So, I had just realised that my 4th point in the 'Ron and Noel want your opinion' thread actually combined 2 ideas: one of a spec tree, and one of the promotion and hire times. Basically, the one about spec hire and promotion times could potentially solve practically all (if not most) balancing issues easily.

The idea would work like this: Instead of having a hire every 18 hours, and making all the hires or promotions cost 1 hire (and thus making this system extremely discrete), we could instead have the queen display how much 'hire time' you had cumulated. When hiring or promoting specs, this would mean that it would be possible to make the system of hires and promotions much more continuous.
For example, if promoting to a king, it might cost a day and a half 'hire time', which your queen would have cumulated, to promote. However if hiring 2 saboteurs, it might only cost 10 hours of 'hire time'. This way, any imbalances could be countered very easily simply by tweaking the amount of time that it takes to hire/promote that specialist. It would be as if you got 1 hire every tick, but kings cost like 216 hires and saboteurs cost like 60 hires.

(For now, to make explaining things easier, lets just say you got 1 hire every tick.)

There's also another extremely interesting idea that comes from this. I think it would be implement a new UI on game creation so that the number of hires that each spec cost could be changed. This would make for extremely interesting ESG games since we could make games in which martyrs cost 1 hire to get, or maybe a game mode in which each person got twice as many specs as you would have usually gotten (by setting each spec to half the time it originally took). It would also make the balancing phase run more smoothly as players could test out different combinations of these amounts of hires, and then report back on how the game went.

So what do you guys think?

It's smart, clever, and fairly common in other games.
I personally don't know how hard this would be to impliment, but I agree. Being able to tweAK the time needed to have a hire available would help the balance issues.
This is present in tons of games- instead of hire time it's called gold, mana, iron, crystals- resources. You trade time for resources and resources for "items, mercinaries, etc"

It would help solve the balance problem, but I think the hire system is fairly unique to subterfuge.

janitorialduties wrote:It's smart, clever, and fairly common in other games.
I personally don't know how hard this would be to impliment, but I agree. Being able to tweAK the time needed to have a hire available would help the balance issues.
This is present in tons of games- instead of hire time it's called gold, mana, iron, crystals- resources. You trade time for resources and resources for "items, mercinaries, etc"

It would help solve the balance problem, but I think the hire system is fairly unique to subterfuge.

Oh yeah lol. Well, I think it would make things a lot easier. And tbh, the hiring system is a bit inconvenient at times. And also, isn't the time used to gain resources in other games just a really sped-up version of hires? So it isn't really the udea of hires that's unique, it's the time frame. In other games it might be 1 every 10 seconds, in Subterfuge its once every 18 hours. Still, I feel like we could implement time as value to address a lot of the current problems we're having with spec balance.