Yertle wrote:

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.

I'm thinking that with with M-Engine, I may be misusing the term blitz.

Remember, you only "move" 1 roll of the dice (a round) at a time, so other players can be simultaneously moving to block, and when I say simultaneously, I mean it. Yes, larger stacks can and will play into later rounds, but even here delayed and event dependent defensive maneuvers can be designed to get in their way. Short of all but 1 player being down to 1 army on every country, no one is exempt from potentially having an order delivered in any given round.

Regardless of all of the above, the board designer (or originating player I suppose) will probably have a number ways to limit or control this feature. Certainly the board designer should be allowed to disable (or possibly limit the number of) chained attack orders, or they could limit the number of rounds played per turn.

Also game-play in "partial" or "fractional" turns would make multiple moves less prevalent.

Hugh wrote:

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.

So BAO uses no dice?  It's all about the size of your stack? No element of luck?

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.

It is depended upon Modifiers and Dice settings.

BAO works like this, the Attacker/Defender must roll above a certain value (Floor value) in order for a Defending/Attacking army to be defeated.

Rules would be set up for Attacker and Defender.  Each has Number of Dice Sides and the Floor Value needed to obtain a kill.

Attacker 10 sided dice, needs to roll a 5 or better to defeat 1 army.

Defender 4 sided dice, needs to roll a 2 or better to defeat 1 army.

So if A attacks B with 10 troops and B is defending with 5 troops.  Then A throws 10 dice and B throws 5 dice at the same time, they are not compared to one another at all, they are compared to the Floor value of their own Rule.

A throws 1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 6, 8, 8, 9, 10 then A kills 6 (really only 5) troops of B.

B throws 1, 3, 3, 4, 4 then B kills 4 troops of A (even though A is going to take over B).

So the end result would be A taking over B with 6 troops going to B (I'd have to play a game or get other input to refresh my memory on how Transfers work, if it is necessarily an Attack/Transfer all concept).

Like I said, it's a pretty different system from just everyone placing a Turn Based order all that the same time.

Ok. Everybody freeze.

We can keep talking about the M-Engine, and M, you can keep promoting it. However, it's become apparent that we should no longer be referring to it as an alternative to BAO because virtually no one participating in the conversation seems to have any idea what BAO is or how it works.

So seriously, go back to ToS and play BAO games with each other until you better understand what you're critiquing.


/moderator out

M57 wrote:

So BAO uses no dice?  It's all about the size of your stack? No element of luck?

That is really not right.

Cramchakle wrote: because virtually no one participating in the conversation seems to have any idea what BAO is or how it works.

Hmmmm, am I saying something wrong?  I think I have a pretty good idea of how BAO works.

Sorry M, I was just using the _expected_ kill rate to demonstrate where the edge is. The dice frequently ignore who has the edge :)  Yertle's above post includes the specifics about the dice.  

I can guess what aspect of my posts Cram may have been shaking his head at. Yertle, the only thing I question (based on the WF FAQ and my own experience reading histories) is the paragraph beginning "BAO can do this:". Orders occur at the unit level, not at the country level, if I understand it correctly. Cram of course, should enlighten us.

Yertle wrote:

Cramchakle wrote: because virtually no one participating in the conversation seems to have any idea what BAO is or how it works.

Hmmmm, am I saying something wrong?  I think I have a pretty good idea of how BAO works.

You make it virtually no one, and not literally no one.

Hugh wrote:  Yertle, the only thing I question (based on the WF FAQ and my own experience reading histories) is the paragraph beginning "BAO can do this:". Orders occur at the unit level, not at the country level, if I understand it correctly. Cram of course, should enlighten us.

It is the Country level and not the Unit level.  I think there has been at least a thread or two and quite a few posts on the WF forums about this (here's a big one for WFers http://forums.warfish.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=546&start=0 ).  But that is how it works.

Ah, good post; confusion from no less a BAO force than Andernut. This portion of the FAQ/"documentation" is then misleading: "this process differs from turn-based play in that instead of being able to use one group of troups to perform multiple attacks you can only issue a single order to every unit." I can only interpret that as insinuating the orders are at the unit level. That bit of wisdom would have been enormously helpful back in the day :)

Here you guys have played hundreds of games on this engine and you still aren't entirely in agreement about it's inner workings. I mean no disrespect by that.  It sounds like a very sophisticated engine and game.  I doubt that my playing 5 or 10 games on it would give me anywhere near as qualified a perspective as yours, and so that's why I'm asking these questions.

Between Hugh's description and analysis and Yertle's concrete examples, I think I have a clear enough picture of how things work to draw some conclusions (Territory level vs. unit level discussion temporarily aside)

These are definitely very different engines -  different games really. And I would say there's not too much need for us to be hyper-critical about the specifics of BAO once we have established their overarching differences, which I think we have. Here's my assessment, and I'm sure I'll be corrected on the BAO end.

