Coming in 3.20 (exact date tbc but we're aiming for August this year), there will be some updates to how Balanced Blitz works in bigger battles. We are hoping this addresses the common complaints from the community that we have seen surrounding dice rolls. This has been a long time coming ever since we introduced the feature way back in 2019!

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Skip to section (3) if you don’t need the background context and just want to see an overview of the changes.

As a quick reminder, Balanced Blitz is a game setting that aims to provide more consistent probabilistic outcomes when utilizing the Blitz option in battles. Blitz instantly determines the result of a battle and avoids having to watch hundreds or thousands of dice rolls. Balancing is achieved by trimming out the extremely unlikely probabilities, making it more suitable for competitive play when compared to the more statistically accurate True Random setting.

Balanced Blitz turns losing battles like 10 vs 5 from a statistical possibility into an outright impossibility, and also limits how many troops you could lose in such a scenario. This is the setting you want when you’re looking to reduce the major factor of luck, and to focus more on strategic skill. Of course, True Random is still an option, but you will be at the full chaotic whims of RNG.

While the Balanced Blitz algorithm produced the results we were looking for, to do so, it required an immense amount of computational resources to output the brute-forced calculations that the balancing applied to. For the vast majority of battles which were small in size it was fine, however, it quickly scaled out of control as the troop count grew.

Unable to find a more efficient algorithm at the time, we employed the use of simple estimation techniques that could output approximations in a fraction of the time. This enabled us to extrapolate the results of smaller battles with the same troop ratio (attackers : defenders) to compute a rough estimation of large battles.

To implement this, we needed to determine a troop count threshold where the estimation algorithm would take over. For the sake of fairness and consistency in a competitive, cross-platform multiplayer game, we were limited by what the hardware in the oldest supported mobile phones could allow. Unfortunately this was determined to be at a disappointingly low 70 troops, and even fewer when you take into account special rules such as Capitals and Zombies.

It was the combination of both; a low estimation threshold and the quality of estimation techniques that lead to inaccurate results in larger battles. These inaccuracies became very evident in battles exceeding 100 troops or as little as 50 when attacking a Capital, and it only got worse as the battles became bigger.

An often experienced scenario that highlights these shortcomings is when you have a large stack of troops attacking a territory with only one troop on it. With Balanced Blitz enabled, you would expect a 10 vs 1 and 100 vs 1 to be effectively the same thing when it comes to calculating possible losses to the attacker side. However, due to the estimation method coming into play for the larger battle, it becomes possible to lose more troops than you would have, if you attacked with fewer troops.

Savvy players would use the Attack Limit slider as a workaround to this problem

The known ways to solve this would be to (a) find a more efficient Balanced Blitz algorithm that doesn’t require so much brute-force computational data, (b) drastically improve the performance of the current algorithm, and (c) improve the accuracy of the estimation method using more advanced techniques. Read ahead for more details, but we ended up going with (b) and (c) for the upcoming update.

Before diving into the details, here’s a quick rundown of the changes:

1. More accurate calculation and addressed attacker-side bias of troop losses in bigger battles*
   
2. More consistency when determining troop losses in lopsided battles**
   
3. Win chance will be displayed in all battles up to and including 1,000 vs 1,000 in size
   
4. Battles larger than 50,000 vs 50,000 will fall-back to using True Random logic

No changes to how battles play out if they are smaller in size or if you are using the True Random setting.

* Greater than 70 troops in standard battles or greater than 35 troops in battles involving dice augments (Capitals, Zombies, etc.)

** For example: the attacker will only ever lose up to two troops regardless of if the battle is 10 vs 1 or 100 vs 1

All battles referenced in this post exclude the one attack troop that remains behind. So when we say: 10 vs 10, we really mean a territory with 11 troops attacking another territory with 10 troops because one troop stays behind and doesn’t partake in the battle.

The first example shown is a relatively large 200 vs 200 standard battle with no special dice rule variations. The horizontal axis plots possible outcomes that each simulation could result in, where all the way to the left has the attacker winning with all their troops remaining - and all the way to the right has the defender winning with all their troops remaining. The vertical axis is just the frequency at which the one million simulations landed on a particular outcome for each method.

By comparing the bell-curve peaks, we can clearly see how the Old Balanced Blitz[(OBB)[/b] deviates from True Random (TR) in an undesirable way, where the attacker is favoured more than they should be. New Balanced Blitz (NBB) corrects this and is aligned perfectly with no bias in either direction.

Another point worth noting is that you can see the possible range of outcomes is smaller in NBB compared with OBB. While both guarantee the attacker will win; NBB ensures that the attacker doesn’t lose too few, or too many troops in the process. This is an effect that is greatly exacerbated in even larger battles as seen below.

