Dune Spice Wars Beginner Guide 1.0 Version

Are you looking for a guide that explains every concept of the game about advanced things, tactics, etc.? Then you are in the right place! This Dune Spice Wars Beginner Guide 1.0 Version guide is a beginner’s guide that aims to explain and explain all the information, settings, tips you need in the game. Check our guide for detailed information.

This is the guide Kolopaper it was created by. You can find the author’s link at the end of the guide.

Dune Spice Wars Beginner Guide 1.0 Version

This is a Dune Spice Wars Beginner Guide 1.0 Version, aiming to explain what is in front of you and give you the general idea of what the game offers, and how it works. Most information is pretty straight forward, but since the game doesn’t do a good job in explaining a few stuff, i am hoping this guide might shed some light in newer players. So let’s get started.

Game Modes

You have 3 game modes from which you can chooce.

• Battle of Arrakis: Your regular sandbox/skirmish experience up to 4 players.
• Kanly Duel: A 1v1 setting which is similar to Battle of Arrakis but the game is designed to be faster. It gives you more resources and is restricted to a small map.
• Conquest: A campaign-like experience where you chooce a Great House, trying to conquer the lands of Dune against other Great Houses following a series of objectives while gaining various bonuses to help you through your conquest. This is not a traditional RTS campaign, but rather a mix of sandbox and various objectives. Smugglers and Fremen are excluded from this game mode as playable factions.
• The tutorial: It gives you some early turorials to start the game.

Conquest

Pretty straightforward here, choosing Conquest will prompt you to select 1 of the 4 Great Houses. Then choose the difficulty and play.

Then as you start the game, press on the main base of your faction and choose 1 major bonus.

You select one territory which you can attack, see whatever modifiers the mission has, on the right side of your screen, decide the councilors you want to use and start your conquest.

As you can see on the top of the screen there are 2 bars. First bar indicates how long it will take for you to lose, so the longer your conquest goes, the higher the risk of losing. The second bar indicates your relationship with the Fremen. Doing secondary objectives and allying with Sietches ingame will increase the bar which can give you powerful bonuses.

On the right side, you can see your main and secondary objectives for the selected mission. Some secondary objectives give you Development Assets which you can use to gain buffs from the territories you conquer. Some other secondary objectives give you better relationship with the Fremen and some others, delay the red bar on the top, so it will prevent you from losing on the long run.

Last but not least, on the left side you can see the main objectives that you need to complete in order to win the conquest mode as well as the various bonusses that you have gained already.

Battle of Arrakis Settings

Now, starting the Battle of Arrakis mode, which is the main mode you will be playing in singleplayer and multiplayer, you choose once again your faction(Ecaz is hiding on the right, press the arrow), councilors and settings. You can also see what bonusses each faction has, on the left side.

You can choose two councilors among four of them. Two councilors are described as Easy, and two councilors are described as Hard. Easy councilors are mostly the ones that can be used passively or without much attention. Hard councilors are mostly the ones that you need to pay attention in order to make use of their ability.

As for the settings of the game you have a few choices.

• Size of the map, self explanatory
• Sandworm: You choose how fast you want the little wormies to wake up and hunt down your army or your spice harvesters.
• Storm Strength: The frequency in which the storms will appear. Storms harm your units, mostly your air units, they will reduce the production of villages and deny you from constructing new buildings in a village that is being hit.
• Locals Strength: Local sietches will attack your in various intervals, the raid size depends on this setting.
• Spice Contract: The emperor demands spice from everyone in the form of taxes. Every month you will be paying your taxes like a good conqueror that you are. This setting increases/decreases the tax accordingly.
• Then choose your Victory Conditions, your number and strength of enemy AI factions, then proceed to play.

Victory Conditions

• Domination: Destroy the enemy base. Once the base is destroyed the enemy will instantly lose everything.
• Assassination: Assassinating the enemy leader has the same effect as the domination victory. It instantly destroys everything the opponent has and loses.
• Hegemony Victory: Doing various things in game will grant you hegemony. Hover your mouse on the hegemony icon on the top right of your in game UI, and you will see the complete breakdown. Once the hegemony reaches 30.000 you will be crown victorious. As an example, whenever you capture a village you will gain hegemony, but whenever you lose a village, hegemony will drop accordingly.
• Economic Victory: After 1 month of ingame time, the CHOAM market will open up. Buying 50% of shares will grant you an economic victory.
• Political: You can vote yourself into various positions on the Landsraad Council. The highest of these positions, is the Governor of Dune. You will win 30 days after becoming Governor, if the enemy does not stop you.