The BAO mechanism is designed from the ground up to create a game that resolves battles in a much different, and in some ways more efficient and/or fluid manner than the rules of standard Risk provide for. Though each battle is an entity unto itself, the order that these individual battles are fought are intertwined to reduce the advantage of going "first", Also, the potential gains that can be realized for well though-out delayed orders through the use of order placement and stacking further reduces this "advantage" to become minimal if any.  The fundamental workings of the BAO battle engine have very little in common with the conflict resolution rules of standard Risk.

In contrast, M-Engine is an attempt to take the standard rules of on-line Risk (including cards, border mods, dice mods, and standard dice rolling rules, etc.), break the game down to a time-frame level where every army on the board with orders can be engaged and roll dice at the same time, and then provide a mechanism that simultaneously can adjudicate every possible situation that all of these seemingly conflicting orders present.  The fundamental workings of the M- battle engine are grounded in the conflict resolution rules of standard Risk.

After all this, I'm temped to say that I got it backwards when I named this thread.

The M-Engine is a simultaneous orders based Risk game, and BAO is the simultaneous orders based Risk "alternative"

BAO also utilized borders modifiers (actually two types, setting the number of sides on the dice and the Floor value).
I do think BAO does Cards different than you currently have as well M. If a scale is 4,5,6,7,8... it will only increment to the next card set no matter how many players turn-in during the turn. If 3 players turn in at 4, then the next turn cards are 5 for anyone that wants to turn in on the turn, if 1 player turns in then the next turn they are at 6, if no one turns in then the next turn they are still at 6...etc.
But Yes, they are two different gameplays with the same idea (all players submitting an order at once).

When it comes to blitzing and round manipulation using the M-Engine, I will note that both players can blitz simultaneously, which should prevent the "1st player blasts through 2nd player, 2nd player sits there and takes it" issue that comes up in traditional Risk two-player games.

Imagine a game of Duck Hunt using the M-Engine and assume that both players use the "let's shoot all of the ducks first" strategy (i.e. nobody's going for each other's dog). Both players list out 10 attacks on ducks, with execution being "event dependent" on there being sufficient units in the gun to maintain the "min armies" limit on each attack (probably 1 - no need for defense, but you still want to place on the gun next turn). Now, assume all attacks are successful. At the beginning of the next turn, each player would still have the exact same income, only both players would be down 10 in income because they both lost 10 ducks.

Make sense?

I do agree that BAO and the M-Engine are very different solutions to the same problem with very different results. Basically, there are no "dice rounds" in BAO because all dice are rolled simultaneously. One of the consequences of this is that, if you have a very large stack (X) facing a small stack (Y), it's virtually impossible for Y to kill off more than Y armies in stack X because X should roll sufficient hits to eliminate all of Y by the end of the turn; this isn't true for traditional Risk or the M-Engine (in both engines, Y can have strings of 6s).

I think what Cram was trying to say is that people in this thread are looking for something to replace the BAO mechanics without really understanding what they are in the first place. It took me a lot of BAO games before I understood how the turns were resolved and reading the FAQ on the site was the least helpful thing I used as a resource. If you would like to try to understand exactly how the mechanics worked I would be willing to play a few games on ToS with players and try to help walk them through. I am pretty sure that people like Yertle, Toaster, Gimli and maybe Cram would be willing to help out also. Start with some Episode II or 1st & Risky (ooops, no longer available there) ok, so start with Bomb Factory or Battle at Marathon and then move up to Axes and Allies.
I'm all for a new system but I am just concerned that not having experience or a complete understanding of the system that is familiar to some of us will just lead the aforementioned system into either the same issues or issues that BAO didn't have.
P.S. If you do invite me to a ToS game, you'll have to tell me here because I have no communication with the site whatsoever and won't unless I have to.

Yertle's description is pretty spot on. I'll try to help fill in some gaps, I suppose.

Let's start HERE. To add to the confusion, there are some things written in the Warfish BAO FAQ that aren't necessarily true, aren't always true, or once were true but are no longer. Super, eh? It gets most of it right, though.

So there seem to be a few misconceptions floating around about BAO that I'll try to address.

Misconception 1: Blind-at-Once is an attempt at Simultaneous Play

The "At-Once" leads a lot of people to believe that its some kind of everything-happens-at-the-same-time type of game system. It's not, really, and I don't think it was ever intended to be. No more so than normal Risk is simultaneous in that everyone is sitting around the table at the same time. The only part of it that is simultaneous is that no orders are executed until everyone has completed giving orders to their units.

