Conquer Club

I think it would be interesting to have a map based on a presidential election, especially because this is an election year. It could be a map of the US, with territories being the states (and Washington DC.) To differentiate it from the current USA map, we could get rid of continents and instead have each territory give a set number of armies, proportionate to its electoral votes. Because each territory is valuable, this would encourage aggressive attacking, and the large number of armies would minimize the effects of dice.

A couple potential problems:

1. What happens outside of an election year - or when the US Census in 2010 comes along and redistributes things?

2. There would be a heavy, possibly imbalancing, bias towards the big states. (In real life, this is okay because more people live there.) California has 55; Alaska, Delaware, and a few other states have 3. Even dividing that by 3 (and rounding), that's still "hold California and keep it safe from attack for one turn, and you can roll over everyone else". An alternative might be that victory conditions are merely to hold enough of the map to have a majority of electoral votes, and leave the army bonuses based on something else (say, region), but that rapidly devolves to not much more than the current USA map.

Very good points.

I think that it would be fine to play it during a non-election year (we play the Senate board when they're in recess, after all,) but the 2010 census would screw up the numbers.

Some possible solutions:

1.If we made bigger states worth just a little more than smaller ones (not necessarily proportional to votes) that could fix it because the relative size of the states is almost definitely going to stay the same even if the exact populations don't. This would also help to balance out the board (e.g. instead of Wyoming giving 1 army and California giving 11, Wyoming would give 1 and California would give 3.) The downside of this is that the numbers would have to be assigned arbitrarily.

2.Another option would be to start everyone in the smaller states, and have neutrals start off occupying the biggest, say, 30 states. The more armies the state gives, the more neutrals would occupy it. That way, no one would get a bunch of armies just from being dropped on Texas, and and no one would be dropped in Vermont and then take New York easily on their first turn.

Thanks for the feedback, btw.

Better would be to actually make an election.

Each state has districts based on the number of electoral votes.
CA - 55
FL - 27
ND - 3
etc...

Every district in CA can attack every district in CA and every district in boardering states. (maybe for gameplay we need border districts between states?)

Holding a majority of the districts in the state gets a bonus.

Winning condition is holding a 50%+1 of districts in enough states to get 270 electoral votes.

Could somebody draw up a map, I would be willing to work on the XML

Winged Cat wrote:A couple potential problems:

1. What happens outside of an election year - or when the US Census in 2010 comes along and redistributes things?

2. There would be a heavy, possibly imbalancing, bias towards the big states. (In real life, this is okay because more people live there.) California has 55; Alaska, Delaware, and a few other states have 3. Even dividing that by 3 (and rounding), that's still "hold California and keep it safe from attack for one turn, and you can roll over everyone else". An alternative might be that victory conditions are merely to hold enough of the map to have a majority of electoral votes, and leave the army bonuses based on something else (say, region), but that rapidly devolves to not much more than the current USA map.

This idea about electoral votes could be interesting. Players would be politicians, and once they get 50%+1 of the big electors, they win the game, like a real election.

The problem is that, unless I am wrong, this cannot be done right now with the current XML because you have to hold all the objectives in a map to win it. But looks like a modification that should not be very difficult to make, and once it is done, this map could be developed.

Oliver it can be done, just the map creator would have to know all of the possible combinations that can make that many points.

So there would be lots of objectives.

max is gr8 wrote:Oliver it can be done, just the map creator would have to know all of the possible combinations that can make that many points.

So there would be lots of objectives.

Really? Oh well. Then if I understand correctly, there is a list of objectives, and each objective can be composed of different territories. But you only need one objective in order to win. Am I right?

I love the district/real election idea, but wouldn't it take forever to list all the possible objectives? I'm not sure if I understand the idea exactly, but it seems like you would have to list every possible combination of districts that would result in 270 electoral votes. If my math's right, there are ~3.8 quadrillion possible combinations of districts (55C28,) to win California alone. I think that anyone trying to code it this way would die before they finished.