  Your mission is to win the game using whatever victory condition you want. Different factions favor different conditions, but all factions can win with multiple conditions generally speaking. Hegemony Victory is the easiest victory to get overall.

• Note: Domination and Assassination work on individual enemies. If you succed in doing these, you will still need to take care of other enemies as well. Whereas Hegemony/Economy/Political wins instantly win you the game, regardless of how many enemies are alive.

UI Elements & Resources

Here i will explain everything you can see on your main UI.

• Starting on the Right Side of the UI and as shown with the picture below, we got the the hegemony score(The 11.4k number)
• In game date and game speed, which can by modified from Pause to 1, 1.2x, 1.5x and 2x speed.
• Enemy leader portraits, which you can select and open the diplomacy screen. The icon below them shows whether you are at war or at truce with each one.
• Looking further down, we have slots for the readily available operations. You can select an open spot and quick start a new operation.
• Below that we have three icons that open the Development(technology),Landsraad Council(Voting), Espionage(agents) panels and their resource production respectively.
• Knowledge is used to increase the speed of Development completion. The more developments you unlock, the slower it will go. Influence is used for extra voting power. Intel is used for various operations.
• Then you can see your harvesters, your ornithopters(aka chicken-copters in plain Greek translation) and your army size including the Command Points available along with the armory button that can be used to upgrade your army.
• Last but not least, you can see a panel for an Assassination attempt from the Harkonnen AI against me. Whenever Hegemony/Economic/Political victory condition is very close to completion from any player, a window will appear on all players, on that right side of the UI to notify you.
• Assassination panel appears only for the attacking/defending players and domination victory does not give you any special window, but instead as an enemy base is getting destroyed, you can hear a destruction sound que from anywhere on the map.

  Top sideHere we have our resources, so from left to right we got:

• Solari: Your main economy resource that is used for constructing some buildings and building/army upkeep.
• Plascrete: Your main resource for constructing buildings.
• Manpower: Your main resource for recruiting units, as well as replenishing their health when out of combat and near your villages.

  BUG: At the time of writing, there is a bug where if your manpower reaches 0 while your army is replenishing, it will stop the health regeneration while manpower remains negative. Hopefully it will be fixed soon, but if you make it 0, just move out of your village, allow the manpower to increase a bit, and then try to replenish your army.

• Fuel cells: Used for constructing mechanical units and various special buildings.
• Water: Used to increase the supply of your army and upkeep for most buildings. Supplies are used outside your territories. If they reach 0, your army will start dying fast.
• Authority: Your village capture resource.
• Landsraand Standing: Gives you more voting power and reduces choam bying price at higher level. At the lowest level the Landshraad is disappointed in you.
• Guild favor: The resource needed for building aerial units for your army.
• Notifications: Below the resources you can see all the available notifications. Red color is something sinister and bad. Gray is something neutral, and green is something awesome and positive.

  Left Side

• Starting with your own portrait and councilors. You can select your portrait in order to see your faction unique bonusses.
• Spice gathering and trading. You can see how much spice you produce in total from every source and the yellow/purple bar next to it indicates how much of that total spice you are selling for solari and keeping in stockpile simultaneously. Adjust according to your needs.
• To the far end, you can see the Choam market button which opens the Choam panel where you can buy shares to achieve your Economic Victory. It also has an Auto-Buy option which turns off automatically when your solari ends. Below that, is your imminent spice tax.
• Down bellow you can see various positive/negative stuff happening to you. Most are temporary.
• And below that again, you can see various mission that pop up through out the game. Select them, see what they are offering and decide if you want to complete them.

  Bottom Left – Villages

• On the left side of the Village UI you can see some icons and the wind strength. The first icon is the owner and the second icon, is a special icon which increases some kind of resource. In the example below, it increases plascrete production. And finally the wind strength indicates how much water you will get when constructing the appropriate building in the region.
• On the top, you can see the traits of any given village and whatever buffs/debuffs exist from various effects.
• In the middle you can see the militia slots, that are used for defending against enemies.
• On the right side, you can see all the resources your village produces and all the buildings that are already constructed and any potential building slot.

  

• Last but not least, when zooming out you can see a few toggle buttons that can make your life easier, such as seeing the Airfield range all the time.

