There's a discussion going on in another thread about team fortify, and it reminded me of a feature I thought of long ago, so writing up a new thread to throw the idea out:

One thing that frustrates me with Team play is that you potentially lose armies to a partner when you want to complete a continent. It would be nice to have the option in team games to have partners always defend with zero sided dice when attacked by your own teammate.

You still have to attack (and leave behind armies in currently owned countries) so you don't break the rest of the game mechanics but that your partner vs partner dice would have a modifier that the defender always rolls zero sided dice. This means the attacker always wins against his own partner, and the attacker doesn't need to lose a giant stack as they move through a partner to go after an opponent.

This has happened a few times to me in the big maze games where one partner ended up attacking into a corner, and because a partner was between him and the front lines of battle, he was now stuck in that corner for the rest of the game, it was potential that he'd be losing his own stack to his partner to get back to the front lines. If we knew that it was an automatic win every roll, I might have been comfortable with the minimum required loss to let that partner get back into the fray. Instead, he just sat in the corner and placed on mine and another partner's stacks for the rest of the game.

Just throwing out the idea and will wait to see if the feature has legs with the rest of the group.

Hmmm. I've wondered the same thing at times in the past.

I'm torn between "this would make team play incredibly effective" in many cases (overpoweringly so, sometimes), and "having to plan out team sacrifices as well as outward-facing attacks makes this even more challenging (and fun to strategize)" in others.

One downside to this is strategic elimination of partner to cash his cards being made a lot more easy and predictable than it's supposed to be.

Yup... it's perversely satisfying to plan out and implement a 4-5 player elimination in a 6-player team game to finish the round.

(Dice-willing, of course :-D )