Hi. Nice to meet you all. I just joined warzone recently. Is there a map for Bay Area with ships and ship dice and luck like in the Warfish map? I see Bay Area but without ships and not the same dice and luck as Warfish

what is warfish?

ps: I don't know of any map like that but I haven't searched because I don't know what it is

Edited 7/30/2020 19:15:03

Warfish.net is an invite only game made in 2008 or so. Warzone is definitely much better but Warfish has four unique attributes that I've yet to see in warzone:
maps of Bay Area, Europe and NYC that are well designed
different sided dice where certain assets such as ships can defend better than regular areas,
luck where it's more variant where you could have a bad streak of luck, and
hordes where adjacent territories even in a non bonus area gives you additional units.

How can I make requests for these maps and these combinations of ships, luck and hordes? Then I can ask all my friends to join warzone more easily

maps of Bay Area, Europe and NYC that are well designed

https://www.warzone.com/Maps

Warzone has dozens if not hundreds of maps set in Europe. At least one of them has to be well-designed. Looks like there's only one Bay Area map and it's not well-designed. Looks like there's 3 NYC maps; I don't know if I'd call any of them aesthetically pleasing (maybe mojo's) but they might have strategic merit to them.

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different sided dice where certain assets such as ships can defend better than regular areas,

This definitely isn't a thing in Warzone, as all armies have the same kill rates. Also Warzone doesn't have dice in the same sense as Risk (1 die/army iirc) and instead computes the armies killed by an attack (or defense) using kill rates, the luck modifier, and a rounding mode. E.g., for attacking D armies with A:

- In Risk, you roll max(3, A) attack dice (d6) and max(2, D) defense dice (d6). Then you compare the highest attack dice against the defense dice and the attack succeeds if the selected top attack dice all have higher values and all the defending armies die, with ties resolving in favor of the defender. Or something to that tune.

- In Warzone, the A attacking armies kill K defending armies, computed based on the attacking kill rate, the luck modifier (https://www.warzone.com/wiki/Luck_modifier - so the pre-rounded armies killed is actually a weighted average of the expected value + the dice-simulating RNG), and the rounding mode. The D defending armies kill J attacking armies, likewise computed based on the defending kill rate, luck modifier, and rounding mode. The attack succeeds if K>=D and if A-J is at least 1. The luck modifier simulates dice (although there's no explicit dice roll) but dice don't have the same prominence in Warzone that they have on a bunch of other risks games. In conventional gameplay, the luck modifier is typically set to 0% and the rounding mode to SR (straight round) so there is nothing dice-like at all. E.g., 10 kills 6, always. You can have unconventional settings to get that dice stuff going, but that's not what mainstream strategic Warzone has become.

So I think the attack mechanics are going to behave a little differently than in most Risk clones, and imo the Warzone mechanics are more tuneable and better suited for strategic play.

Maybe something similar can be achieved via a mod. Arguably it'd make strategy much more complicated, but the same can be said for features like the Bomb Card or Commanders or LD or MA, etc.

Right now the only special units in multiplayer Warzone afaik are Commanders, which are basically stacks of 7 armies that have to be killed all at once (and will eliminate their owner if they get killed).

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luck where it's more variant where you could have a bad streak of luck, and

I think that's doable already with changing the rounding mode (to Weighted Random) and messing with the luck modifier. I don't know how Warfish implements luck. You can definitely have a streak of bad luck if the luck modifier is high enough.

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hordes where adjacent territories even in a non bonus area gives you additional units.

Afaik there's nothing for adjacent territories specifically but you can grant extra armies per territory. Or use a mod.

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How can I make requests for these maps and these combinations of ships, luck and hordes? Then I can ask all my friends to join warzone more easily

For maps, anyone can make them: https://www.warzone.com/wiki/Map_Making. You can also request someone to make these maps in the Map Development forum or the Mapmaking Discord but I don't think that typically works out.

For features changing behavior in-game, there's two options:

• Use a mod: Warzone supports Lua-based mods that modify gameplay and mechanics (https://www.warzone.com/wiki/Mods), although you can only create games with Mods if you have a Membership and have a rate limit on how many games you can create with mods that you can invite non-Members to. For the "different sided dice" feature (which can be approximated by giving some territories higher kill rates than others on defense or even attack), I suspect you can develop a mod. Similarly for hordes, although I don't know how mods can be used to change income.
  
  
• If mods aren't suitable, you'll have to go through the site's developer, Fizzer. He's set up a Uservoice where you can make and vote on such requests: https://warlight.uservoice.com. This approach is most likely a longshot but Fizzer has implemented some popular features before, so you never know.

Edited 7/30/2020 20:49:12

Thanks for such a thoughtful reply. I will make the requests in Discord and in the warzone uservoice features website. I hope one of those two can work. If we can get three key maps in the Warzone system, then I can easily invite 100+ people to join

Uh, there's a limit of 40 players per game, lower for low level players such as yourself.

He means 100+ people from Warfish to move to Warzone, not 100+ people in a single game.

Yes that’s correct. Warfish has many good unique maps and I’d love to work with someone who is an SVG editor to port them. Unfortunately warfish is breaking down with code errors, the admin is MIA, and not creating new accounts to allow new folks to see how these maps are made.

