It's turtles all the way down?

So if the problem is turtling and general inaction being an effective strategy – what needs to happen to solve that?

Part of the problem is the high cost of attacking under combat by elimination as attacking gives you no advantage and you both lose men at an equal rate - another part of the problem is that resource model does not penalise having a small area (this is deliberate and something I think I mainly want to avoid the game having either death or victory spiraling) – another part of the problem is that what wins you the game is owning a stationary and passive status symbol (for all that it's thematically appropriate).

So with the route cause outlined lets look at some of the possible styles of solutions – there not specific suggestions but rather “do something along these lines”.

One solution to this would be to provide a player with 'defensive resources' and 'offensive' resources – and if you sit inactive you simply lose the 'offensive resources'. Or thematically for another game – castles and men – where only castles can control areas while men pull down castles.

You could also reduce the costs to the attacker by rewarding attacking either in terms of 'useful resources' for example men or victory points– this is the route I've tried already with “epic poem cards” and the ability to knock over somebody's stone head and gain VP's from it. But you could go further and say the attacker always gets an extra man post any combat or the person who kills the most people every turn gets a VP for example.

You could make the game penalise lack of resources or hexes – at the moment food increase the number of men you have – it's only ever upwards. But you could make it so a player requires a resource simply to keep his current men on the board - food to feed the troops so to speak. So a player with a large stack of men has to spread out rather then hiding in a single hex with a couple of stone heads churning out VP's.

Another way would be to change the activity's that generate VP's – so either have Giant Stone Heads not generate VP's during some turns and on those turns get points for kicking them over, or increase the points for building a stone head and stop them being generators – so once built there's no point sitting on them.

Now a lot of these seem to me to loop back round to the same ideas just from different motivations – for example some of the ways to change the activity's that generates VP's seems to be similar to rewarding attacking more.

So which to use? I'm not sure I had an answer when I sat down to write this post but setting it out has at least convinced me off what to try first. The deciding factor was trying to work out which seemed thematically correct – but I'll save that for another day.