The Roster

With the two coming expansions, it looks like there is going to be a swing in the balance of heroes and villains.  The current line-up is 9 heroes and 6 villains, however it appears that the new sets will make the balance 16 heroes and 17 Villains.  

Flames of Freedom: 9 characters

Heroes(6):  Absolute Zero, Bunker, Legacy, Ra, Tachyon, and Wraith

Villains(3):  Baron Blade, Citizen Dawn, and Omnitron V

Heroes(5):  Expatriot, Setback, Mr. Fixer, Pinion, and Catastrophe & Verge

Villains(7):  Exemplar, Demon Fist, Grudge, MindPhyre, Karnal, Cyst, and Plague Rat

For Profit: 6 characters

Heroes(2):  Renegade and Mangrove

Villains(4):  Becky Blast, Heartbreaker, Glamour, and Hippocaplypse 

Does anyone else think that the increase in villains might also change the tournament format or at the very least create another possible format?  Perhaps the coin toss will also include a decison of whether your team will play heroes or villains.  

The "Lady with the bird" is Lillian Corvus, formerly known as the Matriarch.  It's unknown what her hero name is.

I haven't played any Tactics, but my impression was that heroes and villains were more or less interchangable as far as gameplay goes, and only differed in story.  Is there any hero/villain distinction in the tournaments now?  If there isn't, I doubt one will be added.

Did we get direct word that there would be 12 characters in Broken City?

"Sentinel Tactics: Battle for Broken City includes twelve characters, three scenario books, and two map locations. More information on those characters, scenarios, and maps will be revealed over the course of this preorder campaign!"

Yes, the heroes and villains are currently interchangeable within gameplay, but some of this also come from the limited roster.  In a 3 v 3 match with one character banned that would leave a villain team with 5 possible choices to fill three slots and a whole lot of redundancy in villain teams.  With a more balanced villain roster, that problem would no longer exist.  Consequently, it could create an alternate play format.

Now, it is quite possible that they won't do this in the official tournaments at Pax, Gen Con, etc..., but I do think it would create another fun possibility. 

I would find the division of a hero or villain teams to  be arbitrarily   limiting as heroes and villains are designed to be balanced and interchangeable in skirmishes. Also, you have the cast in For Profit, about which is said that it redefines the hero/villain dynamic. 

Are we certain that Demon Fist, Grudge, MindPhyre, Karnal, and Cyst are actual characters and not high level goons? Two of Citizen Dawn's scenarios have heroes fighting citizens and not Dawn herself.

I don't think Demon Fist, Grudge, MindPhyre, Karnal, and Cyst will be high level goons.  I base this logic on the miniatures.  The mini set includes 21 miniatures.  If you have 6 For Profit mini's and 12 Broken City minis, that does not leave enough for  Demon Fist, Grudge, MindPhyre, Karnal, and Cyst.  

I know this is far from conclusive (Operative did not get her minions as miniatures in the initial release), but that is still what is steering me towards my current prediction.  

The question is will the Druggies be seperate scenarios?

We have yet to have a villain character that doesn't have at least one scenario of their own.

If the Druggies are in one scenario I would expect them to be Citizen level targets.  If they each have their own scenario then I would expect them to be characters.

Since I can't see having that many scenarios I expect they are a part of Pike's scenario, and therefore not characters.

The reason You don't have a bunch of villain characters in one scenario is the number of players required to run them.  A target with a simple power is easy to run alongside a character, but requiring 10 players to play a scenario with the druggies and equal heroes is not likely.  I also find it unlikely that Pike's scenario would have 6 parts where you work through the druggies to get to him, plus if we are right and they are all created by one of the drugs that made Spite I don't see that translating well to 7 power cards and innate powers.

If the five goons are not standalone characters, I could see them functioning similar to Omni-Reaper where they share one deck together but have their own character cards. Since they are all related to Spite's drugs and possibly his clones, that would make thematic sense.