Villages, Buildings and Bases

A few things to say about each subject, although it pretty straight forward and not a complex matter.

• Village traits: Village traits often can define how you construct your buildings, but you don’t have to follow it 100%, depending on your situation and time of the game. Still it’s a good choice to try and maximize trait bonusses as much as you realistically can, while changing a few things later in the game if needed.

  Also, some traits are global but most traits are local. The first picture shows a global parameter, and the second shows a local parameter. There is not a clear explanation in game, but more often than not, it’s self explanatory.

  

  

• Buildings in general fit into 3 categories. Economy(Yellow), Military(Red) and Statecraft(Blue). it’s pretty easy to distinguish each other.
• Base buildings/Districts: Now these are extremely important. You need to full your base with these, they are expensive but they are necessary. Your base has a variety of 1,2 and 3 building slots. Whenever you complete a full line with the same type, you get a district bonus as you can see below.

  The direction you want to take is up to you, but making sure you construct the buildings you want in a timely order, will give you some benefits faster.
  

• Special buildings: There are some special buildings that you can build in the villages, but only one of each and require cell fuels. These buildings grant you big benefits, along with a big negative. For example: 10% military power but at a higher solari upkeep for your army.

  Side Note: One of the special buildings is the nuke. All the enemies can see that you are building a nuke, and if you fire it, you will lose your landsraad standing and it will deny you Governship. It’s mostly used as a last resort option, or until they decide to buff it.

• When you defeat the militia of a village, you get 3 options. Conquer, Pillage and the Liberate option will be available if the village is owned by an enemy.
• Conquest is fast when it’s a neutral village, and slow when it’s owned by an enemy. Liberation takes the plenty of time as well.
• Pillaging gives you resources. If it’s a neutral village, it prevents the conquest from any player for some time. But it makes it harder to capture it for yourself since it will have a bigger authority requirment.

Army

Now regarding the army, since this is an introduction guide i will be doing a simple breakdown.
Each faction has a basic 7 unit army, unique to each other.

• 3 units are mechanical. 1 land unit, and 2 air units. The other 4 are non mechanical units.
• 3 Units are available from the start, the other 4 can be unlocked going forward.
• There are some special units that everyone can get with other methods. Assassins, Mercenaries, Landsraad units and Fremen/Smuggler Mercenaries from Discoveries. Some of these do not regenerate health as well.
• Manpower: It is the most important resource for your armies. Early game is very low, so you need to be very careful with it.
• Armory: You can get the armory upgrade from the development tree, which will allow you to upgrade, each of your main five units, two times at most. Beware, the upgrades cannot be removed.
• Ranged: Ranged units have a condition where they get a 50% penalty on power when attacking in melee range, so you can shut down their damage this way.
• Demolition: Explosive units have a chance of reducing enemy armor. While their basic attack is relatively low, they are extremely usefull against tanky enemies and especially against main bases which have 20 armor.
• Mechanical Units require Fuel Cells.
• All units have passive abilities, that synergize with the rest of the units. Make sure to read them and utilize them as you get more comfortable with the game. The expensive Air unit that everyone gets, also has an active ability.
• Attack-move command does not exist at the time of writing this guide, like in traditional RTS games. So you need to manage your troops better in fights in order to be effective.

Developments(Technology)

• Let’s talk about the developments. First of all, the developments will become available after you capture your first village, so don’t miss it.
• Developments are seperated into Economy(Yellow), Military(Red), Statecraft(Blue) and General(Green).
• It’s up to you on how to progress your develpoments, if you are unsure of what to choose usually taking the first yellow/green/blue techs and then focusing heavy on economy will make your game. There are a lot of things you can do with each faction and the development order, so as you become more comfortable with the game, you can find better combinations for yourself.
• Water filtration is a very nice upgrade that gives you the proper water building. If you are struggling a lot with water in early game, you might want to take it early. Becoming more accustomed to the game, will solve your early water problem without the Water Filtration, so you can focus on other things.
• Every faction has some unique developments, these are indicated by the faction icon on top of the development. There are some crucial differences among each faction.
• The more developments you unlock, the slower they become. So in a normal game you will not be able to take all developments. You could take on average around 75% of them, depending on the game, so plan accordingly. Increasing your knowledge will make them go faster.
• You can queue up to 4 developments each time, so you don’t have to open the panel all the time.

