Initial troop placement

There are long-term games which takes 5 days per round or so, because people play at different times. If you have 40 troops to deploy 1 by 1, your game would take half an year only to get started!

But we are not talking about deploying 40 troops (if you start with 2 troops in each territory).

And maybe you could place 5 at a time to make it faster, than just 1 at time?

Yes it's ok for me. Random drop with 2 troops auto-deployed in each territory, then the rest 3 to 5 at a time manually deployed. But there are someone here asking to have the same rule as it is on the board game, this is so far from that. In order to have a setup similar to the board game, but more fair and very faster, I suggest: random drop with 1 troop in each territory then the rest manually deployed, all at a time. Usually people deploy all in one territory independently from what the others do, since there's no reason to do it 1 by 1. But really I prefer Muzuane's proposal with 2 troops in each territory, but really I prefer even more the setup as it is now with 3 troops in each territory... Lols Just my thoughts!

So do I...but just helping here. I would most likely never use this...but one never knows.

The reason why territories can't be chosen in 10 seconds is because the game only refreshes every 8 seconds so on average it takes several seconds just to know it's your turn to choose. 30 second turns for choosing the territories would be a minimum though most players can get it done in under 15 seconds if they continue to pay attention. Best case scenario with 5 players on a 50 territory map it would take about 12.5 minutes. That is still too long. But in a long term game it could take weeks. It would be most preferred to design a system that works for both so that it's user friendly. We don't necessarily have to come up with a solution to perfectly match how territories are picked on the board game. We have computers that can help us do it faster and good enough. If the goal is to have more troops grouped together in the same region then I have an idea that should work and will be very fast. I developed the idea after thinking about MuzuaneAskari's suggestion to choose groups of territories instead of one at a time. Before the game starts every player will choose two regions they prefer and two they want to avoid if possible. After the last player joins there will be a one minute countdown in which every player must have their regions selected or they get booted from the game and the game does not start but waits again for players to join. Once the game starts the server then uses the players' region preferences to choose territories for them. The players list is randomized and the server cycles through the list of players and assigns them one territory in the region they most prefer. The server continues to give them a territory in their most preferred region until they own 66% of that region or the region is full because other players also preferred it. It will then choose a territory in the next preferred region and so on. [spoiler]Programming details: The regions that aren't selected as preferred or to avoid are put in a random order in the middle of the priority list.[/spoiler] The server would place 2 troops on all your territories and the first round would just be placing the rest of your troops and then ending turn, no attacks or fortifications. The turn order would be the exact opposite order that was used to choose territories. So the player who got the first territory pick goes last. I have suggested players choose 2 regions they prefer and 2 to avoid so that it takes the same amount of time to make the selections regardless of the map. On a map with 30 regions it would take too long to create a full priority list of all the regions. This isn't as preferred as selecting the territories yourself because you would make adjustments based on what other players choose. You might decide to abandon Australia if two players have already placed there whereas this computer algorithm would make you place there anyway. But it is fast. I could think of several variations of this idea that might work better but I could not figure out how it would be programmed. Perhaps you can find a variation that will work better. But I do believe the solution lies in giving the computer a priority list and having it use an algorithm along with your priority list to choose for you. Unfortunately no one ever wrote a good territory selection algorithm for any of the bots on TurboRisk. The algorithm I wrote for the Vexer bot was just to find the territory with the most borders and dump all your troops on it. So there is no good example work to look at for reference. Honestly most of the games I have ever played were with random territories with 3 on each so I don't even know a good strategy for selecting territories. Therefore I can't program the computer to do a very good job of selecting for you. But we can do something now and improve the algorithm later if we think of a better way. If anyone has some strategy tips for selecting territories please share and I will think about whether or not I can program the server to select for you using that strategy.

