Play Risk Tips and Strategies

Risk Tips and Strategies

by Redstorm
(Major Command Risk Game Player and Blog Contributor)

Forward: Several players graciously shared their game knowledge with me. I have freely edited their remarks while maintaining their unique intent. Any mistakes are purely my own.

Playing Tactics

 

risk tips and strategies

Don’t be a command monkey compulsively reaching for a command. While securing commands certainly has a great deal of importance in escalite and flat rate games, chasing them in escalate games is a recipe for disaster. I tend to employ a combination of the following tactics, depending on how the first couple rounds shake out:

Path of Least Resistance:

If I see a region with one troop in it adjacent to me, I take it. Quite often, I lose no troops. After a few rounds of this, I often find that I’m the troop leader, primarily because everyone else is going through the pain of taking regions defended by three troops, and losing half of their allowance or more each turn. They’re also leaving behind regions with one or two troops in them, which I’m happy to attack. If you haven’t already, try this out. It’s as easy as taking candy from a baby. Stack and Wait: If the game is nine or more players, it may not be worth burning troops early to get a card in the first round or two. I’ll just spread my deployments out across the board, boost my threes up to fours, then to fives, making myself a less appealing target. Once I’ve established a solid foothold, I begin my expansion.

Be Everywhere:

I want to be near weak players when the reserve bonus starts to grow. An opponent with three regions totaling nine troops isn’t going to be the first link in my chain of eliminations if he’s on the opposite side of the board from me, and I have to go through a bunch of other players to reach him. Instead of wasting time and troops securing a command, I try to keep a region or two in every command on the board. It’s easy to be in the right place at the right time if you’re everywhere.

Turtle/Spider:

 

turtle-shell risk tips and strategies

If I’m getting abused early, and I’m already the weakest player alive in round three, I’ll often pick one region and just stack and stack there, turn after turn, and refrain from attacking. A big number looks intimidating to other players, and once I have a strong presence there, I’ll attack adjacent regions, advancing either one troop, or all of them. The key is to keep the stack together. With luck and a reserve set, I can sometimes turn a weak start into a glorious chain of eliminations. Sometimes, I can start this without even turning in reserves myself at the start of my turn, simply because I already have enough concentrated force to kill somebody who holds the cards I need.

Maps

 

Philippines:

Watch out for the sea lanes. I usually try working the map from 1 side to the other; southeast or northwest. I usually prefer the southeast area for starting.

Far East:

Keep an eye on the 2 mini bonuses within commands (India and Indonesia mini bonus). They can be a bitch if they catch you off guard. The Mongolia command is decent.

12 Domains:

 

12 Domains Risk map

1st round: add all armies on 1 castle, castles with 4 hit a 2, if takes, advance 1, if draw, hit 1 more time with the 3 if lose stay with the 2 on the castle. For the castle with the 7, take as many territories as you can until you get to 3 remaining troops then move those 3 back to the castle. The basic rule of thumb is with an army of 4 or above you can attack anything; with an army of 3 you only hit territories with 1 troop and only if necessary. Try to conquer the domains as efficiently as possible, meaning doesn’t block your exit. That’s why Bruichladdich is the hardest domain to conquer followed by Calofar. If you start out with 2 domains connecting to the same town, you develop those domains first and try to get to the town ASAP because 2 connected domains are insanely strong in the beginning. After you just got done conquering the entire domain, you should end up with like 24 troops on the frontline of that domain, 1 turn later, move the 8 from the castle to that frontline, the turn after that you take the town depending on whether enemies are threatening to take over that town immediately, move the 8 from the castle to the town.

WATCH OUT if you’re joining a match on the Twelve Kingdoms map, and it’s set to low or no movements (like Border One or Border None). The trick to this map on those settings is to NOT capture up all the territories in your starting area. LEAVE A PATH OF NEUTRALS BETWEEN THE TOWER AND THE OUTER MAP, and only capture the territories to the side of this path.

If you want to leverage the auto deploy feature on the tower, then you should only capture the terts to the top and bottom, and leave the ones that are left for when you’re ready to “break out” from the starting territory. With six or fewer players on the map, you’ll start the game with more than one tower which means that, once you’ve capped the side territories for a single region, then you can focus your attention on a different tower while this first one racks up all the auto deploys. Twelve Kingdoms on Border One/None is a noob trap. Anyone going into this situation without knowing the trick almost always starts with a disadvantage.

You can bombard opponents’ terts, turning them neutral, in your domain. Bombard the terts that you don’t border first because you can kill those with no loss to yourself. You don’t get the dragons until your next turn IF you hold it. ALWAYS look for easy ways to take away your opponents deploy. For example, if I’m holding 2 villages with only 1 man on them, take them and take 4 deploys from me. In a close game, those 4 men are important. In the beginning of the game, look for the places where you outnumber your opponent. If you start with 2 domains in the west to my 1 you should concentrate on that area and make it a priority to take that domain away. You do that, you win the game.

