Lubawski wrote:I think the King should be a little higher in troops. 7 is just too easy to plow through, even with the counsellor to go through first.
Agreed. Even if the castles are non-neutral again, I'd still advocate making the King higher. The quick-kill-through-the- King strategy will become the main team game strategy on this map eventually otherwise (even if it hasn't yet made itself widely known), and most of the map won't get used. This isn't a terrible problem on Doubles, especially if there are more than 2 teams btw, but it will dominate in Triples and Quads games that the Clans like to play.
In Trips, I found that it's fairly easy to get 9 troops or so on the Lord Chamberlain by the end of the first round, and then proceed with 14 troops at the beginning of the second or 27 troops at the beginning of the third. For quad games, this would change to 18 troops at the start of the 2nd and 35 for the third. This is all assuming that the other team doesn't follow suit and stack and attack, although whomever doesn't have the Lord Chamberlain will be hampered by not being able to reinforce into a common place for a stack.
If the opposing team is able to counteract this brute force strategy without devoting everthing to opposing them, then I think the map will play out as it's supposed to, with empire-building being key. If, say, the opposition only has to devote 1 player's (in Trips) or 2 player's (in Quads) troops to keeping the stack down and still be reasonably safe long enough to get a production line bonus- say 3 rounds- that will be good I think. Let's say that in Trips the opposition to a stack kills off 4 armies, and in Quads it kills off 8 armies each round. That would mean that in Trips a stack'em team would have 10 troops in the 2nd round and 19 in the 3rd round; in Quads it would have 10 and then 19. Given this somewhat worst-case scenario in terms of turn order and assuming completely average dice, the opposition to a stacking team would only be safe from losing a player (or more) in a Trips or Quads game up to the second round.
I don't think it would hurt the map playability at all to increase the King to a killer neutral 12 or even 15. I normally don't advocate for high neutrals- especially killer neutrals- but given the importance of the King in team games, I think it would be justified. In fact, I would be happy to see the King go so high as 18, even though that would probably make it a non-viable gameplay element outside of team games.
Marshal Ney
P.S. edited for bad math, in case someone read this right away