Hey guys,

Felt I'd just share my very scattered thoughts about the rollercoaster ride that was my first Subterfuge game! I'm literally writing this as I'm thinking, so apologies if it's not a pleasure to read

• Technically the game isn't over. I've got 33 hours left. I'm in second place and felt I might as well try and win it, even thought the game is long over by now. That's one anti-climax that I didn't expect... I was hoping our FINAL BATTLE would be really epic, but the game has snowballed so much now that there's literally nothing I can do to swing it.
• Probably just newbie understanding, and I'm sure I'm wrong and will figure it out eventually, but speed increasing specialists just break the game for me. The main reason I've stopped playing is that the leader has multiple Smugglers, Admirals and Helmsmen... and I just can't keep up. He's like 100% faster than me by this point, so even if I have the numbers I can't maneuver enough to stop him.
• Still related to the previous, a lot of it is probably unfortunate specialist choice on my part. Next time I will go straight for all the speed increasers, as they're so god damn strong (I'm sure THAT will end up being a very counterable strategy that I can share with you guys next time!).
• So why does speed increasing break the game and not just make it difficult? It kills the pace. I can't predict or plan anything anymore because the speed increases blow everything out of proportion. My big rival in this game can basically bring 200 dudes from across his entire territory before I can get one default speed army to a medium-distance node. It also means that I can go to sleep and find out the game is effectively over, as massive armies are traveling distances in 5-6 hours instead of 12. I liked that in Subterfuge I could leave the game alone. I want to tinker, but I don't need to tinker. It means that despite having an Intelligence Officer and a Princess near my border with my rival, I still have a blind spot that is my downfall because the distance drills can move is so vast because of the speed increases.
• Diplomacy is indeed the king, the only reason our current leader managed to get into his position is because he cleaned up after our alliance of 4v1 bullied a guy into submission A lot more betrayals will be needed next game!
• It's really hard to finish a guy off. Funny story from our game. My friend, who was my ally from the start, was killing it. He was owning this game. He said to me that he wanted to be a peacekeeper and prevent future wars (easy to say when you're winning!). We just had to kill this guy who was acting aggressive. So we had a 4v1 against this dude (2 active combatants on our side, plus 2 supporters who gifted and agreed not to invade our exposed behinds). He is STILL alive. Due to some extremely impressive military manuevers and the use of specialists, this guy (RickA, shoutout if you're reading!) managed to go all Spartan on our asses and survive our initial onslaught. Then we were scared. Our alliance was strong but our desire for war was severely reduced. If we just stuck together and committed to killing him, we could, but he was screwing all kinds of things up for my friend... so much so that he is now in 4th position! This RickA, the master general, with a single outpost and a shit ton of specialists, managed to single handedly bring down the top player. It was impressive... but I feel bad for my friend haha.
• One reason the above could happen was because of massed speed specialists.
• Having the win condition shook up a lot of stuff, as in all our alliances fractured, but we didn't have enough time to really make a good go of it. Once we all started getting mines, the leader had snowballed so hard that he was impregnable and we just didn't have enough time to ally against him. It feels like perhaps the 150 Neptunium was just too low of a target for our game. Perhaps it's too high of a target in other games, but for our one I really wish we didn't have to have this omg I gotta rush this dude with everything I have to win this game mentality.

Overall thoughts? It's a very fun game. I've loved it almost the entire time. I want to go back in and make different choices and perhaps even role play, as I feel that would be a really fun way to make it more about the journey and less about the win condition. I'm sure that in a different game, with different alliances, different numbers of players (we had 6) and different specialist choices, my worries about balance will be thwarted. It's funny how when I started the game I felt it was too slow, but now I'm at the end of the game I'm complaining about the speed!

Anyway, great job Ron, Noel, and Shane. This really is something special.

No wonder I had such a hard time!

I sent some of my thoughts on that game to Ron and Noel as well, so maybe we will see some changes due to it.