A disclaimer:

Please keep in mind that my badmouthing of commands in escalate games doesn’t apply to all maps, just the medium sized ones. In Classic Massive, I absolutely go after commands. Hope you liked the Risk tips and strategies given above.

Major Command Second Family

Major Command as a Second Family

by legionbuck
(Major Command Risk Game Player and Blog Contributor)

psychology session sign vector

Recently I have read a few posts in The Mess that has a player venting about family issues . We all can use some vent time for various reasons. What I find so amazing is the fact those issues expressed in The Mess show a depth of personal experiences that someone would not disclose unless they felt completely at ease with posting them in public ( so to speak ) and carry a heavy dose of personal pain that normally no one would disclose to people.

zen stone water relax

I will not name that player out of respect for them, but be it known that Major Command contributing to being an outlet for this kind of discourse is therapeutic in more ways than the usual game site can provide. We have some very special people as members, and [some challenging ones]. With that said, it goes to show that our members have experiences and lives that sometimes need an ear to relieve stress, The responses I saw to that particular thread were compassionate and encouraging. THAT is what makes Major Command special ! Players form partnerships, friendships, and count on there being the same type of members. Ya just can’t find that on other sites, or at least that has been my experience.

zen relax clouds peace

The people here are fantastic, and Major Command will continue to not only provide gaming fun but when ya need a friend you can find one here. I might suggest another forum slot… for personal stuff that would be considered classified info and posters can send “read permission” passwords to others they want to discuss things and keep it private. Just a thought… Semper Fi !

by legionbuck

Bug Fixes: Stuck Game and 0-Troop

Major Command Risk Bug Fixes

Major Command Risk Bug Fixes

It looks like we have the two most detrimental bugs under our proverbial thumb.  Marcos, our resident developer has identified the issues and we will be implementing few bug fixes within the next 24 hours.

The first of the few planned bug fixes will be for the “stuck game” bug, where a player will eliminate all others, but the game won’t end.  Instead, displaying “jump to next” rather than “game over”.  These games remain permanently stuck.

The second of the few upcoming bug fixes will be for the 0-troop bug, where a region will have no troops on it, preventing the game from finishing.

We are making these bug fixes directly to the production server as there is still work to be done on the dev server.  This is important. If you encounter these two bugs going forward, please post the issue and game in this forum thread of the bugs forum.

We hope there are no unintended consequences, but you never know, be on the lookout.

Thank you all for your patience.  We will also work to unstick currently stuck games.

Next on Major Command Risk?

Major Command Risk Bugs

So as many of you know, things haven’t been running smoothly in the Major Command Risk. This site is sorely in need of a game engine recode to live up to its full potential and get the hell out of beta. Over the past 6 months, I have set out to find the right developer who can accomplish this task.  After a few false and drawn out starts, we have a new recruit up to the task. Cory is an excellent developer, and will be dedicating his Christmas vacation to getting us out of beta. Future Plans for Major Command Risk

Major Command Risk

While there are some bugs around tournaments and some other issues, the single biggest issue is the game performance. The current code is not up to par and for a modern web game to take so long and crash so readily is unacceptable.

We’re going to try to avoid patching up our current problems and instead to start over on the nuts and bolts that make up the game experience. If you are interested in the details, we will be continuing using PHP but using Symfony or CakePHP, we’ll be changing to a Redis for live games, and MySQL for the historical data. Flash will be dumped for html5 using canvas as well as jQuery. If you are a developer with experience in any of the above and interested in participating, let me know.

This all begins around the week of Christmas holidays and I promise to update you all as I know more about the progress and development. I’m not going to put an exact time frame on it as I’ve found that’s often inaccurate, but will keep y’all in the loop.

In the meantime, we will try to manage the issues as best as we can. We’ll be keeping an eye on the servers and errant scripts. I apologize in advance for any future issues.

And for all those people who have supported Major Command Risk by becoming a subscriber … Santa has come a little early this year.

Thanks for everything,

Badorties

Risk Game – The Honor Points system

Major Command Risk Honor Points

Risk Game Honor Points

So a feature that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention is the Honor system which is rating you by honor points. You can find the number of your honor points on your Major Command profile. It is designed to be a score how you play in terms of your behavior. It should highlight honorable Risk players and warn of dishonorable players. That’s how it’s supposed to work, but in order to really test it, we need to put it through its paces.
So watch the video below describing how it works and how to use it. Then get on rating!

Your honor points are calculated like this. The first number is the percentage of honorable votes. The second number is the total number of votes, honorable or dishonorable. So a score of 80 (17) means 17 people have rated you, 80% of them were honorable. Any questions, just ask. There is also a few threads in the forum about it.