Scythe tips and tricks

Some notes on each faction, especially the mech/hero powers:

Saxony:

• The fact that you have no limit on the number of starts you can get from combat can actually serve as a pressure mechanism. Every fight with Saxony can potentially earn them a star and end the game in a state another player might not find desirable, this goes whether Saxony was attacker or defender. So attacking Saxony carries far more weight in the late game then people tend to assume. Corollary is that this means Saxony can be very good at bullying or disrupting other players because they might not wish to let them win, forcing them to spend a lot of military points or cards.
• Mountain Pass turns every mountain you control into a tunnel, which is very strong for both deep striking enemy territory or retreating your mechs to your own lands to defend workers.

Crimea

• Wayfare is less useful the more players there are, but Scout is an absolute joy to use and works incredibly well with Coercion

Polania:

• Meander gives you two bonuses from encounter cards, and you can use the returns of one bonus to pay for the other, which allows you to make some pretty funny combos sometimes
• Camaraderie means you can chase off workers with impunity, which is very strong in the late game, where workers are used to secure territories for the final calculations.
• Submerge turns every lake into a tunnel, it also makes you the only faction who can definitively chase Nordic mechs out of a lake, which can be a diplomatic bargaining chip

Nordic:

• Seaworthy is insanely strong, not just because it gives you free movement over lakes but because it allows you to retreat mechs or heroes to adjacent lakes, where other factions can't attack you (save Polania). This means the lakes separating the starting points from the continent are all prime spots to stage harassment attacks from, which can also serve as a means of exerting pressure on opponents, since they now suddenly have to keep the presence of your mechs in mind without being able to chase them off.
• Artillery Is so good (pay 1 military point to take off 2 off your opponents gauge) there's essentially never any reason not to do it

Rusviet

• People's Army can be a big existential threat to anyone trying to bully your workers or steal your resources.
• Due to the Factory's central location Township is actually really handy
• People tend to underestimate one thing about Relentless which is that it makes it nigh impossible to accurately predict Rusviet moves. You can no longer rely on the internal logic of the game dictating that all moves are to be followed up by a different one. However Rusviet players sometimes get so excited by this that they railroad themselves into certain objectives and become even more predictable (for example chaining movement turns to gather encounters)

I would say that one of the most important aspects of Scythe is that the game rules force you to plan several turns ahead and create favorable executions for yourself. This means that the best way to disrupt other players is often as simple as forcing them to make turns they didn't intend to make as to delay their optimized strategy or throw them off. You may already have noticed that when the opposite happens, when a player is left to their own devices for a long time, they tend to get ahead very quickly.