With trench warfare you can only assault from regions held continuously since the start of your turn. If you conquer a region (or re-conquer a region) you cannot assault further from that region during the same turn. The one exception being 'killer neutrals' (explained on the Instructions -> Gameplay Notes page) from which you may continue assaulting. The game no longer involves steamrolling across the board. Instead you gradually advance your front!
This gameplay has several interesting repercussions (and there are surely more to be discovered):
- Bottlenecks become important. By holding a buffer region you could effectively make it so nobody could break your bonus zone in one turn. Think Bangkok - Oceania area on the Classic Map. Keeping Bangkok effectively protects all of Oceania. On the flip side, bonus zones without a natural buffer region (think South America and North America, for instance) gives advantage to whoever is aggressive and attacks into their opponent's bonus zone first, since the opponent can never break into your bonus zone, and can only recapture their bonus zone if you continue to attack.
- Spoil cashing is less about "when" and perhaps more about "where" you deploy those troops, since you want to maximize your front.
- You may have to conduct diplomacy in game chat to work with other players to bring back a balance to the game even more so than in normal games.
- You can protect weak teammates or your enemy's assassin target more easily by creating buffer regions.
I suggest reading this interesting report by Blinkadyblink of how gameplay changes with trench warfare.
Thanks to n00blet for suggesting this feature back in 2008 (originally suggested as Adjacent Attacks) and everyone who helped develop and play-test the concept.
Trench Warfare Medal
There is also a new achievement medal for Trench Warfare games, designed to portray the back and forth battle of trench fighting. To add an extra incentive to earn this medal quickly, we will give a free Conquer Cup III entry to a randomly selected player that has earned a bronze Trench Warfare Achievement by May 1st
Trench Warfare Tournament
Gilligan, our Entertainment Coordinator, created a special tournament to be released with this new feature. You can check it out here.
Performance Improvement
I recently made progress with the longstanding nightly lag caused by processing dice statistics. It was occurring each day for a few minutes around at 5:00 AM CCTime and would freeze attacks for up to 30 seconds or more. Finally, this problem has been eliminated.