The reality of it is that each player gives orders to their units, and those orders are executed in a round. Say there are three people, and the rules are set that turn order = seat order. Then player A submits orders: A1, A2, A3, and A4; player B submits orders B1, B2, and B3; and player C submits orders C1, C2, C3, and C4. Once everyone has sent those orders to the server, they are executed as: A1, B1, C1, A2, B2, C2, A3, B3, C3, A4, C4.

Now, turn order is not necessarily seat order. Turn order can be determined by having the person with the most armies going first, the least armies going first, the most territories going first, and so on.

Misconception 2: Order Padding (including superfluous move orders behind the front lines, or against unimportant territories)

Order padding is a result of the default dice settings favoring the defense. The expected kill rate for defenders is higher than that of attackers using the default settings.

So if P1 has territory A and P2 has B, P1 may think he has better odds of taking B if he attacks from A to B after P2 attacks from B to A. If P2 attacks from B to A and kills all of P1's armies before P1's order to attack from A to B, then P1 will never even get a chance to roll an attack. On the other hand, if P2 attacks from B to A, and P1's defense decimates P2, then when P1's order of A to B executes, he may find a much smaller defensive force waiting for him on B. The latter scenario is why people pad their important orders.

An author has the power to penalize padding severely simply by giving an advantage to the offense, as it is in default normal play. Typically, they don't because of the awesomeness that is (absent padding) trying to time an attack to land at the right point in the execution sequence. And not all padding is bad. There is a cost associated with having armies available to move around filling up the stack. Also, as previously mentioned, there's also that chance your armies will be wiped out before they can even act.

Misconception 3: It's too confusing.

The biggest contributor to this idea was whoever wrote the support documentation for BAO on Warfish. As I said, their FAQ is wrong on a few things. The wiki and the map design tool are inconsistent in their use of terms. The name itself is a little bit misleading. Yertle described how it works in about one paragraph. It ain't that hard. It just isn't the same game at all. That's part of the appeal.

Misconception 4: Seat order matters more/less

Actually, the beauty of BAO is that the state of the board can, if you want it to, alter the turn order for a round. Or, it can just go straight seat order. And the value of position is different on a per board basis, per strategy basis. It really comes down to the individual's strategy. And then turn order really takes a back seat to order execution order (stack position). Again, this comes down to the actions of the individuals.

Risky - I get what you're saying. For me, I'm excited about the M-Engine because, so far, it appears to give me the good parts I like about BAO (simultaneous play, fairness on two-player games, some control over turn-by-turn unit movement assuming you turn "blitzing" off) while ditching the more annoying aspects of BAO (marathon turn manipulation, tedious 'the game is over but we have to take 20 turns to wrap this thing up since we can only move one space at a time' issues, etc.). Whether it holds up in full-scale production remains to be seen, but I think it's workable.

RiskyBack wrote:
I am just concerned that not having experience or a complete understanding of the system that is familiar to some of us will just lead the aforementioned system into either the same issues or issues that BAO didn't have.

I understand BAO mechanics quite well (I made one of the more tactically complex BAO dueling boards on ToS, Amphibious Assault), and the whole reason I got involved in this discussion is that while I like many aspects of BAO, I want to improve upon that game system to make it a more intuitive and elegant alternative to basic Risk play.... which is why I proposed KESP. Granted, I haven't been very disciplined in championing my proposal and so it has sort of dropped off the radar (not that many people really "got it" to begin with, I think...).

[On a side note, I do think the M-Engine is a pretty neat idea, but as has been mentioned, it's not really an alternative to Risk, just a (good) way of making Risk simultaneous.]

I designed KESP based on the question, "What would a Risk-like game that resolves rounds of play simultaneously look like?"

Well, since it's a turn-based style of game (as opposed to real time), players have to give their orders in rounds of play. Now the simultaneous aspect means that (a) players have to give their orders at the same time and without knowing what the other players are doing and (b) that the orders are resolved in a simultaneous fashion -- in other words, there is no player seat order, and thus no player has a turn-order advantage over another player.

From that concept it follows that in true simultaneous play the attacker-defender dichotomy breaks down. In standard Risk mechanics, the attacking units are defined as those units belonging to the player whose turn it is, and the defending units are those which belong to players whose turn it is not. In a simultaneous system, it's everybody's turn, always, and so there are no "defending" units in the classic Risk sense. Thus instead of being labeled "attacker" or "defender", it's more useful in a simultaneous system to define each unit as either stationary or moving with a defined direction. Thus a battle might include stationary units (i.e. they've been ordered to "defend"), but it could just as well include only moving units (i.e. "attackers") that run into each other either because they're moving opposite directions along the same border or because they're trying to move to the same territory along neighboring borders.

