We examine the effects of gas expulsion on initially substructured distributions of stars. We perform N-body simulations of the evolution of these distributions in a static background potential to mimic the gas. We remove the static potential instantaneously to model gas expulsion. We find that the exact dynamical state of the cluster plays a very strong role in affecting a cluster's survival, especially at early times: they may be entirely destroyed or only weakly affected. We show that knowing both detailed dynamics and relative star-gas distributions can provide a good estimate of the post-gas expulsion state of the cluster, but even knowing these is not an absolute way of determining the survival or otherwise of the cluster.