SCUverse Game 4 - Discussion And Commentary

And away we go!

Other than my snaffu with trying to stary my turn too soon, all I have to say as of yet is that I was tempted to play and use Motivational Charge, which nets the Heroes 4 HP this turn (same as preventing the Drums damage to myself), with the admittedly minor fringe benefit of chipping in two points towards taking out the Drum, but I thought that with Next Evolution rigth there in hand, soon I'd want a way to ensure I was the highest-HP Hero for maximum tanking.

And then I got rewarded with Lead From The Front!  Stall mode is a go.

(Sadly, posing "Legacy just kind of sits there and takes the Drum's punishment" for a turn is a lot less fun than "Legacy holds off the zombies," or "Legacy charges into the fray inspiringly."  But on the other hand, what sets the Horror tone for the movie better than Legacy being brought to his knees right off the bat?)

Hey, Legacy - you're up!

As for my turn, unless I get a draw that's a lot better before my turn, I need to pop the NPCU and do some healing so I can lay on the smack. At this point, if a cold snap pops into my hand I'll be putting it out ASAP.

I was debating which weapon to drop, no longer I'm putting down the knives so we can kill the hordes.

I am most definetly using external combustion so take that into account when dealing damage. We can have a big turn here!

I strongly recommend a Smoke Bombs either this turn or next one.

I can definently get those down on the next turn I just don't want to have a bunch of us getting hurt versus reducing damage for one of us

Tachyon can shut down damage from everything currently in play.

I get that so it makes sense to go all out on damage now

Maybe this just proves how socially oblivious I am, but I never thought your posts were snappish, just maybe a little confused over the game state (which is perfectly understandable; one of these days I swear I'm going to start drawing the game table in MSPaint after every turn, so we can actually SEE what we're doing).  No harm done anyway.

As usual I'm taking too damn long myself because reasons.  I'll have those cards for you tomorrow HumbleKnight, as early as I can manage.

Thanks

Edit: actually take your time, I'm skiing tomorrow

OK... the Acolyte is locked down until Tachyon's turn starts again. (It is a Cursed Acolyte and not a Chosen Disciple, right?... in either case, it's locked down.)

I know that I've got the last spot in the turn order, but I think I can take care of at least some of our targeting problem. I'm planning to drop a Hoarfire. Assuming that I'm not Galvanized because Legacy decides to Charge somebody (kill the current cultist, maybe?), I'll be issuing 2 fire damage to a bad guy, 3 cold damage to myself, 1 fire damage to myself which then lets me do 2 cold damage to a bad guy, and 2 cold damage to me - net of 2 packets of damage to bad guys and 4 healing for me (yay modules!). In a pinch, I could swap the first packet of cold damage/healing as targeting to a bad guy.

Eliminating the cultist in play will bring a zombie - 2 packets of damage needed so far. Under the assumption that we get the cultist and not whatever's under it, that's another set of targets and aftereffects to deal with, but I think we can take care of them.

So with Profane Zealot (hopefully) coming out, we will need to kill 4 targets, Zealot, Acolyte and 2 Zombies. We will also have the environment to deal with, which in Rook City is always dangerous. To deal with our 3 targets, I have 3 attacks of 3, which is reduced to 2 from profane zealot. This means I can take out the acolyte and the resulting Zombie as well as deal 2 to the Zealot. This means we need at least 3 and 2 from AZ and Bunker to clear the field

I think we can achieve that. :)

So looking through Gloomy's deck, The last 4 unknown cards are another Cursed Acolyte, a Chosen Disciple, and 2 pins, neither of which are hugely dangerous. The Disciple would actually be better for us, because there would be no damage from her or the zombie and we wouldn't have to deal with damage reduction. One pin would go on me and I would have to destroy something at the end of my turn, something I can deal with, especially considering I have doubles for almost everything in my hand. The other pin makes one of AZ, Bunker or Tachyon discard (I think, I haven't checked the exact card counts but I believe they all have 3.) The Acolyte will kill us, or at least all of us but Tachyon and maybe AZ. Edwin could kill us if he chooses, I think it will fall to what he decides to do.

OF course this all depends on if the Environment doesn't murder us first.

