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dwarf74 posted:I'm glad this thread exists! It's not a video, but I just started a screenshot Let's Play with strategy commentary. I'm starting out at the introductory difficulty which may or may not be beneath you, but I do plan on tackling harder difficulties as well which should hopefully help some.
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Mar 28, 2023 20:14
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It depends. If the base game blight flips really early it's usually very bad news. Some spirits don't particularly mind the presence loss though, and even if they do it usually takes a few turns for it to become noticeable. They're very rough for Heart of the Wildfire IMO, because you easily flip the blight card + have bad presence placement + really want presence + it's prohibitively expensive to replace presence where you used to have it. For most spirits I find that the risk from blighted island events is worse than what the base game blight cards do. In my book the worst blight cards are the 3-blight cards from B&C. They're nominally supposed to be a mixed bag but the benefits get really inconsequential at higher levels while the penalties can still hurt you, and then you get left with a pretty thin safety net. I would happily take the base game blight cards 9 times out of 10.
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Apr 1, 2023 04:18
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1secondpersecond posted:I play a lot of SI, usually around difficulty 5-7. Can anybody help me not hate BoDAN? I love spirits with serious tradeoffs, like Wildfire and Ocean, and special abilities that change the game completely, like Downpour. But I just don't get BoDAN. BoDaN is tricky because you have to balance doing the bare minimum of invader management vs. mashing the fear button as hard as you can. Dream-killing two cities does absolutely nothing to control invaders or prevent blight (barring favorable fear cards) but that's your fastest road to victory. It can get pretty boring sometimes, especially in solo; at least with another spirit there you can coordinate to set up bigger dream kills.
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Apr 2, 2023 22:28
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1secondpersecond posted:You've got it exactly - balanced track progression feels wildly mismatched to early invader progression, and unbalanced strategies make it hard to respond to certain card draws (particularly early builds in land #2). An early build in land #2 isn't necessarily something you should feel the need to respond to. Most spirits need to temper their responsiveness with the need to make progress elsewhere, and this is even more true for BoDaN. Two cards and no innates that affect the board directly literally isn't enough juice to react meaningfully, but you can power through the fear deck way faster than anyone else and those fear cards will usually bail you out for the relatively few turns until you deck out on fear.
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Apr 3, 2023 05:36
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I think Many Minds Move as One is better suited for solo than most fear spirits--it gets enough defense to reliably keep itself alive until you run out the fear deck, which most fear spirits struggle with on their own. Spamming fear and praying that flipping a pile of fear cards will bail you out usually works, but Many Minds usually has a better safety net.
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Apr 4, 2023 16:10
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Ragnar34 posted:I can't believe Isaac nerfed it in production, saying the playtesters kept saying it was underpowered and he kept bumping it up in power bit by bit, until he played it himself and in his opinion it was ridiculous, so he knocked it down again. Now it's unreliable as hell. You know it used to have strife tokens!? I want to say Isaac overvalues fear, but he knows his own game better than I ever will, and some of the fear hybrid spirits are really good. It was a bit more complicated than that. The broad consensus was that it was fine, but nobody was really getting much use out of the special rule. Everyone played it as a generic damage spirit, and it performed just fine in that capacity, but was a bit boring. So Eric (Isaac is the name of the gloomhaven guy) kept punching up the special rule in an attempt to make Shroud more unique, reasoning that if people were getting so little use out of the rule that making that part of Shroud better wouldn't be overpowering. Then at some point a couple people tried really leaning into the special rule and realized that you could easily farm a ton of fear while also having top tier damage output. Other playtesters said "no way", tried it out, and said "oh." If you want to get the experience of this version of Shroud, just play River Surges in Sunlight using a greedy bottom track build and then also award yourself an extra 2 energy and 5 fear/turn just for existing. That's basically what it felt like, since it was originally balanced around being able to contribute as much as any other spirit with no fear farming output required. Eric chaos dunked it from outer space with like half a dozen nerfs and... amazingly, it was pretty much just right, people tried the new version and once they adjusted to fear farming being mandatory they agreed it was good. Then several weeks later in one of the last updates before change lock he tweaked the tertiary water requirement on the damage innate up for flavor and thematic reasons. This was where the mistake was, IMO. This last tweak didn't actually change the power curve at all, but it did make Shroud less reliable because it greatly increased the demand for moon+air+water cards. After the big nerf, you could easily fish enough moon+air to keep your innate damage up, but then that little nerf meant that just finding moon+air wasn't always good enough anymore. If you get good draws and hit your element trifecta a couple times you can still be a fear + damage powerhouse, it's just that the threshold for "good draws" is a lot tighter than it was when you only really had to worry about 2 elements. Unfortunately the issue didn't really get picked up in playtesting because there were only a few weeks left at that point and it's a probabilities issue so it takes a fair few games to become obvious. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 02:28
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Azran posted:Yeah you can play JE without B&C but you get a bunch of events, blight cards and power cards that are less fiddly than the ones in JE so skipping it is not something I recommend. counterpoint: the cards in JE are barely any more fiddly and they own bones compared to B&C, both are ideal but if you have to pick one go JE 100% of the time.
