SuicidalSnowman wrote:Right off the top of my head I can think of two reasons to do this:
1) Fog games. Especially in no spoils or flat spoils, you may not want to reveal you true strength.
2) Trench games. It often makes sense to leave 1 troops on a border territory. The enemy can go through that one territory only, and thus you can preserve your stack for later use.
+2
Gweeedo wrote:I continually observe such game play by some players that have better score than my own...that is perplexing.
Maybe they have a better score because they understand when it is appropriate to use such a strategy and when it is not. Instead of making a blanket statement like "Land locking your forces is never a good idea.", perhaps you should attempt to learn something about how to use it.
Manipulating the actions of your opponents by choosing how much of your troop strength to reveal to them is an important part of multiplayer fog games. The player who appears to be in the lead (by some combination of bonuses and visible troop strength) is often the target of all the other players. Making yourself appear weak can get others to fight the presumed leader who has large stacks on his border while you build and wait for the right time to unleash them.
If you have all your troops at your borders, then what happens once someone breaks through and sees nothing but 1's? It's an invitation to go on a rampage and wipe out your interior. Having some landlocked stacks held in reserve can minimize the damage and allow a counterattack. And after discovering that you do that, an opponent may be reluctant to attack even your weak borders, knowing that it could release a large army (though he doesn't know how large).
SuicidalSnowman is right about trench games. If you have 1 troop bordering an opponent, and he has a border with someone else with a stack, who is he going to focus on? He can only kill your 1 troop, and will probably use the rest of his deploy to attack the more threatening border.
In all of these situations, (and probably others that I haven't mentioned), leaving all your troops on your borders is an invitation to have large numbers of your troops killed. Sometimes that's necessary, especially in 1v1, escalating, non-fog or non-trench games, but in many situations land locking some troops will lead your opponents to attack each other more than they attack you. Add to that the dice advantage you get from attacking more and defending less, and it can make a big difference in your win rate.
I looked at your dice stats - you attack 5.2% more than you defend. I attack 13.7% more than I defend. This could be because I'm a more aggressive player, but I suspect that you are actually much more aggressive than me because you attack 8.01% of the time when the odds are against you (2v2 dice or worse) compared to my 1.83%. I think the main reason for the difference is that you are attacked a lot more than I am because you don't land lock your troops.
I'm sure it's misused sometimes, like any strategy, and I'm often conflicted about choosing between two entirely different ways to position my troops, so sometimes it's just a crap-shoot anyway. I play a lot of fog, and prefer large maps and non-escalating spoils, so my perspective may be a bit different from yours.
