for a long time, i used the 6th pick exclusively as a counter pick against the 4-5 of my opponent. because if you get your 6th, that means they got their 4th and 5th. recently something occurred to me, there is another type of pick you can make here.



i took australia, not as a counter pick but as a base from which i could expand like crazy. i wont know yet which of the other territories my opponent has but i will know that if it goes to 6, they wont have anything near australia...

i don't do this exclusively now or counter-pick exclusively, depends on the opponent and the map, where the wastelands are etc. but i think this strategy has a time in place.

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what are some other things to think about with the 6th pick? anything else to do besides this and counter picking?

because if you get your 6th, that means they got their 4th and 5th.

Doesn't have to be their 4th and 5th, could be their 2nd and 3rd or a few other combinations.

Combo with your 3rd is also a good strategy, especially if your 345 are in the same general area of the map, since you're assuming they didn't triple pick.

Putting your 6 nowhere near your 3rd makes more sense than comboing with 3rd if 3/4/5 are together. Better to have 1 of your picks near two of theirs than two of yours near two of theirs.

No clue why you think intentionally having only one safe pick would be a good thing.

The problem with that 6th pick Wally is:

They have Caucasus and East Africa. If they also have Central Russia all is gravy, but if you have Central Russia, and you and them split your 1/2 then your only safe income is Australia, a 5 income bonus that will be difficult to take without allowing them to eliminate you elsewhere potentially. Having a safe bonus that is faster to take is probably more to your benefit, ie. Indonesia

Edited 10/1/2016 16:20:04

Yes.

I learned this recently too.

Like you, I only know two strategies with the 6 -

1) Counter 4 or 5
2) Good safe expansion so that you can win your early duels


2) assumes that you clustered your picks (e.g. 1-2 combo, 3-4-5 trap etc). If you have then getting your 6 means that you have early duels. So, if you go this route you want to consider what kind of duels you might get into and what you want to do in the first few turns. E.g. if you border will you run or deploy first turn? do you plan to block a big bonus on turn 2? or do you plan to just leave your men there one territory away for a few turns.

Once you have facility with how to play the early duels + you can tell what are likely early duels if you have your 6 then you can choose the best sort of 6.

Maybe you want to avoid fighting at the start and out expand your opponent, and so your 6 should be optimized for fastest expansion, and then maybe a well positioned 5 is a good idea. Or maybe you will need some men to defend and so you should go for a 3 or a 4 so that you can have a bonus by turn 3.

Until you have this facility I suggest that a reasonable starting heuristic is that your 6 should be a 3 or a 4 as it's likely that you will need to deploy extra in the early duels. E.g. deploy 1 so that you spoil a 5 bonus with 4 attacking, and thus can't be retaken, or deploy 2 so that the bordering pick can't take you first turn etc. Taking a 5 by turn 3 means you have to commit to not deploying any men elsewhere in the early duels for the first two turns, which can often hurt you. Obviously sometimes this can work great.


Tl;DR - if your 6 is for good safe expansion then a good starting rule of thumb is to avoid a 5/6 bonus unless you have a specific plan of how it's ok to not deploy to your early duels for the first two turns.


Btw, I like that you are writing up the specific pieces that you learn :). If I got my act together I would do more to contribute to the strategy corpus of knowledge.

Edited 10/2/2016 03:26:52

As Buns said, not much to debate it. I would look this thread: https://www.warlight.net/Forum/5289-possible-combinations-starting-picks

This sheds light on the possible combination of starting picks, but be aware, that one aspect is the combination of picks you get, totally other aspect in what order territories are assigned and relatively to your opponent.

So there is not right or wrong where your 6th is. If all territories value is equal, then the best picking order is the one, that offers highest success rate out of all possible picking combinations. That in assumption, that you do not know your opponent picks and have no incentive to think how he may order them or; he has any info how you may do yours. But this usually is not the case and there are mostly relatively more valued territories + territory combinations which lead to counter picking and makes the whole picking more of "trust your gut" and predict how your opponent may do his!

-> I highly doubt that a player will run all the possible picking combination scenarios if there is 3-pick involved, on 2-pick it is easy to do. That´s why 2-territory picks are much more closer to pure-strategy in (average) calculation sense, than the 3-territory picking, because the calculation and all possible scenario analysis are just too complex. The argument is based on human calculation capacity!