  

Game Flow

Different factions have different strengths and weaknesses, so a lot of details will change your ingame experience, but the overall idea of the game flow is similar when starting a game. When you get more comfortable with the game, you can approach your game plan differently depending on your faction and skill.

Since the game does not offer good explanation for many stuff, some people might find it difficult to understand how to progress the game correctly. So first, let’s explain how the basic game flow should look like.

• Starting the game you will be greeted by your base with an ornithopter. Your first priority is to recruit a couple of units, scout the spice field in order to capture it and construct the spice building. There will always be a spice field next to your base, and the icon is visible even in fog of war.
• Don’t forget to set your Gold/Spice ratio on the top left, you don’t want to miss out on your taxes. I usually put it one notch under the middle and change it after depending on the game. More Spice fields = More Taxes
• The spice is your most important factor for your economy, especially in the early game. Later in the game, you will be gaining a lot of solari from other sources as well, so it becomes less important, but it it still important enough to ruin your economy if your enemies take your spice fields.
• SIde note: The fremen do not have a spice building, instead when they capture their first village, they need to train a harvester unit from the right side of your UI. Then send it directly to the spice. They can also get spice from any free spice in the map, even when the village is not captured.
• As soon as you capture your first village, the development screen will become available, so don’t miss out. Depending on the faction, usually the first 2-3 developments you get are from Economy/Green tree. You can experiment and find out what works better for you, as you improve later on. Your development order can change drastically depending on your goals. At first when learning the game, focus on the economy so you don’t go negative.
• You will also be able to capture 1-2 more villages very fast, so scout the areas around your base and capture what you want. There will be some special regions that give you something extra. Additional plascrete for example, is a good way to start if it exists next to your base.
• Authority is needed to capture more territory and it accumulates very slowly. So the actual expansion in this game, is rather restricted and it will be hard to move around the map in long distances. Still, using an ornithopter manually you can find your 2nd spice field and take it as your 4th-5th territory in order to keep your economy alive easier. Water should be running low at this point, so be mindful.
• After a while, your first agent will become available so you need to put him at work. Preferably the first slot should be the Arrakis slot, which gives you Authority. After that, you can decide what agent to put where.
• Your first tax should be payed by now, and if you have 3 villages already, it will give you enough Hegemony to unlock the main base buildings.
• The choam market should be opening up as well, so you can start buying some shares while they are cheap if you wish. Although early gold is very important for constructing base buildings, so don’t overcommit to the market yet.
• The first council will be coming up as well, so you better start voting. First you get a preview of the choices, where some factions can use their abilities. Then the various choices will become available for voting, and once completed the effects will take place.

  This is basically the first month of the game, after that you will be doing more of the same on top of fighting your enemies until the game is finished.

• Discoveries: There are a lot of ? spots on the map, make sure you have a few ornithopters for scouting. They hold important resources for you to pick up, and can scan your potential villages. Manual scouting is good for some occasions, but auto scouting works well for a lot of the information too.

So going forward with the game, you need to do multiple things at the same time. Expand, construct buildings, recruit armies, upgrade armies, scout, vote, fight enemies or check the various winning conditions to see if other players are winning in something.

The flow of the game depends on how everyone is playing, but you decide what you will be doing for your gameplay. Start slowly and when you get more comfortable, you can speed things up.

If for some reason you can’t decide how to proceed in the game, just make sure no resource is in the red. It’s the most basic thing you can do, everything else will fall in place with experience.

Your economy can turn red really quick if you don’t watch out. Constructing a lot of buildings very fast or training lots of units, will make you regret the decision. So even if you have enough resources to do stuff, you need to keep an eye on your Solari. Some buildings have a lot of Solari upkeep as well, so don’t overdo it from the early game.

You will also need at some point, to decide what your victory condition will be. Hegemony is the easiest overall, but against the AI everything can work relatively easy. Playing multiplayer on the other hand, needs a lot more work in every field.

For the most part, currently there is no 100% meta which means you are free to experiment a lot. There are some meta stuff of course, but multiplayer games are very dynamic on the FFA setting, so don’t be scared to play the way you want to.

Tip: If you stay too passive on mid-late game, it might be too late to prevent the winning player, from winning. So as i said above, don’t forget to check how your enemies are doing, in order to start planning some action.

Espionage

The espionage is pretty straight forward to use and understand. Agents come, agents work, you benefit.