This distinction requires a few different stages of battle resolution to ensure that all battles of each type occur truly simultaneously:

First, battles involving opposing stacks that are on a collision course along the same border will have a battle. (Border Battle Stage)

Second, battles involving stacks moving into a contested territory, either because it's occupied by an opposing player or because several different players are moving stacks to that territory.

Beyond that basic definition, I designed KESP to include some things I liked about BAO:

1) Damage dice. I further think that for a Risk-alternative simultaneous engine, the BAO concept of "damage dice" for battle resolution has merit, but for simplicity I decided for KESP to circumvent the clumsy dice mechanic and just use straight x:100 odds of a given unit scoring a kill against another unit in a battle round. If you think about it, the complicated system of differently sided dice and variable kill floors amounts to the same thing, just with more hassle.

2) One order per unit per turn. I've always liked that BAO limits players to one territory advance per round, which is really just an extension of the one order per unit per turn rule. KESP maintains that limit. However, this rule is not a necessity and a simultaneous game system such as KESP could even be modified to make multiple territory advance possible. Mechanics such as unit fatigue (units start to perform less well the more battles they're involved in per turn) could accomplish this in an intuitive and tactically interesting way.

However, there were some things I don't like about BAO that I changed:

1) One round of "rolling" per battle. I've never liked that BAO doesn't simulate pitched battles well, because it limits resolution to one round of "rolling". I designed the KESP battle engine to allow players to choose the extent to which a battle will continue by first allowing multiple rounds of "rolling" (for lack of a better term, since KESP did away with dice), and second by letting players set "retreat conditions" that determine when their stack will withdraw from the battle.

Well, that's as quick an overview of my opinion of BAO and the ways that I would like to see it improved upon at WarGear as I can write. Say what you will about it.

EDIT: @Cram

re: Misconception 1, I agree that BAO isn't really simultaneous (see my post above), which is one thing I'd like to change about BAO.

re: Misconception 3. Padding is also used for tactical reasons beyond the default defender advantage -- for example, if you can pad your orders beyond any other player such that you pretty much guarantee you can make the last moves in the turn, then you can launch all-out assaults without worrying about a small attack from the side taking out your now undefended territory. Small point, but worth bringing up.

Our thread discipline is remarkable ;) "It ain't that hard." (Cram's post) - In spite of my own misconceptions, I strongly agree.

No offense to M, but I was more excited about KESP. I read it thoroughly a week ago, so I've probably lost what I learned. I mostly liked it with the exception perhaps of how multiple players successfully invading a territory is resolved (reading the Risk II wiki, I preferred that approach since it requires no apportioning how many to which players in the battle). Anyway, it is an idea worthy of championing.

BAO defenders have little to fear: tom logged countless BAO games - he must have enjoyed some of them! (plus he indicated a willingness to implement BAO and more.)

Yertle wrote:
I do think BAO does Cards different than you currently have as well M. If a scale is 4,5,6,7,8... it will only increment to the next card set no matter how many players turn-in during the turn. If 3 players turn in at 4, then the next turn cards are 5 for anyone that wants to turn in on the turn, if 1 player turns in then the next turn they are at 6, if no one turns in then the next turn they are still at 6...etc.

Yeah, there are a lot of details, like how cards are distributed, that obviously I'm just pulling out of my ass to make the game work.  These are the kinds of rules and conventions that are best decided by consensus.. Kind of like that 2v2 + 2v2 flex scenario a few of us are looking at right now in a flurry of PMs..

My initial intention was to lay the foundation for the M-Engine, which was done a while ago.  Then I realized that people needed to see things fleshed out a bit, then made play-testable, so in the process I had to create a number of rules that probably need to be looked at critically and changed, tweaked, amended, etc, ..but the foundation is there.

Truth is, I shouldn't be making decisions about a lot of these critical details and minutia ..and it's already gone beyond that point.  I'm just the inventor/big idea guy.  I know nothing 'bout coding, developing, ..the whole process ..what's hard, ..what's easy  ..what tom needs in terms of support to make it happen.

The basic vision was to see the game of Risk (and not something resembling Risk) played truly simultaneously, and I know that it can be done because I'm doing it right now. It needs to take on a life of its own.  There are enough people here that have a pretty good understanding of its fundamental underpinnings and also know that it works, and they're either intrigued by it or not by now.  I don't know, ..maybe we should transfer it all to a wiki and everybody gets to hack at it.  On the other hand, I don't mind being the point person, figuring out the consensus, and updating the site if that's preferable.  I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to let people be "collaborators" on the site so maybe we could have a handful work on it. But in the spirit of how this place was conceived, the end product should necessarily be the result of a group effort.

As Cram pointed out, I'm tootin' my horn a lot about it and that's just fine. It needed to be done. But people have to start stepping forward and saying they like it ..or not.