To add insult to injury, the entire spy ring in Texas was just eliminated in an internal purge (along with a significant number of our Californian operatives). You understand now why I hate plans? It's like lighting a cigarette while waiting for the bus. Bah!
So, your proposal has just been turned down by the woman you love. What's a self respecting man to do? Well, there's always hard liquour, loose women and gambling. Yes there is, but that's not my style. I decided to deal with this emotional setback by spending about 10 hours playing Dicewars, the most excellent flash game ever!
So what is Dicewars? It's a Risk like game where you battle over a colorful map using dice. As you gain a larger share of the map, you receive more army enforcements. But in contrast to Risk, you don't move your "armies" and enforcements are placed randomly. While frustrating at first, this actually makes the whole game super fast and intuitive. Take if from me, you can play this game for hours without engaging any of your higher conceptual faculties. It's just pure tactical gameplay.
I highly recommend this game. Having wasted an entire night on this game I've figured out a couple of strategy items that you might find helpful if you end up all alone and un-loved:
- You gain enforcements according to the number of joined territories. At the beginning of the game, you are therefore trying to connect the scattered territories you were given at the outset. Since the computer opponents will also be trying to achieve joined territories, you can often predict their next move.
- The computer is very aggressive as long as there is no clear leader and will often attack attack attack without leaving any defence. The way the dice rolls works, the defender is slightly at an advantage. This means playing it reasonably conservative in the beginnning will put luck on your side. Try to never attack further into enemy territory than you can defend over the next turn.
- The computer opponents will switch from aggressive to defensive once one player has a significant advantage and will stop attacking each other and only attack the leader. This means that beyond a certain point, you can't rely on the computer opponents taking each other out.
- In the later stages of the game, all players will tend to be maxed out in the number of armies they have on each territory. trying to plow through an opponent by luck only is very slow, especially since the attacker is at a slight disadvantage. The trick is to leave yourself vulnerable at the front so that the opponent charges into your territory, spreading himself thin.
Happy playing.
