Dicewars
The last few days I’ve been addicted to Dicewars.
It’s a very simple browser-based game, superficially similar to Risk. Try the link, but only when you’ve got a few hours to blow off. The games themselves take only about 15 minutes, but you won’t be able to stop with just one.
The site does not explain the rules. The basic mechanics are obvious, but one thing I did not figure out at first were the rules for generating new armies/dice. You get one extra unit for each contiguous territory you control.
So the most important strategy is to unify your empire. Five separated territories will only add one unit to your forces, but three unified territories will add three units.
And, as in Risk, try to get yourself into a defendable corner.
July 31st, 2006 at 6:11 pm
Dang it’s frustrating to not be able to move dice from the huge stacks in the rear!
Or to roll 11 with a stack of 8 dice…
July 31st, 2006 at 7:29 pm
The fact that you can’t move the dice makes the game fast to play, and adds a lot to the strategy.
Also, the random dice placement and occasional bad rolls keep enough luck in the game so that the A.I. can beat you with reasonable frequency, which keeps it fun. It’s a good A.I., but with no luck in the game, a skilled player would win pretty much every game – the luck (good and bad) keeps it interesting.
July 31st, 2006 at 7:29 pm
Also while taking a defensive corner is important. It can be become a trap if you don’t break out of that corner well before the end game.
DiceWars Rocks, all it needs is multiplayer.
Colm Mac
July 31st, 2006 at 10:41 pm
That’s part of the strategy. If you have a big army (7 or 8) of your own, deep within your own territory where you can’t use it, clear a path for the A.I. to attack up to that point.
It’s a very clever game, but yes, multiplayer would be nice.
August 1st, 2006 at 9:50 am
Also keep in mind any stack of 8 is a zone where you potentially waste reinforcements.
I wish it was closer to cribbage where you can win 45-55% of the time vs 20%. Or maybe I just suck. 🙂
August 1st, 2006 at 10:18 am
Nevermind, reinforcements that aren’t used because they’d go on an 8-stack are saved for later rounds.
August 1st, 2006 at 12:30 pm
Holy first-player-advantage Batman! (well, more like last player disadvantage). Nothing like playing the default 7 player game, being second-to-last, and then only having one die left, meaning that you can move.
August 1st, 2006 at 12:38 pm
Twice I’ve been eliminated before I had a move.
August 1st, 2006 at 2:04 pm
When I go early in a 7-8 player game, I usually do relatively minimal attacking. I try to create a 3 contiguous territory zone, then I stop. The problem is that if you do too much early attacking, then all you have is a bunch of 1 and 2 dice territories that get rolled over by the other guys. Let them blow off their big stacks the first turn, then start to make your move the 2nd turn (up to 4 or 5 territories), but don’t get too aggressive.
I think I’m winning about 75% of 7 player games. If I survive the first 3 turns with 3+ contiguous territories, my win rate is 85-90%…
August 1st, 2006 at 11:54 pm
Well, I hate it, but only because it’s a dice-rolling game. My luck is terrible at dice-rolling games…case in point, I had a nice corner, going towards an entire section of the map up to a choke point, when a computer opponent beat me with a stack two less than mine, which let him into my one-die backfield. I was dead in about three more turns.
August 2nd, 2006 at 9:50 am
I am suspicious that the dice rolls are not ‘fair’. I have seen my armies roll 6 ones (on 6 dice) and 5 ones (on 5 dice). The odds against that are 46655:1 and 7775:1, respectively. Granted, I’ve been playing the game quite a bit, but not THAT much…
August 2nd, 2006 at 12:25 pm
Don’t leave your backfield with 1 dice. If you’ve got a decent setup, just do nothing a few turns and build up. Defense wins ties so it’s better to get them to attack you and then destroy them.
August 8th, 2006 at 12:52 am
I’ve also had a surprising number of 5 ones or 6 ones and a two. I played Champions as a kid and in all the time I played, I never rolled so badly consistantly. In fact, I can’t imagine rolling an 8 on 7 dice…I dont think it ever happened to me.
So yeah, this game rules like few others ever could but I definitely question the random factor this game is programmed with when I consider how many stupidly low rolls I see.
I’m glad it’s not just me 😀
August 8th, 2006 at 10:31 pm
Chances of getting an 8 or lower on 7 dice = 8/279,936 = 1 / 34,992. If you role 7 dice 20 times per game that’s about once every 8,500 games. Not common but it is going to happen to someone and that someone is going to remember it and post it (and not remember their 41). Or at least it seems plausible to me.
