more simultaneous you can get.  It's more simultaneous than humanly possible. Picture everyone throwing dice at the same time for all of their territories, attack and defense.  Just for starters they'd have to have 6 or 7 hands to do it. But unlike the Kjeld engine, battles proceed per the regular game rules -- 1 roll at a time and using dice and border mods as prescribed by the board.

The whole flex/attack dichotomy. Near as I can tell, "attack" is "attack with abandon on", while flex is "attack while leaving 1 at home". I don't think this needs a separate distinction.

..the explanation is a little wordy

Just a little?  Hey, I'll take that as a compliment. Verbose is my middle name.

I went through this with Oatworm on a PM, but I'll try and do it again here..

To be clear, just as in a "regular" game, there is no abandon. You must always leave 1 army at home.  That said, if A attacks B with the kitchen sink and defines them all as attack armies (leaving 1 to defend) while B attacks A with the same, it's likely they will just trade places.  There's nothing wrong with this, but it is also why the use of flex armies is intended to be the norm. In fact, the game should play just fine using nothing but flex armies - but test play will be the judge of this.  I think better players will find uses for attack armies in combination with flex armies to ensure a certain number of rounds of attack, for instance when they really need to get a card.

Also, I'm not sure how O. came to this conclusion, but when you attack with flex armies -  Yes, you may leave 1 at home - but you don't have to.  For instance you could have 10 armies on your territory and choose to attack with 4, designating 2 of them as flex and 2 of them as attack armies, leaving 6 to defend.  The reason you might do this is that you expect that you will be attacked and you really don't want to lose your territory, BUT if you are lucky and win a couple of rounds of attacks out-right, you might be able to "steal" a territory, or possibly stop the attack on you if your opponent attacked you with too many flex armies.  It's subtle, but it could work.

2. Blitzing worries me a little, though, if it can be turned off on a per-game basis (M57 said in a PM that it can)

This may seem like hyperbole, but in putting together this seemingly complex engine, and subsequently dissecting it into it's components, I have discovered that every one of these "advanced" features can either be disabled or set to a default value, to the point where you can configure the engine to play almost like a regular game!  As for multiple moves/blitzing, Yes, of course you can turn that off, but consider that you can even play the game at a partial turn (go on, click on it!) level right down to the individual roll (think lightning game).

I envision map makers being able to enable/disable features and set defaults, etc. such that their boards play the way they want them to.  I also envision that people who initiate games on more "standard" boards will have a lot of choices.  You want advanced features? ..delayed orders? ..multiple attacks originating from the same country? ..multiple moves? (BTW, blitzing speeds up what might otherwise be a very tedious end-game), No problem.  You want to introduce a noob to simulplay, turn everything off.  You could even make 'em all flex armies.

M57 wrote:

To be clear, just as in a "regular" game, there is no abandon. You must always leave 1 army at home.  That said, if A attacks B with the kitchen sink and defines them all as attack armies (leaving 1 to defend) while B attacks A with the same, it's likely they will just trade places.  There's nothing wrong with this, but it is also why the use of flex armies is intended to be the norm. In fact, the game should play just fine using nothing but flex armies - but test play will be the judge of this.  I think better players will find uses for attack armies in combination with flex armies to ensure a certain number of rounds of attack, for instance when they really need to get a card.

Also, I'm not sure how O. came to this conclusion, but when you attack with flex armies -  Yes, you may leave 1 at home - but you don't have to.  For instance you could have 10 armies on your territory and choose to attack with 4, designating 2 of them as flex and 2 of them as attack armies, leaving 6 to defend.  The reason you might do this is that you expect that you will be attacked and you really don't want to lose your territory, BUT if you are lucky and win a couple of rounds of attacks out-right, you might be able to "steal" a territory, or possibly stop the attack on you if your opponent attacked you with too many flex armies.  It's subtle, but it could work.

I'm not going to lie - I don't really get the flex-attack dichotomy here, so let's see if we can clarify this a bit.

Based on your above example (territory with 10 units, attacking with 4) and my admittedly limited understanding of how this works, if I sent out 4 as attack units and left 6 as defense, the engine would attack with the 4 until they were exhausted or until they captured the territory, right?

On the other hand, if I had 10 units and sent out 4 as a flex against a territory and left 6 as defense, the engine would attack with 4 until they were exhausted or until they captured the territory, just like a regular attack, but also until I had less than 6 at the home territory, depending on which event came first, right? Is that the distinction in a nutshell?

