Omnitron 3.0

I'm assuming that the 2.0 version of Omnitron would just be playing versus him on Advanced, but this doesn't seem as if it'd really help him very much.  I get that he's supposed to be a difficulty-1 villain, but so is Baron Blade, and I found him far harder to kill.  Omnitron's Components blow up really easily in a 5-player game, very few of his effects scale with H, and his drones don't do much of anything unless a bunch of them come out at once, which is unlikely to happen unless he gets lucky with Terraforming.  Adaptive Plating might severely impair a 3-character party, but is unlikely to be more than a nuisance to larger groups.  Interpolation Beam is pathetic, and Technological Singularity highly situational.  Of the one-shots other than possibly Terraforming (which is environment-dependent and thus only sometimes strong, although potentially very much so on those occasions), only Sedative Flechettes is really mean.  It also Just Bugs Me that the Assault Drone and the Automaton Drone both hit the single hero with the highest HP, and the Railgun hits two such heroes; nothing ever hits the lowest hero for a surprise kill, and only the Flechettes damage everyone.  I think one of those two Drones ought to have a different targeting parameter, not to make the game more challenging so much as to provide a little variety (granted lack of variety might have been deliberate for flavor reasons, since he is a robot...but a really well-programmed robot would target the hero with the lowest HP first, in order to remove distractions and isolate the surviving target before grinding him down into inevitability.)

I get the impression that if a few of Omni's numbers were tweaked, he could fairly easily be made a tougher nut to crack.  Look at the picture of his Factory side...he's discharging 3 wasp-like Drones at once.  What if, instead of reanimating one of his Devices or Components, he got H of them back out every single turn?  Then he'd really feel like he was actually trying to wipe out humanity.  What if the Component destruction point was "H times 2" instead of a flat 7?  Slightly easier in a 3-hero game, but MUCH harder with 5, so he might actually be capable of keeping a Component in play for more than one turn?  Alternatively, dealing 7 damage could destroy one component instead of all of them, so his Rampaging Robot turns could actually keep ahead of the hero's momentum, making him steadily more dangerous each turn, and drawing a Component on his Factory turns might actually worry the heroes a little.  I also think that the Automaton Drone could stand to have its HP set to H+2 or even Hx2, making them very painful on the turn they first come out, though they still wouldn't last long.  And from a flavor perspective, maybe Technological Singularity ought to damage all the heroes except the ones who lost Equipment; this would make everyone suffer, instead of crushing Bunker and Wraith while Tachyon just laughs and Hyperspeed Assaults the big bugbot.

The other thing about Omnitron that bugs me?  He's the only Villain I know of whose death doesn't immediately end the game...except it usually does, because what are the odds you left a 4-5-HP Drone alive after destroying its 100-HP creator?  Even the toughest of the Devices is only 15 HP, and that one is the mega-bomb that screams "KILL ME FIRST", so there's little chance you'll still have it to deal with after taking down Omnitron himself.  All told, I think Omnitron deserves to have a MUCH more apocalyptic deck created for him, with Chairman's or Dawn's or even Matriarch's mechanics used to give him a properly Ultron/Skynet level of menace, and maybe dump his whole Trash into play when he's defeated, just to make sure you nearly always have a bit of mopping up to do even after he's defeated.

Have you fought Cosmic Omnitron? He's generally considered to be in the game's top 5 hardest villains.

(Also, most people find even vanilla Omnitron a lot harder than Baron Blade. Mostly because of stuff like Singularity and Flechettes.)

There is a promo for Omnitron called Cosmic Omnitron which uses the same deck but different character card. This version of Omnitron is easily at least a 3. He starts off with H-2 components in play, and those components will go off during the first turn, so things like disintegration ray and the railgun will go off at least once. He also plays an extra card at the end of his turn. He flips when there are no components in play. On his flip side he plays a card whenever a drone enters play, so you will generally have a turn where a bunch of drones are played. He also deals damage to the H-2 targets with the highest HP directly.

Depending on the team you have, regular Omnitron can be quite a handful, but if you feel he's too easy you can probably get the cards for Cosmitron on BGG.

Well,  firstly I suggest you try advanced mode.   