Fun game. 🙂
August 9th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
and I meant one every 1,750 games …. 🙂
August 9th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
If I’d seen freaky number sequences once, I might write it off as coincidence. But as I said a few posts up, I’ve personally seen them twice.
It’s not like programmers have never been known to stack the odds against the human (and in the A.I.’s favor) in the past…
Also, it’s possible there’s just a flaw in the random number generator. I once had a random number function (self-written), that would occasionally spit out bad (non-random-seeming) sequences, because it was poorly written.
August 9th, 2006 at 5:41 pm
Not really enough data to prove anything but, over 50 rolls:
my total: 183 (average 3.66)
opponent’s total: 178 (average 3.56)
We both seem to be coming in around average (average roll is 3.5) and I’m slightly ahead overall but not significantly. I lost patience after 50. But my feeling is still that it is pretty much just pure random, that you roll a LOT of dice, and people are just picking up on the few outliers.
August 10th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Fun game!
Just a tip: don’t attack from an stack of 8 to an stack of 1, 2 or 3 dices. You will probably win that attack but you won’t hurt much the opponent. Wait till he has 4, 5 or 6 dices on his territory. Your chances of winning in these cases will be 99%, 95% and 84% respectively and you’ll destroy his chances of attacking you.
August 11th, 2006 at 5:07 am
Thanks for the awesome tips. It’s funny, I can dominate every level except for 5! I think my placement is always really bad though. I had no idea about the number of armies being based on unified territories. That’s good to know.
1. Is there a version of this game anywhere else? I can’t play this version at work because of the firewall (which I don’t have access to). Uhh, not that I would play it while working… ahem.
2. Why do pushes only result in a loss for your army and not the opponent’s? I’ve had several times where our rolls will match, but I end up with just one army.
Gripe: I had a seven stack of dice that only rolled like an 11, and attacked a 4 that rolled a 20 and lost my entire army! Talk about frustrating. Not that I mind, I’m addicted to the game.
August 11th, 2006 at 9:15 am
I don’t think the game is anywhere else, but maybe you can find it on a search engine.
The push rule is just part of the ruleset – I suppose it tempers the general offensive advantage in the game.
August 11th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
I have two comments:
1 – random number generator. When I was in college, I read that it is ‘impossible’ for a computer to generate random numbers and that they only appeared random. This can be proven by passing in the same ‘seed’ to the srand() function. I think the programmer used time to seed his, because I notice my dice rolls are better in the afternoon than in the morning.
2 – Strategy – if you are struggling against a large computer opponent, use their small stacks as buffer zones. It is better to leave a small stack between a computers large stack and your midsize stack than to get the extra reinforcement by taking out the small stack. If your lucky, this stack won’t get many reinforcements and the computer won’t be able to attack.
August 11th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Dicewars is a fun game, if you’ve never played the PC version of Risk 2 that is. If you have played Risk 2, you’re spoiled. 🙂 That and Moonbase Commander are two classic games that I always enjoy going back to when the urge hits. Great and simple strategy.
August 12th, 2006 at 2:13 am
StickyKeys,
I couldn’t use the flash version, but found a downloadable version on the same website (start at the main page rather than the direct link Phil provided). Once you download it, you won’t need to worry about your firewall.
August 12th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Here’s another tip. Pay attention to the behavior. In my past two games both dark green and pink seen to be deathly afraid of me and won’t attack unless they have an advantage. Light green and orange have hated my guts! 😐 Kinda reminiscent of Pac-Man in that way, actually.
August 18th, 2006 at 10:36 am
Great game. And really addictive.
August 26th, 2006 at 5:29 am
I love this game, great for lunchtimes at work. It seems random enough, but my gripe is that the computer opponent consistently wins equal battles, whereas I always have to make sure I have an advantage when attacking. Even then it’s usually 50:50. There seems to be a definate weighting towards the CPU. The last game I played I had the CPU almost dead and buried, only for 6 50:50 battles to go against me, and 3 60:40 battles! Random my @rse!
