

Correcting for the first-player advantage in Risk - cwan
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009/08/correcting_for.html

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jonshea
I played risk online at warfish.net for a while until I felt like I had maxed
out the strategy to within the noise level. It isn’t obvious to me that there
is a first mover advantage. In our games the initial territories were randomly
distributed, and I always felt that whoever got the “most closely clustered”
territories had a tremendous advantage.

The best advice I’ve ever heard for competitive Risk is “play the other
players, not the continents”. You want to try to create situations such that
you are the least desirable player to attack. In general, this means turtling.
Occupy a few territories that are close to each other with about 5 armies on
each, and put as many armies as you can on one territory that is adjacent to
enemies. Don’t take a whole continent because people will try to crack it so
you don’t get the bonus armies. Try to get your armies off of continents that
it looks like people will fight for. Try to get a card every turn, and hold
them as long as you can.

You stop turtling when and only when you can eliminate a player in one move
and get a bunch of cards from them. You will usually do this by trading in a
set of cards, putting all of the armies on your big territory, and marching it
all over the place. You will almost always succeed if you have about 0.75 _n_
\+ 1.0 _t_ armies to push with, where _n_ is the number of armies you will
need to kill, and _t_ is the number of new territories you will need to
occupy.

(Corollary, if you’re weak then try to use all your cards so that you’re not a
valuable target.)

Eliminating a player who has 5 cards almost assures that you will win the
game.

After a player or two has been eliminated the game will transition to one
where the players try to hold continents to collect bonus armies. If the
players are fairly competent then the winner will mostly be decided by how
lucky people are with collecting cards. The yield from trading in a set of
cards starts to dwarf the armies collected from holding territories. Almost as
important, the new armies can be place freely.

I have never seen Asia successfully held for even a single turn.

(Regarding the first alleged first-mover advantage: obviously it can’t be
_disadvantageous_ to move first. If it were, then the first player would take
no action so as to avoid the disadvantage. By induction, if it was
disadvantageous to go first then the game would never advance past the initial
state.)

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lionhearted
Good comment. I liked to consolidate my troops in an area that gave me access
to lots of places - like Western Africa or the Middle East. Then, you strike
at wherever people leave alone. Getting that flexibility instead of getting
locked into plans is key.

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gthank
Not having played Risk in ages, I have a few questions:

* Is there a statistically significant first-mover advantage?

* How big is it?

* What is its mechanism?

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icefox
You might be able to find the answers this over on board game geek
<http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/181>

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fugue88
We adjusted by changing the order to count, attack, place (cf attack, count,
place, as I remember). If the 1st player goes on a major offensive their first
turn, they end up spreading themselves thin, so this balanced things out a
lot.

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fizx
What if you auctioned first move? I'll take first move, but give each other
player a 2 army advantage. Then, proceed with a 2nd move auction.

~~~
mshafrir
Good idea - this is often done in the game Puerto Rico.

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gaius
That is remarkably content-free. Where's the maths?

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icefox
Or really any real content. The author didn't even try out his own example to
see if it would work. And honestly how horrible the old Risk rules is _really_
old. There are both new rules and much more enjoyable games these days.

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mcantor
Remember when you were a new coder, and sometimes you'd see an off-by-one
error that for the life of you, you couldn't track down? And after a long
enough time searching, you just gave up and added or subtracted one from the
variable? I don't mean to badmouth these suggestions, because I have none that
are better, but they all feel like that to me. Voo-doo fixes.

Just a thought.

~~~
edw519
_And after a long enough time searching, you just gave up and added or
subtracted one from the variable?_

Don't pull that trick in my shop. Isolate your bug and fix it. Whatever is
causing it is probably causing other bugs that will affect other people,
including the poor sucker who has to clean up your mess.

~~~
Novash
He refers to the known floating point rounding error. You should not expect a
'new coder', as he put it, to trully understand floating point rounding errors
because to understand it, you need to already be a coder with some experience.

~~~
edw519
"You should not expect a 'new coder', as he put it, to trully understand..."

Oh, but I do. If you don't understand it, figure it out. If you still don't
understand it, ask. If you still don't understand it, sound the alarm, and
we'll both sit down and figure it out together. And you _will_ learn it.

But please don't use "newness" as an excuse to leave shit behind. Excellence
comes from doing excellently, whatever it takes.

~~~
Novash
I talk like that because one of my first assignment in College when learning C
was exactly a program to calculate change. And the inherent floating point
erro causes the said 0.01 difference. I was fresh into C, third, maybe fourth
class. You can be sure that no one had the least idea why that happened.
Obviously, we all took the easy way out, used integers multiplied by 100 to
work around it, but you couldn't expect me to figure out by myself WHY that
was happening. This error, and the explanation of why it happened was the
introduction to floating point class that we had after we saw it happen. It is
just one of those things that you have to see working to understand (like
recursion and pointers).

I am always impressed to see how experienced people take a lot of knowledge
for granted from others. It is not like you have never 'left shit behind' in
your career. I would even daresay that if you pick the code you made six
months ago, you will see that it could be improved in a lot of ways. Not
because you wanted but because you didn't know better, mostly. This is
pratically an axiom in the life of a coder.

Please don't use "experience" as an excuse to diss the hardships of others. We
were all there one day.

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msluyter
Most modern eurogames make this sort of correction. Caylus, for example, gives
the the second and subsequent players extra money.

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pavel_lishin
There's money in Risk?

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msluyter
No, I just meant to point out that a lot of modern games make up for the first
player advantage (in cases where there is one) in various ways.

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petemack
This was actually addressed in the newer version of the game, Risk 2008
Revised edition, states in the rules:

Player 3 receives an additional card Player 4 receives an additional card
Player 5 receives two additional cards

In the games we play, this usually neutralizes the first players advantage.

~~~
Novash
Wonder if they will do anything similar with the War game. The last players
certainly also suffer an unfair advantage there.

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iterationx
Novice players will overextend themselves and in this case the first player
might have an advantage, otherwise I don't see it.

