Increasing Fog Games

I'm having difficulty with increasing card games with fog. Usually the strategy is to kill the weakest player for his cards, but with fog it's impossible to tell whether you can kill a player or not. Sometimes i've thought i could kill a player but failed and left a few stragglers hidden somewhere for my opponent to kill instead. So, what do you guys do in these games? Is it best to sit it out and wait until most of the killing is over? Seems like that wouldn't work too well. Or do you just blindly attack, hoping that you're able to completely kill the target player? That also seems too risky. I'm very interested in hearing your thoughts.

I must say that I rarely play fog increasing - and if I do its mostly capitals. The reason I use capitals in this situation is because they are easy to spy upon. Spying is extremely important in a game like this, but its easy to miss one territory in fog games, where you cannot really miss out someone's capital :)

Yeah, i forgot to mention i'm talking about deathmatch games, not caps. Caps is a bit more manageable.

i dont play many of those, but for some reason africa is a popular map to do it on. and i have one like 5/8 that i have done there.

so what is your strategy?

bonus, get as many as you can as fast as you can. people dont know how powerfull you are and thats a huge advantage. if you can make sure you have good places to hold in more than one spot. so if they managed to obliterate one section after a turn in they wont find your other one (hopefully)

So it sounds like you play more on the defensive side in terms of killing players for their cards.

yea, i won a game with 8 players once and i took them all out in one round because of my bonus. once i had a big army i took a few people out and got some cards and i kept going. i was unstoppable at that point. and no one ever knew till it was to late.

I think I agree with marcoxa that getting regions is important as long as you can get one fast. And take two if you can do it early if it's a good sized map. People are less likely to break you if you they don't know for sure that you have the whole region. And if they don't have a region they wrongly expect someone else who already has a bonus to break you. So they leave you alone. By taking the region you may end up with troops in the wrong spots and you might miss out on a couple of the first kills but the bonuses will keep your troop count up so that you survive long enough to take advantage of a failed killing. You really need to survive long enough to be able to get a big (greater than 25) turn in so that you can start exploring and try to find a player who someone else tried to kill but they couldn't find the last couple of territories. Look for signs of a massive attack on a certain player. Explore the 1's that were left behind by the player who fail to finish the kill and then guess at where they didn't go. You might find the last territory there.

I agree if you can get a fast territory do it. But i like to build on territories that are well spread out on the map. I may not attack for cards until my third turn unless its an easy card (3-1 4-1). but by building one a few different regions on the map by the time I lose those spots I can form a strong hypothesis on who is where and how deep they are. Again it is a little guess work but in fog games hiding your strengths is very important and knowledge is power. One of my favorite thing to do is watch the developments through my build up spots over the map to see who is potentially in a weak position and try to keep one of his/her men hidden with mine for an easy kill later, that is a tricky play and can back fire depending on their card amount. If they have 4 I wouldn't do it especially if there is a high turn in but safe if only 1-3 cards. Cheers

I like to try an exploratory attack about four or five turns into the game if I have two larger forces to gauge the strength around me. Sometimes you will find smaller forces where someone has simply done a 3-1 attack for a card and sometimes you will meet another larger force at which point you can weaken them leaving yourself seemingly weak so they try a counter attack in desperation, only to run into your backup force. Then you counter attack them and control the majority of the surrounding territories. If the map is a bigger one and it is a game with 5-8 players (think world expanded or even world classic as opposed to Caribbean) you will find most other players are occupied with their own struggles and are oblivious to your manoeuvres, especially if you have lessened the number of different players around that area http://www.dominating12.com/?cmd=game&sec=play&id=164857 Of course, I got lucky in this game with missed turns and good timing with card turn-ins but I also took notice of blacks efforts and their eventual surrendering of the area and determined no one else was strong around america and went for as many territories to build my bonuses. I also took notice of the chatbox and realized the others were only worried about their surrounding areas and not worried about me because I had no large forces next to theirs so continued to take the Americas while exploring Europe and asia to gauge their strength