A few thoughts from this game:

• I started the game in the evening, but it didn't fill until I was asleep. I thus was a bit delayed in the initial land rush, and so I ended up with not enough factories in the early game
• I never actually interacted with RickA because we were on opposite sides of the map, and the alliances solidified early
• Diplomacy is huge - I played mostly a support role to the more powerful members of my alliance but that let me focus on one front, and after my primary enemy was eliminated I could just consolidate my drillers and mine (I probably should have risked starting this sooner)
• I won several battles I arguably shouldn't have because of sonar range - inbound attacks were too weak either because they couldn't see my defending drillers or incoming defenders
• Near the end of the game, I think I had the option to play the role of kingmaker, but as Warboys alluded, even if I had gone all-out on the leader I don't think I could have taken out his mines in time; I also wasn't interested in betrayal
• As far as feature requests, I'm hoping for some autocomplete for player and outpost names so typing is easier (but I also don't want those terms to accumulate in my own dictionary)
• I have no idea how to decide who to team up with early on, but having a shared border that you can ignore frees up drillers

For the record its 1 helmsman, 2 generals , 2 admiral, 1 smugler.
And i my army was strategicly placed to respond to attacks before i placed my first mine haha. One of my mqin thoughts of defense was to place the mine as centre as possible within my teritory and thats why it was hard to each.
Overall awsome game.

My thoughts on mobility specialists to avoid:
- speed buffs should take only the highest value and shouldnt be stacked in the fleet of 3.
- admirals global 25% buff should either be removed or balanced and not stacked (multiple admirals stacking just gives all your subs the upperhand throughout the game)

Fun note: At one point my main fleet had a spee factor of 4.3 which felt like a freaking speed boat.

Diplomacy is far more important then speed.

Speed is very useful, but I think since it still requires some level of skill and diplomacy to be effective, people undervalue it as a threat. In other words, all other things being equal, when someone gets an Admiral, they aren't treated like the much bigger threat that they are.

That said, I tend to take speed over almost overy other option when given the choice.

... and that said... with what must be close to 20 games under my belt I can say my success or failure has always hinged on 2 things. Diplomacy and my specialists.

Not which specialists I had as options, but how I adapted my strategy to fit those options was key. I've won plenty of games with no speed boost, though I have won very few where I played very defensively. The stategy is about timing... waiting for your moment. Not acting according to a self imposed schedule and making bad choices.

As for diplomacy, there is no game state that can't be overcome by diplomacy. The best diplomat can win under nearly any condition regardless of any other detail.

I do agree that diplomacy plays a major roll. In fact i belive its the primary winning factor. Movements and strategy are all secondary in my opinion. That being said having mobility specialist allows to much room To counter strategies especially when you move twice as fast. The only way to overcome an opponent with high mobility is to have matching speed or a speed that is almost as fast as them. That would eventually drive everyone to favour speed specialist as opposed to others.
That is my opinion from my experience so far. Bear in mind that its only my first game.

That RickA is like the Terminator: Just when you think you put him down, here he comes, crawling out of the flames and wreckage with his nasty metal face, comin' to grab ya. (I think I just game myself nightmares.)

Almost any player is very difficult to kill if they are at least half way good and RickA is a veteran.

Getting your whole fleet to double speed requires the investment of 8 specialists (4 navigators to promote to Admirals). It is really not possible given the randomization of specialist and the general time you have available to pull that off. Further, everyone has an equal chance of making those specialist investments. Speed is unimportant. Relative speed is is where you can gain advantage.

But it's not without risk. Heavy investment into speed means forgoing things that expand your visual borders better allowing skilled players to ambush you.

And it really can't be overstated. Diplomacy more then makes up for any specialist combination.

Right now everything is pretty well balanced. If you are finding yourself in positions you feel are unfair and unwinnable, change your strategy. I see no reason to eliminate an entire class of specialists.

draconis wrote:speed buffs should take only the highest value and shouldnt be stacked in the fleet of 3.

Apart from the Admiral, speed bonuses don't stack. If you read carefully the description, they're phrased in such a way that the specialist allows the sub to go to at a certain speed, not that it increases the existing one.

So normally, the fastest subs you can get are Smugglers (3x) or Helmsman (2x) plus a bonus or two from Admirals.

One option we're thinking for post launch is to allow people to have games that run at different speeds. So someone could make a game where everything runs at half speed and they have more time to react to things (or at 100x speed and get it over with in one afternoon).