The idea's great, though, if the xml could work.

why not have each state be worth the amount of armies proportionate to its electoral votes, like mentioned above, just cut up each state into cities, or territories, or however you wanna do it, and just have the bigger states have more terr to cover making it obviously harder to gain the bigger bonus

OliverFA wrote:

max is gr8 wrote:Oliver it can be done, just the map creator would have to know all of the possible combinations that can make that many points.

So there would be lots of objectives.

Really? Oh well. Then if I understand correctly, there is a list of objectives, and each objective can be composed of different territories. But you only need one objective in order to win. Am I right?

Correct

An election map is a good idea, but this is how I would do it:
I would have the entirety of the US as neutral territories. The neutral #s would be based on their electoral votes. This means that Alaska would be extremely easy to take while California would take forever. For each state, you receive a certain 3 of bonus men with which to deploy wherever you want, so Alaska might give you +1 while California gives you +10. Extra bonuses could be awarded for holding an entire region. Each player would start out as politicians (could be named after the CC staff for gags). These politicians can campaign (attack) any state they want, but can't attack each other. Objective would be to hold all of the US.

I like the idea of the map being populated by nuetrals at the start of the game.

I thought that an "outside track" for bonuses made up of special interest groups or segments of the population could be "territories" that provide bonuses. Such as you conquer the "Hockey Moms" and "Nascar Dads" and it allows you to reinforce to the "electoral map" or to the outside campaigning track. Think of all the Special Interests/Segments there are: environmentalists, tax and spend vs. low tax, blue haired ladies, AARP. A "territory" could be formed from Women with component parts being "NOW", Hockey Moms, and ERA. Etc.

The problem with the umpteen zillion combinations...might be moot. It takes 270 Electoral votes to win the General Election, when there are two candidates.
What is the shot of getting to 270 if there are still three or four guys in the game?
How about an "end around"? You are trying an objective game with Das Schloss, how about a timed game? The election is over the Tuesday in November. How about ending the game at the conclusion of Round X?

One more thought crossed my mind. In order to give each player an opportunity to "campaign" in each state, give each player an equal presence in each state at the beginning of the game. Depending on where he reinforces is where he is spending his "campaign funds". Or, it might be easier (and less spaces) to make it so that a player can attack any nuetral territory from his "Campaign Headquarters" located on the Outer track I proposed earlier. Make it a "One Way" attack?

After he has positioned himself in a state, then he could go after the other players armies in that state, or neighboring states.

If you want regions for additional bonuses, you could group like-minded states The Rust Belt (Michigan, Illinois, etc.), The Bible Belt (Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, etc), Ecotopia (Washington and Oregon), Big Sky Country for Idaho, Montana, etc., Great White North (Alaska, North Dakota, Minnesota...), Heartland (Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska...), and so on.

Since the Western seaboard and the Eastern seaboard seem to trend liberal, thus "like-minded" you could have a short-cut that allows movement of troops straight from California to New York. This would fall right in line with the idea of "Fly Over country" that the seaboards view the interior of the USA as.

It's an interesting idea, that could make a good map - although I expect it might not have particularly wide appeal?

Doing a little math, even cutting the large states electoral count in half or in quarter would still make too many combinations (>32,000) for the XML. One solution would be to have subcontinents on the larger states. California has 55 delegates, but this could be broken up into 11 subcontinents of 5. You would need 6 of the sub continents to get the state bonus. This would give just 462 XML entries. Possibly we need to cut the 55 in half to 28 and do 7 groups of 4 and require 4 of the 7 groups give 35 XML entries. This would definitely be doable. A simple script could write out the XML.

Here are the list of states with their actual electoral count for 2008 and then 2 columns 1 is half of the electoral count rounded up. the last column is what I would propose for sub continents to make the XML smaller/manageable. Where 3 of 3 would mean 3 subcontinents where each subcontinent has 3 territories. You would need to hold the entire subcontient to get credit for the subcontinent, and then you would need a majority of the sub continents.

