Can someone help me understand how to deal with large stacks of units in this game?

My friends and I are new players, and I've noticed our meta is players like to doomstack 10+ power onto a stronghold and just sit on it.
I'm having trouble understanding a good counterplay to this. Here's what I've read about so far:

>Lazgun + Shield combo
Awesome, but does require the one lazgun in the deck to be drawn. GReat oppourtunity, but not really a reliable strategy.

>Small strike forces, 1-3 units with a good leader, to force the stack player to either dial high, risk a high value leader, or risk losing the battle.
Sounds good at first, but I see two problems with it:
You can't assume that only their leader is at risk. Around turn 4/5 everybody has a healthy hand of treachery cards, so you're also risking your high value leader.
Because spice from killed leaders goes to the winner of the combat, even if you make them dial high on their stack, they now have a lot of spice with which to revive/ship-in troops and recover. Yes, their good leader is dead, which is bad in the long term. But this strategy of whittling down leaders could take many turns to finally have them playing only cheap leaders. Meanwhile, you might also be losing leaders. So it's a long, inefficient strategy compared to the little effort it takes to doomstack.
Losing battles also means losing the treachery cards you have, while the stack player gets to keep theirs.
Losing even small battles seems to be far too damaging in the short & long term to make small battles worth the risk; encouraging doomstacking.

>Other players gang up on them
This seems the most efficient. The emperor/spacing guild bankrolling the atreides/harks to absorb the losses of troops (remember this only keeps them on even ground with the doomstack player, who is getting spice from winning small battles).
A big army stack seems to need cooperation to dismantle.

>>95894801 (OP)
You don't play Dune to win, anon.
You play it to sabotage whoever is playing Atreides.

>>95894801 (OP)
OP cont;

The combat system seems to reward even small wins over small strategic losses, and has a snowball effect through those wins, and so encourages doomstacking.
There must be a more efficient way to discourage large stacks besides one rare card combo, or an entire table of effort?

I've not played this game, but stacks of doom are super effective in many games. In some games, the only solution is to build your own stack of doom that's even bigger. In other games, things like artillery, air support, or sabotage that can weaken units with little to no risk to themselves can be used to make the stacks more manageable.

If the ultimate solution is to make a stack of doom yourself, then the game is flawed, but they're in good company at least. In many games it's not just meta but in fact the optimal strategy.

>>95894801 (OP)
Unless you're the Guild you can't win with 10 man doom stacks alone. You can make life hell for other players but to actually win you need to take three strongholds and you've only got 20 force tokens to play with. Troops committed to the planet can't easily be moved around the board unless you're fighting over Carthag or Arakeen, there's a huge opportunity cost to dropping on the Sietches. Playing with the advanced combat rules further weakens stacks by imposing an upkeep cost. A 10 force stack costs 10 spice to play at full strength, while leaders are free.
The first expansion introduces the Tleilaxu who are pure cancer if they ally with the Guild, since you can repeatedly slather the board with forces and trivially revive them. And you don't have to actually win, just delay until you get a Guild stallout victory. But that's a problem with the expansion rather than the underlying rules.

>>95894801 (OP)
I only played once, but my experience was that a smaller force would generally inflict more than its own cost in casualties to a larger force, so you could grind down a doom stack over time especially if you have the emperor's elites or sand boys. Fortresses are very important so people fight tooth and nail for them and thats the point, but the fremen and bene jeserit can just siege/sneak you out and theres nothing you can do about it except turtle and deny yourself the spice deposits on the board.

Really the game is won by alliances, so the better question is not "how do i take this specific fortress", but "where is the weakest point i can flip to get my win-con"

>Opponent sits 10 troops on a city
>send a suicide squad of three with at least one Fedaykin in
>get all three guys back the next turn

You wanna turtle up it's going to cost you.

>>95894801 (OP)
I really like this game but the people I played with it turned insanely sweaty with it to the point they were getting pissy and blaming others if they lost, taking eons per turn, and getting way too heated during negotiations.

Has this happened to anyone else? What used to be my favorite board game turned into a headache source.

>>95894907
alot of problems in game theory are solved simply by having more stuff.

>>95895660
Nah, OP here, we're all newbies so while our turns can run a bit slow negotiations are limp as a wet noodle.

>getting pissy and blaming others if they lost
>getting way too heated during negotiations
Sounds like them just being salty bitches.

>taking eons per turn
Time to get like a 30/60/120s sand timer and using those for the phases. In my experience with tabletop this is a symptom of players just doing it because they can get away with it. Once they meet some pushback on it turns become quicker and pre-planned as they should be.

>>95894817
>sabotage Atreides player who's having the time of his life fucking with everyone else using their info
Plans within plans within plans. In other words, the usual Saturday evening.

>>95894801 (OP)
ᑐ ᑌ ᑎ ᕮ in the ᑎ ᑌ ᑐ ᕮ
aka just using wave stacks seems to be the most effective
feels like im playing pre2000 risk

>>95897831
>ᑐ ᑌ ᑎ ᕮ in the ᑎ ᑌ ᑐ ᕮ
Those who don't appreciate the moisture of their bodies do not deserve it. Wear a fucking stillsuit.

>>95897831
Also WTF we have Dunc font now? Or are those mathematical/logic symbols?