• Time gives you agents, you can increase it via developments and random village traits.
• Agents can be equipped in some beneficial slots to work their magic. Each slot gives different beneftis, such as Intel, Infulence, Solari, Manpower and Authority.
• Left side: You can put agents on your enemies, in order to gain more information about them and to assassinate them. Gaining higher information level, can reveal important information which again you can see on the left side. Information such as, Command Points being used, captured villages, councilors and many more.
• Top: On the top, you have the unused agents and your counter intelligence. Counter intelligence is needed for better protection against assassination and potentially capturing enemy agents put on you.
• Middle: In the middle you can see various slots which can be used by your agents, in order to give you some resources and allow you to use operations.
• Right side: Operations available. Increasing the middle slots will allow you to use the operations using intel and solari. You can see the matching icons. Readily available operations can be seen/used from the upper right corner of your UI.
• The more agents you have, the slower the next agent will come work for you.
• There are various tooltips that you can hover your mouse over and get some details.

  

Sietches

Let’s talk sietches. They are the native fremen who are probably mad at you for harvesting the spice. Pretty canon if you ask me. But if you are a good enough gentleman, you can ally with them and get some benefits.

• Sietch raids are happening every once in a while, generally speaking they are pretty easy to deal with. Make sure you have some militia in your villages, and all is good.
• They can be attacked, but their militia is decent enough so you can’t do it in the early game.
• In order to find the sietches, you need to find some discoveries on the map that have the option to locate them. The alternative, is to use Probe operation which searches an area, and it can find them if they exist in that area.
• Once you find them, you can press a big icon to give them 4 water in exchange for whatever they are offering. Some examples are spice, knowledge or solari. There are various rewards.

  

• After a while, they will become friendlier and will stop attacking you. When their friendliness reaches 100, you can put an agent to validate the friendship and get an additional bonus, as shown on the picture below. In order to actually put the agent and ally with them, you also need to have the territory captured. There are a couple of exceptions on this rule, depending on the faction.

  

• There are various random bonusses, so you can decide if you want to ally with them or not.
• That’s pretty much it.

Assassination Guide

Here i will explain how assassination works. It’s probably the most confusing mechanic for a new player. It’s not hard to realise the assassination tactic, but it’s not explained very well in the game. TLDR part will come first because it will make the explanation easier to follow.

• TLDR: Basically you need 3 agents on the enemy, 1 agent on each middle slot(4 in total), 2 infiltration cells(you can put a 3rd cell if you unlock it from the blue developments, but it’s not necessary), you launch assassination, keep sending assassins to the cells to speed it up, and kill any unit that tries to remove the cells. If at least 1 cell survives and the assassination bar reaches 100%, it is done.
• Assassination-Attacking Side
• Put an agent in the enemy. When information level reaches 1, an operation named Infiltration Cell will be unlocked. Use that to put a cell in an enemy village you wish you assassinate. A small icon next to the name of the village will appear, marking it with the cell.
• At this point the second slot of the agent on the enemy will be unlocked. Information level will rise to level 2. Then the second Infiltration Cell will be unlocked, same as above.
• At this point, the third agent slot on the enemy will be unlocked. Put the final agent, and the information will rise to level 3. If you have unlocked the last Infiltration Cell via the technologies, it will give you the option to place it as well. During the Assassination you will not be able to place more Infiltration cells.
• At this point, the assassination operation should be unlocked and you will be able to start it.

  

• Having completed everything from above, you can initiate the assassination(finally) from the operation slots. At first it will be undetected, but later on, it will be detected by your enemy. On the picture below, you can see various information in the assassination panel, but you need two very important things to consider in order to actually assassinate your mortal nemesis.
• Progression Bar

  This is the main bar which will complete the assassination once it reaches 100%.

• Progression Factor.

  This is the speed at which the progress bar increases. It decays over time so you need to reset it back to 100% speed, as much as you can. The better you do this, the faster you will assassinate the enemy. In order to complete this, you need to train and send assassin units to an enemy village with the infiltration cells you put earlier. You cannot complete the assassination if you don’t do this.
  So basically Assassin -> Cell -> Faster Assassination

  You can train up to 1 assassin at a time, but there is a voting option which randomly comes up on the council, which can give you 3 extra assassins as well.

• Side note: You need a lot of intel to initiate the assassination and to pay the upkeep for the duration, so make sure you are producing plenty of it.

  

• Assassination – Defending Side

  Now on the opposite side, there are a few things you need to take care in order to defend against your assassination attempt.