August 28th, 2006 at 3:51 am
Another tip for those times when you’re against one enemy which has about the same amount of land, you’ve both maxed out your dice and there’s a choke point between you. After trying to get through the choke point for 15 minutes without any progress at all, I noticed it’s much easier to just let the enemy in your land. When he’s got, say, 2 territories in your land, he’ll always try to attack from them to neighboring areas. This means there are 3 contested areas instead of one. He will win some attacks and lose about the same amount. The trick is to always reclaim just enough to let him keep those 2. This will eventually drain his reserve dice, since he always has to replenish the areas regardless of wether he wins or loses. Sure this stresses your reserve also, but not as much, since you know to stop attacking when your reserves are low. The computer doesn’t care about that.
September 1st, 2006 at 1:30 pm
I’ve found that a computer opponent will always overextend eventually. It seems coded so that when the computer sees a chance to roll over a bunch of 1-die territories, it will. Soon, that stack of 8 becomes 8 1-die territories itself. Hopefully you’ve let them into your backfield where you have a number of 8-stacks of your own to push back out, thus bringing larger stacks closer to the front. Repeat until victorious.
I’ve seen a computer opponent go from two 3-stacks in a corner to victory against myself and another computer opponent that was dominating the board (I was in a simpilar position to the first opponent, but I managed to fortify myself instead of pushing out.
Another good thought is to never totally fortify yourself. Eventually you opponent(s) will build up enough reinforcements so that it will be their 8-stack vs yours.
September 5th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
One more addict…
My tips:
The first 3 colours are much stronger than the others (Dark Green, Pink, Light Green).
Some colours behave different than others. While Dark Green always attack all others, others only attack the largest colour. You can use them to put a buffer in between you and your larger opponent. But keep in mind not growing to be the biggest or your buffer will turn agains you.
When you’re at 8 or 16 points you can always spoil one or two eigthers (when you’re totally full) to your opponent. It will be refilled after your turn.
November 9th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
I am also addicted to this game and think I have it somewhat figured out. Although I manage to win quite often, I still get snippity when I only can add dice based on my connected territories and the computer can add full stacks even if only 1 territory is in its possession. Ex: If the die at the bottom pf the game screen reflects that the computer can add one die, and, if the computer’s territory has only one die on that territory, why does it get to fill up to eight dice at the end of its turn?
Regardless, I think this game is great.
Jennifer
November 9th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
Dice ‘stack up’ to a certain extent. If the computer (or you) has maxed out all territories with dice, additional dice go into a sort of cache at the bottom of the screen.
November 15th, 2006 at 6:44 am
Because of the stacking effect, it’s important to try to open up a path to isolated players that are just stacking up, or they’ll be a nuisance to deal with later.
regarding the idea of “personalities” among the colours, i’ve not noticed anything along those lines. you may be noticing the effect of changing fortunes of the players. Once one player reaches a position of leadership, the other players stop attacking each other.
It seems this applies whether the leader is a computer or human controlled player. In fact, I’ve not seen any evidence of the AI behaving differently dealing with you versus other AI. That’s a testament to its strength, it’s impressive to see in a flash game.
December 5th, 2006 at 11:37 pm
This game suits my style very well. I am extremely comfortable with building up defensives and then pulling back to force an enemy to over-extended into the rear then sweep them away.
Not sure if you know this or it’s been brought up, but there is now a version you can play online against OTHER PEOPLE.
[link deleted]
December 6th, 2006 at 10:37 am
I deleted the link above, because I’m not comfortable with what the guy has done – he’s got what appears to be a nearly exact copy of DiceWars on his site, but by his own admission (I briefly corresponded with him), has not received permission or anything like that from the original DiceWars author.
January 9th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Some of my friends have suggested developing this game for X-Box 360….think that would be cool?
January 9th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
I would not encourage a direct copy. But DiceWars shows that simple strategy games can be a lot of fun.
February 9th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
The game is extreamly biased against the player. for some reason i had 3/4 of the territory in the past 3 games and then the ai takes over half of my territory and gets full stacks back because it has more dice than territories and then i loose the next 4 attempts to attack a 5 tall stack with an 8 tall stack.
March 7th, 2007 at 1:54 am
I am not so sure that I would say that the dice rolls are biased either way. However, I think there may be a momentum factor thrown in, that is, if you win one roll, your chances of winning the next roll are slightly better. Seeing an opponent win eight or nine straight 8v8 rolls, but then a couple of rounds later losing eight or nine straight makes me think that.
