@The-Janus said in "East & West" by Imp Games - Discussion:
an East & West mod, for RISK. […] the “Reinvention” version of RISK is the one I ended up purchasing.
Part One:
RISK-isms
Probably the first thing to address in any “team game” modification to RISK is how to determine who gets credit for controlling the continents. As RISK-isms go, if you aren’t going to include continents as a mechanic, why even bother? The iteration of the rules that I settled on is pretty simple:
if NATO controls North America or South America, those bonuses go to the US
if NATO controls Europe or Africa, those bonuses go to WE
if NATO controls Asia or Australia, those bonuses go to the UK
The other thing to address in a 3v1 is some measures to prevent the USSR from just getting dogpiled. The solution I came up with is that NATO can only attack from territories they have controlled from the start of their turn. So, the US could attack from Alaska to Kamchatka, but could not continue attacking from Kamchatka on that turn.
With the ‘Reinvention’ version of the rules, cities and capitols increase the overall production capability on the board, but I felt a few more changes were necessary. When totaling up territories, the USSR does not divide their value by 3 (loosely meant to simulate 2-IPC infantry). Also, the “minimum 3 armies” rule is ignored. So for example, if your territory total as NATO is 6, 7, or 8 you would only get 2 armies.
NATO can reinforce (i.e. non-combat move) through each others’ territories, but cannot share territories. So, for example, US troops in Alaska could reinforce through the Northwest Territories to Greenland or Iceland; they cannot end in the UK or Western Europe.
Reinvention-isms
So the real big additions in this version of RISK are cities and capitols.
Cities effectively increase the “IPC value” of a territory; when drafting troops, a city counts the same as 1 additional territory (i.e. 1/3rd of an army, for NATO.)
A capitol grants you an additional 1 army; this means that controlling your own capitol immediately raises the floor on troop generation (in the base game) from 3 armies to 4.
For all intents and purposes, the capitols are placed roughly where they would be in E&W, and cities are placed where Industrial Complexes would be – notably, this includes some being in neutral territories.
Reinvention also does the more “modern” rule for card trades, whereby the symbols cashed in prescribe the number of armies you get. In this mod, the wild cards are used as nuclear weapons. A recurring theme is that I didn’t want to have to create any separate play-aids for this game to work, so this is one example of that.
Also, I’ll mention here that because Reinvention doesn’t use infinitely-escalating unit production (via cards) the armies are in denominations of 1 and 3, instead of the 1/5/10 of older versions. This will come up in a few small places, for this mod.
Capitols:
Red (USSR) - Urals
Blue (WE) - Western Europe
Yellow (UK) - Great Britain
Green (US) - Eastern United States
Cities:
Russia
Urals
Kamchatka
Western Europe
Ontario
Great Britain
Eastern United States
Western United States
Now, in E&W there is an IC in Italy, so you would expect there to be a City in Southern Europe. The thing I found was that it over-incentivizes the USSR to attack through this route – and they’re already incentivized to not “open” Britain or Iceland. The rationalization I used is that since Middle East is controlled by the Arab League, Southern Europe is more meant to represent Greece and Turkey in this scenario, with Western Europe representing France and Italy. I realize the adjacency doesn’t make as much sense that way, but… I also didn’t want to reinvent the map.
E&W-isms
I mentioned the continents right off the top, but clearly there are going to be a bunch of neutral territories – so how do those figure in?
Clearly, we don’t want a game that incentivizes NATO just bowling over neutrals, as that’s not really in the spirit of E&W. So here’s what I came up with:
Each neutral alliance can support either one NATO power, or the USSR. Originally, I had figured there would be a +0/+1/+2 support level to either side, but to make things easier to track (again, without adding any play aids to the game) the support scale is instead a 5-point slider (i.e. -2/-1/0/+1/+2)
If a neutral alliance is giving +1 support to a power, that power places a 1-army marker of their colour on that neutral’s
city.
If a neutral alliance is giving +2 support to a power, that power places a 3-army marker of their colour on that neutral’s
city.
This is simply our way of tracking support, using the materials the game comes with. At the start of the game, the OAS should be set to +1 towards the US, and China should be set to +1 towards the USSR.
Now, what does this actually mean, mechanically?
+1 support means that when counting up your territories and cities, you can add the territories and cities of that neutral to your total; you can also count their territorial ownership towards your control of one continent.
So, since the OAS straddles North and South America, on the US turn if the OAS is at +1, then the US can choose to count the OAS territories towards their control of either North America or South America. Likewise, with the Arab League straddling Africa and Asia, having a +1 support level allows them to contribute towards control of either one of those continents.
At the +2 support level, the number of cities and territories for the neutral is doubled before being added to the total; you can also use their territories as your own, for the purposes of pathing your reinforcement (i.e. non-combat move). You can also count the neutral’s territories towards your control of 2 continents; obviously for China, this last stipulation would have no actual consequences.
For the purposes of support/influence, Indonesia is treated as part of the Arab League, as long as it remains neutral. If attacked, however, Indonesia and the Arab League are treated as separate neutrals. If the Arab League is at +1 to NATO, they can choose to count Indonesia (if neutral) towards their control of Australia.
Now, that all being said, most of the testing I did in the past didn’t have the support levels change all that much – so a lot of the assumptions around the economics of the game work around the OAS and China always being a +1. If you add in influence rolls to the game, there is going to be more randomness… but that might also allow for more replayability.
The general idea was that the USSR would get one influence roll at each of the 3 neutrals, to start their turn; each NATO power would get one roll towards their affiliated neutral, at the start of their turns. Since this is RISK (where you want to roll high) success would be on a 6.
Since the support level for the Arab League/Indonesia could conceivably increase from +1 on the WE turn to +2 on the UK turn (and more generally, just because the Arab League crosses 2 different NATO powers’ zones of influence) just make a note to only let them be used to a maximum of +2 per round. The chances of being able to count them towards 3 continents in a round without the USSR being dumpstered is pretty low… but for the sake of posterity, I should mention that it is not intended for NATO to be able to cash in on all 3 continents in a round.
Neutral Armies
Now, to determine how many armies to put in the neutral territories, I basically took the total number of units for each neutral power in E&W, and then divided them evenly among their territories. For the Arab League, I believe the numbers for Iran, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia were also included; likewise, Indonesia basically includes Thailand and Tibet.
As said before, since Reinvention uses 1-army and 3-army markers, I decided to round off the neutral armies to increments of 3.
OAS: 3 armies per territory
Arab League: 12 armies per territory
China: 15 armies per territory
Indonesia: 6 armies
With ICs being in Brazil, Egypt, and Manchuria in E&W, cities are placed in Brazil, Egypt, and Mongolia.
As in E&W, the USSR can attack neutrals at any time, but NATO can only attack them if they are giving full support (+2) to the USSR.
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