I have a new map that is pretty much done, but might need some balancing. 

It's based on the idea of 'tech trees' that you see in civilization or starcraft or other turn based or real time strategies.

It's open for beta, or join my new game:

http://www.wargear.net/games/join/99334

http://www.wargear.net/boards/view/2800

Hi Ozyman, first off I want to say that I love your map.  The tech tree is a great idea, and the mechanic you use to implement it works really well.  The one thing I've noticed is that this map (Default varient) tends to end up in stalemates, especially once you're down to 3 players.  You may be interested in watching how this game played out:

http://www.wargear.net/games/view/111569

Once people have ICBMs/Nuclear ICBMs, there's an extremely high cost to leaving units exposed (i.e. anywhere but in capitals and airplanes) at the end of your turn.  It results in a world full of 1 unit armies and encourages a back and forth of breaking people's continents.  Espionage helps a little in trying to deny your opponents access to those techs, but it doesn't seem to be super effective.  Reducing the power of ICBMs might help a little bit with this.

As an aside, I noticed two problems with borders:

1. The border from the European Nuclear ICBM to South China should be artillery instead of normal.

2. There's no fortify border from the European Jet Airplane to Beijing.

Thanks for creating such a great map!

Hi Norseman,

I'm glad you like the map and I love to hear feedback.  I know it's not perfect and I plan on doing a major overhaul when I have time (hopefully start on it sometime in a few weeks).

I'll try to put out a fix for the two border problems you noticed this weekend.

I watched some of the history of the game you linked.  I can see what you mean that it was hard for anyone to defend their territories.  There was one point around turn 1275 where you could have pretty easily taken out red, with your 24 units to place & looking at the history I think you could have told he didn't have much in his capital, but definitely once red caught up to you and green and it was an even 3-way it took a while for someone to break away.  But even beyond your specific game, it is a general problem.  That said it never looked like the game completely stagnated, some of the capitals were swapping back and forth, etc.

I intended for the max on the capitals and the direct attack from espionage to the capitals to act as a way to prevent stalemates.  I figured you just had to accumulate ~35 units on espionage and you could take someone out.  It looked like you guys had a hard time doing that though.

I have a whole list of ideas that I need to consider for the revamp.  I plan on making a post here in the forums asking for feedback and help testing, etc. and I'll PM you when I do that to make sure you don't miss it.

I went ahead and fixed those borders.  It won't affect games already started, only new games.

I have had some pretty awful luck graphs on this board - but oddly enough they were in games that I won.  So I was curious what other games were like, so I tallied up the luck graphs for the 24 games that were finished as of this post, with 4 players and the Default scenario.  Check these out... they are the luck graph score for the players WHO WON each of the games:

I was surprised to say the least!  Now granted, luck graph score isn't everything... a lot of the bad luck can happen after the game is essentially over and you are just going for the capital and so on.  And this probably isn't statistically significant, but it's a very odd trend.  Only 3 winners out of 24 had positive luck?

I wonder if a lot of the bad luck comes from all the ICBMing where you have 8 or 9 sided dice against 6 sided defense dice... just a very odd result any way you slice it so far.

I also noted that (so far in this limited sample) that turn order is not a major factor in the outcome, which surprised me (1st won 8, 2nd won 6, 3rd won 3 and 4th won 7 times).

The country you start out with so far (in this limited sample) is slanted towards USA and Africa: (USA and Africa with 8 wins each, England and Asia with 4 wins each).  After playing the map, I  expected USA and Africa to have an edge - we'll see if this holds up over time or if players just need to do different things when they are blue or green to win.

Bored yet?  Can you tell I'm "into numbers" a bit? :)

Big thanks to Ozyman for this board... I just love it!

I wonder if a lot of the bad luck comes from all the ICBMing where you have 8 or 9 sided dice against 6 sided defense dice... just a very odd result any way you slice it so far.

Luck stats take into account dice mods.

There are a number of common reasons that people with poor luck stats win games.  Players often concentrate their attacks on the player who is ahead.  Players with not so good luck stats who can hang on are often overlooked as they recover and manage to eliminate players weakened by their own attacks ..on the way to a victory.

A player can have the game "in the bag," collect a lot of armies for elimination, and then get poor rolls as they mop up. These are essentially garbage stats because they really don't impact the outcome.

Luck stats take into account dice mods.

There are a number of common reasons that people with poor luck stats win games.  Players often concentrate their attacks on the player who is ahead.  Players with not so good luck stats who can hang on are often overlooked as they recover and manage to eliminate players weakened by their own attacks ..on the way to a victory.

A player can have the game "in the bag," collect a lot of armies for elimination, and then get poor rolls as they mop up. These are essentially garbage stats because they really don't impact the outcome.

I agree with you, but in many of these Invention games the player who wins is ahead and a clear leader for most of the game.  They collect a lot of the negative luck when the game's outcome is still up for grabs, yet still hang on to win the game.

With my comment "I wonder if a lot of the bad luck comes from all the ICBMing where you have 8 or 9 sided dice against 6 sided defense dice", I was trying to get if it was more the units in the tech trees, which aren't on the game board itself, were the major cause, since if you are still strong on the game board the bad luck from tech isn't as bad as it was if it was on the game board (hopefully that makes sense).

I know luck isn't everything, but thought these results were pretty untypical (even for such a small sample size).

