Hi Tom,

Something a lot of board designers want to do is have off-world territories to help control factories on a per-player basis. This is difficult to do, because you need some way for those territories to be lost so players can still be eliminated. There are two solutions that I think might be simple, and if either could be implemented, it would open up a lot of possibility.

Option #1) "Token Territories" - These are territories that are owned by a player, but aren't tracked in the player count for the per territory bonus or for keeping the players alive. If a player has only 'token territories' left, they are still eliminated.

Option #2) "Random Capitals" - Currently, to mark a territory as a capital, you have to pre-assign it to a particular seat/color or make it neutral. If you could instead assign it to a random player, that would also solve things, as you could just make all the normal-world territories capitals. Random assignment of territories in the beginning would be done in two steps, so that each player got a similar number of random capitals and non-capital territories.

Without having any idea what the DB and back end look like, I feel like one or both of these could be fairly simple to implement, and would make an enormous difference in creating innovative gameplay.

You can find more detailed discussion here of workarounds and their limitations - https://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/5407/Solution_for_off-board_territories

So a Random Capital would be a per territory option in 'Setup', not a global setting, right? Can you give us an example of an implementation?Why might you have random territories and random capitals on the same board?

>a Random Capital would be a per territory option in 'Setup', not a global setting

That's how I envisioned it, but please anyone jump in if I'm missing something.

>Can you give us an example of an implementation?

It's in the original thread I linked. Basically you have some territories off board, and you have your normal "on-board" territories. You want someone to be eliminated when they lose all their "on-board" territories, so you make all of these capitals. But currently capitals have to be explicitly assigned, so if you do this then the initial state of the board is exactly the same every game.

I should also say that while half asleep last night I think I came up with a solution for another work around to this problem, but I need to think about it while awake and see if it will actually work. So I might not actually need this for the board I want to make, but I still think one or both of these solutions would open up a lot of possibilities.

Ozyman wrote:>a Random Capital would be a per territory option in 'Setup', not a global setting

You want someone to be eliminated when they lose all their "on-board" territories,

You could create a single off-board capital for each player. Give the capitals a max unit count of 1 and have them self-eliminate with a -1 unit factory every turn. Then have every on-board territory point a one-unit factory to them. It's cumbersome and makes for awkward gameplay with the one-turn elimination delay. (Not that I care all that much, but I don't think anyone would get the elim bonus)

"Random Capitals" gives a good solution. The only downside I can think of is that you can't use capitals for anything else, but certainly Token Territories offers the more elegant solution, not to mention that it has other benefits.

M57 wrote:So a Random Capital would be a per territory option in 'Setup', not a global setting, right? Can you give us an example of an implementation?Why might you have random territories and random capitals on the same board?

Yes. That would be a per territory option. The current options for the scenario_type for Territories are "0", "Allocated", "Neutral", "Capital City", and "Neutral Capitol". I assume from that that the "0" means no scenario type, which gives you randomly allocated player territories. All the others give you specifically assigned territories. I think it might require a significant code rewrite to combine the two. The "token territory" idea might be easier to code. But I think the Random Capitals would also have more uses than the Token Territories would.

For your second question, I think for most projects you would only have Random Capitals and pre-assigned territories. With the pre-assigned territories being the off-board factories and the Random Capitals being the main playing space. But of course I'm sure someone will come up with more creative uses.

Now that I'm thinking about it, Random Capitals could be useful outside of off-board factory uses. Let's take Capital Crusade for example (https://www.wargear.net/boards/view/Capital+Crusade" target="_blank">Board). The only options are to have random allocation and no capitals (barbarian type setup). Or to have a single pre-assigned capital that can be randomly allocated by selecting the random seat assignment option in setup. With Random Capitals you could have each player start with 2 randomly allocated capitals instead of just the 1 that is possible in the current system. You wouldn't be able to tie that to the starting positions in the starting continents though.

That makes me think that it might be easier to have Random Capitals be a global setting instead of a per territory setting. Means you couldn't mix regular capitals and randoms though...

M57 wrote: Token Territories offers the more elegant solution, not to mention that it has other benefits.

I see additional benefits for Random Capitals as mentioned in my previous post. What are the other benefits to Token Territories? That you can also have normal capital elimination? Or more benefits?

Korrun wrote:M57 wrote: Token Territories offers the more elegant solution, not to mention that it has other benefits.

I see additional benefits for Random Capitals as mentioned in my previous post. What are the other benefits to Token Territories? That you can also have normal capital elimination? Or more benefits?

Well the big one for me is that Tokens do not count toward in-hand bonuses, which becomes pretty important when you have tens or even hundreds of off-board territories doing magical things.

M57 wrote:Korrun wrote:M57 wrote: Token Territories offers the more elegant solution, not to mention that it has other benefits.

I see additional benefits for Random Capitals as mentioned in my previous post. What are the other benefits to Token Territories? That you can also have normal capital elimination? Or more benefits?

Well the big one for me is that Tokens do not count toward in-hand bonuses, which becomes pretty important when you have tens or even hundreds of off-board territories doing magical things.

Good point! I had forgotten about that.

Korrun wrote:M57 wrote:Korrun wrote:M57 wrote: Token Territories offers the more elegant solution, not to mention that it has other benefits.

Well the big one for me is that Tokens do not count toward in-hand bonuses, which becomes pretty important when you have tens or even hundreds of off-board territories doing magical things.

Good point! I had forgotten about that.

If in fact "Token Territories" is not a feasible option for Tom to code, perhaps the creation of a "bonus floor" in combination with Random Capitals might be a reasonable alternative.

The way it might work could be placed under the "Rules > Bonuses, Limits and Dice" tab.

Somewhere with the above Include the following with a pulldown menu:

"Disregard" or "Do not include" the first X territories held.  (default = 0)

Really, I think the menu should go to at least 500, but I can imagine scenarios where ~1000 might be needed.