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Apr 5, 2023 21:38
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Sharp Fangs has it kind of rough, the B&C minor deck is not very kind to it. Token powers and events are a little bit undertuned in B&C as the dev was wary of giving them too much value, and there are no 0-cost plant+animal powers other than one of your uniques, which makes bottom track very taxing on your energy. A lot of experienced Fangs players preferred to lean on the top track instead; the top track elements mean that after a few turns you only ever need 1 plant and 1 animal to hit your main innate, letting you play off-element majors using your burst energy growth while still doing your main thing just as consistently (or more!) than the bottom track. Jagged Earth finally adds a 0-cost plant+animal minor and multiple blight manipulation plant+animal cards in the minors deck, as well as a ton of great defensive animal element cards and also Blood Draws Predators which is better than a lot of majors for you. With the JE cards in the mix Sharp Fangs absolutely fucks whether you're going for top track majors or bottom track minor spam.
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Apr 10, 2023 17:33
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Perry Mason Jar posted:Rules question: so JE adds a rule to discard the top event in the first invader phase, without resolving the event. I don't think this rule is in B&C. I was skipping the event but not discarding the top card, just a preference. But it actually makes a difference for France Level 2 with the Event card setup... is France balanced around discarding the top event card or not? edit: nm, misread the question, listen to this guy V V V the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Apr 10, 2023 |
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Apr 10, 2023 20:05
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Perry Mason Jar posted:I get that, it's just unclear whether JE is adding something that mitigates this change because it's also JE that adds the rule. That is, is it balanced with just B&C - is it errata or expansion-specific? The JE rule is written specifically to keep France's event card in the same place as the B&C rule (also, if you discard the top event on turn 1 then you're more likely to remember to do the event on turn 2 than if you just skip it altogether, so it helps you practice good habits.) If you don't touch the event deck at all turn 1 and didn't adjust the France event manually to compensate, at that point you're just houseruling. You can play B&C with or without the updated rule. It doesn't necessarily make things easier or harder, just less random--the newer rule is technically a little easier overall as there are more ways for a turn 1 event to go catastrophically wrong than for them to go catastrophically right, but it's still possible for the invaders to just get absolutely destroyed by the event and make the game trivial. Most of the time it's not going to be a huge deal one way or another if you play the turn 1 event though.
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Apr 10, 2023 21:17
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Ragnar34 posted:I forget, are they allowed to put the Horizon spirits on the Steam app? I feel like they aren't but I also think it'd be a good DLC, like "oh yeah we're obviously already working on it" good. They've announced that they're working on it for release this year. (Jagged Earth is also in development but has a lot more stuff to implement.)
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Apr 13, 2023 05:26
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Eraflure posted:Fangs' only problem was being shipped with B&C. The base game obviously doesn't support its beast-centric gameplay and base+B&C doesn't give a lot of good beast cards/0 cost on-element cards. The spirit itself is perfectly fine, if frustrating to newer/weaker players who might make some mistakes early on and taper off due to its weakness to early blight. If you stick with it, you'll probably find that its issues all make perfect sense : reclaim + gaining a card is well worth 1 energy on a spirit with two growth options and the blight restrictions on its powers are mostly there to rein in its very strong early game. It's my favorite spirit and I can assure you it can beat any level 6 adversary* so don't worry too much about what people say.  Even in B&C it's playable, you just have to lean more on majors than a lot of players expect (and it sounds like Tekopo did.) The JE minor deck adds so many great cards that bottom track Fangs can get pretty wild too, though.
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Apr 21, 2023 20:07
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Wallet posted:I keep a spreadsheet to record my games and try to play all of the spirits more or less evenly, and I honestly like all of them. Really? The one that gives you extra cards and plays and damage is fun as hell. Vengeance is probably my favorite spirit. Honorable mention for Trickster, Volcano, and Shroud.
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Jun 1, 2023 14:52
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Fellis posted:Once I played Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds, I learned everything I needed to know about sparing the Dahan. Similarly, once I played Heart of the Wildfire, I learned everything I needed to know about the island getting blighted. Lightning's Swift Strike solo is a great lesson in the value of the Dahan, since you will use Harbingers of the Lightning approximately one million times per game and it specifically incentivizes you to send Dahan up against invaders, but you will probably never have a defense power to use on them.