Oatworm wrote:

Based on your above example (territory with 10 units, attacking with 4) and my admittedly limited understanding of how this works, if I sent out 4 as attack units and left 6 as defense, the engine would attack with the 4 until they were exhausted or until they captured the territory, right?

Correct

On the other hand, if I had 10 units and sent out 4 as a flex against a territory and left 6 as defense, the engine would attack with 4 until they were exhausted or until they captured the territory, just like a regular attack, but also until I had less than 6 at the home territory, depending on which event came first, right? Is that the distinction in a nutshell?

Almost.. For starters, the "default" minimum amount of dice that flex armies are willing to attack with is 3. They are not that courageous unless you want them to be.  So if on the first attack, two of them were eliminated, the remaining two would go home, unwilling to attack with 2 dice..

There is one exception.  Say your attack:flex orders read 3:1 and you lost the 2 armies on the first round, leaving you with 1:1.  Now assuming the flex army is not called back to defend on the next round, it will participate in the next attack because the attack army is committed and the engine will let the flex army assist in the attack.  Of course, if on that attack 1 is lost, that will leave 0:1 and the flex army will go home.

It follows that by tacking 2 flex armies on to any attack army order, you can assure that that the minimum # of dice thrown will be 3 (assuming they are not called back, but then at that point, you might as will attack with all flex armies, right?)

(One of the the "Advanced" order features lets you adjust this "default" flex value to 2 or even 1)

Oatworm, your questions are helping to illuminate the fact that the difference between attack and flex armies is subtle.  I'm thinking that 80% of most attack forces might end up being all flex armies, and if you add that "advanced" feature, maybe 90+%.  I'm not sure. Test play will show us.   I'm concerned that small stacks combined with card values that encourage if not require a victory somewhere on the board will pressure players to use attack armies in certain situations.

I think I'm beginning to understand why ToS BAO just rolled all of the dice simultaneously - that way you don't have to worry about mechanisms like flex/attack armies to control behavior when dice counts hit certain statistical thresholds. It's a little more intuitive to say, "If you have 10 armies, you roll 10 dice". Of course, there are consequences to a decision like that - rolling 10 against an unexpected stack of 30 means you're losing all of your units on the first roll instead of always having a reserve or two lying around.

Hmm.

I will note that, as much fun as "subtleties" are with something like this, I'm a little nervous about purposefully introducing a game mechanic that has no intuitive applications. We're not talking about RiskyBack-style "breakage", where existing rules and mechanics are applied in non-obvious ways - we're talking about a mechanism that has a limited set of applications and all of them are non-obvious from the get go. That worries me. Then again, play-testing might reveal that it's not so bad.

I'm willing to wait to see how this turns out in the real world.

Okay, one other question - what happens in an N-party attack? All of your examples appear to be two-player attacks, so I'm a little curious how this would scale if three or more people attacked the same point on the same turn.

..what happens in an N-party attack? All of your examples appear to be two-player attacks, so I'm a little curious how this would scale if three or more people attacked the same point on the same turn.

From the site:

Multiple Attacks on a Single Territory

Dice are rolled for all attackers as usual, however the defender rolls only one set of dice, which applies to every battle on the field and all conflicts are resolved against the territory’s defending dice only, where the defender’s maximum losses are allowed to be no larger than the number of dice defensive dice thrown per round (..in other words, two). In the case where the defender is defeated and there is still more than one player contesting the territory, attacks continue on the newly unoccupied territory, but the engine will then recognize a different battlefield scenario and the rules for resolution of "Multiple Attacks on an Unoccupied Territory”

Once again play testing with tell, but because the one set of defending dice apply to all attacks, if the defender rolls 6's, a lot of attackers will die. If this is thought to be too unrealistic, it could be changed such that the defender rolls separate die for each conflict (and with 3+ attackers, his stack will likely go down quicker while the attack stacks will not), but as it stands, the MOST a defender is able to lose in any "round" is 2 (or 1 once that territory is down to 1 army).

To let a defender lose any more than that would put heavy demands on any flex armies he has deployed, which I guess is no big deal.  In such cases, a defender with 8 or so armies armies could conceivably go down in just 1 or two rounds.  I don't have a problem with this.  I considered it at one point but thought it might meet resistance.