Secondly,  I suggest you try it on advanced mode with 4 players.   The fact of the matter is simply that the game is easier with 5.   No matter how you slice it, H mechanics or not, its easier with 5 than with 4 on every villain.    However the fact that you are presumeably playing 5-player games agaisnt Baron Blade and finding him more difficult than Omnitron is mindboggling to me.   

Regardless, as others have said,  play the Dropship Omnitron promo card.   Promo Card Omnitron is easily the hardest of the 4 villains that come with the base game.   My win rate against him on advanced mode is not good,  not good at all.

There are a lot of ideas floating around the forum for customizing villains and heroes.

one of my favorite ideas was put forth here: https://greaterthangames.com/forum/topic/villain-lieutenants-for-super-advanced-difficulty-3996

I've done a bit with it you should try his lieutenants for Omnitron and Baron Blade, they make it a much different challenge, come up with your own too, it can greatly change the feel of a villain, without having to redo a villain card or change the deck.

As was mentioned, play with less people. Doing 15 damage in one round is easy with 5 heroes in the game (even Visonary can deal her required damage of 3), but is a lot harder with 3 heroes where each has to do 5.

Don't forget the Omnitron is a device. So it would also get the damage reduction/increase. This can make taking out the components on one side much harder, not to mention negate certain cards like Hypersonic Assault. A lot of times when playing against Omnitron on advanced, it is all about which side to hit him on for the most damage. (Not saying you made this mistake, but it was misprinted on the original oversized villain cards.)

Perhaps the easiest solution to make it harder is don't metagame. Even some level 4 villains can be a a piece of cake if you choose the appropriate 5 heroes. Even if you don't want to play with random heroes, have a random order. Pre-selecting the order can instantly negate Adaptive Plating Subroutine. This not only means free turn when it is played, but you don't have to waste an Ongoing destruction on it. This card is not fun at all when you have characters like Bunker and Wraith next to each other.

Chairman doesn't either (if the Operative is out), and he goes into the discard pile. Much worse.

Overall, just have fun. If things are too easy, just modify the cards so that it fits your play-style.

I don't think Omnitron is a 1. I think his normal version is a 2. His Cosmic version is a 3 IMO.

That said I do use a house rule that his components are not destroyed unless he takes damage in a TURN not round (like Omnitron-X).

An even harder Omnitron challenge can be found in my Sentinels of the Multiverse Adventure here:

https://greaterthangames.com/forum/topic/a-sentinels-of-the-multiverse-adventure-3765

I do 3 Heroes and I think regular Omnitron was fine, harder than advance Blade. Early Electro Bombs in 3 player games are brutal. I do agree that his component wipe should have an H somewhere there.

By all means post your suggestions for modifying him in an easy way to read them!

If you believe the statistics thread, The Dreamer actually gets harder with more characters. But she's the exception.

As for Omnitron, we almost always play with 3 heroes and I'd rate him closd to a 4 – definitely harder than most villains. Can't comment as much on 5-player games…

Arathorn

Yeah, and looking at her mechanics, I can believe it. Several of her projections have some kind of multi-attack, she plays more of them the more players there are, and the number of projections she plays is superlinear with the number of players.

The big thing is her second side, she does enough damage each round that you might not have enough time get ten under her card.

Miss Information gets tougher with more players as well, leaving those clues out gets rough if they don't come quickly.

Blade was 4 players both times I faced him, so that may well have made a difference.  Also as I said before, one of my five was Legacy, while he was only in one of the 4s, and he wasn't combining with Ra and Tempest that time.  (The Omnitron party also had Visionary and Bunker, while the second Blade party was Legs, Haka, Visi and Zero.  Plus I put Legacy first in the Omnitron party, while versus Blade he was in third.)

This was my first game against Omnitron, so I didn't know much about how he plays, and I picked heroes irrespective of any attempt to powergame against him.  I did the same with the Chairman and in my first game against Citizen Dawn, and suffered for it both times; in future I'll try to specifically target their weaknesses in order to have a fighting chance in those games (the second time I fought Dawn was a close loss due to attrition; that first game I actually won, but it was very miserable and desperate victory in which two heroes were entirely gelded by Citizen Tears by the end).  If I play against Omnitron again, I'll probably use 3 heroes, and attempt to avoid heavy damagers…but if you did the same against a tough villain, you'd be utterly screwed, so my original point stands, Omnitron is kinda underpowers in general.

