Weekly One Shot #183: Ruined for Posterity

Completionist Guise, GI Bunker, Best of Times Chrono Ranger, and Blood Mage Lifeline vs Baron Blade, Biomancer, Plague Rat, and Citizens Hammer & Anvil.  I hate Vengeance mode, so I was going to do a practice game or two -- but accidentally hit "new game" instead of "back".  Aw, crap.  Looks like another week without a mint, so still no Completionist Guise unlock for me :-(  Got Biomancer and the Citizens down, but still had a long way to go on the other two.

The first two environment turns blow up vats, which helps take out villain targets, but then you get the one that turns all damage to toxic, which is bad for Plague Rat.  No idea how to use Completionist Guise effectively...

And I get the feeling that using him effectively is the point. I missed my Mint, too, and I'm not sure what could be done better. ._.

Welp, my copy was definitely ruined.
Fine after 2 owie games, with the last one being 0/13/0/0

Toxic vats are NOT your friends, considering the amount of plink damage Teams Villains do, AND the fact that it makes Plague Rat immune to damage. Everyones game is going to be different based off Completionist Guise and the Displaced Armory you start with, but here is what I did to get where I did.

Firstly, starting with GI Bunker means Biomancer is actually a viable first target. Combined with the lack of self damage this team has, his flip side isn't terrible. I used Guise to get out Regular CR as I find BoT to be very niche and not great, targeting the Impulsion Beam because Implusion Beam.

Second, GI Bunker targets Biomancer and I focus fire down the Impulsion and start working on him. Leave any Plague Rat Handlers in play, as they tend to die anyway and the +2 damage without them hurts....

Third, I pulled the Neruo-Toxin for CR to help mitigate what damage I could. PR is a great target, even though it won't do damage, to just reduce his output.

LifeLine just did Lifeline stuff with his axe.

Next round, I swapped GI Bunker with FV Bunker, and used the GI Power via Guise. FV Bunker is more utility imo and he started tanking. I brought down Biomancer that round via focus fire.

After that, my next target was Citizen Anvil then Hammer, with a side priority of getting rid of Blade's ongoing so he starts killing himself. Also, as above, I tried to take out any Toxic Vats asap. By this point, however, everyone was pretty hurt, though Bunker was doing alright with his Heavy Plating/Recharge Mode. I swapped Guise for his base version as he was getting low and his incap abilities are better long term on his base. After managing to bring down the Citizens, it was "Keep Bunker Alive" mode and Guise, CR, and Lifeline quickly dropped. Plague Rat was full, and Blade was high teens.

However, Heavy Plating and Recharge Mode's 2 DR is hard for villains to overcome, especially with incaps that heal and an Omni-Cannon charging. It took 5 rounds to get the 15 cards to one-shot Plague Rat, but in that time Blade and PR both beat on Blade enough to drop him. So a fully charged Bunker blasted the Rat and we won.

~Komori

Is there a bug in the iOS version?  The incap hero cards kept getting treated like targets — for example, at the end of my game, the only things standing were Bunker and Plague Rat.  The rats from the environment deck were supposed to target the two non-environment targets with the lowest HP, which by default would be Bunker and Plague Rat, the only two non-environment targets standing.  Instead, they always targeted Bunker and one of the incap heroes.

FWIW, I ended up winning the same way as some one described above:  Kill Biomancer, then Anvil/Hammer, then let all the heroes die except Bunker, who gets put  in Recharge Mode with the Gatling Gun, Heavy Plating and the Omni-Cannon in play.  However, unfortunately one of the toxic vats got into play, and It was a LOOOONG painful slog waiting for the environment to play a vat-destroyer card so that I could finally damage Plague Rat.  Think I spent something like 7-8 turns just waiting for the environment to cycle through its deck.

If you’re seeing an issue like that report a bug.  I doubt it would be limited to iOS

I had the same bug on steam. Forgot to send a report, but I think I still have the log so I can probably do so later 

Edit: Ok, submitted a bug report.

Also encountered a bug with Guise incap ability; used his ability to give Bunker a "full turn", but it only gave me a card play and a card draw, no power.

At that point, I was hitting “Fast Forward” about 100X per turn to take care of all of the plinky damage to the three rats and the still-alive villains, but now that you mention it, I think I hit this bug, too.

If anyone felt like they got good use out of Completionist Guise, I’d love to hear the details. Maybe it’s the mix of heroes he was with, or the fact that everyone got killed/incapped so fast, but I definitely didn’t find many good uses for his power. I think I used him as GI Bunker one turn to help kill Biomancer, another turn as FV Bunker to play an extra card (with middling results) and I think a third as Blood Mage Lifeline to do area-effect damage because I had nothing better to do. It seems he’d be a much better friend with, say Legacy (ex: let Guise give everybody +1 damage as regular Legacy while Grampa Legacy gives people extra power uses), or AA (particularly when all of AA’s instruments are out, Regular AA could activate his base power to chain a whole string of powers/card plays while Guise uses PW AAs power to pull more cards and activate Accompany texts).

