(Apparently its related to Neptune's Pride in some way I think players of that game got free entry to this or something).
I'll summarise some points I've scratched together in my mind that weren't immediately obvious:
Game is free, but to unlock serious play is $10
Non-serious play means
- can't schedule moves ahead of time
- can't play in ranked games
- can't play more than one game at a time
Players might be on Android or IOS.
The game commentary/share feature is IOS only right now.
The beginning tutorial is divided into easy medium and hard. Completing all the easy scenarios takes just 5 minutes and is really a guide to the user interface. Then you can start a public game. You can go back and complete the medium and hard scenarios for practice.
Picking a public game might show only one game available and taking players but seats fill up really quickly and then you are left in a 4 hour countdown mode where you can chat to other players and perhaps propose alliances.
At first I though - oh its in space - but of course duh its SUB terfuge so its underwater. Not that it matters as you an think of it as a space invasion game.
The world is a virtual globe expressed as a flat map so there are no map edges. Everyone is surrounded. There is fog of war.
If you plan and input your moves before the game starts, you show your intentions early and the other players can act accordingly. Once the game starts your first moves are set. All you can do is turn a losing "invasion" into a "gift". So I recommend not doing that. And not starting a game that you won't be around 4 hours later for. First moves seem fairly important, to put it mildly!
Most of the complexity/depth of the game revolves around the specialists and the promotions to specialists. The right specialist turns a losing strategy to a winning one.
The game appears to eat batteries at the moment, developer knows this and I hope it is high priority to fix because it isn't gpu or cpu intensive.
The clock idea is great. Winding back or forward time to see the results of the current state of play or look back at what happened while you were offline is super easy. The youtube commentary uses that to comment out a week long game but while playing you're always moving the time forward and back to see what is due where, when, so you can predict battles and modify strategies.