While not very many Risk matches will feature battles of this size, it is still important to provide results that align with statistical expectations (especially so if a battle of this size decides the match). OBB performs appallingly in this simulation and is so attacker-favoured that it produces outcomes outside of the TR range.

NBB stays well within the bounds of what is considered a reasonable outcome while guaranteeing the win for the attacker. Interestingly, there were over 1,000 simulations that resulted in a win for the defender using TR; this is exactly the kind of statistical anomaly that is not possible with Balanced Blitz. Just need to remember that anything can happen with TR and it will show an even wider range of outcomes if we weren’t limiting it to a measly one million simulations.

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The examples used so far have been with similar sized forces, so let’s take a look at more lopsided battles and closely examine resulting troop losses. We’ll start with a 10 vs 1 where we don’t expect to see any difference between OBB and NBB because it is well below the 70 troop estimation threshold.

Because the battle is so small we can plot out all outcomes on this reverse logarithmic-scaled bar chart. (smaller bar length = more likely outcome) It’s interesting how linear the TR outcomes appear, and it shows that you really don’t need to be super unlucky to lose a 10 vs 1.

As expected, we see NBB is within the margin of error of OBB, and the only thing worth noting for the two of them is that losing more than two troops is impossible. Let’s see what happens when we increase the attacking troop count…

Quite evidently, OBB cannot be considered “balanced” at all, as it follows almost exactly with TR. What’s happening here is that there is a special-case handling for large battles (over 70 troops) with extreme troop ratios (100:1), where it fails to provide an outcome consistent with the smaller 10 vs 1. NBB on the other hand, is able to correctly maintain the same result.

The exact same behaviour can be seen when you reverse the ratio. OBB has potential to give more than expected losses on the defender side for a 1 vs 100 battle and again, NBB corrects this.

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Now, let’s take a look at how this affects Capitals! A general rule of thumb if you want a good chance at succeeding, is to not even think about attacking a capital until you have at least twice the number of troops. In this example we have a little less than double, but we get a clear view of how much a coin toss the outcome would be.

Despite OBB and NBB having a near identical overall win chance (65% compared to TR’s 59%), it is very clear that their outcome distributions differ enormously. The outcome range of OBB is comparable to even TR, however a big difference between the two is that TR shows this trending towards zero at the extremes whereas with OBB you are not that unlikely to land on a near worst/best case scenario compared to the median.

If you’re wondering why there is a dip in probability at the win-lose crossover, this is due to how rounds work in Risk battles, making it incredibly unlikely to end the battle with only one or two troops remaining on either side. This effect is reflected properly in NBB, whereas it has become unnaturally pronounced in OBB.

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That’s all the space for graphs that we can share today. Just know that we’ve got hundreds more spanning all sorts of sizes, troop ratios and dice augments and we just wanted to show the more interesting ones. If you only care about how this affects your game, you can safely stop reading here - stick around if you want to understand a bit more of the technical internal workings.

5. How is this possible now?

As previously mentioned in section (3), there are two primary factors that make New Balanced Blitz improved over the Old Balanced Blitz, and without which they would otherwise be identical.

1. Increased Estimation Threshold
• 70 ➔ 2,000 (in Standard Battles)
  
• 35 ➔ 2,000 (with Capitals and Zombies)
2. Better Estimation Techniques
• Old:Linear regression with a small sample size and edge-case handling for extreme troop ratios.
  
• New: Asymptotic regression with a large sample size, min/max bounding and no edge-case handling.

Both are related to the estimation of large battles and have nothing to do with the balancing algorithm itself.

Increased Estimation Threshold

Estimation threshold refers to the point where the troop count of a battle is so large that it is deemed too computationally expensive to calculate the probability of every outcome on older mobile devices. This was overcome by simply making it faster…

For any programmers out there you might recognize that the compute complexity didn’t exactly change as it still scales quadratically with troop count. However, the rate at which it scales is far, far slower - to the point where we could justify increasing the estimation threshold by several orders of magnitude.

CPU time doesn’t tell the full story of performance, as memory allocation played a severe limiting factor in the old version. That too saw similar levels of improvement and hopefully results in less memory pressure in those big Risk battle games.

Better Estimation Techniques

We won’t be able to go too in-depth with the new estimation techniques because there are quite a lot of steps to it, but one aspect that is shared and directly comparable with the old method is the need to derive a formula used to determine the overall win chance based on the troop ratio. (Attackers : Defenders) The old method achieved this by using linear regression on a sample set of battles below 1000 troops in size. This has been upgraded to using asymptotic regression on a sample set up to 2000 troops.

