Day 1 Thoughts...

The game has been up for over 24 hours, and it appears to be working as designed.  I'm very excited.

I didn't anticipate two things.

The first thing is how difficult it would be to press into enemy territory, once battle lines are established.  I knew I wanted to have a range of difficulty levels, and make it easier to attack regions where you own some of the neighbors.  But I didn't realize that the difficulty level would still be Challenging, Difficult, or even Heroic/Legendary.  I also didn't realize how difficult it would be to try to re-capture an island if it's entirely owned by the other team.

The other thing I didn't realize was how addictive the game would be for some people.  I was astounded to see some players capturing hundreds of regions on the first day.  The high score list shows players up over 200 and 300 captures.  Pretty impressive.

I'm not allowed to submit a patch to the game for a week, but I'm considering the following:

1)  Reduce difficulty levels by one level across the board.
2)  Make ocean regions behave as friendly regions when attacking a coastline.

The idea is that the FUN part of the game is attacking and gaining regions.  I don't want to make it TOO easy, but I think it's too difficult at the moment.  I also would like to make it harder to dominate an entire island, and I like the idea of a sneak attack behind enemy territory... hence the ocean change.

I'm going to think hard about these changes over the next week, and monitor the map to see how it goes.  I don't want to make any rash decisions. 

I'd appreciate any user input, if anyone is reading this.