I just can't keep up with you guys in terms of volume of text read and written. I'm respectfully bowing out, and working with whatever tools are created. I'll have better input once a framework is built and I can say how its working for me.

I just had a week off so I'm cramming it all in now. What? You think this'll happen overnight while you're sleeping?

A suggestion on how to do simultaneous play. (Note that I never was a member of TOS and am only vaguely aware of how it worked there.)

Each player simultaneously chooses which armies to move into which territories. Could be their own, or other people's. (or could be a setting where you can only move to attack here.)

If a player moves forces into their own territory then they are added to the ones already there.

Then for territories have 2 or more people's armies in it:
- For a territory with just 2 sets of armies. The one who owned it originally is the defender, the other is the attacker. The attacker attacks until either it wins or is completely wiped out - Rolling 3 dice when down to 3 armies, 2 dice at 2 armies and 1 die at 1 army.
- For a territory with 3 or more sets of armies. Repeat the above with the defender and either the largest invading force or the smallest (A possible setting here). If the invading force wins then they become the defender and fights the next invader in the queue.

- The one who owned it originally is the defender, the other is the attacker.

This is how i saw Kjeld's suggestion working.

I was catching up on reading after vacation and hit #50 and thought the conversation had stopped there and made my post. I am trying to figure out Kjeld's system, but I am too tired to fully digest it now. It does seem to be a much more fully formed version of what I proposed, but I have to read it again.

Amidon's suggestion is different from mine in several important regards, most notably his system would ignore the case where unit stacks are moving in opposite directions along the same border.

His proposed battle resolution process - using an auto-rolling engine akin to standard risk dice with an attacker/defender - is completely different from mine. While it might seem to be more intuitive to people used to Risk dice,  I don't see how it would handle a battle involving more than 2 players, and I don't see how it resolves the turn-order problem. Finally, it allows for only very minimal tactical control on the part of the players.

so in yours then, since they both are 'attacking' across the same border, are they both attackers and roll 3 dice? i guess i was tired when reading it too and didn't digest that part of it. yours make more sense at a somewhat deeper than cursory glance than whomever else you were duking it out with earlier.

'Top, I think post #70 answers your question.

ah, i was thinking that was for M57's proposal. i'll have to think about it now, but in the meantime - how would that deal with border modifiers?

Apply a conversion algorithm that enables the KESP percentage dice to most closely emulate Risk Dice.  As I mentioned in a previous post, it could be pretty straight ahead, or it could be more sophisticated, sliding appropriately with size of the stacks.

Modifiers in this system would work more or less the same -- designers can add a modifier to both directions of movement along any given border. Any stack of units that gets involved in a battle while moving along the border would have the modifier for that direction of movement applied to its chance to score a kill (increase or decrease the chance). There is also the possibility of adding a feature to the designer that would allow designers to set modifiers for an individual territory, to be applied in the same way to the chance to score a kill of any units defending that territory (i.e. those units are "in place" and not "in transition) in a battle.

EDIT: If we decide not to introduce the individual territory defender modifier attribute, then an algorithm like the one M57 is talking about would allow relatively seamless conversion from the existing board format.

OK, I've tried to create a visual representation of the KESP system in action based on my current understanding.  All of the below armies are attacking with orders to kill or be killed.  It is my understanding that all attacking armies must occupy the enemy territory.  The results of the following scenario assumes that those armies cannot fall back to defend against attacks on another border.  They are committed.  I think I might be able to find a few problems with that paradigm, but for now I'll just put this out there:

Above: The intersecting spaces represent the battlefields where attacking troops are committed and the arrows represent their orders.

Above: Parenthetical numbers represent the losses incurred as a result of the "expected" 50% attack dice results.  So in the case of A who is a attacking with 50 armies - he would kill 25 armies.  B only has 2 to lose, but that's ok.

Notice that 50% of  B's armies (in this case one) killed 1 of A's attacking armies. leaving A with 50 - 1 = 49 armies to occupy B's former territory.

Edit: There's a typo on the first slide.  C is attacking A with 4, not 30

M57, you're correct that any stack committed to a move must either complete that move (ending in the territory to which is ordered to move in the case of a fortify, an occupation, or a successful invasion), or retreat to its home base in the case that the stack loses a battle AND the player gave retreat orders. Note that stacks cannot engage in a battle during retreat -- if they're attempting to retreat to a territory that was successfully occupied by an enemy stack, the retreating stack "surrenders" and all hands are lost. The rationale behind this is that any given stack can only participate in a maximum of one in-transition battle (i.e. encountering an enemy stack moving the opposite direction along a border) and one territory battle (i.e. attacking a territory or defending against an outside attack) per turn.

..So in a different scenario, let's say A has 52 units and attacks B with 50, setting a threshold of 25 to "cease fire" and consequently leaving 2 behind to "defend". He is then unable to take B because he reaches the threshold. Meanwhile he is attacked by C, who only attacked with 5 armies. You're saying those 25 "returning" armies are killed without a fight as they come home?

I haven't read any of this yet, but will when I have time.

And M, I don't think Appo would be broken as BAO.

I like K's system so I'm gonna do my best to break it ..'cause that's what I do! From there we try to fix it.

Let's look at a situation where he attack dice get hot.  I think this is a situation where everyone dies in a critical battle. ..and I think have a solution.. but here it is for now.

I purposely made it so that only one of A's armies invade B (so we can't say that one gets to spill into C.

Mongrel wrote: I haven't read any of this yet, but will when I have time.

And M, I don't think Appo would be broken as BAO.

Notice that this is different than saying it works and would be fun. My 30 second evaluation says that moving slowly through neutrals with high defense dice one space ahead would be stalematey.

To the general discussion. I played RISK 2 a decade ago and really liked their version of simultaneous play. So BAO took a while to grow on me, as I was used to the other way, but once I realized it's potential (and had fun with it!), I was fine with knowing 3 ways to play risk.

Point is, there's many ways to do it, and it's on the designers to extract every interesting drop of strategy out of that rule system. I have no idea how BAO will jive with capitals or artillery, but I'm ready to try it out. Agree with 11's- BaO is familiar and people want that. We should bring that over just to increase the numbers on the site. Though I don't like the idea of idea poaching, no one blinked an eye while playing "enhanced RISK" of WF. So let's do "enhanced WF", taking what we like, adding new features, and just all around doing things better than how it was done.

So the way I see it, what happens depends on whether there is abandon or not.

If abandon is on, then at the end of this turn B controls the yellow circle with 37 units and the blue circle with 1 unit, while A controls the red circle with 0 units (defender always wins a tie, or in this case a mutual annihilation). C is eliminated.

In the event that abandoning territories is turned off, at the end of this turn B controls the yellow circle with 37 units and the blue circle with 1 unit, and A controls the red circle, and gets 1 unit "resurrected" to populate it as a tie-breaker (since defender wins in case of a tie). C is still eliminated.

Agree with 11's- BaO is familiar and people want that.

Got some evidence to back up that assertion?

Gotta say I doubt that many people on WF actually played BAO games much, as the system was pretty complicated for the majority of casual players that populate that site. Also, if they took the time to learn BAO over there, don't you find it likely that they'd also take the time to learn an alternative (and *cough* better) system on WarGear?

Also, at some point it might be good to start a STICKY discussion of simultaneous play. It sounds like Tom really intends to go forward with implementing a simultaneous play system (in several months), so we should have a place to hash out what exactly the community wants for when Tom gets to this.