by Stu Holttum
CapNClassic wrote:
I bolded the flawed reasoning. You cannot remove "tough decisions" by planning your expansions in advance, regardless of the method of planning. You clearly have no objection to planning in your mind. Would you object to planning off the board on a hand drawn map using pennies? Then why object to placing pennies on the board instead of on the hand drawn map?
Because to my mind, the strategy of the game in deployment lies in determining where to place your troops BEFORE any of them land on the board - which, as I've said, appears to be borne out by the rules.
Same applies with pennies - because if what you are doing is placing out all the pennies, then replacing each one with soliders, then you are doing nothing different than deploying in a manner inconsistent with the rules.
If however you are suggesting that the player places pennis on the board to do his maths, then removes them all and uses that as his means of determining how many troops to place in each of his OWN territories, then I don't have a problem with that.
I suppose the point is: how many times have you deployed your troops, begun an advance....and then realised "oh heck, I could've done with a couple more troops here, I wish I'd deployed a couple more"? Expansiondeployment, in the way I oppose, means that that realisation will never happen. ALL your expansion moves will always be perfect.
I suspect its the way that our groups operate. The groups I play with tend to be very much of the opinion that when you've adjusted the board, you've made your move and that's that. The expansiondeployment is too much changing the board before you finalise - I suppose that's a question I have: do you envisage the player laying out his pieces with no "takebacks", or do you envisage him doling out pieces onto new territories from his reinforcement pool and taking them back into the pool if he changes his mind about where he wants them to go?
I suspect further (sorry, stream of consciousness!) that my preferred way of playing goes back to far too much chess when I was young. In chess, if you touch a piece, you MUST move it (although you aren't forced to move it to a particular spot). I see the Risk deployment in the same way - you lay out your troops, and when you've laid them, you move. Expansiondeployment seems (to me) a bit too much like moving your queen to see what the board looks like with it there - then deciding it looks dangerous because there's something you hadn't seen before, and moving it back.