Above we have an example of a troop ratio that is favourable (9:10) and another that is unfavourable (6:7) to the old method. The reason that the linear method performs reasonably well in the 9:10 troop ratio is because the actual odds moves towards the limit faster. A 6:7 troop ratio is only very slightly in favour of the defender and so it takes a long time for the actual win percentage to get near 0%. Having far fewer samples also resulted in it having a very inaccurate calculated slope causing it to deviate quickly after a little extrapolation.

Regardless, the new method outperforms the old in both cases with lower average deviation from the actual win percentage, simply because an asymptotic curve can better fit the real form that trends to but never reached either 100% or 0%. The “squiggliness” of the line is simply due to the tested troop step size resulting in a ratio that doesn’t quite match the target 9:10 and 6:7 and so it is deriving multiple slightly different formulas per step.

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While the fact that this still requires an estimation method at all, means this could be improved in the future - at least we can say that for 99.999% of Risk battles that consist of fewer than 2,000 troops, the situation is vastly improved. And even beyond that size, it will be significantly more accurate.

A surprising amount of work went into making this a reality despite the fundamentals of it being just some dice rolling. Worth shouting out the several explorations into alternative algorithms and sheer amount of data to process which required a whole suite of custom tooling to help analyze.

So that’s about it for covering the basics of the new Balanced Blitz! If you were once burned by one of the issues in the old Balanced Blitz, we hope these changes restore your faith in the dice once again.

Over and out,

Aiken & Claire
Developers
Team RISK.

Hey everyone and welcome to Community Bulletin #30!

It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, which means there’s lots of awesome community content to catch up on. Let’s dive in!

Last month, our team rolled out Update 3.18. However, as with any big update, things don’t always go exactly as planned.

We truly appreciate everyone who reported bugs and shared feedback. Your passion helps us improve the game, and thanks to you, we were able to release two hotfixes to resolve any lingering bugs.

Read the full release notes here:

• Update 3.18
  
• Update 3.18.1
  
• Update 3.18.2

Still experiencing issues? Let us know here.[smgstudio.freshdesk.com]

We also dropped a brand-new mode: Secret Assassin. It’s sneaky, chaotic, and super fun. Learn how to play here:
Here are some of our favorite recent uploads from creators.

Creators play Secret Missions:
Vampire Chicken
Bunz:

Creators play Secret Assassin
C_Money
Acro Risk:

Creators Play Napoleon Maps
Spinseeker_Risk:[www.twitch.tv]
Ellis:
Fanti 13:
C_Money:
Puddle_Jam: [www.twitch.tv]

The Discord community has come together to create some exciting tournaments and competitions for you all to join! Join the Discord and read the #Event-announcements[discord.gg] for more details.

*These are unofficial community events and are not affiliated with Risk: Global Domination, SMG Studio or Hasbro.

Assert your nation's prowess via World Domination in the least violent manner. The Cup was earned by England in 2023 and the Americans in 2024. Who will be crowned the greatest RISK players in the world in 2025? Read more here.[www.professionalrisktakers.com]

Got an epic game moment? A hilarious betrayal? A ridiculous dice roll? Share your best RISK screenshots, vote on your favorites, and potentially win prizes!

Now it’s time for one of my favourite parts of the Bulletin…

The memes!

Can confirm, I am guilty of all of these! 🤣

This might be the first time I’ve ever seen someone call Risk a horror game. RISK: Global Domination - Horror Update coming October 31st? (I’m just kidding please don’t take it seriously 🤣)

Ok this one I may have heard of once or twice or a few hundred times before. 👀

Leave us a Risk review on Steam and let us know your thoughts!

If you’re up for a challenge, join the RISK community Discord to stay in the loop on tournaments, connect with other players, and sharpen your strategies for future conquests: Join here[discord.gg]

To stay updated on all things RISK, follow us on Facebook[www.facebook.com], Instragram[www.instagram.com], X[x.com] and
TikTok[www.tiktok.com].

What did you think of this update? Let us know down below!

See ya next time.

SMG Studio: Team Risk.

• Progressive games will no longer allow illegal combinations of cards to be traded.
  
• Capitals Mode will no longer allow players to place extra Capitals in certain conditions.
  
• Matchmaker achievement should be awarded correctly now.
  
• Fixed a bug where the wrong thumbnail occasionally showed up on some notification screens.
  
• Fixed a bug in the shop where emotes could appear to be available for purchase after buying them.
  
• Fixed a bug where some mobile users could get experience a lock when being asked to give feedback on a map.
  