There are all kinds of options. Whatever makes sense..  what do you think?

Edit: How 'bout separate rolls for each attack with the possibility of drawing down the defender stack proportional to how many attackers there are (as described above)? This is a huge difference, but the Engine can easily handle it.  I actually like this method.  In some ways it seems more "realistic" and not really any more complicated.  The one weird thing about is that defender is potentially throwing more dice than he has armies.

'nother Edit: OO, and it takes care of that pesky "incongruous dice modifier" problem!

I like separate rolls better, too. Otherwise a pair of 6's will kill N*2 attackers, assuming all attackers are attacking with 2 or more units, which seems more than a little unrealistic. If you're getting hit from multiple locations, defense should be harder, not easier.

Well, this makes it easy, and it cleans up some other problems as well.  I've changed it on the site..

Multiple Attacks on a Single Territory

Dice are rolled for all attackers as usual, however the defender rolls a separate set of dice for each attacker, and all conflicts are resolved against the territory’s defending dice only.  So for example, if the defender has at least two armies available to defend, two dice are thrown for every set of attack dice. Flex armies are called back to to the degree that it is possible so that there are enough dice thrown to defend in all battles.  Normally every defensive dice thrown represents a real army on the battlefield, but there may not be enough flex armies available to accommodate this, so it is actually possible for the defender to be defending with more dice than (s)he has armies.

When a point is reached where the defender is defeated and there is still more than one player contesting the territory, attacks continue on the newly unoccupied territory, but the engine will then recognize a different battlefield scenario and the rules for resolution of "Multiple Attacks on an Unoccupied Territory” (see below) will apply.

The M-Engine has got a couple of test games going.  Well, not quite. Game 1 is still waiting for “someone” to come back for vacation to input their first move, but Game 2 is into its third move. Right now, Game 2 can be viewed as a slide show with commentary and all orders can be viewed in a spreadsheet format. Both are available on the game page and should be viewable by all.

A couple of notes:

Game 1 “will be” using both attack and flex armies per the original specifications, but Game 2 is using nothing but flex Armies, with a “min # of dice willing to be thrown” value attached.

After having a number of chats with folks here, I’m coming to the realization that there is little need for attack armies.  In fact, attack armies make things more complicated, both for the user (apparently) as well as the engine. Really, it isn’t that big a deal for the engine, but consider that attack armies can still be fighting long after their home territory has been vanquished. Where’s the reality in that?  Also, the inclusion of attack armies makes it possible for two players to trade places with large armies on the first round of attacks. Also, not so real.

Game 2 has a pretty full version of the engine going.  It’s a standard world map allowing 1 Pre-fortify, and 1 mid-turn fortify, delayed moves (though no one has tried it yet), and a “Min # Dice willing to be thrown” value that lets player control how “desperate” their armies are to take a territory.  The engine (that’s me for now), has been pretty easily able to handle these things and we’ve already seen a few coordinated (multiple) attacks on a single territory as well as a flex army needing to "fall back" to defend.  Considering that there is no Gui and players actually have to fill out a spreadsheet to make their moves, things are going smoothly so far.  Check it out.

A couple of recent M-Engine updates:

• "Attack" armies with "kill or be killed" orders no longer exist. There is just not enough distinction between them and "flex" armies to take advantage of, and certain artifacts such as "homeless" armies and "territory swap" are now no longer possible.  All attack armies are now "flex" armies, and a "minimum number of dice willing to be thrown" threshold gives players control over their willingness to fight down to a single attack die.
• Ignore post #29. With a little help from Kjeld we have developed a slightly more complicated but much fairer resolution process for Multiple Attacks on a Single Territory.
• Detailed rules for mid-turn transfers have been developed and are being play-tested.

I didn't want to hi-jack the "Real-time 2-5 min" thread any further so I figured I'd move the conversation over here..

I have posted a FAQs page on the M-Engine site so that folks who are familiar with ToS BaO can see how the M-Engine is a completely different animal just by reading the answer to the first question.

I understand that in bringing BAO over here we will at least potentially have an instant base of users who understand the mechanics of that game.  But clearly it is not very Risk-like, and the problems associated with building membership into that "club" will likely continue.

