Advanced Strategy Tutorials wanted

[Badorties]

yeah great thoughts on diplomacy, i never thought of it that way.

 

[mapguy]

Yea Squirt. This is one of the reasons that I like to make PERM. truces that last for the entire game.

 

[theycallmesquirtle]

I understand why you do that now lol, but tbh....permanent truces can backfire, i RARELY make a truce for over 4 turns

 

[Afus]

Not always earn a zone is good.

Let's suppose you are in a X game with X players. There Player A has Zone A. You have Zone B and Zone C. Player A has many troops on zone A. B Zone is like a path between A zone and C zone, it is the only path there. Player A attacks Zone B but he leaves only 1 troop.
STOP there! Do not attack!, it does not matter if player A is winning or not, or if you have less or more troops than him, you have to take advantage of Player A's move and do not touch that map. Why? Because Player A will not be able to attack you with that huge amount of troops, so he'll have to use them on another person, like Player C.

With that little "strategy" you can grow your troops while another threat appears after you

 

[mapguy]

I understand why you do that now lol, but tbh....permanent truces can backfire, i RARELY make a truce for over 4 turns

It is all about advantage and how to give to yourself, the most that you can. You can make a truce that lasts for only an X amount of rounds, and that will give you an advantage over your other neighbors, BUT Your advantage is multiplied if you instead make the truce PERM.
I look at it this way-
There can never be any hurt feelings when a truce is ended, like I have seen so, so many times before. Also If you are safe in your mind that the player you are dealing with IS honest, and will not break the truce, it really frees up your resources to use against those other neighbors that are trying to build up commands on your other boarders. The ideal situation would be to have Perm. truces with 2 out of 3 of your neighbors. I suggest that you play a few games with Robinette. Now she is a Diplomatic wizard.

Squirt, try out my PERM. Truce idea. I think that you will be surprised at how well it can work, once you get the hang of it.

 

[KungFuDuet]

Not always earn a zone is good.

Let's suppose you are in a X game with X players. There Player A has Zone A. You have Zone B and Zone C. Player A has many troops on zone A. B Zone is like a path between A zone and C zone, it is the only path there. Player A attacks Zone B but he leaves only 1 troop.
STOP there! Do not attack!, it does not matter if player A is winning or not, or if you have less or more troops than him, you have to take advantage of Player A's move and do not touch that map. Why? Because Player A will not be able to attack you with that huge amount of troops, so he'll have to use them on another person, like Player C.

With that little "strategy" you can grow your troops while another threat appears after you

Somehow this sounds similar to the "land Locker"

 

[Afus]

Where is it?

 

[mapguy]

Where is it?

Where is what ?

 

[KungFuDuet]

Where is it?

If you are talking about the "Land Locker" it is in the Basic Tactic and Strat page

http://www.majorcommand.com/wiki/Basic_Tactics_%26_Strategies#The_Land_Locker

 

[Afus]

If you are talking about the "Land Locker" it is in the Basic Tactic and Strat page

http://www.majorcommand.com/wiki/Basic_Tactics_%26_Strategies#The_Land_Locker

Haha ok. Sorry ^^

 

[Badorties]

I would consider the landlocker an advanced strategy.

 

[ORBOTRON]

I would consider the landlocker an advanced strategy.

Sweet, I need more bling on my user page Any of my others strike you as advanced, or do I have to come up with a new one?

 

[Dreadnought]

Here are my two contributions to this thread:

1.Take advantage of situations where one players disgruntles another by using diplomacy. Offer a way for the disgruntled player to get back at his opponent that favors you. I recently used this with great success in a 8 player game. Also I like to think it serves a greater good as it promotes nicer conversations and better sportsmanship.

2. When playing a game with four or more players, plan the move from four to three players extra carefully. Winning 1v1v1 is the hardest, so I try to position myself so that it quickly goes from a 1v1v1 to a 1v1 before player four is taken out. Chosing your 3 opponents is one way, getting an enemy in the middle of the map is another, build up and having cards to trade a third just to mention a few ways you can do this.