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Jun 13, 2023 20:19
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Ragnar34 posted:I want the aspects so much. I'm surprised how restrained the Shroud one is, though. I'd heard that it was super good, but the presence movement feels less interesting than the old rule without being much stronger, and isolate is an effect I don't see having that much of an impact on Shroud's usual approach. Isolate does help patch one of Shroud's pain points, since it means you can leave wounded buildings and not have to worry about them being a source of new explorers.
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Jun 23, 2023 23:40
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Ragnar34 posted:I'm going to miss tipping point, is that weird? I'm usually a little relieved to see it. There are much worse things in that deck. It hits some spirits harder than others of course, so maybe the problem is that it can be unfair. Yeah, 80% of the time it's one of the easiest blight cards in the game, 15% of the time it's a bastard on par with other bastard blight cards, and 5% of the time it's an instant loss. That's not really great design overall.
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Jun 25, 2023 01:16
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The fear gain is capped at 5/turn but the energy gain still goes up at 6, 9, and 12 (good luck).
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Jun 29, 2023 22:11
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Eric Reuss mentioned after JE that big power deck expansions were unlikely; the decks are already getting pretty unwieldy, and draws get streakier and higher variance as the decks get bigger, even if the proportions of elements and effects remains the same.
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Jul 2, 2023 00:13
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I haven't had a chance to sit down with Eyes, but yeah, combining defense + Dahan movement tends to just be insanely efficient, and you're getting fear too.
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Jul 6, 2023 20:40
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Impermanent posted:Red rules but succumbs to the fate of all high level board game players of developing increasingly idiosyncratic and intense game opinions over time. There's a few like that over in the Discord as well. They're all great. Ocean really struggles against Habsburgs and to some extent Russia, and doesn't scale great at very high player counts. I don't fully agree with RedRevenge's reasoning but they're correct that Ocean is considerably weaker since JE came out.
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Jul 14, 2023 20:47
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Impermanent posted:4. Fear and Control are more powerful overall in solo than they are in team games. One or two good fear cards can let you blitz through the fear deck, and control can completely close off part of the island, greatly reducing the amount of problems that pop up. Isolates and other more subtle control effects are even stronger because no one is going to come in from your teammate's board. Yeah, if you've got a spirit with a strong opening (turn 1 + turn 2 fast phase) then you really want to try to lock down the inland if you get the opportunity. Lightning or Fangs gets a lot easier solo when you're potentially only facing one explore per turn. Other solo-specific considerations: You want to watch your corner lands very carefully since they can turn into very nasty cascades very quickly. You may also have to be flexible with your turn 1 + 2 plays in order to prioritize getting presence placement out for range purposes; on a bigger island you're more likely to be able to spill over onto someone else's board in exchange for someone taking bits of yours that you can't easily reach, but in solo if you start in a corner you're SOL.
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Jul 14, 2023 20:52
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Ragnar34 posted:I don't play enough high player count games to have an opinion on this, but I've been pretty happy with ocean at 3+ because now you've got 3+ players using the water as a resource. Suddenly every push is a severely undercosted kill. That's wild. And in 1-2 player ocean gets stronger as enemies get more numerous, so higher difficulties end up helping you in some ways, but maybe that doesn't do as much in 3+ since one or more other players probably aren't feeding you at that point. It's more about 5+. The requirement of needing presence on a board in order to get push drowns gets to be a real burden, and even once you get presence everywhere it's less likely that all 5-6 spirits will be able to take full advantage. If part of the board isn't able to participate in drowning then Ocean just gets straight up nerfed since the energy penalty applies regardless. At 4 it's not so bad, Ocean hurts compared to lower player counts but is still plenty strong against most adversaries, but past that things break down. misguided rage posted:Both of them have special rules which seem written to gently caress over Ocean in particular. Habsburgs are especially annoying because often you still get to kill the town (if there's a coast with a blight on it) but you lose out on the energy from drowning it. At least with Russia you get some extra fear. Scotland also makes things harder for Ocean although in practice I haven't found that one too bad. Yeah, Scotland is a real mixed bag and the parts that Ocean hates are necessary to keep it from being a pushover due to the parts Ocean loves. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Jul 14, 2023 |
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Jul 14, 2023 22:22
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To be fair, if River had that unique it would play the hell out of it. For that matter even River being in the game is enough to get Lightning to play it.