I also had incapped heroes being treated as targets. Of particular interested with Lifeline’s incap power to have somebody gain 2 HP. I was curious to try it to see if it would let me revive somebody, but I was still hoping I might have a chance at a mint and didn’t try it…

Count me in as someone who had a game that was buggy as hell. I didn't send in the bug report right away; I'll have to do that tonight.

My Lifeline got targeted repeatedly as an incap hero, although I think it only happened during effects that targeted everyone (not totally sure) and it went away when Guise swapped his incap card. I also found in two seperate occasions that Guise couldn't give full turns, only card plays. In the first case, it actually cost me the game, because I was counting on Chrono-Ranger getting a power use after I played Hunter and Hunted to do a ton of damage via bow and drop Plague Rat, and instead his turn ended, Bunker couldn't kill the rat, and then Plague Rat got to go and things went... badly. 

Still pulled a near-mint. My biggest mistake on the first play was not realizing that Completionist Guise is able to swap heroes back, which really would have helped me out. 

Ended the game at Fine with 0/13/0/0 just like Starkenburg.

This game was especially nasty as GI Bunker was the only Bunker variant I had unlocked prior to this Weekly One-Shot, and everyone only has one variant anyways. It took several replays to even have a chance of finding the Omnicannon, and by that point I was recycling Auxillary Power Sources with Decomissioned Hardware to use all the Maintainence Units I had out to keep Bunker alive. Never got a Gattling Gun either until after Recharge Mode was in play, and by that point the Omnicannon took priority.

That being said, getting through the first two turns is key and with the right plays, you can easily weaken Biomancer and get rid of troublesome devices in time to hurt all the villains consistently. With access to more variants I could have worked through the chellenge more easily.  The first two Environment turns net you a Vat Explosion and a Supercooled Trisolvant Vat, respectively, unless you modified the decks with something like Guise's Gimmicky Character.

That card is not your friend here. I had thought, with the Environment and three of the four team Villain decks stuffed with targets, Guise would majesticaly leap over the industrial complex on some sort of acid-breathing shark with a frickin' laser beam attached to its head, but sadly this was not the case. Using that card made the first two games worse for what came out of the environment after, even on the turn I chained two of them together I did not top more than 1 HP regained.

Ideally, it would be great to keep Lifeline alive longer because he and Bunker are good friends in this match if you have Ammo Drop out. If it wasn't for all the damage he has to eat through as the 4th Hero turn, Lifeline would be great using the splash from his Nordidian Sulp-Axe and Vitality Battery to keep his HP up. Another thing to watch for is that with Baron Blade having frequent Old Trick - New Allies plays, you might end up Citizen Hammer's Scorching Snap doubling up on your highest HP target, which is likely Bunker shielding. Still, when I had that happen it was always fun to prevent the blowback from External Combustion.

Also had the glitch occur with Incapacitated Heroes swapped out by Completionist Guise. I'd gladly take the glitch since this week's on-shot stunk. You are a mad genius if you unlock Completionist Guise from this monster.

Yeah, I had a bug as seen above that may have cost me the Mint - removing all of Bunker's variants via CGuise's incap ability did not give Bunker a full turn. Instead, it jumped straight from Play a Card to Use a Power, except cards could still be played, but whichever action I took ended Bunker's turn. Having that extra 2 HP from Maintenance Unit may have kept me alive long enough to win. And no, I didn't have any Modes out at the time. 

Instead, I've been stymied by this one - I've yet to deal damage to Plague Rat in subsequent runs because no matter what deck shuffle I get with him, he ends up murdering Bunker before I have enough time to get the cannon charged sufficiently. That, and I haven't managed to get multiple healing incap abilities in play before Guise goes down. This is awful and will be my first Fine for a while, assuming I can get it done in the next day or so with a road trip on tap for today...

I am pleased to report that I got it on the fourth try. Tried playing differently in two ways:

1) Ignoring Omni-Cannon. I focused on damage with Bunker instead. Ammo Drop turn 1, got a couple of free plays of External Combustion thanks to Scorching Snap, and the last one did just enough damage to finish Plague Rat (who went down second).

2) Ignoring Displaced Armory... at first. This got me Kill on Sight at an opportune time (on F5 Bunker's first turn, after being swapped in for GI Bunker) to drop it and have it go off immediately when Plague Rat killed a Handler. This let Chrono-Ranger have plenty of stuff to do to ping Plague Rat as soon as we could damage him, and a round and a half of focus fire KO'd him.

Hammer and Anvil went down immediately afterward, and poor Blade had no chance against Guise and the reappeared GI Bunker. Guise dropped on the last turn when Blade killed himself, leaving only Bunker standing at 12 HP.

Got a fine on my third try.  Lots of bugs.  Incapped Guise gives somebody a full turn?  Apparently a full turn doesn’t include a power phase!  Bugs in Pike Industrial Complex get huge!

i ended up having Bunker turtle up against Blade and Plague Rat.  I had the wrong variants out for Guise and Lifeline, so their incap abilities were useless.  At least Chrono Ranger let me plink Blade down.  Then I just had to survive long enough for the cyclohexane vat to go away.  Ended with Bunker at 5 HP (and only because Turret Mode let me heal him before firing the Omni Cannon.

Yeah, this was very strange. And then the game continued from the end of that turn, where I was expecting to be like team La Capitan’s nested turns shenanigans.