• Made a number of visual adjustments to the Napoleon maps which should help with compression and readability on smaller devices.
  
• Territory cards on Asia 1800 display correctly now.
  
• Dynamic turn timers should consistently only show up in Private (Friends) games only now. Our new shorter timers should continue to be available in Public (Casual) as well as Private (Friends).

Known Issues:

• We're aware of a bug players may accessing their maps in offline mode. We're looking at a fix to roll out soon.

Over and out
SMG: Team RISK.

Last week saw the release of v3.18 and a new game mode: Secret Assassin. It’s a variant of Secret Missions mode released last year where there’s only one mission: find your target and take them out!

Secret Assassin is a fast, frantic game of double bluffing and deception where you can literally trust no one.


Nobody plays Secret Assassin to make friends

To play Secret Assassin look for it on the Modes and Modifier screen or when joining a lobby.

1. At the start of each game, each player is assigned a secret target..
   
2. Eliminate your target before any other player eliminates their target to win the game.
   
3. If your target is eliminated by another player, the game doesn’t end, instead, they become your target! Revenge is so sweet. 😈

For an example of the rules in action, check out this video on how to play RISK Secret Assassin:

Speaking of new ways to play, we released Secret Missions December last year based on the official 1993 Secret Mission ruleset.

Feedback has been positive but you’ve gotten back to us with suggestions on how to make it even better. Here’s the changes coming in 3.18:

Someone taking out your target is now just the beginning of a beautiful rivalry

1. Someone else achieving your objective doesn’t end the game: We’ve received fair criticism that someone else achieving your objective should NOT end the game. This was actually our biggest request since the release of the game mode. We’ve decided to change this rule so instead of the game ending, that player draws a fresh objective from the objective deck.

2. Balance changes for 1v1 games: Some of you pointed out Secret Missions needed better balance for 1v1 matchups and we agree. We’ve made tweaks to improve mission balance in 1v1 mode - no more turn one wins on a lucky draw!

3. New overlays help players see objectives: We’ve added clickable overlays to all Secret Missions so players can see all the possible objectives. Previously only Occupy type missions had clickable overlays. Now selecting any mission type will show you where to target.

Both Secret Missions and Secret Assassin are still in beta. Try them out, let us know what works (and what doesn’t), and help us fine-tune the game mode in 2025.

Over and out
SMG: Team RISK.

3.18 is a big release, and we had a couple of hiccups. Here’s what we’re tackling in hotfix 3.18.1:

BUGFIXES

1. Fixed an issue where phase animations could cascade if the app is backgrounded on android.
2. Fixed an issue where players could spawn too many capitals in capitals mode.
3. Fixed an issue where the draft troops animation wasn’t showing correctly.
4. The Syrian flag should now show the correct flag in user profiles

KNOWN ISSUES

These aren’t fixed yet but will be tackled next week in hotfix 3.18.2.

1. Matchmaker achievement still not triggering correctly.
2. Upon ending turn you may see a brief overlay popup. As a workaround for now, you can enable ‘Draft Troops Animations’ and ‘Phase Change Animations’ if its causing issues.

Over and out
SMG: Team RISK

A new game mode, community requested features and quality of life updates and then we’re heading back to Risk’s roots with a Napoleon themed map and cosmetics pack.

1. New Game Mode: Secret Assassin Secret Assassin mode has entered open beta! Hunt a random enemy player while you try to evade the player hunting you.
   
2. New Content: Napoleon’s Battles Map Pack & Cosmetics Featuring 4 new maps and a cosmetic pack straight from the fields of France. More on this below.

1. Turn Timers
   
   • Dynamic Turn Timers have come to risk! Dynamic Turn Timers add extra time whenever you perform an extra attack with a little more going to mobile users to help with those late game power plays. You can turn them on in the Game Modifiers screen. For now they’re optional and in private (friends) only but let us know what you think - love it, hate it, or have more suggestions. We’ll continue to visit this in 3.19.
     
   • For people wanting a faster game now these options are in, we’ve added a 30s and 45s option to the base timer - available in public (casual) and private (friends) games.
2. Secret Missions We’ve made more changes to Secret Missions since launching the game mode last year:
   
   • Someone achieving your objective doesn’t end the game Players who have their mission fulfilled outside their turn will now draw a fresh objective. Keep shooting, soldier!
     
   • Better 1v1 Balance We’ve done a sweep and rebalance of mission objectives for 1v1 games. ‘Occupy X’ missions should be better balanced now compared to the others. No more turn one wins!
     
