recently I've gained a new appreciation for the assassin as well.

I can defend 2 outposts from enemy specialist invasions. I'm basically saying: if you want these outposts, you gotta beat me with drills, or sacrifice your specs!

that beings Said, my absolute favorite combo in the game is the navigator + pirate + thief with a general in the background. I like swimming around the map with a ball of death.

Navigators are necessary. They add a random aspect to attacks which can be crucial later in the game when you're trying to overpower that last outpost with 300d and every specialist your opponent has hired. Otherwise defending would be too strong.

Plus how could you screw over that big player about to win but dropping on his mine, letting him capture it, then dropping on it again -- just to ensure he doesn't win? Thanks to the navigator, such revenge tactics are possible.

roadkiehl wrote:I'd argue that the nav is a necessary part of the game. In any game, there has to be some element of unpredictability in order to give the game a different flavor each time. Most games use dice or some other RNG, but in games like Diplomacy, there's the unpredictability compounded on the immediacy of your opponents' moves to create unpredictability. The nav is the biggest aspect of Subterfuge that has unpredictability, and thus should be preserved as it is.
Why unpredictability? Because otherwise each game would begin to feel the same. Imagine Yahtzee, except that you're just given a set of numbers to construct your yahtzees or whatever. Well, then it's not a game, but a puzzle, and once you've beaten Yahtzee once, you've got no reason to come back. Or imagine Risk with no dice, where superior forces win all the time. It's far less exciting when the one soldier in Kamtchatka has no hope to kill 20 soldiers alone.

I agree with you about the nav, but I don't agree with the 'every game must have some element of RNG (or your 'unpredictability')'
There are 2 types of unpredictability which I think you're talking about: externally generated and internally generated. External unpredictability is generated by something such as die, computers, coin tosses, and other things which none of the players have control over (or should I say, have the ability to predict). Internally generated unpredictability stems from human nature (I mean, of course people are not predictable!) External factors is commonly called luck (although this isn't entirely correct). While internal factors can be thought of as skill (again, not 100% accurate) The most important thing here, is that internally generated 'unpreditability' isn't luck, its a reflection of how skilled your opponent is.

Your examples were all examples of external factors, and an example of a game where this hardly exists is chess. In chess, the only factor which may be random is whether you'll be black or white. Everything else is practically the same.

You might wonder about paper scissors rock, or some other 'luck-based' game like that. Basically, that game is full of externally generated unpredictability (which is for the most part is contained in the rules of paper scissors rock). Your mind is literally flipping a virtual '3-sided' die which influences what you will pick. The only internal factors might arise are from psychology and personal preference. For example, if you always started with rock, and I knew that, then that knowledge is part of my skill, which I can use to draw scissors. In that case, you are not flipping a virtual 3-sided die anymore, you know you will draw scissors. Recent scientific studies (you can search these up on Google) have shown that if someone wins, they will likely draw the same one, while if they lose, they will likely draw the one that beats the one they lost to. If you knew this as well, you could say that there is some skill involved in paper scissors rock, and that you can predict your opponents moves to a certain degree.

In games, different genres will have different optimum balancing ratios of both EGU and IGU. Of course, games tend to have a higher IGU ratio to EGU ratio. People tend to prefer games with a lower EGU and a reasonable IGU (for that genre). However, EGU is needed against AI's otherwise, as road has said, the game will become a puzzle (or at least, against some certain AI's, because if that AI didn't choose randomly between e.g. the top 2 choices, every game will be the same). Against humans however, EGU is arguably not needed as people will improve their own strategies to avoid defeat in the same way. Humans naturally learn from mistakes, and unless you can get an AI to do that, you'll still have to have EGU within the AI's programming.

Anyway, back to Subterfuge, I have proposed an entirely EGU free (or at least from the game mechanics point of view) version of Subterfuge. That is, 1v1, all outposts arranged in lattice formation on the surface of the torus (which is the 3D representation of the map btw, not a sphere). All specialists choices are the same per hire for both players.
However, if we are talking about navigators, they have no form of EGU whatsoever (apart from the hiring process, in which you may not be able to hire a nav/pirate at the same time that they do). Therefore, don't call it unpredictability, it should be called either 'an advantage based on the EGU of the hiring process" or "the strategy of a skilled player". If you are good enough, you'd be able to, for the most part, predict where that navigator is going to go, although you may realise that you can't do much about it because alerting your opponent to the fact that you know his plans will cause him to change them. In this case, you'd call it the former name: a disadvantage based on EGU.

So basically, what I'm saying is that the navigator is not unfair in itself, but that the reason we think it's unfair (or unpredictable) is because of unequal hires. And that's all part of the game (at least, for now).

Without EGU I think people will just hire the same specialist which leads to kind of boring games that will lead to always pick specialist and a specialist strategy meta that people will mostly go for. You will still have strong diplomats, strategist and sneaky players that will swing the games their way but that element of adapting to your base layout and specialist pick would be gone.

Most specialist give an advantage over others. You might not have an navigator but you have some other specialist that gives you some other advantage. No specialist is a immediate I win and that EGU factor lowers as days progress and people get more hires. Eventually everyone will either have the ability to hire the same hires or hire a counter.

