SUBTERFUGE Forums

Hey there.

Currently playing my first game and I really like it, got L2 right away To get a better grip of my chances of drawing a specific specialist I made some visual aids and I wanted to share them with you here.

As most of you should already know, specialist draft works by filling three drawing bags (one for each category) with three copies of each specialist and then you are presented with one of each category for each triplet. Therefore your chances of seeing a spec go down if you already hired one/two of them. They go up when other specs of the same category are hired. Here is a visual representation of the bags at the start of the game:



Use them by crossing of your hires as you make them. Doublepost coming up because image limit prevents me from explaining with an example.

An example of how to use it from my current game: so I hired two assassins, one lieutenant, two thiefs and a pirate and crossed them off on my tableau. Calculating the chance for an infiltrator works as follows: i see that three infiltrators remain in the bag, the bag consists of ten elements, 3/10 means 30% chance to draw an infiltrator next for the attack category.
Lieutenant has a 20% chance and the thief is lowest with 10%.
Next draw in this case means the one that gets generated as next preview.

First off, welcome to the forum community! We're glad you've come to enjoy the game, and we hope you'll be around and join some tournaments we put together.

This is a great way of visually representing the statistics (obviously it isnt too complicated but sometimes you don't think about it as a strategy)
Any ideas on how this can be useful for planning into the future? Because of the three-layered specialist system since there are three bags, it becomes a bit more difficult to predict, but still possible to see the probability. Still, what do you guys think this can be used for (obviously it's most important to hire for the current moment, but future investments are huge as well).

Thanks again 111011 and I hope to see you around often

Is thos actually how it works though? Because I feel like we've had conversations on this before, and it's not that simple...

Yes its supposed to work that way, at least the wiki says so.
http://subterfuge.wikia.com/wiki/Specialist_Selection

Knowing the way specialists are presented (as detailed in the Specialists section) can be very useful when making difficult choices.
Specialists are divided into three categories, Offensive, Defensive & Other. There are 5 Offensive, 7 Defensive and 8 Other Specialists.
Every time you are presented with a choice of specialists the game will offer a choice of three, one from each of these categories.

For planning into the near future if you need a specific spec it can be great. Also I have no idea whether bags actually get emptied regularly in lategame but predicting this some time ahead, maybe even work towards emptying it, could be useful. Can also predict yr neigbors options better than they do maybe.

mathwhiz9 wrote:Is thos actually how it works though? Because I feel like we've had conversations on this before, and it's not that simple...

Yeah math, I remember reading the guide and the wiki, and it did say that the mechanic is similar to three bags
There's an algorithm that randomly generates the options. What makes it more complicated than what 111011 showed is that the selections come from all three bags, and so there isnt so much predictability.
Since you could have more than one specialist available to hire from each bag (you get three hires and two are aggressive/offensive), the statistics are not as clean.
Ultimately though, if you've only hired offence specs, then you will most likely receive the other two categories. But you can predict the probability of each coming up, just based on numbers.

Also, it seems like the specs jump back into the back eventually, because you can have over 3 of one spec that you've hired yourself. I think the "card" goes back in after 1 round

coltspaesano wrote:There's an algorithm that randomly generates the options. What makes it more complicated than what 111011 showed is that the selections come from all three bags, and so there isnt so much predictability.

Never did I say that. My theory is that they are drafted in triplets, one from each bag.

Since you could have more than one specialist available to hire from each bag (you get three hires and two are aggressive/offensive), the statistics are not as clean.
Ultimately though, if you've only hired offence specs, then you will most likely receive the other two categories. But you can predict the probability of each coming up, just based on numbers.

Don't think that's possible. Read the OP again maybe?

aclonicy wrote:Also, it seems like the specs jump back into the back eventually, because you can have over 3 of one spec that you've hired yourself. I think the "card" goes back in after 1 round

So I think they dont go back into the bag. From my empiric findings they remain out of rotation until a specific bag is emptied (but the game has not gone on long enough for me to verify.. I read in Nefario's FAQ that if a specific spec gets picked it will not pe picked as next but this has yet to confirmed. Doesn't fit with my current theory, so I am doubting it for now.

My idea came from the wiki, on the specialists page it says:

Here's the process from the devs:
Each specialist is classified as attack, defense, or other
We take 3 copies of all attack specialists and put them in a "deck" and "shuffle" it
We similarly create defense and other decks
Each round we draw one specialist from each deck and present it to the player
The player selected specialist depletes the pool of specialists in the deck for the next pick, making duplicates less likely.

Theory can be disconfirmed by emptying all but two or three of the same spec in a bag. Going to keep track for now, maybe lategame I get to spend some hires to create a shortage of variety in a bag. I suppose there are records of past games in your accounts, maybe someone wants to to through their longest one again to keep track, and see how it holds up?

Wow! I really appreciate the amount of work you put into the pictures! The backgrounds are really nice, and I see that you had to put a colored outline on each icon so that you could see it better. Well done.

Although, I think that the spec you hire does in fact get 'put back into the bag' much sooner than we think. It's impossible to know how exactly it works, but one time I played a match where I would only hire offensive specs, and if I remember correctly I had 4 lieutenants before I even had 3 matches for any other offensive specialist.

zyxe wrote:It's impossible to know how exactly it works, but one time I played a match where I would only hire offensive specs, and if I remember correctly I had 4 lieutenants before I even had 3 matches for any other offensive specialist.

Can't yall look into records of a longer past game and look it up with the trackers? 'One time I played match where' doesn't quite do the trick for me...