Environment difficulty!

This is something that's been on my mind since the first day I got SOTM. What are the difficulites of the Environments. I want to hear your opinons on this. 

This has always been something that has plagued me when me and my friends fight a villian for the first time. Will say something like "Hey, lets play this villian here." as we grab Gloomweaver. Then one of my friends will say "Okay so he's a level three villian. What environment should we choose?"  We'll look at the environments and we're almost fearful of what environments we grab because we don't want the environment to hinder us so much that we loose right away. Usually we just grab megalopolsis (sorry if I screwed up that spelling) because that's what we feel safe with.

Megalopolis isn't too hateful, but the Cannot Play and Cannot Use Powers cards are hateful.

Atlantis tends to be the site of many defeats for us, simply because the Kraken targets low hp targets, and they have such high hp.

Insula Primalis can be rough, but the damage buffs on Obsidian Fields are definitely helpful.

Mars Base is fun, but between the Self Destruct Mechanism, the Red Dust, and the Meteor Storms, there's a lot of time devoted to managing the environment, rather than beating the villain.

Rook City is just hateful.  Aside from Dr. Tremata and the private eye, nothing helps the heroes at all.  Sheer pain.

Pike Industries is a pretty fair balance, I think.  Damage buffs and reductions for all, a few nasty targets, and some indiscriminate explosions.  Fun for all.

Discord is pretty sweet on the heroes.  Even the dreaded Portal Fiends aren't too hard, and there are lots of helpful cards for heroes.

Tomb of Anubis offers a lot of targets, but not a lot of threat.  The treasures are a nice touch, and worth pursuing at times. 

If I had to put them into categories?  

Easy-- Megalopolis, Discord

Moderate--Pike Industries, Insula, Anubis

Hard--Mars, Rook City, Atlantis

I agree with all of that except maybe Megalopolis.

I used to think that Megalopolis was the easiest of the environments, but it is situationally devastating. Sure, any of the environments can be if you get the wrong card at the wrong time, but I think it comes up more in Megalopolis than anywhere but Rook City.

Mind you, that doesn't bump Megalopolis any higher than Moderate, in my mind.

Discord is the easiest, and in many ways the most fun, but I think it, much more than the other environments, overshadows the rest of the game.

Of course, we now have four new environments!

I'm not sure about Final Wasteland -- haven't played it enough, but I think the other three (The Block, Time Cataclysm, Silver Gulch) may all, surprisingly, fall into the Easy category. I need more plays on all of them to be sure.

I wouldn't say Realm of Discord has cards that help the Heroes. It has cards that can help the Heroes, but often those cards will screw up the Heroes, and there are other cards, like Claustrophobic Delusion, that are a real nightmare.

I hate the Realms of Discord. I am never lucky with this environment : the "claustrophobic delusion" card, or whatever its name, which makes all non-hero cards but the one with the less HPs immune to damage manages to always stay in game for multiple rounds. I've lost many games to this card... Worst case is to combine it with Citizen Truth :( Now, when playing there, I always keep my environment destruction cards in hand for destroying it as soon as it appears.

It also has that card that makes the hero on the highest HP unable to do damage. Negative Energy Field always seems to do a number on the Heroes as well.

I'd normally agree, as those are pretty crippling cards, but the likelihood of any of them sticking around for more than one round is pretty limited, since they're all Distortions.  Where other environments can get just as nasty as the Villain Decks with cards that just stick around--I played a game last night where I had both Experimental Mutagens out, and the vat that reduces damage in Pike Industries:  those rats just wouldn't go away!--Realm of Discord has a pretty high likelihood of allowing you to deal with only one environment card at a time.  Couple that with any Environment-removing card (Grappling Hook, Sarabande, Planar Banishment, Blinding Speed, RPG Launcher) and you're good to go.

I might be persuaded that Discord is not always easy, but my main point about Discord is that is has a habit of overpowering the game -- it has outsized effects on the game compared to other environments.

I dunno…the entire game ending if you don't take the right actions on Mars can be pretty overpowering ;).

I posed a similar question a few months ago.

https://greaterthangames.com/forum/topic/mostleast-challenging-environments-2850

This was right around the time that the Sentinels statistics project started. Based win rate for about 1000 games here are the environments from hardest to easiest:

Rook City
Ruins of Atlantis
Wagner Mars Base
Tomb of Anubis
Pike Industrial Complex
Insula Primalis
Megalopolis
Realm of Discord

By the way, Googlelies, you should not be afraid to fight Gloomweaver in any environment. He's a pushover.

You should check out the environment decks on http://www.spiffworld.com/sotm/. I think they are a little easier than the official ones. The Odyssey Space Station is a lot of fun.

