1v1 dices

Having played quite a few 1v1 games I’ve witnessed and experienced a lot of frustration about the dice. It’s not only unpleasant to lose a game because of one or two bad rolls, it also keeps lots of players away from 1v1 games because they feel it’s too much based on luck with the dice (and drop and starting position, but that’s for another thread).

Too many times a 1v1 game gets won or lost because in one turn someone gets a 7-1 win and the opponent gets a 0-6 loss, or something like that. Happens all the time. In multiplayer games that’s not a problem, there’s plenty of time to recover. In 1v1 this often is deadly. In the long term the dice are fair, but not in the short term. 1v1 games are short, and therefor the dice are rarely fair in 1v1. In the long term, if you play enough 1v1 games, they become fair again. But that does not take away the frustration from the individual games.

So how to increase fairness inside a single 1v1 game? Actually it’s quite simple. I’ve seen plenty of win 7 – lose 1, and win 0 – lose 6 situations. I’ve never seen a win 70 – lose 10 nor win 0 – lose 60 situation. Quite logic, since the dice randomness only becomes fair when there are sufficient rolls. So instead of having 3 rolls in a turn, there should be 30. Or in other words, have 30 armies on each country instead of 3. Also armies received per turn and when having a set should be multiplied by 10.

Yes, attacking will be click-intensive, but to increase the fairness of the dice I personally wouldn’t mind that (or – like on the ‘old’ DominateGame site - have an ‘Attack all’ button).
Comments, thoughts, suggestions welcome.

i wonder if it would be more fair if the dice were randomized to only 1 and 6.  meaning a two sided dice. so you still have some randomness but the probabilities are 1 in 2 in lieu of 1 in 6.

i think it might be something that could be turned on my a check box during setup. maybe we can do a beta test??

@kwikool
Flipping a coin (which is equivalent to your 1 and 6 suggestion) or throwing a dice doesn't make much difference if you only do it on a few rolls. You need the big numbers in order for the statistics to normalise. 

We had that dice of just throwing 6s and 1s at our old digs....this will guarantee the first person will win in about 95% of the 1v1 games....this was our version of balanced dice. It doesn't work well with 1v1 or team vs team games.

Think its an interesting idea but giving the attacker 3 dice vs 2 in every location on the first turn would most likely lead to an even greater going first advantage even if it smoothed out the volatility of the dice by adding larger numbers

Not sure first turn advantage would be greater, but it would definitively still be present. Why not give second turn player an extra country in 1v1?

or keep the original number first armies for the whole game

now if you start with 4 the first player can reduce you to 3 before starting 
if it stayed 4 for the whole game it reduces the first player benefit a tad...

You mean that the MINIMUM should be 4 instead of 3?

Anyway, my original suggestion is rubbish. In live 1v1 game, players will quickly try to reduce opponent's armies. And the game - regardless of starting with x * 10 armies instead of x - will quickly revert to a game with the 'normal' setup. Need to do some more thinking. Thanks anyway to those who gave their input.

 @KK

yes the minimum would stay 4 if you start with 4