Have a Contingency Plan

This is Steven Petrick posting.

Have a plan and be ready to toss it out the window if things are not going as they are supposed to.

The last time we had a "game night" we played a three-player round of "Dust."

In the setup, I grabbed the capital on the North American continent. My plan was that my two opponents, having a common land border, would probably initially fight with each other, whereas I would be able to sew up the north and south American land masses during set up. While my opponents preoccupied each other, I would move stealthily to secure control of the seas. I would try very hard not to antagonize my opponents so that they would not see me as a threat while they were dealing with each other. In this way, I would minimize my own losses early in the game (giving me more combat power late in the game) while my opponents burned resources fighting each other.

This is not as easy as it might seem, since this meant that a lot of my power would be in sea units which are not useful for fighting land campaigns. Worse, controlling the seas did not mean my own heartland was safe from attack as there are two ways to invade across the seas other than by sea (bombers can take ground in Dust, and the mech dropper card is far too common in the deck allowing an invading force to simply drop a mass of mechs anywhere on your continent).

Things looked good as Joel initiated an aimless attack into northern Europe accomplishing nothing of note except to poke SVC. SVC initiated a drive into the center of the lands held by Joel in Asia, not quite splitting Joel's holdings in half but isolating India. I sniped around the periphery, solidifying my hold on the seas and eliminated much of Joel's navy (since he had no choice but to respond to SVC's advance).

Then disaster struck in the battle for Afghanistan.

Joel initiated a major counteroffensive designed to wreck SVC's major army in a battle of attrition. The disaster was that SVC rolled an amazing number of hits, virtually annihilating Joel's army in a single throw of the dice.

Suddenly the situation had changed. Joel was effectively at SVC's mercy, and I was not yet in position to try to pull off my plan. (I needed more time, but if I took that time SVC would crush Joel and with the combined economies and his comparatively huge army (because Joel had inflicted virtually no casualties on him) would easily be able to build a force to attack me.

I had no choice but to execute my contingency plan. One of the cards in my hand was an aforementioned "mech dropper" card. I built all the mechs I could and dropped the force on SVC's African holdings where two of his production centers were located. It was a sacrifice move, the force would be annihilated by SVC's counterattack, but SVC would be forced to turn away from Joel (maintaining Joel's existence and depriving SVC of the ability to capture additional resources from him). SVC had no choice but to counterattack as my mech force had occupied two of his production centers and threatened his capital, and I could spend my entire economy placing new forces at my "newly gained" production centers in what was his rear.

The end result was victory for me, but only because while keeping my eye on the prize (ultimate victory) I had a contingency plan prepared, and had it prepared before the first turn of the game had been played. (I could have executed the contingency plan against Joel as well, had things in Afghanistan gone the other way, and would not have needed to execute it at all if Afghanistan had resulted in the bloody stalemate that had seemed likely before SVC's astonishingly lucky throw of the dice.)