 

[Badorties]

smart moves dreadnought, thanks. when its down to 4 players i always appear weak until i can do damage and defend my self from the inevitable 2v1.

 

[diogenes]

Not sure if you're still taking tips or not, but here are some of mine, some more basic than others. I didn't read through all the suggestions, so there are probably some duplicates.

Conditional probabilities
In escalate, if you're about to cascade for the win (eliminate and take cards to eliminate someone else to take their cards...), you should already be using the canonical probability website
http://gamesbyemail.com/Games/Gambit/BattleOdds
while planning the attack. However, if my odds at success are borderline, like say 70%, it's still very helpful to continually update the odds. Especially if, early in the turn, I go against a huge stack and take a disproportionate loss. Better to give up for the turn instead of fighting the odds and making it easier for someone else to eliminate the target.

Combination of some tips that have already been given
For escalate, single, about 6+ players, you can become pretty strong, but not number 1. If you're 2nd or 3rd or 4th, people won't want to unilaterally mess with you as much, but if you're 1st everyone will probably be focused on you. Instead of being greedy and taking more and more, slow down and spend more time securing what you already have to discourage attacks. Besides, later on, escalating reserves end up mattering a lot more than a couple extra commands.

Strategic laziness
In escalate when everyone has 4 reserves and they're about to cash in for the first reserve bonuses, and my turn is towards the beginning, if I'm decently strong I may want to not take any territories for the round (especially if I already have a set). If I force everyone else to turn in reserves so they get all the 4's and 6's, then I can get a higher-value card. The game speeds up when the price for a set is about 15 or 20 troops. Also, if you're weak in escalate, and the reserve numbers are relatively high, don't save reserves, get rid of them ASAP, or you're begging to be taken out.

Exploit mispriced assets
On Classic Massive and others, I look for what appear to be undervalued commands. (I care more about how many borders I have to defend than how many bordering territories there are.)

For example, the US vs W Europe vs Andes on ClassMass:

• US: 5 territories, 4 that border other commands, and 4 that border the US- worth 4 troop bonus
• W Europe: 7 territories, 4 that border others and 5 that border W Europe- worth 4 troop bonus
• Andes: 5 territories, 4 that border other commands, and 5 that border the Andes- worth only 3 troop bonus

I don't often try to defend the Andes or China unless they just fall into my hands, since the bonus is 25% smaller than, say the US, for the same amount of work to take and defend it. Same for W. Europe; the bonus is the same as that for the US, but you have to do 40% more work to take it. I know, it may only be a troop difference here or there, but I'm a stingy fellow. And it adds up over rounds.

Be shallow- worry about your appearance
Also, I try to avoid the commands that have a larger appearance. For example, Siberia and Western Russia get the same amount of points, but Siberia covers about twice as much area on the map, so it'll have the psychological effect of drawing more attention from other players who see all your colors occupying such a large space. And attention is bad.

Colors
If people go AWOL before getting reserves, and it's not a mercenary game, I change their colors to match neutral. Not as big a deal now, but before when a lot of people went AWOL it helped to focus my attention on the real opponents.

Stack vs spread
Think about the tradeoffs between stacking your troops high in fewer areas and spreading them out over a lot. If you're worried about being taken out, you'll want to spread them out to make it hell for anyone who tries to attack. But keep in mind that this will diminish your flexibility to launch an attack if the opportunity or cards present themselves. Also know that stacking may draw more attention.

 

[serf]

I think most things are best taught by seeing them in action. Why not show a turn-by-turn video of a game, with commentary about what the winner was thinking when deciding what moves he was going to make? It'd tie up some bandwidth, but you could reduce that by just showing a series of still frames and have only the audio be continuous (instead of a real video which has thousands of stills strung together) , and then maybe you could just offer one or two videos for the freebie accounts, and more for upgrades, which would pay for the extra bandwidth...
And I think it'd be way easier than writing an article- you might not even have to do any work, cause everybody wants their fifteen minutes of fame, you could probably get video submissions for free, way more than you wanted haha.
Not to mention the most important part- there'd be lots more good players on the site, and cannonfodders would get up to speed faster. Who likes an easy win? It's no fun.