semi offtopic, but do any of the bolded three even play anymore?

Haven't seen the first in ages, saw the second pop in a couple weeks ago for maybe a day, the third was semi active a couple weeks ago. Went Nekotai and busted some heads and got busted herself.

Celina and Urazail tend to popup every now and then. I remember seeing Celina during Chaos. And someone yelling about Urazail raiding.

Oh all the comments, yours involves board game design, so you get the quote!

In the context of this thread how many times have you "seen raided plenty of times" a plane that has all its powers up? Vortex is not free, Nil is not free. Those are the only owned planes I see raided really. I am not saying this to deflate your argument but I am wondering if you are commenting based on experience against people without discretionaries.

Distort is atrocious, it makes it impossible to do much of any thing in terms of escaping. You have to have a ship, that is all there is to it. If you can wait the 2 minute delay chances are you are not being attacked anyway. What really hurts raiding though? Ripple/Flux/Liveforest. As if being stuck wasnt bad enough, passive stun, forced movement, and entangle on top of damage is just stupid.

Take the last mini raid on ethereal glomdoring. Heres the checklist:
- You cant meld without killing a treaty protected denizen.
- Upon entering the archway you are immediately entangled by liveforest (every member of your group enemied is).
- If you want to raid you have to hit something, which is usually a daughter. Of course daughters are incredibly powerful for any kind of guardian and though they "wander" they always form clots in the same area (are they being limited until attacked?).
- Defenders can meld from the nexus to any smob to get a clear chain going that cannot be broken.

This really might need its open seperate topic at this point. Also, you dont need to want to "grief" to raid. Most raids are started in an attempt to get a combat reply. Its "grief" when you do it alot, for an incredibly long time, or when you bring 15 people to fight 5 defenders.

As to grace and avenger though. I am open to elegant solutions if you have some ideas Fain, but really the fact administration has established it must be coded against or its legal has gotten us to the state we are at now. Being a target, harvest, calling ships of people, spying (in some cases), enabling passives to continue by being in the area, etc. These are all possible mechanically so the standpoint is they are ok. This is what most of us would call grace abuse, if you have no reason to be on Water other than raid, why can you stand on water for 10 minutes and make defenders sit there or risk you raiding when they leave?

No, I don't really.

P.S. Surely Risk is weighted towards the defender - on any given die role the defender wins in the event of a tie.

Edit: I'm not sure I'm contributing much to this thread.

Risk has all kinds of mechanics to balance positive and negative feedback. The more territory you own, the more armies you get, but the more borders you have and the more vulnerabilities you have. If you stop and look at all of it, it's quite remarkable. Make a very small change in any of a dozen rules one way, and you will have a game where, once you have a lead you're unstoppable even against an equally-skilled, equally lucky opponent, except in the case of a huge break of luck; make a rule change the other way, and you have a game where there's no point in gaining a lead because it's too easy for the tables to be turned. And there's at least a dozen details that contribute to this, that would change the balance if you changed them at all, including the way dice break on ties, how many dice you can play, how many armies you gain, how many you lose in fights, how the cards get played, the benefits for holding continents, etc. Risk is by no means perfectly balanced, but it's still a great example of what the target is: a lead should be worth having, but not the end of the game. This is something Lusternia could really benefit from.

Doesn't grace only last for 5?
There have been raids, even knowing that free discretionaries could be put up. From both Mag and Celest. Not full on battles, but raids none the less. Small group of Celestians attacked Nil, even though we knew Distort could be put up. Only reason it didn't turn into a full on fight was because we were inexperienced raiders/combatants and panicked. And same with Mag. Have had Estwald, Destridas, even you attacking us, even though we could put distort/flux/ripple up at a moments notice. Not downplaying their effects, but even knowing about those things, doesn't always deter someone from raiding.

Mag doesn't have free distort on Nil like Celest does on Water.

If I recall correctly, Mag doesn't have free distort anywhere. Discretionaries are rarely used when they aren't free.

Thought they did while they held a bubble. My mistake then.

Gaudi does have the Vortex construct, we were getting insanity there the other day but either nobody bothered to cast the discretionaries (!?) or maybe there was just no Illuminati security online.

We do? That's news to me. You must have been mistaken.

I ended up on Fire a couple of times when distort and flux were up. I got chased around, by myself, for about 45 minutes by a rather large group of people. Eventually, distort dropped for a second and I escaped.

Regardless, though, I personally don't see distort as a problem even in theory: if you decide to raid, the defender should have the opportunity to say, "Okay, lets do this, but you aren't going to sit there picking us apart while we gather numbers and then cubix/transverse out the minute we outnumber you." I see distort as a sort of insurance policy. The raiders had all the time they wanted to organize, assemble and get into position; distort just ensures that the defenders have an opportunity to do that, as well.

Here's a nice link that shows the probabilities of Risk and explains how the game favors the attacker: http://boardgamegeek.com/article/2452478#2452478

I agree with this fully. Prav has cogently summarized what I thought was the purpose behind implementing distort.

You get insanity even without the Construct now.

The Construct does speed up insanity gain.

Huh, that's news to me. Must have missed the announce. Is that for all enemy planes, or just Vortex?

All planes you're enemied to (except of course Ethereal).

This is a big part of why free distort should have been built in, not a construct reward. In fact, I think it's why, years ago, it was made virtually free in villages. Those who say it quashes raids are really saying it quashes risk-free stomp-on-people-and-leave-once-it-gets-too-thick raids. It does nothing to actual real raids where you plan on fighting the defenders. That so many people say it quashes raids just shows how few real raids there are.

Risk completely favours the attacker to the point that it's silly though.