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Jul 20, 2023 14:08
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Rampant Green can afford to spam the +1 card +3 energy growth a lot, so in the mid and late game you can easily get 1-2 majors out per reclaim cycle. Also, between your starter cards and your track elements (which you unlock very quickly) you don't actually have much need to draft plant cards, so feel free to focus on picking up moon and/or water cards first and foremost in order to juice your innates. In general drafting for damage is a good idea; you already have a ton of built in defense so defensive powers are usually overkill, and you have a lot of weak damage on tap that's good for comboing with other damage to boost them up to city kills.
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Aug 3, 2023 19:35
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Annointed posted:NGL maties the defend card on fear not impressive. Yeah, it can be fun in team games where someone else can pump it up but when you have 2 card plays you don't want to spend both of them just to set it up and pump fear into it (and if you just use your innate alone to pump it you're paying 2 energy for defend 2-4.) But you usually wind up jettisoning your cards for majors anyhow.
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Aug 8, 2023 05:02
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Annointed posted:I'm still trying to figure out bodan. So far I'm not doing great with bodan in terms of mitigating invader building or getting dahan to wipe out more troublesome lands. I still need like 6 blight points to win using level 0 rules. In small games BoDaN really can't afford to worry too much about invader control or defense. If the opportunity comes up to block a build or get a nice counterattack on the cheap then take it, but you can't afford to spend a lot of resources trying to force it. Most of the time your goal is to set up the biggest dream kills possible and hope that the fear deck bails you out. A juicy major that dream-kills a city + town + town gets you 9 fear, which in a level 0 solo is 2 cards and 25% of the way to a fear victory by itself.
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Aug 9, 2023 19:21
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Fractured Days is also a great support spirit. Throw around extra plays and reclaims and also you get a nice little sideboard to poach support powers from.
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Aug 22, 2023 03:53
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Base Fangs earns its complexity rating, sacrificing presence for beasts is a tough balancing act. Fangs has a lot of demanding targeting requirements, so maintaining enough presence where you need it is much trickier than it is for most spirits, especially since your primary movement is tied to your staple attack. It does get somewhat easier if you lean on top track and just mash the major power button though.
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Sep 7, 2023 06:11
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The Big One seems like it's mostly for memes but the other levels of eruption all feel like valid options to plan for.
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Nov 28, 2023 06:38
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Generally when I'm playing Fractured Days, I slow roll the first 3 turns stalling + ramping up as much presence as I can to build up my hand and presence tracks and then start hammering the sun growth to simultaneously pick up big majors + extra energy to play them with while also handing out repeats like candy. You can definitely jump into a more active playstyle earlier, and if you're playing super mega hard difficulties you will often have to, but at regular human difficulties (10-) I find it's a lot harder to gently caress up if you take the extra time to max out your tracks before you get too spendy. The Past Returns Again and Pour Time Sideways are pretty much just there to be fodder for majors. They can be really powerful but the cost is enormous so you can't afford to play them unless you have the board set up absolutely perfectly, which probably isn't going to happen before you need to jettison them for something more immediately useful.
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Nov 28, 2023 20:32
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Fractured Days is the one spirit nobody in my group touches. A couple of us tried it once or twice and found it super ineffective. I'm sure it can do a lot in the right hands since it has a couple of effects that are conceptually very powerful, though. I thought RedRevenge's tier lists were for larger games? Which might actually account for BoDaN, I find it really wants a sweet spot of having a partner or two that can coordinate with but not so many that the fear pool gets too large for you to have an impact. IIRC they're also for very high difficulty games, and Vengeance is definitely a "when the going gets tough" spirit. Although they're not even that particularly high; 20+ different spirits have at least one aspect ahead of Vengeance's ranking in that list.
