CONQUEST Fog of War: How Much of the Map You See

With fog of war on, you can read a territory only if you own it or it touches one you own. Everything else turns into a dark tile with a question mark.

How much that hides depends almost entirely on the table size. On the dealt board at the start of a game you can read 96% of the map at 2 players, 77% at 4 and 62% at 6. We computed that from the game's own code, and the numbers are below, map by map.

CONQUEST is a RISK-style game and is not affiliated with Hasbro, the maker of RISK. The rule described here comes from sanitize() in shared/engine.js, the function that builds each player's view.

The rule is one sentence in the code

When fog is on, the server builds a set of visible territories for each seat: every territory that seat owns, plus every territory adjacent to one of them. All other territories are sent to that player with an owner of "nobody knows" and zero armies. The map draws them dark with a question mark where the army number would be.

The setup screen describes it as "only see lands next to yours". Adjacency is the game's own adjacency list, so the authored sea links count as borders. Two things are not fogged: the manual draft, and the finished game. Once someone has won, everyone sees the whole board.

You see less as the table gets bigger

We dealt 2,000 random games for every map at every player count, took each seat's fogged view and counted the readable territories. The average over all 15 maps:

Players	You own	You can read	Hidden	A whole region in view
2	50%	96%	4%	87%
3	33%	87%	13%	65%
4	25%	77%	23%	49%
5	20%	69%	31%	37%
6	17%	62%	38%	30%

The last column counts how often a region (a continent on the World map) is entirely readable. At 6 players it is fully visible only 30% of the time, so you rarely know whether somebody is about to complete a region bonus.

On the World map in particular, a 6-player seat owns 7.0 territories on average and can read 25.2 of the 42. At 2 players it owns 21.0 and reads 40.4. The worst single view we saw at 6 players was 22% of a map.

Fog changes little at two players

The first practical result is a negative one. At 2 players you hold half the board, and half the board touches nearly all of the other half. The fog hides 4% of the map on average. If you want fog to feel like fog, it starts to bite at 4 players and is heavy at 5 and 6.

Per map, the spread is small but follows the geography. Maps with fewer neighbours per territory hide more, because there are fewer lines of sight:

Map	Territories	Avg neighbours	Readable at 2	at 4	at 6
Oceania	19	3.26	95%	72%	56%
Nordics	18	3.44	95%	74%	59%
Japan	22	3.55	95%	75%	59%
British Isles	18	3.67	97%	77%	61%
Europe	27	3.78	95%	75%	59%
World	42	3.90	96%	76%	60%
Russia	32	3.94	95%	76%	60%
North America	27	3.93	95%	76%	60%
Germany	18	4.11	97%	79%	64%
South America	18	4.11	97%	79%	64%
Africa	28	4.21	97%	78%	63%
Middle East	27	4.44	97%	80%	65%
USA	39	4.46	97%	79%	64%
Asia	30	4.47	97%	80%	65%
China	31	4.52	97%	80%	65%

Oceania, the sparsest map, is also the foggiest: 56% readable at 6 players against 65% on China, the most connected.

Fog hides what is two steps away, not what can hit you

This is the part that matters for decisions. An attack in CONQUEST has to go from one of your territories into an adjacent one. So the only enemy territories that can attack you this turn are the ones next to yours, and those are exactly the ones fog leaves visible. You also never attack blind: your target is adjacent, so you can read it.

What the fog hides is what is coming next. Three things are worth reasoning about.

1. The number you read is not the number that attacks. At the start of its turn a player receives its reinforcements: territories divided by 3, rounded down, with a minimum of 3, plus region bonuses. A card set adds more, and the card trade-in values climb from 4 armies upwards. A visible stack of 6 next to your border can be 9 or more by the time it rolls, and an attack leaves one army behind, so it throws one less than it holds.
2. Region bonuses complete out of sight. If the rest of a region is dark, you cannot see that its owner needs one more tile. The bonus is the biggest swing in the game, and fog hides the build-up to it.
3. The leader is harder to find. With 38% of the board unreadable at 6 players, a player who is quietly stacking up in the corner can pass you before you notice.

A sensible way to play it

None of this is a rule from the game. It is what follows from the numbers.

• Add 3 to every stack you read. The reinforcement minimum is 3, so a neighbour's visible army count understates what it can attack with.
• Borders are the information. Taking one more territory also lights up every tile next to it. A conquest that opens a new view is worth slightly more than the same conquest in a corner you already see.
• Check the dark tiles when a region is nearly complete. If a region is partly dark and its visible part is all one colour, assume that colour owns the rest.
• Do not play fog at 2 players for the fog. It hides 4% of the map. Play it at 4 or more, or at 3 if you want a mild version.

Bots do not play fog

The game's own FAQ answers this directly: bots use the full map state for their decisions, and they do not cheat dice or armies. The server calls botStep on the real board, not the fogged view. So fog does not make a bot guess. It makes you guess, and a game against bots with fog on is a game where the other side knows more than you do.

Medium bots and above plan around region bonuses, and Hard and God Mode also hunt for eliminations, so the extra information is put to use. The bot difficulty guide shows how each level behaves. For a fair fog game, play with friends: in the multiplayer lobby the same rule applies to every human seat.

How other games do fog

Fog of war is an old idea. Wikipedia's entry traces the word back to Clausewitz, who wrote of war's factors as "wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty", and dates the earliest video-game use to Empire in 1977.

Warzone, a separate turn-based game that we do not make, offers six fog levels. What CONQUEST does matches the one it calls Normal Fog: you see adjacent territories in full and everything else is hidden. Warzone also offers lighter levels that show owners without army counts, and CONQUEST does not. If you want more granularity than on or off, that is a point for Warzone.

To try it, tick the fog box when you set up a game against bots or create a lobby on CONQUEST, and read the rules page for the other setup options.