by Rad80
We didn't lose much cover and managed to keep survelliance under check, but did fail or partially succeed a couple of months before August, so YMMV. We played with 4 players.The character upgrades are fine and a few are really powerful. In the beginning we only got the really few best ones and invested heavily in "the board", which pays off on everyone's turn rather than only 1/4th of the time.
- We invested early in permanent Safe Houses. In August I think we had 5 (including Washington) and they were scattered around the world to be easy to reach and in cities of varied affiliations. We still used the power to create free safe houses in almost every game.
- In the first half of the campaign we'd use 1-2 of the gray eyes each month.
- Almost every month we included the "Diversion" event in the deck (not sure about the English name - it allows to move up to 3 Incident markers) and used it to concentrate them in a single city (preferably Moskov, which can get no more red eyes and where we had a permanent safe house). Since multiple markers in the same city only yield 1 surveillance, we prevented a LOT of surveillance to be placed that way. Concentrating incident markers also reduces the chance of chain incidents, especially if the city does not have three agents and is not "in play" in the current game's threat deck.
- We often moved pawns that were in surveillance cities by having the conference planner move them away (and possibly somewhere useful) before the start of their next turn.
Changing alias is expensive. We usually had only 2 we'd use extensively and often switched rarely. In my case I'd usually spend 3 turns gaining action tokens and the switch to the conference planner, using those tokend to move people and teams around. Other players switched more often, but still about 2-3 times per game.