The alternative, a more Risk-like engine like the M-Engine or KESP (which seems somewhere between the two) will have to build its following from scratch.  But the more it plays and works like the regular game, the simpler its learning curve will be, and the more players it should attract in the long run (provided that it is at least as good a game as BAO).

Last I was aware, tom was actually considering having both here (BAO and some other alternative), so I don't see this conversation in an adversarial light.   I'm interested in making sure that the M-Engine is truly an "alternative", and not something that plays like BAO but is a "little different".

One question I have for the ToS BAO crowd is:  Is BAO a "fair" engine in two player games? I ask because I can pretty much guarantee that any fairly designed board played using the M-Engine gives no advantage whatsoever to any player, and I think this is a reasonable question to ask about an engine that will potentially see many two and three player games considering that it might be preferred by the "lightning game" crowd.

M57 wrote:

One question I have for the ToS BAO crowd is:  Is BAO a "fair" engine in two player games?

Yes BAO is fair in 2-player games.  Without really knowing the complete depths of the ME but with my so far basic knowledge, I would say BAO could be potentially more "fair" than the ME.  I think the ability to quickly "clean-up" a win with the ME could also lead to a less fair earlier game.

If by "clean-up" you mean -- sit back a couple rounds and then come in after everyone else has beaten on each other, consider that everyone can adopt this strategy.. Consider also that when you delay an M-Engine attack order, you expose yourself to someone running completely by you with a flanking maneuver. With BAO, can someone Attack A to B, then B to C concurrently, or do they have to wait for the next "turn"?

'nother BAO question.. If A attacks B and B attacks A.  Does one attack occur first, or are the stacks simply compared?  If the latter, how is this different from if A attacks B and B orders nothing?

M57 wrote:

With BAO, can someone Attack A to B, then B to C concurrently, or do they have to wait for the next "turn"?

BAO cannot do that*, but that's what I meant by "clean up", ie you have the win but don't have to move only 1 space each turn to finish the game.  This "blitzing" can potentially, IMO, result in less fair balances earlier in the game than moving only one space at a time.

* BAO can do this:  If Player 1 owns A and B, and Player 2 owns C, if Player 2 takes over B with C (so now owns C and B), then Player 1 could have orders in which he takes back B with A then attacks from B to C and takes C, but Player 1 would have had to own both A and B at the start of the turn to get to C, if Player 1 only owned A then he would not be able to get to C in a single turn.  Which that's cool IMO, although some have disliked that functionality.

M57 wrote:

'nother BAO question.. If A attacks B and B attacks A.  Does one attack occur first, or are the stacks simply compared?  If the latter, how is this different from if A attacks B and B orders nothing?

One attacks first.  So if A attacks B and takes over B then that turn is over.  If A attacks B and doesn't take it over then B would attack A and either take it over or just end up with A and B staying separately owned.  Hence why potential "junk orders" can be important.

Yertle wrote:

M57 wrote:

'nother BAO question.. If A attacks B and B attacks A.  Does one attack occur first, or are the stacks simply compared?  If the latter, how is this different from if A attacks B and B orders nothing?

One attacks first.  So if A attacks B and takes over B then that turn is over.  If A attacks B and doesn't take it over then B would attack A and either take it over or just end up with A and B staying separately owned.  Hence why potential "junk orders" can be important.

Does the attacker have an advantage over defender?  In other words, does it matter if A attacks B or B attacks A?  Certainly the attacker has the advantage in the sense that only the attacker can occupy.

Yertle keeps finding these great points about BAO that never occurred to me :) BAO's fairness doesn't derive from turn order, it derives from its insistence on 1 space at a time.

I'm not sure there is anything unfair about being able to quickly clean up either, though. It just places more emphasis on initial success.

M57 wrote:

Does the attacker have an advantage over defender?  In other words, does it matter if A attacks B or B attacks A?  Certainly the attacker has the advantage in the sense that only the attacker can occupy.

The standard kill rates were 60% for the attacker, 75% for the defender, though this was frequently modified.  Based on that type of rate, it is better in an even battle to be 2nd to attack.  Consider 20 vs 20.  Attacker kills 12, defender kills 15, leaving a 5 vs 3 for the 2nd attacker.   The 2nd attacker then kills 3 while losing 2-3.  Generically, 2nd to attack does better.  However, if a weak territory is being attacked by two opposing strong ones, it is better to be the first to get there if the force is strong enough to defend effectively.