>>95897890
beep boop

>>95894801 (OP)
If they're parking a doomstack of 10+ onto a stronghold then that's half of their total forces that aren't chasing spice or pursuing other objectives. That means that they're reliant on dropping their reserve troops down on someone's head via guild shipping, which means their pursuit of more strongholds and spice is contingent on a big expenditure to bring in reserves. It's not that this doesn't make them a threat, but it means they have limited space to maneuver and they have a lot riding on their big play.

If you really have to shift that doomstack though here's what I'd be thinking depending on my faction.

>Bene Gesserit/Harkonnen/Atreides
Bene Gesserit have The Voice, Harkonnen have double the treachery cards, and the Atreides got to sneak peaks at the treachery deck. Your odds of successfully killing their leader and getting some spice and potentially shifting the battle results are pretty good even if you are committing fewer forces. Even if you lose the fight it was likely more expensive for them than it was for you, and you have a shot at winning by virtue of picking off their leader or at least recouping some of the cost.

>Fremen
If you have a cheap hero or are willing to risk a weaker leader then I'd play a suicide stack and just make them bid a lot of force to win the battle. If you're playing with the advanced rules and they have to pay to supply their forces then the cost of defending against your strike force is astronomical compared to your cost to field it. Or just commit some Fedaykin and take it.

>Guild
You laugh your way to the bank because you know you're inevitably in for a fat payday from that player when they decide that it's time to do something.

>The Emperor
Sweet talk your ally into hitting that stack with the promise that you'll bankroll his troop recovery. If that fails, well that's what Sardaukar are for.

>>95897806
Simple as

>Harkonnen are in a position to hit 10/15 potential spice blows with a thopter move from Carthag
>Atreides are in a position to hit 8/15 spice blows with a thopter move from Arakeen
>Fremen are in a position to hit 13/15 potential spice blows from their three starting positions with their special movement
>Bene Geserrit are in a position to hit 3/15 spice blows from their freebie location in the Polar Sink
>Spacing Guild is in a position to hit 1/15 spice blows from their starting location at Tuek's Sietch

How much does the location of that first spice blow tend to dictate the course of the game?

>>95894801 (OP)
>>95894821
>>95895770

A few things.

1. I assume that you're playing with only the basic rules for now and not the advanced rules. Is this correct?

2. What Stronghold is getting 10+ forces parked on them? A doom stack in Arakeen is a different animal than a doom stack in Habbanya Sietch which is different than a doom stack in Tuek's Sietch.

3. If those forces are just parked there then they aren't out collecting spice or capturing additional strongholds. Have you tried ignoring them? Or has this become a pervasive behavior with everyone turtling on a stronghold?

4. A suicide squad doesn't require a high value leader. Making your opponent bleed forces against small commando squads led by disposable commanders is entirely viable, particularly when you're the Fremen.

5. If everyone is doing this then the Harkonnen's extra traitor cards become heavily weighted. Losing 10 units in one go is a disaster.

>>95895660
>Has this happened to anyone else? What used to be my favorite board game turned into a headache source.
we played via treachery.online and the dev added a chess clock option for people who were taking too long
we also found that disallowing backchannel alliance communication sped things up, since players no longer strategized for multiple minutes over every move
both changes forced everyone to play more intuitively rather than trying to calculate probabilities and the optimal move in every situation
it's a different dynamic compared to a physical table but the basic principle is the same

>The Richese player drops a No-Field onto your troops
>Offers to tell you if the amount of troops under it is 0 in exchange for spice
Do you pay them?

>>95894817
>play Harkonnen
>ally with Emperor
>Atreides are camping Arrakeen and Carthag
>get Family Atomics
>Emperor has Weather Control

>>95898850
The econ factions usually don't care about that but the factions that start on the planet do.

>>95899286
OP here

1. Nah we were playing with the advanced faction rules, but no double spice blow or spice empowered combat.

2. The Fremen player, in an alliance with the Spacing Guild. On turn 1 he dumped all his units from reserve, used a double-movement treachery card, and marched them all over there.

3. Between him and the spacing guild they had 3/4 strongholds required to win. Admittedly, there were weaker strongholds to attack, could've waited for a better turn order, etc. So yeah, ignoring him would work I guess.

>>95903630
Seems less like the problem is the doomstack and more that the Fremen had the right combination of bullshit and a Nexus letting alliances form to grab some early advantage. Without cash flow though he was a sitting duck to someone like the Emperor or the Harkonnen once they had some good cards to play with. That said grabbing 3/4 strongholds early on is ambitious.

I notice that most people don't play with the spice empowered combat rule even if they do play with the other advanced rules. Doesn't that effectively gimp some factions and make it entirely too easy to field doomstacks?

>>95906929
>spice empowered combat
Is that where you need to pay one spice per token or your troops fight at half strength?

>>95907362
Yes.

>>95907746
Ok, then we've always played with that.

With the expansions that I can stomach (I refuse to play with Moritani and Ecaz because that level of nu-Dune sickens me) the information control game from the base expands so much that it feels like it dilutes the base factions somewhat. The Ixians feel like they step on both the Atreides and Harkonnen's toes in particular in terms of what information they get to know. Does it feel like that in practice when you run the Ixians, or does it just make all the cloak and dagger scheming more intense?

>>95906929
People don't like having to spice dial but logistics are important.