Chairman doesn't either (if the Operative is out)

Wait, how the hell does that work.  Chairman is immune to damage until he flips, and I think he doesn't flip until the Operative dies.  Or maybe it's something to do with underbosses, but I got a strong impression that getting him to flip while she lives was at least functionally impossible, if not definitionally so.

Overall, just have fun. If things are too easy, just modify the cards so that it fits your play-style.

That's pretty much where I was going with this thread.  Although it's tough to change what the cards say on them, unless you're playing with experienced players who can remember to mentally change the stats (or you just want to deface your original cards, but I'd rather not do that).

Quote:

Overall, just have fun. If things are too easy, just modify the cards so that it fits your play-style.

That's pretty much where I was going with this thread.  Although it's tough to change what the cards say on them, unless you're playing with experienced players who can remember to mentally change the stats (or you just want to deface your original cards, but I'd rather not do that).

I have three versions of Gloomweaver I've tried out,  I wrote the rules on an index card and drew a stick figure Gloomy.

If you would like to play with some of us "more experienced" players check out the games on Google hangout (or whatever it is) or join up on one of our forum games, you can learn a good deal in a slow game where you have a day or more between your turns.

It's not impossible. The Operative only looks for Underbosses in the deck, not the trash.

chairman flips with the Operative still alive in a large amount of Advanced Mode games.    it's still quite difficult to kill him normally without killing the Operative first,  though I've seen it done (Wrathful Retribution usually involved).

Yeah I had a nightmare game against the stupid robot.  Self-play, 3 heroes, Omnitron, and Ruins of Atlantis (which ALWAYS F*@$% me).

Omnitron 1: Explosives, then component that damages 1 for each card drawn.

Visionary 1: Hemorrhage for 2 on Omni and Explosives, power on Expat, Expat takes 2 damage, draws 2, discards 1, Visionary draws, takes damage.

Expat 1: Shotgun, shoots for 4 on Explosives, draws, takes damage.

Scholar 1: Flesh to Iron, draws, no damage because of Flesh to Iron.

Environment 1: Leaky Room (F@#E$#%$%)!

Omnitron 2: Explosives shoots for 9, Technological Singularly, destroys shotgun deals 2 damage to heroes, no drones or components in trash.

Visionary 2: …power on Expat (to draw more guns), Expat draws 2, takes 2 damage, discards 1, Visionary draws, takes damage.

Expat 2: draws 2 more, takes 2 more.

Scholar 2: discards for Flesh to Iron, power to heal for 1, draw 1, 0 damage.

Environment 2: Leaky Room goes away, Pillars of Hercules (damn!).

Omnitron 3: Explosives shoot for 9, Pillars play…Explosives…shoots for 15, Terraforming, destroys Pillars plays Flechettes…deals 4 to all, destroys all ongoing.  Visionary KOed, Expat KOed, Scholar is at 1.

Me: I think I'll go play a different game for a while.  I blame Ruins of Atlantis as usual.

Hmm, one little note - you say the Tech Singularity destroyed the Shotgun and dealt two damage to all heroes - I don't have the card on me right now but I'm pretty sure it only hits the hero whose equipment was destroyed for two damage per equipment (so if the only equipment in play was Expatriette's Tactical Shotgun, she'd be the only one to take damage for it).

And why did the Flechettes deal four damage? Don't they only hit for two, or am I getting confused with Omni-10's Disruptive Flechettes?

Also, note that you don't have to draw during your Draw Phase. You only have to draw if someone plays a card or uses a power which says you do - if it only says you may draw a card, then again, you don't have to.

Okay, that was technically three little notes, but still…sounds like a pretty nasty game :(. Once we had Omnitron play both EPEs on the same turn, but fortunately Tachyon had two Hypersonic Assaults in hand, so was able to stall them both long enough for us to destroy them :).

Sedative Flechettes does H+1 damage to all hero targets.

Ahh, okay. We've not fought him for a while and I've played as Omni-10 several times recently, so that might be why I forgot that one ;).

About to play a 3-player game against Advanced Omnitron, and I've intentionally picked heroes that shouldn't be too strong against him (no Haka, Ra, Tempest or Legacy, though also no Bunker or Wraith or Absolute Zero, so Singularity won't be too much of a spoiler).  We'll see how this one turns out, but I can already tell that Rampaging Robot turning off Hypersonic Assault is going to make the EPE a lot more dangerous.