Im a big fan of realm of discord its proly my favorite environment. It can be hard at times but the distorions dont last long and I love the way they change the game

Realm of Discord seems to be scoring really well for heroes on the stat reports, which seems odd to me.  Claustrophobic Delusion and Ethereal Bonds are the main source of difficulty, I think, but well done, everybody!

For the new ones, I think I would rate Silver Gulch and Time Cataclysm as closer to the easy category.  The Block and Final Wasteland are a little rougher.

I've had two games on Realms of Discord (both against Gloomweaver, due to Spiff's randomizer) and both times we smoked him once the card came into play that speeds up time.

Im actually feeling Silver Gultch as a lot harder (than i felt it was in playtesting, but i didnt play the final evolution) - i played a game today with it and it felt like it was certainly puttin gmore in my way than usual!

I have to say that Rook City is hands down the hardest environment to fight in. I've lost to Baron Blade in it. Baron. Blade. Rook City is brutal -___-

for the new ones, I'd say that Time Cataclysm is easy, and the others are all medium.

Both games in The Block that I played so far started with the warden, followed by a bunch of cards that did nothing or inmates that got destroyed immediately by the warden. So in the end it did.. nothing :I That was pretty easy! But I guess it can be a relatively rough place if it the warden is taking a nap or something.

I've found it's not uncommon for the Block to flop in weird ways that minimize its effects.

The FILTER Agents are actually a good bit more dangerous than most of the Inmates.

I dunno, Char plus a couple of Rogues can be pretty painful...

Insula Primalis is clearly among the easiest one.

Obsidian +1 Damage help the heroes A LOT.

The T Rex and other can be used and abused as extra damage on the villains and villains target.

No real bad cards or unmanageable one.

Megapolis have some cards that can just SCREW the heroes if drawn at a bad time (No cards draw when you need to discard).

Rook City is among the hardest and the tomb of Anubis can sometimes get out of hand.

Ah right remember we cycled through environment deck 1.5 times and had Anubis showed up 3-4 times while playing against Baron Blade with 3 players. In that scenario the Environment was just so much more dangerous than the boss itself.

Oddly enough, Megalopolis is our hang out for when we're playing a new villain or tackling a 4 and we don't want the environment to get in the way. I can't tell you how many games we've drawn Close quarters combat for the last round. But that's luck.

Last night we played Voss on Insula Primalis and my boyfriend spent the entire game swearing he wouldn't play IP again (it was brutal, the T-Rex thought WE looked like tasty lunch, though wraith did decrease enviromental damage). Argent went down early-despite our best efforts at minion-management he just. kept. getting. hit. But once we flipped Voss he never flipped again (wraith being the real hero on that issue). Then we had Mr. Fixer with the highest HP at 7 and here comes the darn T-Rex. Voss is higher than the T-rex, but it doesn't eat itself, so hey old mechanic flesh! Mr. Fixer has his pipe wrench out, so between that and Wraith, he only takes 3, leaving him and Ra at 4 and Wraith at 2. It came down to math, but we managed to get Voss under 15, so that got the T-Rex's attention. We lost Wraith in the final villain turn, but Mr Fixer took Voss out the very next turn with his pipe wrench (and alternating tiger claw and harmony) It was glorious.

So now my boyfriend doesn't think the t-rex is ALL that bad. I think it depends on whether you can handle environment targets, and I think they just stress him out.

Why would Voss being under 15 make him a target for the T-Rex? The dino ignores itself, doesn't it? So Voss would still have been the highest and from the looks of it that would mean Ra would have been the target.

We read through the card a couple of times and decided that if T-Rex is the second highest he won't deal damage to himself but that the language didn't preclude T-rex from being counted as something with hp. This might be wrong, but this is what happens when you play with a 3rd year law student who spends all her time doing statutory interpretation work.

I seem to recall that the T-Rex's card says that it deals "the target, other than itself, with the second-highest hp", meaning it ignores itself - if it has the second-highest hp out of everything, you ignore it and hit whatever has the next-highest hp instead (ie third-highest overall).

That is what it says (minus the comma), but like I said, I'm a law student. I can argue anything. And that's how we interpreted it. The issue was if it has the HIGHEST hp, do you hit the second highest or the third highest?

I read the "other than itself" part to be tied to what it hit, not in determining second highest.

It doesn't matter what hp the T-Rex has, you just ignore it entirely as it can never attack itself. I read the wording as "Apart from the T-Rex, which target has the second-highest hp?", meaning ignore the T-Rex.

That is also a potential interpretation.

Basically, this game is to law students like methadone is to heroin addicts. For someone who's been trained specifically in interpreting text exactly the way you want it to be read, these cards are dangerous. (no surprise that my fellow law students love it?)

I remember asking.Christopher about this a long time ago, and I’ve forgotten what he said.
(Congratulations, I have managed to contribute absolutely nothing to the conversation.)