Champinoman wrote:Things I learnt: Being 4 outposts ahead of the person in 2nd on day 3 is not necessarily a winning strategy

Let the 1v4 commence. lol.

Actually it was probably because a person like me was in the game, I was indeed the one who gathered the 5v1 against you as you know and that was probably because I didn't see anyone else trying to ally against the person in 1st, which has mostly led me to victory in my other games (on my other account lol)

tw2000 wrote:

Champinoman wrote:Things I learnt: Being 4 outposts ahead of the person in 2nd on day 3 is not necessarily a winning strategy

Let the 1v4 commence. lol.

Was actually going to be a 1v5 with jaykay but he was turtling...
Thing I learnt: Never wait for Champ to tell me what was going on go and find out before things go wrong.....

Turtling? I had three people hitting me...I held on as long as I could. Almost had Alts' queen. His only out was a smuggler. That was it. But his luck held out; he got his smuggler.
The only reason I got eliminated was because I worked a couple 18 hr days in a row; Alts managed to take my queen while I was catching up on sleep. I was hoping to survive until the end, but alas, that was not to be.

Game 2 was a violent game. The first mine was 10 or 11 days?

Nobody had 50 drillers to safely build a mine for a long while. I know I was down to around 120 drillers and 4 outposts at one point. It was a good game for everybody where we learned a lot.

Braxo wrote:Just finished an 2 hours ago or so.

Game 2:

1. DarkCityStrings
2. ponnithi
3. Braxo
4. Alts
5. Champinoman
6. TW2000
7. jakay077 (eliminated)
8. kspace (eliminated)
9. SempiNova (eliminated)



On a personal note, this game was a great game. Every player was very competitive and talented. I'll post up a video in a new post, a lot of strategies were used. I had to counter 3-way attacks and double Nav/Pirate subs to attempt to stay relevant and reach the final round.

Will a video of this game eventually be released?

I don't have a video of the matchup published yet, but I did publish a quick video demonstrating how I used 3 Engineers to gain drillers after each combat. I believe I also had 3 Generals during this portion of the game.

https://youtu.be/Y-knnWABY7k

Quick update without sharing anything strategic about individual players:

As sun sets a few hours before the end of day 6,

• 0 people have been eliminated or have (auto)resigned
• 1 mine has been built
• 5 people have a king

Edit, also:

• While being a "balanced" game, only 30% generators make it a very hard game. See this topic.

I blame RoadKiehl and his four king game for uptick in King usage.

During the early games, you'd only see a King used if a player is trying to stave off elimination. Now you see Kings early and often.

Yeah. It's really unfortunate to see so many kings. I tend to try a different approach and use specialists more strategic but when everyone around you has a King, you almost have no choice but to King yourself.

Several players in this game think the King is overpowered. It really completely shifts the balance of the game, more than any other specialist does. Sure, there are a few ways to respond to a King. But it's still *one* specialists, completely changing the math in this game. Just like the first mine shifts the focus.

Now some alpha testers have played way longer than I have, and participated in the balancing discussions.
And some newer players have player way more games than I had, and have had more experiences with Kings.
But I'm starting to hear more signals about the King being overpowered and the bonusses needed to be decreased a bit. If more people feel the same we could start a topic about this, gather some opinions, and send our combined views to the devs for consideration?

I think where the shift really happened was when diplomats were nerfed. The original diplomat left a lot of room for some interesting strategies and unpredictable moves but it was also a bit overpowered. Maybe the diplomat nerf moved people to see the king as more powerful.

Now we're seeing a huge advantage to the person who can land the first or second hypnotist the quickest. I don't think the King itself is overpowered but I think the disadvantage of the king is too weak mainly because it doesn't stack effectively. If for example, each king reduced driller output by 1 (similar to Minister of energy) it could balance the King out quite a bit more. Having 2 kings means producing 4/6 potential drillers at each outpost. This leaves little room for defense and also little room for quick reinforcement.

There are a lot of counters to the king, but that's assuming the non-king player has prepared and is setup positionally to counter the king; which effect is "present" on every sub. Someone can surely use a double agent against a large sub of drillers but that's a one time kill to one single sub and doesn't effect future combat. Also, the counters that are regularly effective typically require more than 2 specialists.

It's hard to say what should be done. I'm still wondering why we didn't see more kings in alpha but then again, the king description changed before release, I don't know if the actual effect changed with it. I say strengthen the downside instead of nerfing the upside.