I chose to draw because 1 damage for a card is more than acceptable.  I know a hero doesn't have to draw during the draw phase.

Technological Singularity does only deal damage to the equipment's owner, so I messed that up.

Flechettes is H + 1 as stated already.

I've lost to Omnitron before when he draws this type of start.  Random early Explosives can be very difficult to deal with sometimes.

Or an Explosives played outside of Omni's turn.

Had a grueling seven-hour game, but finally triumphed.  Advanced Omnitron feels like still no more than a 2 difficulty; he made me sweat, but at no point did I feel that I was utterly doomed.  Had I not accidentally dealt a one-target damage to all targets instead, it's not certain whether any heroes would have gone down, but since I was trying out Unity for the first time (my order box containing her arrived literally while I was setting up; I was going to play Fanatic instead, but this was so much better, having Tachyon die proved to actually be immensely helpful, as she allowed Unity to play Turret Bot right before her turn, and a bunch of other free Bots besides, and then a Supply Crate...between this and Visionary feeding her cards, Unity became thoroughly ridiculous and pretty much single-handedly dismantled Omnitron.  The first Technological Singularity had slammed Unity badly and left her unable to play bots until after "Tacky" died, but she had enough sense not to keep Equipment in play past the end of her turn after that, and thanks to Visionary's Suggestions, Precognition and Brain Burn, Omnitron was completely neutered by about round 6, and after that it was just a matter of wearing him down - in large part by making him replay TechSing three times with absolutely no effect.

All told, a hilarious game...but I'm never letting Unity go last in the turn order again.  :P

All told, a hilarious game...but I'm never letting Unity go last in the turn order again.  :P

Any reason why?  I like her last so she can benefit from extra cards, extra plays and such.  I play her last even over Argent Adept, who I absolutely love last in the order.

Well my impression is that Envisioner felt she was TOO powerful that way.  Certainly if your goal is to destroy all equipment before Omnitrons turns, having her last is ideal, but there are also some advantages to puting her first in turn order.  She can then destroy limited equipment just before the hero replaces it.  (Of course she can pretty much do this from last place as well, just not to equipment you want out during the non-player turns and you run the risk that the villain/environment will surprise you and make that hero want to play a different card)

Yeah, Unity's deck might be balanced in and of itself, but when all the previous heroes are feeding her all the help she needs (particularly when even one previous hero has an Incap effect of "one hero may play a card now"), she becomes ridiculously broken fast.  Without any help at all, she might border on unplayable unless she gets a good draw, but cards like Modular Workbench and Flash Forging mean she only needs to get really lucky once in order to begin steamrolling the opposition.  Having her go early means the heroes have to plan ahead a bit in order to get her the help she needs.

Her weakness is her bots have hp, villains that hit hero targts hit bots.  She can be one of the stronger heroes, but there are a lot of villains she really struggles with.

Like Zero she's a late game mauler, onece they get built up they are really powerful.

That can be a strength in a lot of cases.  Against Omnitron, nearly all of his attacks target the highest-HP hero, so if the heroes are in danger of imminent death, the chances are he's hitting a boss instead of them.  Against Grand Warlord Voss, it's a lot more likely that the Minions are dealing damage to everything, or to the lowest-HP target.  The latter might still benefit from the bots, but more in the early game when the help is less necessary.  And of course all-targets damage is ruinous to Unity.  Still, my basic point stands, she does a lot better when the other heroes are dropping everything else to help her, and may have trouble functioning on her own as well as other heroes do.

Everybody does better when all heroes drop everything else to help them.

Does she do worse than other heroes alone? Yep. Do others do even worse than that? Definitely.

I would also point out Unity is largely immune to Equipment or Ongoing destruction, her bots are neither.

Yeah, AZ and Unity I would say do the best with everyone helping them.

We had one game with Adept and Visionary where Unity did nothing on her own turn but draw cards or play one-shots if they were worth it.  Visionary was stacking her hand, and Adept was letting her play two cards on his turn.

Unity doesn't gain as much from Adept or Visionary increasing damage, she needs universal and all hero target buffs, where AZ with TtE and an extra power each round is insane.

Legacy does best when people are helping him. After all his base power is completely useless if no one is doing damage.

