Help me make my strategy game more active with no camping!

Welcome to the BGDF.

Without actually seeing the game, I'd say #1 or #2 would be the best options to reduce "camping."

1) It is only natural that the more land you have, the more resources you will be able to produce. If a player can acquire more resources by obtaining more land, then at least some of your players should be motivated to quickly grab more land through battle early in the game rather than playing defensively like you mentioned.

2) Likewise, some lands should produce resources better than other lands. By mixing up the production rates of different territories, players will be drawn to conquer those better territories.

Finally, you could also set a turn limit. For example, you could say the game is over after 15 turns. If no one achieves the victory conditions you presented before the end of 15 turns, then whoever controls the most land after 15 turns wins. This would also benefit your game by keeping it from dragging on and on for hours and hours.

First of all, I recommend turning the game into a game with a turn limit (as GamesOnTheBrain suggested) and rewarding Victory Points (VPs) to players for certain accomplishments (such as occupying certain countries, or winningbattles). The player with the most VPs at the end wins the game. VP mechanics are often much easier to balance and tweak to your liking, especially for games with three or more players. Also, having a turn limit gives you some control over the length of the game.

I think giving a bonus or a reward to the attacker is a good idea. It gives players an incentive to attack. You might simply reward a number of VPs to the winner of a battle. Make sure the attacker has a slight advantage of the defender to encourage attacking.

I think I prefer dice to resolve battles, instead of a deterministic model, though. Dice are exciting, and a lot of people just like the feel of dice in their hands and the sound they make when they roll on the table. I kid you not, dice are great!

I also like your idea #3 a lot, it's a typical set collection mechanic that makes a certain country very valuable to one player, while another player won't care that much about it. This creates assymetry and tension in a game, which is good. Perhaps instead of lumping the necessary lands together as a "trade route", you might want to spread them around the map. For example, if you control Argentina, Norway and Japan you get a bonus. This will force players to spread out a bit more, and perhaps make the game a bit more active.

Good luck!

I would stop camping by
putting in a time or situation where they HAVE to fight.

you draw a card that says you must attack somebody.
oh man that's gonna be thrilling to randomly pick out
cards from that pile, it better have some other really good
cards or it's not worth the risk.

You can have a 6 step time line like a dice that you just
rotate time to manuever, time to get resources, time to
adjust time, time to fight.

Ok for the actualy fighting, higher number auto wins,
the only way a lower number can win is if they gang up
and combine their numbers to get a higher number, but
to do so, they must manuever into a good position
like "Go" where you surround the enemy on all 4 sides
or something.

hope this helps!

I have a couple of ideas. Does anyone remember the pencil and paper game where two players took turns creating a number of random, enclosed territories? After making a couple dozen or so, each player took turns distributing an army of 100 units (like in RISK) by writing a number in the enclosed areas (each player had a different colored pencil). During play, the attacker chose an enemy territory. If the attacker had enough forces surrounding that territory, he would cross out his opponent's number in that area, leaving him a little bit weaker. Play alternated until no more attacks were possible. The winner was the player with the most survivors.
I have played this battle system as an alternative to the classic RISK dice rules. We added other goodies such as aircraft bombing runs to neighboring territories, but even just the basic concept of massed attacks is really fun on the RISK map.
That idea would tend to discourage camping. Also, it totally eschews the dice and randomness, replacing it with pure strategy and tactics.

Mitch

thx anyway...

//Thx from behind

Well, if you're using the rest of the RISK mechanics, your opponents can amass a huge army via expansion and, if you're cut off in South America, you can't stop them. Besides, you are assuming that you can control Central America, which you can't do if you're massing troops in Brazil. Eventually, somebody is going to execute a classic pincers maneuver on Brazil (via Central America and North Africa).
Besides, even if it isn't the same opponent, you'll still have to fight on two fronts. Even worse is trying to camp in Australia, because you won't get to do anything at all if you don't control Siam.

Mitch

It's the first time that I see that people can camp in a strategy game.

For the risk dilema above, I think the problem is that there is too few invasion point. In fact there is 2 invasion points. This will make the player move all his troops there and camp. But if you could attack all territory from many different place ( air, land, sea ), it will increase the number of invasion point and force the defender to spread his troops and its variety. By doing so, there won't be any safe point since any condensed invasion is likely to work. The defender will lose the invasion and he will have to try to expell the ennemies out of his territories, else he his doomed.

So the basic idea is to make sure that the player cannot completely shield himself. He is always open but he can still defend himself or counter-attack.

For a 2 player strategy game, I have played a game called "Bells of war"( like axis and allies with a bigger map focused on europe ), and there was 6 basic countries ( US, England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia ) and many neutral countries like Finland, Roumania, etc. The idea is that you rarely play 6 player. So when you play 2 players, 1 person take the axis, and another take the allies. There is also the neutral countries which are controled by any player or a dead player. When we played 4 players, 1 player played france and russia while the other one played US and england.

The idea is that if you split the player among different countries and if you set many neutral countries, the game won't make a direct face to face. Since ressource cannot be shared among countries and allied countries cannot build units in allied countries. If each player control 3 countries, a player who concentrate on 1 countries, he will eventually lose ressources and become weaker.

In the same game, each territory had a number which indicated the industrialisation level of the territory. Making some territory worth more. There was also some canister with number that indicated the fuel level of the area and there was also shipyard on some territories.