Matt Lees has been doing a video game diary of Subterfuge, a competitive strategy game played in real time. Moving resources from place to place takes 8-16 hours, so there's plenty of lag -- you don't need to be glued to it. There's a few simple game mechanics revolving around producing resources and building armies, but the real depth comes from making and breaking truces and alliances with the other players. It sounds like it's right up our street.
Would anyone be interested in playing in a private Beex game? One of us will need to buy the £8 IAP to enable private games (I can do this.) I'd look to start it next week because I'm at a conference tomorrow and Friday. The "make a game" thing seems to suggest caps of between 2 and 10 players, so it sounds like the game scales to varying numbers of players. There's also public games but that sounds rubbish.
You'll definitely want to play through the tutorial puzzles before starting the game, there's a fair bit of non-obvious stuff.
I need to set this up, and you need to pick the number of players when you create the game. So far I have Cras, Grim..., and me. Can't help but think it'd be better with a couple more. Anyone?
(Reminder: you need to have completed at least 10 of the tutorial puzzles to join a game, and you're probably going to want to complete them all to understand how it works.)
Yeah, I'm pretty keen based on what I've seen so far. It's very much like a traditional boardgame, but played over 1+ weeks, which gives the diplomacy and wheeling-dealing aspects of the game room to breathe.
There's a marvellous bit in the video game diary I posted upthread where Matt Lees says "see, here's the thing. The game shows you who is online. I can see that four other players are online, but they're not doing any orders and they're not talking to me. So they must be talking to each other. Are they talking... about me? Are they plotting to attack me?!"
Sorry, I realise that you can see subs as they head towards you, but I thought it meant that you could see full orders, including future stuff, etc.
I am still confused about the hiring in the future thing as Specialists 5 tutorial states, "Just like orders.. orders to hire and promote specialists can be scheduled for the future"
And it id the tutorial I am stuck on as I can't seem to do it!
I'm playing a 4 player game which started on Saturday and plodded gently along until getting a little bit silly last night. At one point I'm fairly sure that 80% of drillers were all on their way to battle at the same time.