Starting territory placement

One thing that really makes some games lopsided from the very beginning is the random placement of territories. If a player gets lucky and starts with a lot of territories clustered together, or if they get unlucky and are scattered far and wide, it can make or break their chances of winning from the very beginning. When I used to play variations of Risk in person on a physical gameboard, my friends and I rolled dice to establish turn order and then we took turns placing our initial troops, claiming any territory we want that hadn't already been taken. This makes the game a lot more fair and even-handed from the beginning. I have a Risk app on my phone that also gives you the option of letting players select their own territories.

Can we make this an option that users can choose when they create a game?

Hi mpesa,

This is a suggestion that many people have brought up. I am afraid I can't find the thread right now, but let me try to summarise:

• Implementing this would be very costly for the programmers.
• Having people choose turns would take quite a long time. While this is something that's maybe manageable in live games, long term games could take weeks to get started. In the classic map, 42 territories have to be distributed. In a 5 player game, that would be 8 rounds. Given that many games don't really last past 20 rounds, this would basically make games 50% longer, which is quite a big deal.

This is why it is unlikely we will implement such a mechanic for the foreseeable future.