However that would leave 6 or 7 characters left for the expansion to fill. That's a lot, especially since we don't have much to go on besides the cover art on the box. If this is the sort of "Rook City" for Sentinel Tactics, that could mean that in addition to Pike->Exemplar, Spite->Goons, Matriarch->Hero, this could be the right time for other characters known to inhabit Rook City. Right off the bat we should consider Plague Rat, NightMist, and Ermine as real possibilities. We should also consider the nemeses of anyone who hails from Rook City as a possibility. This theoretically could include Kismet, Chrono-Ranger, GloomWeaver, and RevoCorp. There are also a huge amount of minor nemeses from the Vengeance villain decks that could show up at some point in the Tactics storyline.

Other who aren't currently on a known team and could fit in thematically anywhere including Broken City are Parse, The Sentinels, Fright Train, Friction, Miss Information, and K.N.Y.F.E..

Crater girl with the green energy is a good possibilty since Rook City seems to be a crater at this point anyway.

Sadly, it appears from the Omnitron scenario book that Omni-X is dead. So not only is his timeline pretty much erased (shattered?), but he probably won't be coming back. RIP O-X.

Unless he secretly made an O-XI in case of emergencies!

I hope so. Somehow I have the impression that the end of SOTM will cement the disparate timelines into a unified continuity that would prevent people like alternate future Vanessa Long, Iron Legacy, or O-X from ever occuring. By helping the heroes defeat Ominitron and revealing himself to his past self, he likely erases his own existence. In comic book logic I suppose there's no reason he can't come back 

The flavor text on Omni-drone makes me think he is not all gone, that and the particle of his programming being all that survived.

I just don't see that going down like that in a comic book without the good Omnitron coming back.

This is where I disagree with you.  I think the game is going to start steering towards equally powered teams.  As we've we seen in the tournaments, this game really starts to shine in that format.  Consequently, I predict that scenarios will include a roster of multiple villains against multiple heroes.  Now I don't see a situation wherein it is 5 v. 5, requiring 10 people to run, but 3 v. 3  is quite possible.

I dunno. I hear a lot of people say "yeah skirmishes are fun, but the scenarios are the real game", so I'm not convinced that skirmishing is the universal "shiny" part of the game.

We'll see what the guys have planned soon enough* though! I guess.

*It won't been soon enough for me!

Huh.  To me it was "Scenarios are fun, but Skirmishes are the REAL game."

I'm a big scenario fan myself.

Hoping the new maps have awesome scenarios for them.

I have flipped on this. At first I found the skirmishes uninteresting. It just seemed to be a bunch of characters charging in and attacking, while the scenarios were like puzzles that needed to be solved.

Now, after playing in a tournament, I am enthralled by the meta-game of choosing characters, positions, etc. before a match and I am keen to learn the best way to make use of all of these characters abilities both along and in conjunction. It is a frankly daunting task.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good skirmish.

But Omnitron with your drones?  That's just fun.

Also my gaming group is much more co-op so they don't do the best with skirmishes, and I usually just stomp people.

I've been trying to find a way to get to Gen-Con this year so I can try a tournament, but the group we had going fell through and it looks like I won't have money for my own hotel room.

Sorry to hear… 

I've begun pulling individual scenarios out of the comics and putting them on their own card so that we can flip through cards to decide what kind of experience we're in the mood for.  I've done the same with the various modes phantaskippy came up with a while ago so that we can decide "I'm in the mood for a Capture the Flag skirmish" or "I'm in the mood for the MistStorm scenario", etc..  This is vital for my gaming group because they find vanilla skirmishes to be just like Andy said, just a bunch of characters rushing in a punching each other, and to tell the truth, I find the scenarios in the comics to be nigh unreadable.  Calling each option for a game out in a clear, single card, seems to work well for my group.

Is that something you'd be willing to share, Spiff? (Or is it already on your site and I just missed it?)

I haven't shared them because I haven't had a chance to try each of them out and I wanted to make sure that in the process of simplifying things, I hadn't missed something important.  If you guys are interested in seeing them and doing a little playtesting to make sure they're solid, I'd be happy to post them up on my site.

That would rock Spiff, I would definitely try them out.

You got it.  I'll try to clean them up a bit tonight and post a link here.  I won't post an actual public link on my site until we're sure they're solid.