I understand that there are similar maps but they aren’t the same. Who can I best collaborate with to get these best maps into Warzone?

Bay Area on the west coast of the US not anything in europe though right?

Yes California SF city region and its suburbs but with ships that defend better, port access where only select territories get ship access, and ships can attack territories in its vincinities

(pasting from Discord to keep track of the action items per discussion about what it would take to get Warfish near-equivalence in Warzone for those 3 maps):
we need to:
a) create 3 Warzone maps based on the Warfish ones (or find Warzone maps that are already good enough for that)
b) create a mod that rotates turns between players or teams (only Player 1 can move in Turn 1, etc.)
c) create a mod that supports the typical 1-2-3 Risk sequence (deploy, attack, transfer) and can be used in conjunction with mod b)
d) investigate the probability distributions for A attacking armies killing D defending armies and see if we can get near-equivalent luck behavior
e) create a mod that lets the game creator change kill rates for specific territories
f) create a mod that allows for asymmetric connections

the B mod has already been made by fizzer, if im not mistaken....

Thanks, Njord. Looks like the Take Turns Mod was Fizzer's example mod: https://www.warzone.com/blog/index.php/2019/09/take-turns-mod-mod-development-tutorial/

and it seems dabo1 already made a one-way connections mod: https://github.com/dabo123148/WarlightMod/tree/master/OneWayConnections

I can't find much documentation on how the one-way connections mod works but it looks like b) and f) might already be solved.

i dont know warfish, but D should not be impossible.... if munna raja(or another warfish player), just gives an complete explenation of how warfish mecanics works, it should not take an insane ammount of time

Edited 8/2/2020 09:28:55

3 Warfish.net gameplay videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfF5jaSXJDY (Overview)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDoCYBEnyFw (gameplay on a continental US map) -> this one seems to be the most useful for understanding gameplay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3pDu6vzuPM (on the Wii)

My current understanding is that Warfish attacks just use Risk mechanics, with an auto-assault (or continual attack) feature like on Conquer Club. MunnaRaja might still need to clarify when the continual attack stops; I know it stops when the defending armies are killed (and auto-transfers surviving attacking armies onto the target territory) if the attack succeeds, but I don't know what happens when the attack fails. Will it keep going until the attacker has only 1 army left, or- like Conquer Club- will it stop the continual attacks when the attacker has fewer than 3 armies available to attack with? I.e., will a failed attack leave the attacking territory with 1 army or with 1-3 armies?

There's already a few challenges to getting the same behavior- in Warzone, all (often more than 2) defending armies are used in each attack. So the army distribution outcomes for after the attack are going to look a bit different (the attacker might be left with more than 3 if the attack fails). We could have a mod that limits defending armies to 2 at a time if this matters.

Almost all this gap is just going to come from the vast rift between Warzone's attack mechanics and classical Risk mechanics. If the mechanics are a really big deal, it might be worthwhile to just try one of the other online Risk sites (WarGear, LandGrab, Major Command, Dominating Twelve, or Conquer Club) because their mechanics for attacking/defending are already like those of Warfish since they all just copy Risk mechanics. I would personally recommend just getting used to Warzone's mechanics because imo they're a vast improvement over Risk mechanics; Risk mechanics had to do the 3v2 dice stuff because they were built for a board game to be played IRL, while Warzone took advantage of available technology to build cleaner, more predictable, and easier-to-explain/model mechanics that result (imo) in an overall superior strategic experience.

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Edit/Self-reply:

I think I made two oversights in my analysis above:

1. We can probably simply create a mod to allow for Risk-like attack mechanics in Warzone (dice, 3v2's and all)
2. The 5 other Risk-like online multiplayer sites are all much less active than Warzone (Conquer Club comes the closest but Warzone dwarfs it in terms of monthly games played and all-time sign-ups). I don't think any of them has a non-Flash client out of beta yet, so the Flash end-of-life at the end of this year might destroy them. Warfish, Pogo's Risk, and Art-of-War all seem like they're about to die (or already dead) for the same reason.

So the online Risk community might end up just having to adopt Warzone as its new home. In light of that, having mods to make Risk-like mechanics achievable in Warzone could be a really good idea. We can have mods for:

(Risk mechanics)
1) Switching turns between players -> Fizzer already implemented this with the Take Turns mod
2) Deploy/attack/transfer phases (like Risk's phases)
3) Multi-transfer (to mimic Risk's fortify/transfer 3rd phase) -> I suspect a mod might already exist for this case
4) Risk-like attack mechanics, where you can have repeated 3v2's

We can probably package 1/2/4 into a Risk-in-Warzone mod. I think one exciting possibility is that by decoupling these mechanics and allowing for some customization (e.g., ties could resolve in favor of the attacker rather than the defender, or the number of attack/defense dice can be changed), we could add a ton of new customization possibilities to the Warzone engine and possibly add a new strategic frontier, maybe making FFAs more viable as a strategic format.

(Warfish mechanics)
1) One-way connections -> Looks like dabo1 already implemented this
2) Kill rates that vary by territory -> TBest's Better Cities mod sort of achieves this, although (afaict) not at game-creation time and not in a stable way

Edited 8/2/2020 20:21:59