Post by jimanchower on Jun 15, 2019 22:51:01 GMT
I love Risk, I grew up playing the board game but WTF is going on with the SMG online version? The AI is terrible, if there's a bot near you in the game you better get away from it ASAP because they just randomly attack with no rhyme or reason. At the beginning of the game if any are near you they will just attack and attack. If you leave one near you and you add men the bot will just add men to keep up with you. The AI doesn't try to take over territories, it doesn't try to take territories away.......it's just behaves completely randomly.
The biggest flaw in the online game though is the lack of communication between the players which is an integral part of the board game. You can do basic things like request alliances and they have emoticons so you can get basic "messages" across like laughing at someone or letting them know you didn't like their last move or whatever, but you can't actually communicate.
This leads to so many players just collecting cards because everyone is afraid to make a move. In the Fixed cards version of the game so many players will sit around forever waiting for someone else to make a move and weaken themselves. Players will just collect cards every single turn instead of actually attacking.
The game is called "Risk" but the online version actual incentivizes not taking risks so it turns into "Caution: The Card Collecting Game" where everyone is afraid to attack.
It just sucks because the person who wins is often the person who does the least. If you can take Australia and have the patience of Job then you can win more often than not.
I've lost more games from sheer boredom than from lack of skill or the other players defeating me.
I just played a game (which I won because a player bailed at the end of the game and turned into a bot) where a Master ranked player was sitting there letting the Green player take over and hold NA and SA. The Master player was in Europe, the Green player only had one single troop guarding the entrance to NA and a single troop in most of the territories in NA and around 60 troops total but the Master didn't even attempt to attack NA. He just stockpiled all his men in central Europe and he had something like 100 men there.
I got fed up and suspected the green player was a sock account of the Master and decided I wasn't going to sit back and wait for the Master and his sock account to finish me off. I was pretty much equal with the Master, I think I had about 15 more men, but him allowing the green player to keep NA piss me off so I attacked him and finished him off. I was down to just a few men and figured I'd finish second.
Luckily for me the green player botted out and since bots don't even try to win in that game I ended up winning which makes me think I may have been right about the green player being a bot of the Master, since after the Master was defeated the green player quit.
But it's just such a frustrating broken version of actual Risk. I don't understand how the AI can be that bad. I had Risk on my Iphone 10 years ago and it's AI was fine. It wasn't as good as a smart human opponent but it could beat you if you were playing against 5 computer controlled players.