too foggy

Hey folks!

Just wondering if people think the fog games are a little too foggy? the only thing I find a bit annoying is the game log doesn't show moves within your line of sight.

As a side note another popular risk site (shall not be named) logs all moves with ? when the regions are in the fog and it also gives you number of regions each player controls. I actually prefer this site not showing so much detail as the whole point of fog is you don't know if someones dominating. I do think however a log of things happening within my line of sight would be better, after all the whole point of the log is to detail things we would normally see happening if we sat in front of the screen while others took turns right?

any thoughts?

One of the reasons why I don't play that much fog games is because they cost a lot of time to monitor - I like to see the board after each player has done a move to see what changed.

I guess that is exactly what you want as well here, so I sort of agree with you at least.


What I'm not sure of is what you should show in the log? Should we show: 'player X conquerored territry Y from player Z', or should we show: 'player X conquerored territry Y from player Z killing 5 loosing 19'.

Generally there are more details in the log than you see when watching live...
More so, sometimes when I play live games I just watch the log instead of the board, to see the exact details (you can click on territory names and they'll highlight the territory on the map for the overview).


So yeah, not sure what part of the log we should show. Maybe nothing, but get a replay functionality that just shows you the board after each players turn or something.
But then that might take a long time to ever get there

I think it should have the 2nd more detailed log, but as long as it only shows that information for territories within your line of site. Thinking about it that is pretty much just a log of attacks against you.

You could have a little information about attacks between territories within the fog e.g replacing troop numbers and territory names with "?" but I don't know if that takes away from the "not knowing when someone's dominating" side.

Not sure what you mean by replay functionality. No need to do anything too complicated

I don't think the current system would support something like showing the moves within your line of sight, and the way the future system is currently being designed, it will not support this either.

The feature you propose would be incredibly challenging to implement, and would require another log system on top of the log system as easiest solution, so I don't think we can support it. The main reason for this is that your line of sight changes all the time, so when loading the log, we sort of have to simulate the entire game to figure out which log entires we can show. Of course we could also save a different log for every person, but the amount of data would be tremendous, and we simply do not have the resources to do so. There are some workarounds, but as I said: those would not be trivial either.

Long story short, I don't think we can and will support this any time soon. Not because I don't want to, but because of technical limitations.

Rather than a program that monitors line of sight what about a program that displays only attacks involving the players forces. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to the work you guys do I'm afraid so it's probably a stupid point but if the program used the current log system but hides any data not involving his own territory

The problem is: if it's a log move from three rounds ago, was it his territory back then?

I thought up a way to do this by having another table store who can see each log entry but it would add an average of 40 bytes of data per entry. That doesn't sound like much but it adds up.

Showing the log entries where you were attacked is doable because that info is already in the log entry.