Network WARS 4+

This is an interesting twist on Risk-style strategy games. I have my suspicions about how the battles are decided, but it’s definitely not 3v2 with defenders winning ties. Each game is completely random, which leaves some games feeling very lopsided. I wish I could wager on the outcome, or that there was some sort of challenge metric assigned to maps where my high-density units are at the 4 corners of the map.

I hope this game gets updated. Classic mode and other-more reasonable- modes…

3 big problems.
1) how rolls are determined isn’t stated, nor obvious. Is it random or not? Modifiers? Unknown.
-An 8 unit spot shouldn’t be whittled down to 2 by a 2 unit enemy.
Likewise, I’ve played rounds where every one of my rolls is bad. And I mean that. *every* roll.
2) you can’t call off an attack once started. It’s all or nothing. Thus, if you have a series of rapid awful rolls on the attack, you don’t get to cut your losses and wait. You whittle yourself down to 1. This is a deviation from risk rules that does not add to the game, imo.

3) whacky starting positions. In some ways it keeps things interesting, but sometimes the game starts off truly absurdly. There’s no sense playing them. Play one turn, get bad rolls, and it’s done. Auto surrender. It’s annoying. I can think of several novel ways to bring both choice and chance into determining starting position, so it’s doable.

This is a fantastic addictive game with realistic strategies. There is one flaw that gives the human player a tremendous advantage. Bots never attack a node that has an equal or higher value. Attacking a higher node sometimes is a great strategy as it weakens the node so that it gets attacked by other bots or allows the player to use more than 1 node to gang up on a higher node.