I haven't found Absolute Zero to require any help.  If he doesn't have a Module to make his power useful, he just draws two cards on his turn until he gets Onboard Installation or something.  He's got four copies of each module, plus Installation and Realignment, and several useful one-shots.  I've yet to have a terribly bad game as him.

Equipment destruction does hurt her fairly significantly at times.  Most especially, it can take away her Modular Workbench, which is almost a must-have.  Without it, her whole turn usually consists of putting down an Equipment, then turning it into a Bot.  With Workbench, she actually gets to play a card on subsequent turns in addition to making a Bot.  Scrap Metal and Volatile Parts are also Equipments she likes to keep in play, though they can be Bot-Fixed if necessary.

I'm not sure that's a great comparison because that's not really people helping him so much as him not being able to help other people. Even if he can't use his base power, he still has very useful cards like Take Down and Heroic Interception which can benefit the team greatly. There is almost always something to do as Legacy.

I personally have never had issues getting Zero's modulars out, but having to skip your power phase because you don't have a module out is very different from skipping your power phase because nobody else is able to make use of it that turn.

I like Zero and think he's a good character but there are valid frustrations to playing him.

Well I finally managed to lose a game to Omnitron.  It wasn't easy, though; the result of a single trash-shuffle was what caused Fanatic to die just seconds before she would have blasted him down to about 9 HP.  With a little more attention paid to destroying his repair drones instead of beating on himself, he would have been in worse shape.  And my loss was probably entirely due to my forgetting Alchemical Redirection and letting the Scholar get killed, while short-circuiting Absolute Zero's turn, in addition to the Time Cataclysm being extremely good at f***ing up games (the other time I played there, it turned a difficult scenario into an absolute nightmare; this time it gummed up the works of what should have been an easy victory, long enough that the heroes managed to screw up a few times and start losing ground).  It was easily my most epic game against him, a fact that can largely be credited to Visionary's absence, and it left me with new appreciation for Fanatic, who double-End of Daysed just as she did in my single lamest game to date, but this time she saved the heroes' bacon rather than utterly mopping the floor with the villain, so it felt much more triumphal even though the game was actually lost.

So I admit that Omnitron is not a complete buffoon; he seems to rely on longevity and lots of destruction to wear the heroes down, in a way that isn't immediately obvious.  I still think he might be less likely to pull off wins, especially on Advanced, than Baron Blade, but he can definitely at least make the heroes sweat.  I still want to tweak him into a deadlier version, but this game gave me an idea of how the result needs to feel...it isn't so much about letting him get more Drones into play or making them tougher, but just contributing to his current tendency to outlast and oppress the heroes.

There was one really challenging omnitron matchup we tried.  If you know two other people who own the base game, Omnitron vs three copies of Haka in Insula Primalis.  The real challenge is that once the adaptive plating comes out you are completely reliant on Savage Mana and the Environment to get him off of melee imunity.  We tried this a couple times in a row and I'm not sure we ever actually won.

When I lose to Omnitron, it's almost always because he Singularity or Flechette, and clear all of my equipment/ongoing.  Often it's because Omnitron Terraforms when there's a few environment out and he combos a bunch of things.  On advanced, Omnitron often gets more damage off and tanks just enough damage to allow his components to stay in play for a few turns.  Also, when I play against him, I often get Explosives 1st or 2nd turn.

Adaptive Plating often slows things to a crawl, allowing Omnitron to play his "win" cards (Singularity/Flechette).

We usually lose because of the Electropulse. That comes out early before the heroes have built up their hands and on-table resources, or out of sequence (because of an Environment draw), or the heroes just have bad luck in dealing with it, or any combination of the above, and it really cripples the hero team.

He opened with first-turn Flechettes (5 damage to everyone, though no Ongoings to destroy), and later fired off another one (6 damage that time due to Advanced Factory Mode).  On the other hand, he wasted Terraforming completely on turn 1, and later another one hit only a Fixed Point (thus sparing me from a sticky rules question regarding a "take damage to keep this in play" card), plus he got both Technological Singularities in one turn, so the second one did nothing and the players no longer needed to fear his destruction until he reshuffled.  So it wasn't his meanest possible game; he never got a Railgun or Disintegrator to fire (though in this case it actually took Ongoing destruction and even an End of Days to get them out, rather than just beating on him for 7), and the one time EPE blew up, there were only two hero(ine)s alive, and they both had armor that completely shrugged off the 12-point blast.  So it wasn't really that Omnitron did anything terribly decisive to win the game; he still strikes me as just barely a credible threat.