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Nov 28, 2023 20:49
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Yeah, it's the nature of tier lists that they're about probabilities more than anything else. If you look at the fighting game scenes where tier lists first got really big it's pretty common that a low tier character may have an advantageous matchup against a high tier character or two, while having a much worse winrate against the rest of the cast. It seems counterintuitive to say that a fighter could be "worse" than another fighter they have a noticeable advantage against, but if you look at a lot of matches across a wide range of circumstances the higher tier characters are going to get more wins overall. It's not saying "this character is better than that character in every possible circumstance", it's saying "this character is better than that character across a wider variety of circumstances." River and Ocean are good examples of this, they're both strong spirits that dunk most adversaries extremely hard but they each have a couple bad matchups that are a big problem for them. A spirit that is merely "good enough" against all adversaries is going to win more consistently across more circumstances. Even then, though, there's going to be a lot of subjectivity in terms of where you place your benchmark and also just outright opinion. If you're targeting difficulty 10-11 then a lot of merely average spirits are going to notch more wins overall than River or Ocean, but I suspect if you started cranking things up to really stupid difficulties River/Ocean would eventually come out with better winrates because they can still get wins from the adversaries they counter extremely hard while more average spirits start struggling to consistently win against anything. If Spirit A wins 95% of the time at difficulty 10 and 20% of the time at difficulty 15, and Spirit B wins 85% of the time at difficulty 10 but 40% of the time at difficulty 15, which one is "stronger"? At that point it's just a value call. Going by consistency at difficulty 10 makes a lot of sense because most players aren't going to gently caress with the super difficulty options and straight level 6 adversaries is about the limit of what they're going to see in play, but that can create counterintuitive results where an absolute shitwrecker with a few blind spots gets ranked below distinctly less impressive but more broadly consistent spirits. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Nov 28, 2023 |
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Nov 28, 2023 23:39
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Some spirits play quite a bit differently in pure solo but they're all functional. Make sure you're up on the blight pool errata (you should start with 3 in the pool if you're using a blight card, not 2 as the original printed rules tell you) as the original rules do make solo dramatically harder for any spirit that's blight-prone.
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Dec 11, 2023 22:57
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Defense + Dahan movement and defense + fear are both very efficient combos, so yeah Eyes Watch is just very straightforwardly effective. (That's a big part of what makes Grinning Trickster so strong too, since you get free Dahan movement every turn and can throw strife around liberally.)
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Dec 21, 2023 05:30
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To be fair, there are a lot of blight removal powers with plant element that work very well for Wildfire. Obviously you want Fire+Plant cards and if you luck into the sacred flame blight removal power then you're golden, but the main Fire thresholds you care about hitting are 2 and 4 so if you have a spare card play after hitting those thresholds then playing a non-fire plant card is better than playing a non-plant fire card (especially if that plant card removes blight.) But yeah, it's a struggle and events/blight card flips can be devastating.
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Jan 30, 2024 23:00
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Elysium posted:I just realized in Blitz you get one less blight after flipping the card, which explains a lot of the instalosses. Oh poo poo, yeah, not a Blitz player but I bet that it does suck extra hard for Wildfire since a lot of the advantages that are supposed to offset your disadvantage are timing-based. IIRC the Blitz rules give you a bonus for fast powers, but not for spirit phase effects, because those barely existed at the time. So if being able to burn invaders in the spirit phase is an important perk for you, congrats, that is no longer noticeably faster than slow powers and you get nothing to compensate.
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Jan 31, 2024 14:54
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Yeah, I would probably count on 4 hours, and it might get worse if people don't stay on top of things. It might be a good idea to split things into two islands just so people can kind of narrow their focus, and also to have something convenient to throw at anyone who thinks about pulling out Fractured Days or Finder.
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Feb 14, 2024 02:40
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Yeah, I like Reach as a quick and dirty fix to Shadows. It's still on the weaker end of the scale, but it's in line with other mediocre spirits instead of being its own class of garbage, and it has a fun gameplay hook when you draw something super short range like Quicken the Earth's Struggles and get to go  mode
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Apr 3, 2024 21:18
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Lambo Trillrissian posted:It's a hilarious meme opening but I'm pretty sure it's just objectively bad play outside of some real long odds lucky drafts and I've absolutely stunk up any game I've tried it in (only 3 times is a small sample size but it was disappointing enough that I'm not going to waste my time again.) On 10+ difficulty games the amount of momentum you lose isn't worth one single turn where you spam one unthresholded major 4 times and then afterwards you've blown your load of stockpiled energy and have basically the same ability to impact the board as you would have if you hadn't spent the first half of the game doing nothing, possibly less. Eh, it's not the worst. There's a lot of variance; if your first major pull is all defensive/support powers then you're probably hosed, if you get an optimal offensive major like Cleansing Flood you can get a pretty quick clean win. It helps if you're teamed up with aggro spirits that appreciate the amount of stall you can put out in the early turns and can keep offensive tempo up, although those teammates are a good fit for Downpour regardless. It's definitely less about taking advantage of a setup and more about Downpour being so strong in that setup that you can get away with goofy meme stuff.
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May 7, 2024 16:58
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 23:34 |
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Defense + fear is a really strong, simple combo. Defense-heavy spirits normally struggle to reach win conditions and fear-heavy spirits struggle to keep the island from falling apart while they shotgun fear cards, so combining the two fixes both their weaknesses. There are also a ton of in-element minors for Dahan movement which even lets MM capitalize on its crazy defense with consistent counterattack kills. It's not ultra busted as far as spirits go but it is very easy and consistent.
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May 10, 2024 19:08
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