Hello and welcome to this guide. This guide is for everyone who is just starting out their RISK journey and wants to win some low level matches. We will be using the following settings for this guide.



.
.
Also we will be filling all 5 remaining spots with bots, cz more kills = more fun!
[if you win the game, which you will, it means everyone else dies!]

With blizzards ON the game opens up to a lot more choke points than just Siam-Indonesian Australian choke point. I should probably tell you what choke points are, but before that you need to understand the continental bonus points.


Continents
The map is divided into 6 continents, if a player owns all the territories inside a continent, they get extra troops in the next turn. As a beginner, you want to own as many continents as possible so that you get more troops, and more troop = more chance at winning the game.

Border Fortifications
The territory on the borders of each continent, which gives you access to the adjacent continent are the most important territories and are often well guarded if a player owns the entire continent. Border Fortifications are very effective against bots and beginner level players.

Choke Points
When a continent has just one or two border territories, they can be considered as a choke point as the entire army has to funnel through that one choke point to pass to the next continent. The most famous choke point in the game is the Siam-Indonesian choke point.




As you can see, if a player gains control over the entire Australian continent, and stations their entire army at Siam, other players will have no access to the continent till they defeat that army.

Other Continents have such important border territories too, eg. South America has two- Brazil and Venezuela. (Tip: If you can't see territory names, zoom in with mouse scroll.)

As a beginner, you should aim at controlling the continents with lesser choke points first, fortifying your border territories and building your way up from there. For this reason, Australia and South America are excellent for beginners to aim for.

Unluckily for us, AIs had already started aiming for Australia but we got a decent hold on South America, remember to always group up your starting picks in 2 or 3 areas, that way,
1. you won't die if one of your areas is conquered (so don't clutter only in 1 area.)
and
2. you have territories who have got each other's back because they are close together. (so don't go for more than 3 areas or else all your picks will be far apart.)

Here is how we got our starting picks going.


.
.
Next step is to deploy your remaining army.
For this step identify your first attacks. Remember our aim is to take over Australia and South America. For this reason, I would have to conquer three territories, Brazil, Indonesia and East Aus. But if we divide our army for all three, we may lose all of them. We need to sort them in importance and concentrate on 2 of them.

Brazil is my most important target right now because
1. Conquering Brazil gives me the entire South America
2. Player at Brazil can attack each of my territories in South America

I deploy an additional 6 armies at Argentina to attack Brazil, we will also add our first deployments into this when the game starts.
And the remaining 8 in Western Australia.

This is how the first view of my game looks like.

Usually the AI will attack your territories having 1 army deployed, that is fine, because those territories are like baits so that we can use our larger armies to get back at them.

When your turn arrives, as planned, let's deploy all our new armies at Argentina and do the attack Argentina>>>Brazil.
In Australia we do the second attack, West Aus.>>>East Aus.

As expected we win both these attacks, now we have control over the entire South American Continent, we use the fortify command to send half of our remaining army to Venezuela, and just like that, we will be getting +2 extra army deployments from the next turn. We will be concentrating on Australia from the next turn.


In the next turn we deploy our army at Guinea and attack Indonesia and get back Siam which we just lost (yea, the AI attacks you too, you know), And then use the Fortify stage to send our army at East Australia to seal the Siam choke point.


This is the base map where you should aim to reach in the first 2-4 turns. After this, you will be gaining +4 armies every turn plus a bunch more for territories gained, also remember, to have these chokes reinforced if you decide to move forward, and/or get attacked on them.

Now that your starting plan is secure, you want to expand the choke points outwards, If you see the difference between our Australia and South America regions, you will notice that we have used Siam as a choke for Australia but it is outside Australia, we can do the same thing for South America, this serves multiple purposes.

1. If your choke point gets attacked and conquered, you still have the entire continent intact for the next turn.
2. Your opponents cannot conquer the entire continent without taking over the choke point.
3. It gives you extra scouting on which of the territories you can attack in the future.

So for the next turn we will be attacking Brazil>>>North Africa and Venezuela>>>Central America.


Also remember, if you have at least one winning attack per turn, you will get a card, if you have 3 or more cards, remember to click on them and check if you get any matches (the game auto-matches for you) this gives you extra armies to be deployed.

Now our plan 1 was to get Australia and South America, our next plan is to get the entire Southern Hemisphere, which means we conquer Africa next. try to build up your army at North Africa (usually after you get your first card match deployments, an then take entire Africa in one clean sweep.

The African Sweep


It goes from North Africa>>>Congo>>>South Africa>>>Madagascar>>>East Africa.

(If you did not take over South America initially you can also take the entire South America in one sweep Brazil>>>Argentina>>>Peru>>>Venezuela or vice versa, depending on where you enter from.)

The Southern Hemisphere

Now that you have control over the entire Southern Hemisphere, you will be getting +7 extra deployments each turn, remember to keep the choke points secured with army, The easiest route to the Northern Hemisphere is to take over North America, as it has three choke points, Greenland at Europe entrance, Alaska at Asian entrance and Central America which we already control, try to take over Northern America in 1-3 turns, and bolster the choke points, if you have control both of the choke points at Europe and Alaska, you can move the army at Central America forward.

Remember to use balanced blitz, the approximate rule is, try to attack armies which are half the size or less than you; and if you are unsuccessful at reaching the next choke point, use the fortify option to enhance your previous choke point to be safe.


As the game moves forward, you will have multiple chokes to take care of, remember to watch out for all of them You will have an unnecessary fight back challenge if your opponents break one of them.
But it wouldn't be the end of the world if that happens as now you have grown large enough to comeback from any situation.

Now you have grown large enough to have information about almost all the territories, aim for killing your opponent i.e. reducing the territories they control to 0. If you are on a marching spree, try not to leave opponents on one territory as someone else will kill them and get their cards.

If you have 5 or more cards, you most definitely have a match in there, just click on them.

If you kill an opponent mid-battle, and the total count of cards you have go above 4, you will get extra troops in the the middle of the march, use these troops to go even further than you planned.

Also, as already mentioned keep checking your cards and see if you get some matches and extra troops. You should now try to take over Europe and then Asia. If you are close to winning the game, use the army at your choke points to finish off the last of the opponents.

Win and feel good about yourself. Maybe increase the the difficulty level of bots and try again, or go out there and try to beat the new people who haven't read this guide yet.

This is just my second Guide on Steam, hopefully it acts as a good start for players who are just starting out.

If you have any suggestions, do let me know down in the comments, I will try implementing them.

Any questions regarding the guide or gameplay can also be asked below. I will be happy to answer them, and if there are multiple repeats, I can add them to the guide itself.

Have fun and enjoy RISK.