Everyone knows that neutral cheats, so in a board with all that neutral-bashing in the tech trees, poor player luck should be expected =D

Ok, I created a test version of Invention with some minor changes:

• War techs now give +1/+2 attack bonus instead of +2/+3
• Capitals defend from ground attacks at +2 instead of +3.

That's it for now.  I want to do an 'advanced invention' version at some point, but these were simple enough changes to try out right away.  Post here or PM me if you want me to invite you to a private testing game.

The one thing that I find most frustrating about Invention is the lack of any real reward for eliminating a player (at least on the default scenario). It has happened to me several times that I have eliminated 2 of the 3 other players, and still lost because it really didn't give me much reward to let me take on the 4th player. Maybe that is intentional and you have good reasons for it, but I for one like some incentive to take out players (like an elimination bonus, or auto-capture some territories after a capital elimination).

Kjeld - Right now the reward for eliminating another player is access to their tech tree.  It is likely they will have already progressed through the tree, so you would only have to knock down a bunch of 1s to get to some upper level techs.

Also, with two capitals, all of the labs basically count double, because they produce tech points in each flask.   Of course this means you have to actually hold on to your labs.

Maybe you already realize all that...  The first versions of this game had the opposite trouble where eliminating one person gave you a huge lead, so I took out all the elimination bonus stuff.  Maybe some of it needs to go back in.  I'll look at that once I figure out how these new borders work.    As you said, maybe unit assimilation, or a bonus.  I might add back in cards, so maybe card capture.  I also am thinking about making the capitals be worth +2 units a turn by themselves, so that would be a little something.

I understand your points, and agree that you wouldn't want to grant too much advantage to an elimination. I just wanted to point out that, from a player perspective, there doesn't seem to be quite enough reward through just the tech tree, as it's too slow to build into effective advantage -- you don't need extra ICBMs, really, or the flight and radar. The only truly useful bonus from an additional tech tree are the big bonuses to population at the end of the tree, which probably weren't captured by the eliminated player, leaving dozens of neutrals to plow through in order to realize the bonus. I personally would advocate for a moderate % of unit assimilation, subject to play-testing of course.

Right now (especially in default) when someone gets a lot of armies one turn (and if they have ICBMs) they can easily wipe out everyone else's bonuses and effectively have the game all but won at that point.  Cards could help keep those that don't get to start as fast in the game.  I would think the static count for cards would work best (like in the Barbarian scenario) if you put cards back in.

Hey Cona, I have my luck stats for about 500 1v1 WW games listed and charted.  Is there a good way to post an Excel sheet or chart in case you or anyone is interested in checking it out?

SquintGnome wrote:

Hey Cona, I have my luck stats for about 500 1v1 WW games listed and charted.  Is there a good way to post an Excel sheet or chart in case you or anyone is interested in checking it out?

I'm not sure what the best way to do that on this site is... anyone else have some thoughts?

And sorry for being dense, but is WW "World War"?  It'd be interesting to see what you have... I love messing around with data.

Ozy, great map.  I really enjoy it.

One idea - currently there is little need to go for the satellite bonus - once a player has the ICBM, he or she just starts bombing randomly on all available areas.  If there's only one army there, there's no penalty for bombing.  If there was a chance to lose a unit from the ICBM slot when bombing a single army area, then the random bombing would have a cost.  That would make the satellite more valuable and force players to divert resources to get that slot.

Just a thought - as I said, great work, great map.

Actually, what would be interesting to try is allowing players the option to skip over some technologies in the tree. In other words, each tech would be attackable from the beaker instead of the tech immediately before it. Might open up some interesting options.

Shelbo - I pretty much agree.     I don't think there is anyway to make it so that it is possible to lose a unit from ICBM when bombing a single area.  Well actually if I set min units to zero, there would always be that chance, but that changes a lot of things.

I am testing a new version now where ICBM only gets +1 to attack, and I think that will make people a bit less bomb happy because they are more likely to lose their ICBM units.

I've got a couple thoughts about how to make satellite more valuable.  One thing I was thinking about was having every blue tech earn you +1 tech points (except computers which would stay at +3).   Since the neutrals are fairly low for blue techs, it might be worth it just for the +1 tech, even if you don't want the satellite.   Also, I am thinking about an Advanced version of the board with 6 techs in each tree.  I was thinking I would add 'Internet' as the most advanced blue tech and have it be worth +3 or +5 tech points, so you'd have to go through satellite to get to Internet.

Kjeld - I thought about that.  Might be doable, but I'd probably have to rework some of the neutral counts, because for example, right now to get to Espionage, you have to go through 50 neutrals, but if you could attack directly it would only be 20, which is probably too few.  I'll add it to my big list of possible changes.   One way I could make it work, is add another neutral box in front of each tech (except the first), that the flask connects to.  So if you want to jump ahead you have to go through some extra neutrals more than what you would have to do if you go in order.

Ozyman wrote:

Kjeld - I thought about that.  Might be doable, but I'd probably have to rework some of the neutral counts, because for example, right now to get to Espionage, you have to go through 50 neutrals, but if you could attack directly it would only be 20, which is probably too few.  I'll add it to my big list of possible changes.   One way I could make it work, is add another neutral box in front of each tech (except the first), that the flask connects to.  So if you want to jump ahead you have to go through some extra neutrals more than what you would have to do if you go in order.

Or a negative modifier (or slight defensive dice) when trying "jump over" techs?

Good idea Yertle.  That would be a lot simpler.