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Doctor Spaceman posted:If that's the scenario I'm thinking of then the problem is squarely on Marcel's shoulders for being poo poo at playtesting/design. Bingo
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Mar 2, 2024 19:09
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DashingGentleman posted:Yeah, my group played TTS gloomhaven early in the pandemic and it didn’t keep us engaged enough to stick with it. We found that it mostly boiled down to setting up and executing the same couple of combos over and over. Interesting decisions came up rarely and victory was more likely to be determined by card draw than as a consequence of player choice. The more complex characters and scenarios do look appealing but we were not ready to put in the work to get to them. Original flavor Gloomhaven has three foundational issues (and some smaller side issues): 1. The game is hardest in the first few scenarios and the difficulty keeps dropping as you go. 2. Your options are most limited at the start of the game and expand as you proceed. 3. Enemies as set up in the early scenarios aren't selected to avoid complexity, and you encounter very few "late" enemies who are substantially more complex or difficult than the early ones. Frosthaven fixes some of these problems, but partly by having more complex characters who are harder to learn to play out of the gate. Gloomhaven 2E may fix the rest of it. Gloomhaven is my all-time winner for boardgame hours played: I've played two complete campaigns with two different groups of people. The value for money there is considerable. But yes, it isn't a short session game and if you have analysis-paralysis or a co-gamer who has it, Gloomhaven probably isn't your best bet.
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Mar 2, 2024 19:30
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Perry Mason Jar posted:Thinking about how Ark Nova isn't well-liked in this thread and wondering: what highly rated/ranked (BGG) games don't you like? So - as you learn the way to play, the game feels a whole lot less strict about optimal decisions. There's also scalable difficulty - you can choose to set it easier, which also opens up space for more mistakes and less optimal turn-taking. There is, though, a difference between good gameplay and bad; getting good is a learned skill, and I think that's honestly desirable for a tactical board game. With all that said I'm going to poo poo on Gloomhaven 1st Edition a bit here. It was a loving blast but the balance got worse as the campaign progressed. There were certain VERY optimal classes and tactics that just trivialized scenarios and got repetitive. Frosthaven tightened up the scenario play and class balance issues pretty well, after learning from GH 1e's mistakes. GH 2e goes even further and took lessons from some of Frosthaven's. And then Jaws of the Lion is just a much tighter and self-contained game - and what I'd always recommend to people. Anyways if you want to try it again sometime, I'd recommend Jaws of the Lion or holding off for GH2e.
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Mar 2, 2024 19:44
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Magnetic North posted:Crossposting from the dealz thread: Oh, boo. I ordered it, having never played Sheriff before. Oh well. At $15 my kids will enjoy the theming and will give us the gist of the game anyway. My 8 year old's favorite game since he was 6 is Coup. Little guy loves bluffing and subterfuge. Maybe he'll grow up to be an investment banker or something more respectable, like mafia don.
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Mar 2, 2024 21:38
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canyoneer posted:Oh, boo. I ordered it, having never played Sheriff before. Oh well. At $15 my kids will enjoy the theming and will give us the gist of the game anyway. If you haven't played Sheriff before, you're still in for a treat. The nicest edition is out of print, and I can't honestly say it's so different as to suggest rustling up a 1E copy. You will still be able to get the core fun out of the game. It's a game I've played probably 20 times and still do enjoy, though I admit it's not exactly Brass in its design.
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Mar 2, 2024 21:43
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dwarf74 posted:With all that said I'm going to poo poo on Gloomhaven 1st Edition a bit here. It was a loving blast but the balance got worse as the campaign progressed. There were certain VERY optimal classes and tactics that just trivialized scenarios and got repetitive. I'm interested since I played a bunch of Gloomhaven but haven't really studied it - what were the very optimal classes and tactics?