State Abreviation Elector count map subcontinents
Alabama - 9 5
Alaska - 3 2
Arizona - 10 5
Arkansas - 6 3
California CA 55 28 8 of 4
Colorado CO 9 5
Connecticut - 7 4
Delaware - 3 2
D.C. - 3 2
Florida - 27 14 5 of 3
Georgia - 15 8 3 of 3
Hawaii - 4 2
Idaho - 4 2
Illinois - 21 11 5 of 2
Indiana - 11 6
Iowa - 7 4
Kansas - 6 3
Kentucky - 8 4
Louisiana - 9 5
Maine - 4 2
Maryland - 10 5
Massachusetts - 12 6
Michigan - 17 9 3 of 3
Minnesota - 10 5
Mississippi - 6 3
Missouri - 11 6
Montana - 3 2
Nebraska - 5 3
Nevada - 5 3
New Hampshire - 4 2
New Jersey - 15 8 3 of 3
New Mexico - 5 3
New York - 31 16 5 of 3 maybe 4 of 4 with 1 tiebreaker
North Carolina - 15 8 3 of 3
North Dakota - 3 2
Ohio - 20 10 3 of 3 or 5 of 2
Oklahoma - 7 4
Oregon - 7 4
Pennsylvania - 21 11 same as ohio
Rhode Island - 4 2
South Carolina - 8 4
South Dakota - 3 2
Tennessee - 11 6
Texas - 34 17 6 of 3
Utah - 5 3
Vermont - 3 2
Virginia - 13 7 4 of 2
Washington - 11 6
West Virginia - 5 3
Wisconsin - 10 5
Wyoming - 3 2

In New York, since it is a large state with an odd number I thought we could have one non-subcontinent district that could be the tie breaker. New York has 4 subcontinents of 4 and one center district. So having 3 subcontinents OR 2 subcontinents and the 1 tie breaking district. We could put the tie break district in the middle of the 4 subcontinents to avoid outside states controlling that one district.

No thanks, I already get enough election maps shoved in my face.

Johnny Crow wrote:... Or, it might be easier (and less spaces) to make it so that a player can attack any nuetral territory from his "Campaign Headquarters" located on the Outer track I proposed earlier. Make it a "One Way" attack?

...

If a "candidate" could one-way attack a state to get it's electoral votes, and the candidates can't attack each other, as proposed earlier (I like that, actually), How would a player eliminate someone?

We could have the HQ start with a large number of units, say 40
And then the HQ could auto-generate neutrals being a killer territory. So the first turn each player can start their campaign taking some number of territories. Then the campaign would continue from where you started your campaign.
Also, each of the territories could be a +1 bonus on that territory indicating that the player is gaining support.


We would have to think about gameplay and any possible advantage to going last.

if you make set starting positions as the strongly-democratic states on one side, and the strongly GOP states on another side, then maybe you could have each state-territory produce reinforcements more (relatively) proportional to their number of electoral votes, and still be able to balance it out, because they won't have to start with the same number of territories... the middle swing-states would start as neutral.

The problem where I see it is getting it on a map.
The states to the east are all quite small, so making that clear on a map will be a nightmare. If you then start to divide everything up in smaller territories to make the XML easier, you'll get even more territories (even in the east, as it's densely polulated).
Do you know how many territories you'll get? It seems to be over 100, which promises to be difficult to jam on a map.
The only solution is to morph the states' sizes.

in my opinion u guys r all over complicating this

all of the states with 3 electoral votes=8

all of the states with 4 electoral votes=5

all of the states with 5 electoral votes=4

so all players start with one state with 3 votes and in games with 4 players or less, they will get two 3 votes, one 4 vote, and one 5 vote.

All other states start with there respective delagates as neutral so California would give you a bonus of 55 but you would have to conquer a stack of 55 to get it.

attacking would be very simple any state that touches part of another can attack it even at the 4 corners they can all attack each other

Maybe also, strongholds for each party could give the defending roll a plus 1 when owned by a player (not neutral) for example New York of Texas.

1 way to win could be like in the real election have over 270 votes which woul translate into having enough states to amass a bonus of over 270

even more advanced things can be added such as swing states lose 5 troops a turn or that u can (like Eastern Hemisphere map in the naval superiority) from a strong hold conquer something like a tv add and from there bombard outwards any state