I still think it was my game to lose, and my stupidity with Alchemical Redirection was the only reason I lost it.  Though Fanatic's little game of chicken didn't help either.  Not that she had much of a choice - the turn before she died, she'd had to draw cards in order to get Wrathful Retribution online, and the turn before THAT, she was playing an Aegis so she didn't die.  Hurricane shutting off our card supply was also a huge reason for the defeat;  I'm 0 for 2 in the Time Cataclysm, thanks to Hurrican and the Main Computer Room in some order.

Wait, what? Seven HOURS?

Actually the one last night was more like TWELVE.  But in both of these cases, I was playing all heroes in a solitaire game, while blogging the whole game and watching videos on YouTube…the time adds up.  This is why I had largely stopped doing the blog thing, making a rare exception tonight (and paying for it by being up until 6 in the morning).

An idea I had tonight while re-reading this thread.  Since I feel that Unity is more broken the later she is in the turn order, while Legacy is at his best when going first (except possibly if he's followed by Absolute Zero or Nightmist, since they damage themselves a lot and don't necessarily profit from it the way Fanatic does), what about assigning each hero a "speed" value, and having each party take turns in speed sequence?  You could also use this as a way of hardcoding the "bunker and wraith vs. Adaptive Plating" problem, thereby making Omnitron more of a challenge.  Or conversely, you could switch the speed order for easier games when you need the extra help against a tough villain.  Unity would be at one extreme of the speed range and Legacy at the other, though I'm not certain who'd go where in the middles.  All this would probably mostly apply to solitaire play, of course.

Any categorey involving the word speed should start with Tachyon.  

Speed can be simulated by changing the seating order. Part of the challenge, especially if you go random, is dealing with the order of play.

Perhaps, but if that were done it would only be true for flavor reasons, and what I'm discussing is a purely mechanical effect.  Plus it would have her take her turn before Unity, unless players went from slowest to fastest, which would seem extremely strange.  And as I already pointed out, a dead Tachy taking her turn before Unity is often more powerful than a live Tachy, hence why I want to put Unity first.

(I play mostly four hero games, so this is all geared that way)

Players that I think are more powerful up front are ones with ongoing and environment destruction, and ones that give cards to allies.

Omnitron-X might rank #1 in going first power, he has great destruction and Time shift is great when first, but if you have a visionary and Omnitron-X Visionary is most powerful right before Omni, esp if it is dark visionary.

Adept I find to be really powerful last, buecause his card play granting and power use granting is best served at the end when cards are played and drawn already, Unity is about the only Hero that really benefits more from going after Adept.  The only reason I see to put Legacy first is Take Down, when cards grant villain play on hero turns.  I actually like it when you have a damage dealer in front of Legacy, so that if you need to switch off of Galvanize, you split the team in bonus/no-bonus.  It makes a weaker first round, but not much.  Legacies lack of destruction makes him more of a liability than I like first play.

When I am building a team to really do well (a revenge game or a tough challenge) I usually take a destruction heavy hero first, then a more consistent damage dealer that has some destruction, then a legacy or Mr. Fixer type, then a build up to big damage hero at the end.

If you don't need destruction first, like you are facing a Voss or Omnitron and the environment isn't debilitation heavy I like a heavy one-shotter or someone with irreducible damage to lead off, someone who can burst through some DR and set the rest of the team up to mop up the rest.

Tempest and Omnitron-X do well in both situations, Visionary I like first because she has destruction and WtM is often a great card to throw first turn so the rest can plan out their moves with it in mind.  A lot of discussion can eliminate that bonus, but we tend to play faster than that.  Also Dark Visionary first followed by Omni is ridiculously powerful.

One of my favorite games ever was DarkVis/Omni/Bunker/Adept vs. Chairman.  Bunker was ridiculous.

Chrono Ranger can do pretty well, too - The Whole Gang can be very useful for taking out low-hp targets. I've used it to good effect to take out both the Effigy and the Runes simultaneously whilst fighting Apostate. The Masadah means that you don't have to worry about soak, as well, so once you get a few bounties out (and especially if there are damage buffs floating about), ol' Jim can totally destroy a whole load of stuff nice and quickly :).