Hello,
*bear with me on the long into it does become subterfuge relevant I promise or just skip ahead*
A long time ago I was bored of mobile games so I tried to research to find the best ones. During my research I found Subterfuge which I was super excited about but sad to wait and wait for alpha access for so long :p. There are so many mobile games out there and probably 98% are bad(from a "hardcore" gamer perspective). I think the Idea of mobile games has always been great but the execution has been depressing. Although there are gems out there such as Infinity Blade, I think that the mobile genres that deliver the best quality games are arcade(ex-SuperHexagon), "experience"(ex- A dark room, 80 days), and finally strategy/boardgame type(ex-Xcom, civ,outwitters, SUBTERFUGE) with honorable mention to MOBAS for getting me into LoL and card games(aka hearthstone) because although I'm not into that lots of my friends are.

So I was super happy to finally get access but kinda sad because most of my friends no longer have iphones so I can't wait for the android release. I really want the release for this game to go well because its everything I want in an ios game so I want it to be relevant. Outwitters was the last game i played that I liked was most similar to this and spent the most money on but lack other people playing it that I know made my interest fade away fast. I think the issue is as identified in the dev blog to be that this type of game appeals to a certain type of person and capturing that audience quickly can be hard.

So I think the best way to accomplish this would be use a style similar to what the game Ark Survival Evolved did a few weeks ago. Twitch is the most popular game streaming site on the internet. What the Ark devs did is open their beta by giving popular streamers access to a streamer only early access server. This is a win-win for the devs and streamers. The streamers want to entertain their audience with cool gameplay. The devs want to test their game with dedicated good videogame players that will identify bugs and create a community around the game. Streamers also like to be able to engage with their viewers and subscribers so some had a server that they played on and gave access to their viewers and some did beta key giveaways. This created so much hype around the game( My computer is not good enough to run it though :/). I think a similar approach would be good for subterfuge. If you can get the game in the hands on some streamers it would probably be great for the game. Although it wouldn't make the most entertaining stream in itself subscriber/giveaway subterfuges games could put the game in the hands of the right audience. Hearthstone obviously is also hugely popular on twitch. The game I watch on twitch and play myself is the MOBA league of legends. This is almost always the most viewed streams on twitch with top established streamers getting 10,000-30,000ish viewers a day each and the esports scene that last year pulled in over 27 millions viewers worldwide for the world finals. For normal "soloqueue" league of legends, their is downtime in-between matches especially for players on high elo. Subterfuge would make a great "queue" game that streamers can play and entertain with in-between their league of legends games which are always in high demand. A streamer would sort of act as celebrity endorsement in the gaming world.

The other thing that I wanted to weigh in on after a light reading of the recent forums is how to deal with the veterans ruining the experience for newer players. I think the best solution for this would be a leveling system similar to league of legends and Hearthstone(I think). Basically there could be exp floor gated matches such as lvl 1-3 games, lvl 4-6 games, lvl x-y games ect. There are two different styles of exp systems that I feel like would work. The simplest is play a game to get exp with more exp for winning. Another system could be a hearthstone daily/weekly missions thing or like achievements system that would be like get so much exp for hiring a certain specialist or taking someones queen. They could get more advanced like use a pirate-navigator combo or a tinkerer -security chief combo or a combo that a noob like me hasn't even seen yet that you would get so much exp for. A combination of the two could also be used. Then you pick a certain level that the ranked/elo/rated games can be started at. This also gives people a sense of value of progression and reason to keep playing the game for public matches as well as an alternative to grinding the tactical solo missions. I also think that all rated/elo/ranked matches should be match-making made so a group of people can't come into the game with an unbreakable alliance that ruins that game for others or have cheating with multiple accounts. Maybe a 2 person group would be acceptable. The problem with this is that the number of people would have to be standardized probably or at least categorized differently.

I am also red-green color blind so I have input on that. In the first game I played, I had trouble easily distinguishing red, green, and brown from each other ,but as the fog of war opened up more and after a couple of matches I can easily distinguish the colors.

The only other thing that bothers me is that sometimes the city names are a bit wacky. Are they from anywhere? It would be kinda cool to change them to major city names of the world.(hopefully they aren't already that would be embarrassing) That is one little thing that bothers me about civ beyond earth vs civ V. ( btw i love the 4x style mechanics as explained in the dev blog. My favorite part is the who is the bad guy here factor which is like the real life version of the civ denouncing/warmonger statuses.

Thanks for reading my super obnoxiously long post. I really hope this game is super successful. Hopefully some of my ideas were helpful and not just things people already said. Goodluck devs!

-atklecz

hey atklecz,

first, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts in detail, and i'm really glad you're enjoying the game! android is coming very soon, like maybe even a couple of weeks kind of soon, so you'll be able to play with your android friends in no time.

regarding streamers: subterfuge looks like a screenshot, it would make the most boring stream of all time . it's better suited to the kind of writeup that RPS did on neptune's pride, which is the main inspiration for subterfuge. check it out if you're curious: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/01 ... lete-epic/

regarding veterans ruining games for new players: most veterans don't want to play new players, it's actually more important to protect the vets from the noobs . but as a new player, i totally get you don't want to play with veterans. we don't have an explicit mechanism for that yet, but you do have two options right now:

1. if you start a game, you can boot any player you want. check out their profile, and if they have too many games under their belt, boot them.
2. start a private game so only people you invite can join. obviously, that will be easier once you can invite your android friends

regarding color blindness: we started a thread on the forums for just that. we want color blind people to list the problems they have with the game, so that when we get to the point where we address those, we know what we need to fix and can talk to you guys to make sure that our solutions actually work.

finally, outpost names, yeah, they're wacky, but they all have meaning, and eventually you won't need to type them, you'll be able to just tap the outpost and its name will be inserted into the chat text.

ron