Wasn't able to find a feedback link on the in-game PDF, so reckon I will leave it here for LeadFootSlim

First off, its a good game but has quite a few balance issues. In my opinion the games leans way too much on the side of the players winning. After playing the game a few times with 3, 5, and 6 players we have decided that a group must really mess up pretty badly to lose the game.

1) Security Threat does not really seem to do anything. It is just too easy to manage when you reduce Threat Level by Accomplishing an Objective, eliminating a Hive, and through activating many of the Research cards. In all the games we played, the Security Threat Level never went into the Yellow zone, and once we knew how to play it never went past 4.

2) Research is way to over powered. We were able to win the game with pretty much nothing but straight labs being built from round 1. The majority of the objectives are research based and the others are battle based which can also be accomplished with nothing but research cards. This means there is little reason to build turrents or mines (we only ever had 1 mine. and turrents are created through research cards)

3) Being able to place new tiles anywhere and in any rotatable position as long as a single path is accessible makes the game very easy to streamline the bugs and bottle them for easy elimination. Our starting board looked like a sun and after that tiles were put corner to corner which ment we had a spiraling board where the mobs literally could only move in a single direction which was easily managed with both players and turrents.

4) Having the Escavator (the one that gets 1 material for every rock destroyed in their tile or an adjacent tile) go last means you start off with a ton of materials.

5) The evolution cards are just too easy to deal with.

Suggestions:

1) Make higher Security Threat levels benefit the players. The higher the threat level the more "Ability" they have. The reasoning could be "Courage under pressure" or "More focus when threatened", or whatever. This will cause the players to strategize gaining and losing their threat level instead of just keeping it down all the time. The reason for this helping the players will be needed if the other below suggestions are used cause the game will be made much harder to win and players will need help later in the game.

2) Add objectives that have nothing to do with killing or research at all. Instead have objectives that are gained only through the building of certain combos per tile, number of specific types, etc. Something that can NOT be gained through research cards.

3) Reduce the victory points awarded to objects which are only research related. And change the objectives that say "When any 2 or more of the below are discarded" to "When any 2 or more of the below are discarded on the same turn"

4) All tiles must be laid so that the long sides connect fully. (In other words no spoke layouts. Make all the tiles lay flat)

5) Create three types of evolution cards. A Stage 1 (which looks to be the current deck), a Stage 2, and a stage 3 where each stage is guaranteed to get harder. You may also wish to do this for the hazard deck as well.. where at each Evolution Card stage, the hazard cards become much tougher as well.

6) Add a timer to moves, we have found that when you have a lot of people the game can really really drag on due to certain people just taking too long to move. In fact we had two games where players left during the game cause they waited too long for their turn. (We made a house rule for this, but would probably be good to have a game rule for it as well)

7) According to the Frontliner's ability, they are able to build on a tile with bugs. This causes the research cards that allow the building of two turrents in any tile be extremely powerful as they can literally place them in the middle of a hive tile and basically whipe everything off.

8) I would remove the "building a hive eliminates 1 bug to build it" and just leave it at 3 bugs make a hive leaving 3 bugs and a hive on the tile at the end (After all, hives are done last so they won't spawn an extra bug that turn).

Anyhow.. these are some of the suggestion that the people I played with and myself came up with.

Thanks for the game! :)


PS. one more thing, the script that handles the placement of Research and Objective cards needs to be fixed. We had a couple of games where we were unable to place some of our research or objective cards because we had too many of them. Either make the table bigger or allow free placement of the cards.