Let say there are 4 players in the classic map and they all chose Aussy and SA as preferred and Asia and NA as avoided, then the result is to have them equally spread in every continent. But if someone pick a continent non-picked from the others then he would be super awarded. Interesting... but the task was to make them clustered, not equally spread and also to [u]know[/u] what the others pick not to [u]guess[/u] what they pick. I played selected territories on pogo-games, it is called manual setup, in opposition to automatic setup. In that site there is only the classic World map and 99% of the games are played with 5 players in, because it's the default. The strategy more or less is that everyone picks a continent and tries to fill it. If you pick a territory in a small continent (SA, Africa or Aussy) probably your opponents will let you to hold it all. But if you pick territories in a large continent (NA or Europe) probably someone will break it (during the setup) to avoid you to get 8 troops from the 1st round, especially if you are the first or second in turn! Usually who picks SA also picks some territories on the southern part of NA and eventually some in northern Asia, who picks Aussy usually picks territories also in southern Asia... Just simply as cluster as possible. Sometimes there is someone who doesn't pick any continents but he just deploys here-and-there breaking every continent, but he takes the risk to have many enemies during the game. Sometimes there are two bickering for the same continent, but that is not so convenient! Then it starts the second phase when every territories has been occupied with 1 troop then people keep deploying 1 troop per turn in their territories. More or less the strategy is to protect the borders of your continent if you hold it all, or bank all your troops in one or two territories to complete the conquest of your continent. The internal defense is also very common, for example if I hold SA rather than deploy half in Brazil and half in Venezuela I can opt to deploy all in Peru, whoever will break my continent he will suffer my revenging shot. Same for Europe, a good defense can be half in Iceland and half in Northern Europe... Internal defense, but I don't think the program can do that. So my suggestion is to let people to chose the [u]area[/u] of the map they prefer. More or less is like it works the manual setup. A player evaluating what area on the map is the best to start with, he would be awarded. I think it would be more interesting than simply choose 2 regions and also the effect more similar to the board game rules. So, let people manually pick 1 territory, then the program would finish the job picking the closest territories to the 1 they have chosen, and possibly bordering. ((The program should pick territories with this priority: 1st the closest territory to my starting territory, 2nd a territory bordering with a territory that I own, 3th a random territory)) Practically the first choice determines the area of the map that you want. (It would be still possible to bicker for the same continent, but still it's better to don't do that). The second phase I think it should be managed by humans and in order to fasten it, deploy all the troops at once rather than 1 by 1, it doesn't chance so much. Who deploys last has an advantage but it compensates the disadvantage of being the last to choose what area of the map he wants, so I think it's okay. Neutrals should be randomly decided [u]before[/u] doing all this. The problem is that I don't know if it possible to easy make a program that calculate distances and it picks the closest territory. --- Well, okay, I've just came up with an easier to program idea. The algorithm should first pick every territories bordering with my first until they are all filled, then it picks every territories bordering with the second territory picked, until all filled, then bordering with the third (it would be needed to keep them recorded). It's almost the same result of what I've said above but... I'm not sure I've explained it well! Someone understand me?

I understand you :) One thing to note is that not every player wants to choose one area, but an area here, an area there, and an area way over there. He will problably initially deploy most troops on one of the areas, but still be present in the others.

I lost my post... lols well just wanted to say that I had only considered how things are in the classic map, but if I have to play selected territories on mediterranean states or world expanded I probably wouldn't all the territories in one side, since the idea of picking 2 regions it might be good. Eventually in a small map with only 2 or 3 interesting regions there will be several ppl choosing the same resulting in a more balanced placement among the interesting areas. My questions are: do you want ppl to know what regions their opponents picked or not? And how to pick a region? I guess by name, but ppl don't know regions names in most of the maps. And what about the second phase, i.e. the 'initial reinforcement'? The program cannot do that, since what? 1 by 1, 5 by 5, all at once?

To try out the idea, wouldn't it be possible to do a long-term game with the condition that everybody must be present during the first 30 minutes to do territory selection ?

No, as I can join them, go offline, and then 3 hours later the last person joins. At that moment the game starts...

Lols... I found my post, thanks Matty... it was in Italy!

To Matty : can't you use the same "joining policy" as a short term game (with the "i'm still here" a bit longer than 5 minutes) and then switch to long terms turns ?

Doesn't that defeat the purpose of long term games?

No, it's more like a hybrid. I think that it might work.