KillerMidget said:
Wizna no, but Thermopylae yes. I see your point.
I suppose it's more the fact that I cannot control my own men once the fight begins, and I have to decide their fate via rolls of the dice. I don't like it being purely luck, whilst in those battles you must admit that a degree of skill is certainly needed.
Quite.
But just for arguments sake, in a real battle no general can really claim to have "control" over his men either. Sure we have the chain of command and radio communication, but giving orders in a battle isn't as much as controlling the men as it is giving them general instructions to follow. More often than not, the men on the battlefield have more knowledge of what's going on in their most immediate vicinity, which the general lacks, which means that the grunts will have to improvise a lot during combat. Some times the improvisations will result in groundbreaking victory, other times it might result in humiliating defeat.
The way the Greek forces deployed in the Battle of Thermopylae is a prime example of improvisation. They used the geography against the Persian invaders. While this might seem like a no brainer to most strategists ("Duh! Of course you use the geography against your opponents"), one have to remember the fact that geography and other battlefiled conditions might not always be there to be taken avantage of, it's really a skill of knowing how to find possible advantages to exploit if they're there.
So dice rolls for the men on the ground could be seen as a representation of these facts. That you as the general might be able to order them around and tell them where to move and which enemy to engage, it's still up to them to accomplish these tasks.
But as for Risk I can agree with you on the part that it's an indication of bad game design. Personally I prefer wargames with rules that are a little more advanced (like Warhammer 40.000), where they have taken the "men on the ground improv" into consideration but still made an effort to balance stats and possible dice rolls to be a bit more probable and reasonable than in Risk.