I didn't exactly choose to kill you all; had I resolved the Environment turn differently, AZ might have survived, but when I pulled the Acolyte on the villain turn (and I swear it was random, I shuffled the remaining cards back when I resolved IREP and did not then peek at them), I saw no point in artificially prolonging the game.  So it's more or less over; we can move right along to Episode 5 if you so choose.

Given that most Gloomweaver games seem to end with the heroes killing him outright, do you think it was unfair of me to go along with Envisioner's "Gloomweaver isn't a target because he hasn't even been summoned into this reality yet" concept for this match?  Was it too hard?  I've only gotten a relic victory once and I believe I've only lost to Gloomy once (maybe it was twice); making it impossible to win the game quickly was perhaps excessively mean, but on the other hand, the game ended so fast that I'm not sure you'd have had time to kill Gloomy even if it was an option.

I don't think it would have been much different if you had included Gloomy himself. The way SCU plays, and how ineffective the IE was, Gloomy gets to play his evil cards and ignore his pathetic ones.

There are two things I think need to get accounted for in the future:

- First is that the IE was effectively nerfed in this game. It got used in one of the other two, and I can't recall exactly how we dealt with it then, but I think it gave a bit more control than was present in this game.

- For courtesy's sake, I'd opine that once a turn is posted resolved, it stays that way even if there's a catch later that something should have been done differently (unless the error is pointed out and resolved rapidly).

- As for who gets the Deus Ex win, as much as I love AZ, I'll volunteer to retire him. I know that we've got a sort of bench of Haka, Fanatic, and Expat going on right now, and I've opined that Unity needs to be early in the rotation.

At any rate, on to game 5?

I also want to point out that either AZ or Tachyon is alive. Depending on the order of attacks smoke bombs or no smoke bombs saves one of them, when wraith dies determining that. In fact we could save one of them and legacy and bunker if we could pick the order of attacks.

That said if only one hero lives I don’t feel the need to keep playing

Infrared Eyepiece was used once or twice in the first game verses Omnitron before a Technological Singularity destroyed it.  The ability to control what the villain to play next is pretty much nerfed.  The ability to bottom deck a card is still there - and it was used to bottom an early potential EPE play by Omnitron.  However, the faster deck throughput of the villain means that anything bottomed will come back up roughly twice as fast as normal pace.

Playing Wraith in the first two games I generally just opted not to use it after that initial attempt.  The payoff just wasn't there as compared to getting in damage or another effect for the power usage.

If you really think IREP loses more from the pick-2 rule than it gains from your own draws gaining that rule, I can rule it differently in future.  But I would still discourage this; in essence, IREP is allowing you to remove the worst of two options, and leaving the other as one of two options, when without IREP the villain would play the best of the original two cards - essentially it turns a 50/50 choice into a 75/25 or a 33/66 or something like that.  So it's a question of how often you think the third card of the deck will be better than either of the other two.  I think that if the IREP "locked" the villain deck, it'd be too much of a "we win" card, and would result in games as pathetic as the Insula/Matriarch one.

It was not really handled differently at all.  Maybe Envisioner was a little more willing to choose suboptimal cards for the sake of the story - but that's really more to do with the sort of story he was telling.  That was your first team outing against Omnitron; you were intended to win, since the alternative was cataclysmic.  This was you fighting a psychotic cult; having beaten you, they'll go back to lurking sinisterly in the shadows, plotting various nefarious deeds.

• For courtesy's sake, I'd opine that once a turn is posted resolved, it stays that way even if there's a catch later that something should have been done differently (unless the error is pointed out and resolved rapidly).

That's really probably something I can't do.  I'm just stretched too thin trying to keep on top of what's happening; if I'm not allowed to make mistakes, the update schedule will about get cut in half, since I'll have to double-check everything before I can post anything.

I'm not saying you can't make mistakes - just that, once a mistake is posted, we all roll with it for good or ill. FWIW, I'd say the same applies to a player mistake. I've certainly made those in games I've moderated at BGG, benefitting players sometimes and villains others. We roll with it unless it's caught & corrected within 24 hours or so.

Maybe handle the IREP as "reveal the top 3. One on the bottom, two on the top"?  At least that way we still might know what the options are that we're facing.

I nominate Tachyon to survive :P

Wow just realized that the conversation on who survived is in here.... Anyways I posted my thoughts in the game.