Initial troop placement

I think it would be a good idea to allow an option for the initial troop placement to be determined by the players, rather than randomly.

That is, the board starts off blank, and the first player chooses a territory to place one troop, then the second player must place one troop on another territory, and so on. Only once all territories have been claimed can more than one troop be stationed on one territory. This placement continues until all players have placed all their initial troops. The player who placed an initial troop last (and thus has that disadvantage), gets to move first, and the second to last person who placed an initial troop, gets to go second, etc.

I think this has three key advantages over the current random/3-troop way. First, it is more fair. A lot of the random games, I can tell who will win (or who has a large advantage or a large disadvantage) by who is lucky enough to have, for example, all of Australia already captured, or who is unlucky enough to have all their initial territories far apart with no clear place to start making their home base. If everyone chooses the placement, there are no imbalances, and the advantage the first player has in placing the first troop is much less of an advantage than that of the player who gets the best random placement usually has in the current system.

Second, the games get started faster, since there doesn't have to be 3 troop on every territory, which makes initial buildup very slow and tedious. It often takes half an hour in the current system before the game even really gets going proper. The games would be faster, and more strategically interesting, if players chose the initial placement.

Thirdly, there is a whole new level of strategy and planning involved in choosing how to set up the board. The game becomes even more complex, and more challenging, and in addition to learning the strategy of how to play an existing game, players will learn additional (and not necessarily overlapping!) strategies for initial setup.

I'm aware that despite issues of fairness and game-pace, some people might still prefer the current system, but why is the option not available? In real-life risk, the rule book allows for both ways to place, and it seems to me (anecdotally) that most real-life games follow the system I've suggested, rather than the one on this site.

This is on a list of things to do but it is not high on the list for 2 reasons;

1. It requires a good amount of programming and the programmers are swamped with a very long list of high priority issues and

2. We need to figure out a way to do this without it taking forever to get the game started.

One way of making it faster is choosing blocks of countries. The advantages? I can see two:

1) It will be faster.
2) Choosing all the countries there are the risk that someone gets a continent almost free (because nobody selected one country in that continent, or if he/they did it, then nobody reinforce those provinces).

So here it comes, my other suggestion. At least there should be 2 troops in every country.

Yeah, this might actually already be on the todo at some point. I like the idea, but it needs to be worked out properly before implementation should start. On a map like World Expanded this would take ages and all the "slow buildup" arguments are suddenly not really arguments any more. If you can find a good way around that, this might be implemented at some point

I understand that if it is a difficult or extremely time consuming programming task, then it would have to take a back seat to things more feasibly done. But that said, I'm not sure what else is on the to-do list, so forgive my ignorance, but it would seem that making sure the game is playable in the same manner it is meant to be played in real life would put it near the top of the list if all things were programmingly equal. I recently noticed the "make a new new game" page was redone and improved, which is a nice touch, it looks a lot better, but if I can't play the game properly its sort of like installing a new stereo system on a car whose engine doesn't run properly.

The set-up time for initial troop placement, at a generous 10 seconds per placement, wouldn't take more than 10 minutes. The current system makes games easily 30 minutes (or even closer to 45 minutes or more for 5 and 6 person games) longer than they need to be due the the extremely slow early-game.

Ten seconds? I wouldn't think so. I would calculate at least half a minute, if not a minute per placement, making the troop placement 30 minutes to even an hour!

And the create game page redone had more reasons than just making it nicer. It is actually a step in improving the overall game quality. I also do not agree that we should program all game options before making things nicer. I prefer quality over quantity. Of course we want our players to have more possibilities, but we also have to keep up a certain amount of quality and you don't know how much my fingers are itching to redo huge parts of the interface (and also the backbone). Surely there are people that want specific options, but we also have to keep the "general crowd" happy.

Apart from that: yes, it is actually a lot of programming effort and I think exactly copying it from how it works in real life would be fairly impractical. You make the assumption everyone takes 10 seconds to do a placement, but I think you won't make that, so we might have to consider different options.

In the case we had the option of developing the troops wherever we wanted, I wouldn't like to see the board full on 1's from the first turn; that's the reason of my suggestion of 2 troops minimunm in each province, which make this part of the set up much shorter (you can give 30 seconds to the players to choose where to put their troops).

So the computer picks the territories and places two on each territory, then you get to fortify the territories you want. Is that what you are saying?

Yes, that's what I meant. Thanks for explaining it ;-)

Alternatively, we could also make this a long term only function, for those who don't mind long games.

Long term games is just the thing I am afraid of. Spending weeks to do the troop placement is not exactly what anyone is waiting for, right?

Yes right. Maybe we can start with 2 troops per territory and then deploy the rest 3 at once. That is not how the official rule is, but... maybe it can work (?)

I wouldn't mind waiting for a long term game; and I guess I am not the only one who thinks like this

" I would calculate at least half a minute, if not a minute per placement, making the troop placement 30 minutes to even an hour!"

Are you serious? I've played hundreds of games of risk in person, every time with player initial setup, and it's never taken more than 5 minutes. 10 seconds really is generous. If anyone ever took 1 minute to decide where to place a single person, I think they would be informally banned from playing risk with anyone else. That's like someone taking 60 seconds in poker to stare at their cards decide what to do with their hand, every hand. Yes there is some thinking to do, but really you should be able to make a judgement call relatively quickly.

It's not something that you wait your turn and then go do something else and then come back later to see what everyone else has done. You watch in real time as the other players place theirs, and then you response accordingly. By the time your turn rolls around, you already know where you will place it. Honesly most players in person only take 2 or 3 seconds, as much time as it takes to physically pick up a piece and then set it on the board. Shouldn't take more than 5 minutes, and if you need more time than that, well, you just need to learn to play faster, learn to improve that part of your "game". It's really not that hard once you do it a few times. You can just "see" where everyone else is placing their initial pieces, and judge accordingly where is the best way to react to that.

Yes, in person that might be true, but this is not real life. Say you have an 8-player game. People might be doing something else in the meanwhile (yes, that happens). Also, you might have noticed that there is some delay on the website as well, so you also need some time for switching turns. All in all, I think it will take way more time than you are imagining.

Not to speak about long term games, which do not even play in real-time.