March 20th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
anyone know the algorithm for how much a stack is exhausted by a winning attack? Ex: 8 stack vs 6 stack the 8 wins but is then 5 stack. Does it relate to the amounts between the two rolls? Ex: a 32 roll vs a 9 roll is less expensive then a 32 vs 30 roll? or does it relate to the difference in stacks? Ex: 8 die vs 2 die = 7 die, 8 die vs 7 die= 3 die ?
March 21st, 2007 at 1:38 pm
anyone know the logic behind the way a winning stack gets diminished?
March 27th, 2007 at 6:36 am
fantastic game…it would however be nice to apply random dices…as of now ( played a lot) i would say that attacking ( in beginning unless trying to ” cutup” a strong opp) will allways be suicidal unless you have at least a 2 dice advantage to give you a sligtly higher than 50-50 chance….why not make a “fair” version ? simple programming…would take 5 min max 🙂
March 27th, 2007 at 6:44 am
maybe even apply some sort of scroll-parameter to make it possible to turn down com puter-advantage in % ? at present its around 60/40
a way to make a levelregulator from beginner to pro…come on…sounds fun to me!! 😉
May 14th, 2007 at 2:14 am
Dice Wars is an interesting variation of good old Risk. it is quite an interesting game only on a tactical level. However I agree with other comments that you need to be able to place your own reinforcements yourself. Of course some people find this an interesting twist and challenging. Due to this lack of reinforcement phase the game becomes too long towards the end and is less strategic. Nevertheless, it is kind of addictive to play. It makes you think on border expansion and also how to eliminate other players for good.
You can easily use successful strategies from Risk to win in this game. I have presented many strategies in my book Risk (Total Diplomacy: The Art of Winning Risk) and there is a dedicated website for the book and risk strategies (www.totaldiplomacy.com). It is sometimes amazing how certain tactics are universal and can be applied to games that look completely different and even have different rules. Strategy after all can be timeless. This is beautify demonstrated by the success of Sun Tzu’s Art of War after so many years.
[Declaration: I am the author of the book and the website]
May 16th, 2007 at 9:53 am
dude, it would take a lot more effort to make the game unfair! to make it ‘fair’ all you have to do is generate random numbers and compare them. to make it unfair, youd have to run the random numbers through some kind of ‘unfairness’ algorithm, and i think its really unlikely that the programmer did that.
i win 95% of the games i play, because of strategy. if youre whining about fairness or luck, youre probably just bad at strategy. luck tends to even out.
May 20th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Hi,
Since two people asked:
Logic behind “how winning stack is exhausted”: You “loose” 1 (being the one left behind on the territory you moved away from, so in fact you loose nothing, but neither gain anything, other than the new territory of course). If you “win” when attacked, you also neither loose nor gain anything, rather your stack remains as it is (while the attackers stack is reduced to 1).
For reference:
Logic behind “reinforcements” (getting more dice at end of turn): You get 1 dice for each territory in your largest contigous (connected) group of territories (so it is rarely wise to move stacks which you can’t connect with your currently largest group, or a group that would then become the largest – The exception to this rule is when such a move would part an oppenents territories, thus reducing the opponents largest group). Note that the size of each surviving players largest group is shown below the game board.
Oh, and by the way:
The game AI “cheats”, in that it consistently rolls above-average (or possibly, you consistently roll below average?) Notice for instance how the AI will beat you more than 50% of the time, when it attacks and the two stacks are equal (when, in fact, you should have a slight advantage, since a draw will go to the defender = you). Compare this with how hard it is to just break even when you attack, even if you only attack stacks that are 1 lower than yours (which should give you a slight advantage, even as attacker). I’m guessing the reason for this cheat is to compensate for the ultra-poor AI (it moves in a near-random manner, without regard for any kind of strategy, and it more or less commits “strategic suicide” as soon as you have any kind of advantage, by being FAR to agressive, which is good at the beginning but not at the end). I find this rather sad, since it is frustrating to know that you aren’t “playing on a level field”. It shouldn’t be too hard to implement a much better AI, which could stand its ground without having to cheat, even against experienced players (the “optimal strategy” for dicewars is quite simple, and should be no problem to code in a likewise simple manner).
For those who seek a greater Dicewars challenge:
Google “kdice” for a link to an online multi-player version of Dicewars, where you can play against 8 other people (which is VERY difficult, compared to the AI – Prepare to play ultra-defensive or loose…)
Regards,
A-)
July 2nd, 2007 at 3:55 pm
[…]The games themselves take only about 15 minutes, but you won’t be able to stop with just one.[…]