Borders Logic

[Froggy618157725]

I'd like to see either an improvement to borders placement logic, or to have the game describe it in greater detail.

Currently, it seems like it chooses an arbitrary ordering and focuses defenses there. This often leads to having an island in the middle of nowhere being turned into an 8, and main regions being completely undefended. It'd be nice to have something more consistent, and closer to what a reasonable person might do. You obviously already have to calculate the size of clusters for reinforcements. You could weight the likelihood of reinforcing your largest valued clump higher. Perhaps build up to parity first on the main clump, with preference towards defending against larger values, then going for 1 more on the borders, or parity on the other clump borders. A bit of randomness would be nice, too. It seems like currently when it puts troops where you don't really want them, it will stick to that for the entire game, regardless of how in trouble other borders get.

I feel like those changes would take a lot of the luck out of borders. If people knew roughly what behavior to expect, they'd be able to take advantage of it, leading to a greater reward for good positioning, which is what borders is all about.

[Autumnwolf17]

That's the point of borders, it reinforces first whatever touches and ective player, then whatever touches a surrendered player, and then whatever touches blank space. Then its random/

[AxemBlue]

If borders was logical, it would just be a computer-placed manual mode, right?
So yeah, what the wolf said.

[Froggy618157725]

That's the point of borders, it reinforces first whatever touches and ective player, then whatever touches a surrendered player, and then whatever touches blank space. Then its random/

Did you read my comment?

The problem is that the priority for which borders are reinforced is pretty arbitrary. It does not behave in a consistent way, so you're really at the mercy of whatever happens to be first in the ordering, as opposed to reinforcing borders of your main group. This mainly shows up in full map start games, where you're likely to have random islands of 1 piece. Sometimes, those islands have top priority. Sometimes they don't. This is an essentially random problem, but once it starts, it is consistent. It adds a good deal of luck to borders that it would not be difficult to remove.

Also, manual mode lets you double up on some paths, or drop 8's against 1's, which the borders mode I'm describing would only do that if all other spaces are defended.

[Autumnwolf17]

It's random among anything that has same criteria, so separate places are just as likely to get reinforced as another as long as the other also touches other players.

[Froggy618157725]

It's random among anything that has same criteria, so separate places are just as likely to get reinforced as another as long as the other also touches other players.

That is false. I stated the issues with the current system in the initial post. The placement is not random on places that fall into the same bucket, which is part of the problem.