Swing Die Strategy

Setting your swing dice (or picking reserve dice, or setting option dice -- we'll call them all "swing dice" for now) is one of the first and most important parts of Button Men strategy. This page has some tips.

Background
Here are some background concepts that are important to understand before you can figure out what you're doing with your swing dice.

How to win
One important thing to realize is that you don't have to capture all of your opponent's dice to win; you have to have more points than your opponent at the end of the round. A lot of the time, if you capture all of your opponent's dice, you'll end the round with more points than them... But not always.

Sides
The winner of a round is ultimately determined by who has the most points, but during play, it's often more useful to think in terms of sides, i.e. how many sides of dice you need to capture (or avoid getting captured) in order to win. This gets a little tricky with dice that alter the point-value of captured dice, like Value and Null, but for basic purposes, it's good enough. It's also easy to compute: If you capture a plain eight-sided die, you go up by eight sides.

The Buttonweavers interface shows the current status right in the gameplay area, next to your score, where it says "Score: 52 (+1.3 sides)" or whatever. That "+1.3 sides" tells you that (a) if the game ended right now, you'd win; and (b) for your opponent to win, they need to capture 1.3 sides more of your dice than you need to capture of their dice. We'll call this number "your position" below, i.e. your position in that example is that you're +1.3.

Keeping track of this number is crucial. The most important thing you should know during a round is how many sides you need to be ahead by, at the end of the game, in order to win, because it tells you which of your opponent's dice you need to capture and which of your dice you need to protect. If you're up by +4.3 sides, and you have only 12 sides worth of dice left, all you have to do is capture 8 more sides from your opponent, and you've won the game. You can completely ignore otherwise-dangerous dice as long as you get your eight sides. (And vice versa, this sort of thing tells you which of your dice you need to worry about trying to stop your opponent from capturing.)

Swing
Ok, great, but what does this have to do with swing dice?

A minus B, times two over three
It informs the most important formula in all of Button Men:

(A - B) * 2/3

This is what tells you at the start of the round how many sides you need to be ahead by at the end of the round in order to win, where A is your total number of sides, and B is your opponent's number of sides.

(The derivation of the formula: When you capture an N-sided die (improving your position by +N), it increases your score by N, and reduces your opponent's score by N/2, so capturing an N-sided die changes the score differential by N * 3/2; or, the other way around, if you want to change the score differential by M, you need to capture an M * 2/3 sided die.)

This is the thing you need to know.

Complications
...but there are a couple of complications.

Poison
When you're adding up your dice to get A and B, Poison dice count as half their number of sides, and negative, because they have the same differential when they're captured, but they count differently for your starting score (an N-sided regular die is worth +N/2 points to your starting score, an N-sided Poison die is worth -N points). During the game, in terms of their effect on your position if captured, you count them just the same (but negative); but at the start, for A and B calculations, they're negative one half.

Null
Null dice are worth no points whether you keep them or capture them, so you don't count them at all for (A-B)*2/3. During the game, if you capture an opponent's N-sided die with a Null die, that only changes your position by +N/3 sides, because they lose the N/2 points, but you don't gain the N points. Conversely, if you capture an opponent's Poison N-sided die with a Null die, that changes your position by -N*2/3 sides, because the opponent gains the N points but you don't lose the N/2 points.

Dice that change size
Any die whose size might change during the game is a little hard to figure, but at any given time, at least, you know how big it is.

Value
Value dice are just complicated. Capturing Value dice isn't so hard, because if you capture a Value die of size N showing V, it's exactly as if you had captured a V-sided die, because it was worth V/2 points to your opponent, and is now worth V points to you, regardless of what N is. If you use a Value die to capture a regular die of size N showing V, though, that's worth V points to you, but it was worth N/2 points to your opponent, so the effect on your position is 2/3 of V plus 1/3 of N.

Both players ending with dice remaining
Often what you're going to use this for (see below) is to figure out "if my opponent or I capture all of the other's dice, what dice will we need to have remaining in order to win". What if both players might end up with dice remaining? (e.g. if either or both of you have Shadow dice, Stealth dice, or any other die type that can't make Power Attacks) That's actually not complicated at all, because what you're really trying to figure out is "how many more sides than my opponent do I need to still have left at the end of the game in order to win". That's easier if one of you has none, but it's not much harder if both of you have some.

Application
Ok, so how do you apply this when setting swing die sizes? If you know your opponent's total number of sides, you can use (A-B)*2/3 to figure out what you'll need to do during the game if you set your swing dice in certain ways.

For example, say your opponent has [4 6 8 10 12], a total of 40 sides. If you have [4 6 8 10 Z], you can have anywhere from 32 - 58 sides. So, you could:


 * Set Z = 4, at which point (A-B)*2/3 = (32-40)*2/3 = -8*2/3 = -5.33 -- so you can win the game even if you're behind by 5.33 sides at the end of the game. In this case, that means that your opponent can't win by capturing all of your dice and keeping only their four-sider.


 * Set Z = 12, at which point (A-B)*2/3 = 0, so either player will win the game if they capture all their opponent's dice, and have any die remaining.


 * Set Z = anything from 7 - 17, which has exactly the same effect, because that (A-B)*2/3 range is -3.33 - +3.33. If you pick Z = 7, you'll have a better chance of getting initiative. If you pick Z = 17, you'll have more power. Which you prefer is a matter of personal taste, and/or somewhat dependent on the other dice -- for example, if the other dice are such that you're not at all likely to get initiative anyway, perhaps you'd conclude that you might as well go for power.


 * Set Z = 18, at which point (A-B)*2/3 = +4, meaning that you'll tie if you capture all of your opponent's dice and keep only your four-sider, or win if you keep anything else. For simplicity's sake, let's say you don't want to tie, and we'll skip over those options for the rest of these examples.


 * Set Z = 19 or 20, i.e. (A-B)*2/3 of +4.66 or +5.33, both of which mean you can win as long as you keep any die other than your four-sider.


 * Set Z = 22 or 23, i.e. (A-B)*2/3 of of +6.66 or +7.33, which mean you can win as long as you keep at least eight sides more than your opponent (e.g. any one of your three bigger dice, or both of your two smaller dice).


 * Set Z = 25 or 26, i.e. (A-B)*2/3 = 8.66 or 9.33, so now you need either one of your two bigger dice, or any pair of your three smaller dice.


 * Set Z = 28 or 29, i.e. (A-B)*2/3 = 10.66 or 11.33, so now you need either the big die, or any pair of your other dice except the smallest two.

So there's a lot of options here! What should you do? That's largely a matter of personal taste; the important thing is that you should know what you're doing, so that if it doesn't seem to be working (or doesn't seem to be fun for you, or whatever), you can start doing something else. I (irilyth undefined) personally tend to like big dice, but I also like to be able to win by keeping any one of my dice, so I might go for Z = 17, the biggest die that still lets me win with just the four-sider. Sometimes it depends on how many dice you have -- [4 12] vs [4 Z] is very different from [4 4 6 6 8 10 12] vs [4 4 6 6 8 10 Z], even though both are a -5.33 - +12.0 range.