Twilight Struggle

Would you mind explaining what, exactly, the COIN system is? From watching some reviews of Fire in the Lake and Liberty or Death, I might have it. Players are assigned to one of four factions. Each turn, a card is drawn, showing some art, operations points, and the factions listed in a particular order. This order is the order in which players may elect to take the action given by the card, and only a maximum of two players can act on that card. The degree of the action is dictated by the first player to act, while the second player to act may only take the corresponding following action. When you take an action, it will benefit you in some way but also benefit your ally to win on their own. Is COIN more of a system, or more of a mechanic?

What is this ā€œBrilliant Strokeā€ Iā€™ve head about and why is it a big deal in one game or another? (Maybe Iā€™m misremembering the name.)

I like the way the mechanics seem to match the theme in FitL, where everytime you want to further your agenda, you do, but you help your ally more. Though, LoD sounds like an easier entry by being streamlined and is a bit more interesting to me, thematically.

/hijack

I got to play TS with my wife again this weekend! Per standard, I was the USSR and she the USA. She had a dastardly move to open the game, and headlined CIA Created. She was able to see a scoring card and then used her 1 Op to coup Iraq, and rolled a 6 (wiping me out)!!! Then my initial coup of Iran failed to totally clear her out, so she secured both countries for her first move. That early drama likely cost me the game, but itā€™s not like I didnā€™t have a couple things go my way to balance it out. I ended up with Israel thanks to the Arab-Israeli War. In the Mid War, she attempted to move up from the Middle East and into eastern Europeā€¦during the same hand in which I held Romanian Abdication, putting a stop to her capitalist propaganda. I eventually had to play Five Year Plan, which got my OPEC discarded. It was so difficult to get into South America, but I eventually got a slight foothold. In general, Asia went well for me, but I received an unfortunate combo of Shuttle Diplomacy on Turn 9 and Asia scoring on Turn 10, denying me Dominance (so close to SD not counting for anything!!!). Those points were sorely missed in the end as my wife won with 2 points.

COIN is really a couple different game mechanics tied together. The central one is the deck mechanism- youā€™ve basically described it. The differences from TS are that there arenā€™t operations points- all ops are limited instead by resources; and that events typically have two different choices and may benefit more than one side (for example the General Strike in Cuba Libre can either fail, shifting a city to support for the Government and opening a casino for the mob, or succeed and shift cities to opposition for the rebels.) The ā€œbrilliant strokeā€ system exists only in LoD and FiTL (as ā€œpivotal eventsā€). Thereā€™s also a lot of other signature mechanics that are less tied into the ā€œbrandā€ (most of them were developed out of the designerā€™s previous game Labyrinth: The War on Terror and there were adopted from several other games) that represent how counterinsurgency actually works- government forces are tough and deadly, but they canā€™t affect popular support without immobile police forces and can only kill insurgents that have been activated, either by seperate intelligence efforts or by their actions. Each faction is radically different from each other and has varying victory conditions. Fundamentally it was meant to simulate the narcowar in Colombia and future games have riffed off it in various ways (notably ADP and FiTL have the Americans, who have infinite money, deadly troops, and can coopt government forces but are sensitive to casualties and at the mercy of their erstwhile allies in the government to actually raise support for their country.)

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What do people think of the ELO rating system being used for this? I can understand ELO being used in a game like Chess where thereā€™s no randomness and no hidden information, but in TS you have cards and dice and an unlucky (or lucky) run can warp your rating quite badly.

When I was on 1500 I played someone who was on about 1850, we got to Turn 8 and with 16 minutes left (he was losing), no more response from him - so I win and go up to 1950, then find it much harder to get a game because everyone assumes Iā€™m unbeatable.

I have played this a lot and I am pretty good, but unbeatable I most certainly am not.

One game should not boost your rating by 450 points, no matter what system is being used.

Yeah that is an issue with the K-value (as in, how many points a game against an equally matched opponent is worth) - Elo is theoretically robust regardless of how high-variance a game is. That seems like a pretty miserable implementation.

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Iā€™ve created a subchannel on Stimhack Slack to talk about strategy and organize games. Feel free to join, the name is, quite unsurprisingly, #twilightstruggle.

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