In the game cold war where the game doesn't start until 10 specialist hires I hired a bunch of weird specialist maybe. Intel officer, hypnotist, lieut, lieut, pirate, assassin, foreman, smuggler, tinkerer, saboteur and revered elder and then finally my first navigator. Although it was kind of all the admirals that I captured or hired that won me the game :/.

yeah, i basically give up if someone has a navigator with some other specs or a lot of drillers, im not gonna wake up at 4 am to check if you change direction

This solution was suggested in the past:

ucross wrote:Navigator: Can only perform future course alterations at an outpost (once en route can't give the sub new commands)
- This is more just for convenience. Right now a smart player can hover a navigator indefinitely around with no way to take it down. It's frustrating and annoying and goes against the games general policy of "you make a move, it takes a while and you can come back later". When a navigator approaches you you kinda have be logging on every 5 minutes to check for changes and adapt to them. Using the navigator is the same. Often it's smart to make constant modifications. Both require a lot of logging on which often is quite annoying or impossible. With this new system the navigator will still have half it's strength (the fact that it's unblockable save for a pirate) and will still be able to alter course mid way for some decent juking action. However, it will be a lot less responsive so that you don't have to log on so much and it doesn't just hover indefinitely around your outpost.

I agree tw2000. And I do agree with the OP and ucross that the Navigator has been designed in a way that is contrary to the concept of the game. The entire reason it takes a week to play, and that there needs to be all this time between attacks, is so that people dont need to be online every second of the day to be competitive. The navigator creates scenarios where yes, you do need to be online at an exact moment to properly deal with it.

However, at least in my experience, it is the person with the Nav that needs to be online at an exact moment, not the defender. The defender needs to be prepared for all scenarios, because the attacking nav is the one with the chance to change their mind, not the defender. Any choice the defender makes (even in online at exactly the right time), the nav can simply alter course, wait for the counter-move to lock, then react again.

The defender has lost the power of the "reaction move" the moment the enemy nav enters the picture, and needs to understand that right away, not only once the nav is ready to hit. If you are hoping to react at the last second, you are basically hoping the Nav player is inept and hasnt scheduled the right moves, and also isnt online to react.

Now it does suck for the Nav user that he needs to be online to get max effect, but the nav user has control of when he launches and can schedule a time that he can be online, OR just not hire the nav in the first place.

rlin81 wrote:Without EGU I think people will just hire the same specialist which leads to kind of boring games that will lead to always pick specialist and a specialist strategy meta that people will mostly go for. You will still have strong diplomats, strategist and sneaky players that will swing the games their way but that element of adapting to your base layout and specialist pick would be gone.

Most specialist give an advantage over others. You might not have an navigator but you have some other specialist that gives you some other advantage. No specialist is a immediate I win and that EGU factor lowers as days progress and people get more hires. Eventually everyone will either have the ability to hire the same hires or hire a counter.

In the game cold war where the game doesn't start until 10 specialist hires I hired a bunch of weird specialist maybe. Intel officer, hypnotist, lieut, lieut, pirate, assassin, foreman, smuggler, tinkerer, saboteur and revered elder and then finally my first navigator. Although it was kind of all the admirals that I captured or hired that won me the game :/.

Well, isn't that the same as chess? Every single chess game starts out the same. And there is no EGU whatsoever. In my proposed EGU-free version of Subterfuge, there is still EGU actually, that is, the computer picks which 3 specialists the players will get to choose. But unless you have a rule dictating the rule of the specialists being chosen, so that the players can correctly predict which 3 specialists are going to be possibilities next, or you have just every specialists available on every hire (which is just crazy), you can't really eliminate that aspect of EGU. Anyway, people don't necessarily choose the same specialists, for example, I would choose smuggler over hypnotist, but I know many people who would do the opposite...
So basically it really is a test of skill, instead of maybe "oh I started out with 9 outposts, I'm probably going to lose..."
Or "Oh, the others are going to gank on me, I'm probably going to lose"
etc...

It is like chess only chess you start out with more bases and specialist so you have a bit more choices in the beginning where subterfuge is more of distribution and counter distribution in the beginning?

...I rephrase that I THINK I agree with tw. that earlier post was too long to read (thats saying a lot coming from me).

The aspect I agree with is that the nav runs counter to the concept of the game (in a bad way), but its not actually that bad.

The one aspect I find bad about it is the lack of counterplay to it. Not to the navigator himself, but the combos he has. In my last game (which will end in 3 hours) I couldnt win because I was under assault by two seperate combos, one queen's bounty and one admiral+pirate +nav with 317 drillers on board. Queens bounty is not impossible to deal with, but the other one really was painful. I had 30 outposts, a lot of production rate, but I was spread thin and couldnt gather that much at my mines, so he just drove straight to my base, didnt care that that sub was isolated in my sea, and captured my mine. I just find it fun-draining that the only combo that is capable of stopping it is another pirate+nav + martyr/double agent combo, especially when the enemy combo just appears in your sonar all of a sudden.