Elliott C. Evans writes:
>Please note, I moved this to an Icetowers thread.
Cool.
>Joshua K. wrote:
>> Hmm. I'll note that this is actually at odds with what I saw of your
>> Icetowers strategy (which seemed to involve shaking things up until
>Josh is referring to a sequence of moves I made several times in
>the Icetowers tournament, where there were several towers with
>two pieces of the same color at the top, and I split the caps off
>to the table.
Yes.
I'll often use "split and cap" in Icetowers when somene's sitting on
top of "my" tower (ie, a tower that has multiple pieces of mine in it
and fewer of other player's pieces) to avoid the risk of a hostlile
split, but you were splitting towers just to keep the game moving, and
it seemed to work for you, at least to help you climb out of a hole.
>I have a real hatred of double-caps on top of large towers.
It depends. I think double-caps on top of "your own" tower -- a tower
that has a couple of your large pieces in it as well as one piece of each
other player's color -- is just fine; the player in question is tying
up a lot of material (1/5 to 2/5 (depending on whether it's a
Medium-small double-cap or a small-small one) of their attacking power
plus several other of their pieces to establish a claim on a tower
that is worth more points to them than to someone else anyway.
Double-caps on a tower that's you don't have any other pieces in? Not
so much (and an invitation for someone to capsplit you just to get you
out of the endgame).
>I'll note that I only pulled this trick when I could split
>double-caps for all three of my opponents, so I wasn't just giving
>power to one player to knock down the leader.
*nod* I think I only played one game with you at Origins, so I didn't
see enough of a representitive sample (and I don't remmeber you doing
it in one of our giant icehouse games, though it's harder to keep
track of what's going on in those).
>It's not possible to shake up a game of Martian Chess as throughly
>as a game of Icetowers, so it is definitely a case of different
>philosophies.
*nod*. Icetowers is more or less defined as being zero-sum; Martian
Chess...not so much.
>games after game of newbies if I'm not careful, is too defensive for
>tournament play. In three games, my scores were 30, 31, and 30. I'm
>proud of myself that I can break even in such a pool of sharks, but
>I clearly need to work some aggression in there if I want to win.
Hmm. I suppose I should do some analysis on my own play, since it
seems pretty successful (don't remember my scores prefectly -- two
34ish, one in the 38-40 range, but for those not there, I won every
game). A lot involves establishing a good early position and
defending it from all comers -- if I can set up three towers that have
15-20ish pionts of my own pieces in them, without setting up a
self-split (the real trick to it), I'll usually win even if I
can only hold two of them by the endgame.
That said, I distinctly remember one game where I had only one big
tower by the endgame, having self-split and otherwise let myself get
spread out more than I prefer -- but controlled enough midsized towers
that I won pretty handily anyway.
--
Joshua Kronengold (mneme@(io.com, labcats.org)) |\ _,,,--,,_ ,)
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/\\ get an extra digit?" "I knew," weeps Six. |,4- ) )-,_ ) /\
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