Suggest improvements, specialis, etc

Specialist: Spartan adds 50% to any losing force during combat, up to losing by one.

Upgrades to Sparicus (ignoring him not being Spartan). Escapes with half troops to nearest base faster than any Pershing sub.

Minimum 1 troop per shield. This will make it less likely the losing target of an attack will run with all troops. It will also make it harder for an aggressor to overwhelm an opponent. May want to increase driller production limits to compensate. Say by player shield total.

Notify on arrival. Currently there are only notifications if I arrive at a place owned by someone else (triggering combat). It should be an option to receive a notification that one of your units has arrived at somewhere you own.

Notify on launch toward. Currently you only get notifications when new subs come into sonar range. If someone within sonar range launches a sub toward one of your outposts, you should be notified. Having that be a "surprise" when you next check in adds nothing to the game.

Maybe a settings screen where you can check or uncheck what you want to be notified about? I think the quantity of notifications you want would vary a lot depending on the player.

yeah, alert customization is on long list of post-launch things we want to do.

When taking another player's mine award the Np that is deducted from the player who's losing the mine to the player who has captured the mine. Intent is to encourage late game aggression.

Some things I'd like to see, but maybe it's just me:

-- Game threshold based on RESIGNATIONS - I get the new rankings and that's neat and all. Personally, I don't care if someone's a bad or unlucky player and has a low score. What I do care about is someone who has played 6 games, 1 victory, 5 resignations. Those guys aren't fun to play against.

-- Neuter resigned drillers - There are certain players who, when the going gets tough, they fire everything in one direction and quit. That nuclear option can completely decapitate another player with a move that would ONLY occur if someone was giving up. If they've quit, their drillers shouldn't be able to wipe out someone who's working hard to win.

-- Dead players stop producing - I feel like this was reality at one point, but I'm seeing it in a game now. A resigned players factory is still churning out drillers. What are they building for? They have no queen. They have no need. They should be drunk or something.

Just some thoughts/suggestions!

A few specialist suggestions...

Spartan: Sub limit is 300 regardless of energy output. In combat, your Drillers deal half their strength in damage (rounded up) before specialists participate.

TONIGHT WE DINE UNDERWATER!

Note: I was trying to think up of a good character that can rival the King. The King compensates for destroying Drillers by preventing Shields. This specialist, the Spartan, compensates for extra damage by setting the sub cap to 300, regardless of any generators or other specialists you own. At first the specialist appears to be overpowered (something better than a King, for the cost of one promotion!), however the Spartan is designed for survivability in small spaces, kind of like the Spartans in a movie we prefer to not talk about. Therefore, as territory gets larger, the Spartan becomes less and less of an option. Still, while it is designed as an early game character, even for those who have reaped the reward of high sub cap limits it is an excellent endgame character as well.

Gift-Bomb: Cannot be seen by other players. Detonates inside owner's sub six hours after being gifted - blast radius is 15% normal sonar radius. Detonation is cancelled and ownership converted if another player takes ownership of the gift bomb first.

We sell gift horse bombs too. Now available in Trojan!

Note: This one is clearly based off the Martyr. The difference here is that the gift-bomb adds a psychological element. Since no one can see a gift-bomb, only people who can see the player's Queen can know whether you have a gift-bomb or not. Making a gift-bomb work successfully on a Queen also becomes a matter of whether the enemy knows about the gift bomb or not. In other words, as a stealth Martyr it will alter the enemy's behaviour, and how it will deal with attacks from the player's border - essentially changing up how the game is played in the process.

Leper: Any outpost Leper touches becomes infected with a disease that destroys 1 Driller every hour at outposts or subs where infection occurs. The disease can be also be spread through subs travelling from infected outposts. Infected outposts with no Drillers are cured, and become neutral buildings with full shields.

There's no death like a black death.

Note: This specialist was specifically designed to make the player be as much a threat to other players as he is to himself. In return for an outpost's inability to provide friendly support in a battle, the outpost becomes infected with a disease that can pose problems to even Tycoons. Anything with disease will "blink" (disappear and reappear at half-second intervals), and clicking on the blinking sub or outpost will show "-1 Driller in 0:45 and every 1:00". The only way to prevent infection by a diseased sub is to destroy it before it arrives, and even in doing so you sacrifice your own soldiers to get rid of it. So yeah, the death thing goes a long way with this one.

Physicist: Blows up an outpost you control upon command. Blast radius is outpost's current sonar range.

Neptunium? I thought you wanted Uranium!

Okay, so this one is clearly designed as a bigger Martyr, only this one isn't built to participate in combat. So, since most outposts a player owns can see at least one other owned outpost in the vicinity, the Physicist is built to be a big bomb that would be difficult to detonate without sustaining losses of your own. 'Nuff said.

Surveyor: +1 Neptunium every 2 days for every building you have while at an outpost.

Most things can be found easily. One need only know where to look.

This one is built to be a mobile mine that bypasses sub payment for the cost of a smaller mine that can move around (albeit at the cost of potential Neptunium.) This specialist is designed not to be a replacement for an actual mine, and more something that can help grab a higher place in rankings at the last moment.

I made a thread for this, then realized it would be better here. Here's the link:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=322

Anyways, the gist of it was that there should be a way to display your orders on a friend's time machine. "Share orders" could be a valuable function for coordination (I can't tell you how many times I've asked, "And when will that sub arrive?")
I also get that this makes backstabbing trickier ("Why won't you share that order with me?"), so I also think you should be able to share fake orders.
Jasonjie, in that thread, posted a similar idea that he called "The War Room." I think that's worth checking out, too, but I won't try to paraphrase it here.