WarZone again

I accidentally started a new map on WarZone before bed last night.  This one is a simple grid where every 3x3 block is a territory worth 5 armies each.  So, you spend a lot of time on those making sure to complete your territories while busting the ones your opponents control.  I guess that's true of all Risk-based games.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun watching all those little numbers extending arrows and fighting over spaces.  Last week I failed at a few other community maps, but this one was generic and balanced.  I filled in my corner ... only to find that the board wrapped around when I was attacked by a long, stretchy arrow from the top edge.  So I slowly extended my control to one block beyond my core territory so I had at least one move's notice when attacks were coming my way.

So here I am, the deep blue state (ironically, being in California in this particular election year), and it turns out the pink state was my ally.  Pink was almost wiped out by the time I got there, but at that stage of the game, I could give them 10 or 20 armies at a time and let them work the neighborhood.  You can do that my tapping your space, then an ally space next to it and choosing "give troops to my ally" and choosing a number of troops.  I forget the exact wording, but it's the middle button on that little pop-up.  I suppose I could have attacked and wiped out my ally, but this ran for an hour 45 minutes and it was approaching 1am on a work night.

It's funny how, early on, you have to put every army at just the right spot and hope they mostly win the battles, but toward the end I was dropping 40 or 50 or even 120 troops on spaces just to get done with deployment and get to my 8 or 9 actual skirmishes.

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There is a map called "Rebirth of Prussia, part 1" that is so obviously stacked for purple that I don't see how anyone in the map stats could possibly have not beaten it.  I think the win rate was only 60%.  I remember playing this one a year or two ago with the same impression.  Though it is fun squeezing the opponent, and I expect that the final holdout will be somewhere in the British Isles, this time it was western Ireland.

I tried out the "War in Korea" map.  This started out well, but when the unknown opponent appears and starts dropping 10+ armies on all your border squares, the game has hit your downward spiral and it's best to just duck out.

One last one I tried out is "Race Rush" where you are occupying streets in a city or a race track of some kind.  For this one, you really need the opponents to spend more time fighting each other.  The magenta army was done with the others after only about 8 turns, and although I grew to where I was getting 50 armies per turn, they were getting about 90 and occupying 8 new territories every turn.  The curve had left me behind again.  You know that feeling ... still, this is a very interesting map with a lot of little territories to boost your forces and some large swaths of road worth 25-35 armies per turn if you can reach that far.

This could have gone very differently.  Sometimes it's fun to dominate, keep one or two remaining foes in a corner of the map, and methodically capture every single space.  But when you know you're on the losing end, there's a surrender button in the bottom left Game menu.  After which you get to see the graph, see if your gut instinct was right.

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I like that the map descriptions have that win percentage shown.  I'm not going to torture myself with a map that only has a 20% win rate.  Life is too short.  The game has a shop with a ton of options, including $14.99 to have permanent access to the full set of community maps.  That is the equivalent of hundreds of video games.  Everything about this app feels fair and full of value.  They even have a disclaimer saying they never sell anything that can give any player an advantage over any other player.

This is still a favorite of mine.  I would play it more except for the length of time involved on some of the levels.  I even had it on my previous laptop.  I should get it installed on my current laptop, since it's nice getting away from the tiny tablet screen.