In general, your deployments show up sequentially in the order that you place the troops. *Note, I think this may appear slightly differently in Unity when orders are lumped together, though I still think they appear in the order list in the same order.

Generally, I see a lot of people that appear to place all of their deployment orders for in-the-fog expansion first, then, whatever they have left over, they plop down on the front that is visible with the enemy.

When viewing the turn, deployments then happen in the same manner as doing attack/transfer orders, so you can then get a count of how many deployment orders the other player made, which gives you an indication of how many other armies that player is deploying behind the fog. For example, with 2 neutrals, you could assume that each deployment order that you don't see in the list of order deployments before his final deployment, you can assume he placed 2 armies. So in this example, if you didn't see 10 of his deployment orders and he plopped down 30 armies against you, you could safely assume he had at least 50 income that turn.

If the person attacks many from one, then this could increase the implied armies b/c each deployment order would take more than 2 armies to support attacking many territories from one.

This tactic does take a little extra time to count up, and the results of this don't show up in the statistic graphs.

One thing I do when deploying troops is to always plop down 1 initial army in territories that border the enemy, then make all of my expansion deployments, then with any leftovers, deploy them where I want to fight. Sometimes I eliminate the +1 that I initially put there as the deployment order placeholder if I indeed don't want to deploy there.

I feel that this at least hides any potential information about my income that the other player may derive based on when he sees me deploy.

Useful tip.
I try to hide number of deployments, but keep forgetting that.

Great advice!

Note also, that in a game with Cyclic move order, your deployments can reveal what the cycle is to your opponent. If they see your first deployment before their first deployment, they'll know you had first move on that turn and therefore know what the cycle is for the rest of the game.

For this reason, it may be useful to hide your first deployment from the opponent, if you're also hiding your first attack and if they might not know the cycle yet.

Edited 8/19/2018 17:37:04

This game is too complicated for me.

Hey Fizzer. I think it is important to realize that you don't need to see your opponents 'first deployment' in order to deduce the cycle. As long as your opponent makes at least 1 visible deployment before your last deployment you should be able to find the cycle by counting the number of deployments you have made before your opponents deployment. If you count an odd number of deployments, then you went first that turn, while an even number means that you went second. Since you can't hide the move order, I see no reason to hide your first deployment. Thus as a rule of thumb, it is better to make all deployments visible to your opponent before making any deployment that is not visible to your opponent. With the exception to this rule being, if you are intentionally trying to mislead your opponent about your income, skill level, or your expansion rate.

Edited 8/31/2018 20:24:36