   • New overlays All Secret Mission mission types now have interactive overlays to help you visualise your goals.
3. Map Screen Some more improvements to our new Map Screen, including:
   
   • Map Packs Tab shows all maps sorted into map packs.
     
   • Recently Purchased category has been added to the Categories screen.
     
   • Support for Mac Magic Mouse added.
     
   • Timers now display time remaining for free maps and sales.
     
   • Better filter handling on the All Maps screen.

1. Camera animations disabled for new players by default on their first MP game You can turn them back on in settings - but should result in faster games all round.
   
2. Shorter bot-out timers for disconnecting players Players have 3m now to rejoin after losing their connection (was previously 10m and prone to abuse).
   
3. Smarter automatic Territory Card trades The game will automatically offer smarter suggestions for card trades - no more suggesting to trade in an extra wild or +2 just cuz.
   
4. Confirm Capital Placement in Capitals mode Misclicking your capital placement is now a thing of the past with a new confirmation step added to the flow.

BUGFIXES & MINOR IMPROVEMENTS

1. Fixed three broken achievements: Better Luck Next Time, Matchmaker & Land Baron.
   
2. Blizzard placements should no longer be able to make games unwinnable in some Secret Missions.
   
3. Fixed some visual bugs relating to Among Us dice and Dune troops.
   
4. The Viking Conquest map pack now has correct art.
   
5. Improved optimization for the new map screen on android devices.
   
6. Push notification reminders for new users should show up more reliably - existing users may get one more reminder to turn on notifications after this update.
   
7. The shop and cosmetics screen have seem some small fixes: discount flags should show more reliably and shop content should be sorted in more meaningful orders.
   
8. Fixed broken connections on Among Us Polus.
   
9. The Syrian Flag profile badge has been updated.

Map packs will be available from Friday 21/3 . Napoleonic content will hit the shop through March so keep an eye out!

1. Napoleon’s Battles Map Pack inspired by the great battles of Napoleon and the 100 Days War. A map pack for lovers of large scale battles.

• Battle of Ligny 79 territories, 15 continents
  
• Battle of Charleroi 88 territories, 14 continents
  
• Battle for Plancenoit 79 territories, 14 continents
  
• Battle of Waterloo 97 territories, 19 continents

2. Napoleon’s Battles’ Dice

• Battle Map
  
• Wellington’s Finest
  
• L'Impérial
  
• Napoleon’s Best
  
• Fabergé Egg

3. Napoleon’s Battles’ Troops

• Napoleonic Artillery
  
• Austrian Double Eagle
  
• Russian Bear
  
• Le Coq
  
• English Lion
  
• Prussian Eagle
  
• Napoleonic Ambulance
  
• Napoleonic Infantry
  
• Napoleonic Cavalry

4. Napoleon’s Battles’ Frames

• The Von Blücher
  
• The Grand General
  
• The Saber
  
• The Marshal
  
• The Revolutionary
  
• The Legion of Honour

What do you think of the latest update? Let us know your thoughts and tell us what you’d like to see next!

Over and out
SMG: Team RISK

The Steam 2025 Spring Sale has begun which means BIG discounts for Risk.

This includes 50% off selected Map Packs and Premium. This offer lasts until March 20th!

*Only available as a Steam DLC purchase.*

Team RISK@SMG.

Hold onto your big pointy hats because v3.18 is dropping soon and it's a big one.

- New game mode: Secret Assassin
- Community requested updates: Auto-disabled camera animations, adjustments to card trades, bot-out timers, more forgiving turn timers and much more.
- Napoleon's Battles Map Pack: 4 brand new maps inspired by Napoleon's final military campaign.
- New cosmetics, UI updates, bug fixes and much more.

Team SMG@Risk.

Here’s a sneak peek for our next content update: Napoleon’s Battles.

Featuring four brand new maps inspired by the great battles of Napoleon’s final military campaign - the Hundred Days War.

The Among Us pack saw the release of some of our most popular recent maps, particularly The Airship, a big old thunderdome that clocks in at 104 territories, our largest map to date.

We saw that enthusiasm and big map fans have plenty to chew on here. With an average territory count of 86 territories per map, this is a pack for those who like to live large. The centerpiece of this pack is Waterloo - Napoleon’s greatest defeat and… maybe your greatest victory? With 97 territories to capture you couldn’t escape if you wanted to.

How much bigger can we go in future maps? There’s a functional limit to maps based on size so if we add too many regions it’s hard to tap. Let us know if you’re #teambigmap or not in the comments.


We’ve also got some fantastic dice, troops and frames coming also. Here's a first look at some of the new troops.

Expect to see this pack to arrive early March.


SMG: Team RISK.