• The assassination attempt will be detected at some point, the more agents you have on counter intelligence, the faster it will be.
• Agents on counter intelligence have a daily chance of taking enemy agents as hostages. This means that the assassination will progress slower as well. Although the attacking side can put more agents from other fields to cover the vacancy.
• As soon as the assassination is detected, you will get a cheap operation named Cell Search. Use this operation, targeting one of your villages in order to find the cells. This operation will detect up to 1 range away from your village. So you need to use it on multiple locations through out your empire in order to find everything.
• Once the Cell Search is used, you will see some villages with a magnifying glass icon on top of them, as shown in the picture. Use 1 army unit to manually search and remove the cell from the village. If you remove all cells, you will stop the assassination.

  

   

• Side Note: On the contrary, the attacking side will need to kill your army in order to deny you the search. So in order to successfully assassinate enemies, you also need a superior military.

Landsraad

In this final section, we will cover some basic information for the political side of Dune. The landsraad is a council where all the players can vote for various outcomes.

• Voting basically comes up once per month, it gives you 3 options to choose from. Every benefit/negative lasts until the next council session.
• On the top you can see various council positions, which give you great benefits but in order to be eligible, you need to complete some prerequisites. Hover the mouse over each to see the details.
• All the players can interact with the voting process.
• Votes + Infulence are the numbers you use in order to actually vote. The numbers indicate your voting power and can be seen for all players on the right side of the panel, with their corresponding icons.
• There are some votes from minor houses that are basically an RNG system to make you mad or happy, depending on the outcome. If you have enough voting power, the minor houses don’t matter that much, but they do play a role in many outcomes.
• Below the votes you can see the previous voting session that is still active.

  

• Some factions have some abilities that can be used to interact with the voting process. These abilities are as followed:

  Smugglers Bounty = Gives solari to the players who vote on the bounty.

  Corrino Imperial Edict = Changes the scope of the resolution. Single Player -> All Players and vise versa.

  Harkonnen Corruption = The enemy who gets the resolution of the vote, will lose Landsraad Standing. It needs a certain councilor to work, which you choose before starting the game.

Random Tips

• Putting an ornithopter on your harvester, will make it safer from the worm and increase the spice production a bit.
• The game offers tools for gaining a lot of information from your enemies. The diplomacy screen can reveal a lot of stuff. When you put agents in the enemy and the information level rises, you can see some extra information on the left side of the agents and the ornithopters can reveal a lot about what is going on at the map. You can use it to decide your offensive or defensive actions.
• On the agents panel, the operations are categorized as Easy/Normal/Hard. The higher the difficutly, the higher the risk. There is a small tooltip that shows you the exact numbers of the difficulties.
• Truce is not alliance. It can be broken with infuence. There are a few effects that don’t allow you to break the truce for some days though. The game is still FFA, so don’t expect eternal allies when playing multiplayer. The goal of each individual is to win at the end. Backstabbing or 2v1 is a natural and sometimes unpleasant process of the game.
• Breaking the truce with military action, and not your infuence, you will get a traitor debuff for a while, which will give the enemy an important military advantage against you and will redeuce your spice to solari exchange at 50%.
• Sietches will stop attacking you when pillaged. They also give a lot of resources so don’t feel bad about them, they had it coming.
• Renegades, were designed as an end game crysis but were nerfed quite a bit from their release. They show up unannounced and take over neutral villages only. After that, it’s the same as the sietches. Destroy them to stop harrassing you, while gaining plenty of resources. On the other hand, their raids can target all nearby players, so sometimes you could let them live if you have strong militia.
• If you want to play Multiplayer at some point, you need to get used to the 1.5x speed and not pausing all the time.
• This is the most important tip you need to remember if you play MP. Do not be afraid of taking action, just because someone looks strong, it doesn’t mean he will kneel you to submission just by thinking about it. It will happen, but not everytime. You need to keep an eye on enemy victory conditions, more often than not, i see players that do not act fast enough when someone is winning, so they end up losing while being “AFK” for a long time. If you see the winning notification from the enemy, sometimes, it’s already too late or you have barely enough time to counter it. Most common victory is Hegemony, and some factions can boost very fast.
• If you are being assassinated and reach to a point where the enemy does not allow you to remove the cells by searching, then you can simply abandon your village. It will remove the cell, and potentially stop the assassination. You still lose a village, so it hurts, but its better than losing the game. Also, if the attacking force is occupying the village, you cannot abandon it because the enemy is interacting with the village.