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Mar 3, 2024 00:34
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Gort posted:I'm interested since I played a bunch of Gloomhaven but haven't really studied it - what were the very optimal classes and tactics? Broadly speaking the overpowered elements are curse spamming and non-loss executes, with aoe disadvantage and invisibility helping a lot. Stamina potions were nerfed because replaying your strongest card(s) more than once a rest cycle is obviously extremely strong.
Music Note + Eclipse + Sun/Spears + your choice (potentially the other out of Sun/Spears, or Angry Face, or Cthulhu) will trivialise most situations. Two Minis is very strong in general at 2P but has some weaknesses and scales somewhat poorly. Doctor Spaceman fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Mar 3, 2024 |
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Mar 3, 2024 00:51
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Cthulhu face had so many changes to its powers and forced the only 10 curses per deck rule change because the first edition version can jam a billion curses into the monster deck off the jump and nothing is a threat ever again.
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Mar 3, 2024 01:52
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I think the biggest issue with Gloomhaven is that it has to be designed to accommodate varying numbers of players at varying levels with varying resources. It's extremely impressive that Gloomhaven managed to stay as balanced as it is under those circumstances but the balance is always going to suffer compared to a more curated experience.
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Mar 3, 2024 01:54
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I still think some of the worst design in GH when I played it was anything that could summon more enemies, which made for wildly swinging difficulty for a scenario that featured them simply based on how quickly the enemies summoned more enemies.
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Mar 3, 2024 01:58
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Tekopo posted:I still think some of the worst design in GH when I played it was anything that could summon more enemies, which made for wildly swinging difficulty for a scenario that featured them simply based on how quickly the enemies summoned more enemies. Especially since the component cap was the same whether you had 2 player or 4, leading to wildly different experiences based on game size since you could potentially have twice as many player characters fighting barely any more enemies.
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Mar 3, 2024 02:01
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Tekopo posted:I still think some of the worst design in GH when I played it was anything that could summon more enemies, which made for wildly swinging difficulty for a scenario that featured them simply based on how quickly the enemies summoned more enemies. The Savvas enemies that summoned were the only ones I thought worked well mechanically. The game always treated them like minibosses and some of their other abilities were so nasty that a do-nothing summon turn could be one of the easier things to deal with. Oozes were just a bad idea. Doctor Spaceman fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Mar 3, 2024 |
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Mar 3, 2024 03:19
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Putting summon actions on the card with the reshuffle icon so that it can potentially come up every turn should have landed Isaac in game designer jail.
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Mar 3, 2024 04:23
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A huge strategy element when dealing with summoning monsters is gaming the position so they have no legal summon location. Honestly a ton of gloomhaven strategy in general is positional optimization, and once you get good at that the game gets a lot easier to deal with.
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Mar 3, 2024 06:27
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found terraforming mars for $20 with all the parts at the thrift store. i figure why not worst case i can probably sell it for more than that or trade it
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Mar 3, 2024 08:05
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mikeycp posted:found terraforming mars for $20 with all the parts at the thrift store. i figure why not worst case i can probably sell it for more than that or trade it No the worst case is you discover your friends like playing Terraforming Mars
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Mar 3, 2024 09:59
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million dollar mack posted:No the worst case is you discover your friends like playing Terraforming Mars No, the worst case is the OP discovers they like playing Terraforming Mars.
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Mar 3, 2024 10:19
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My biggest irritation with Gloomhaven is rather the absolute bloat. I would really appreciate they had spent the effort on the game being easier to set up and tear down with an insert, maybe less annoying dungeon building system and how about a god drat element board that fits all the elements or the bottom insert that can actually organize all the cards? Instead the stupid achievement stickers take up more space than the entire element board and a small forest died to make the monster cards that could've easily been a dice and a single card listing their abilities, like battletech hit table. Not to mention in at a time where recycling and using less resources is more important than ever, a large amount of effort is put in for the game to be played once and not be resellable. I also agree with the game having as much frustration and unfairness as good times. We very often get stuck on dungeons because black imps or other creatures like that draw insane amounts of shields, curse everyone and heal friends. Bonus if they are being spawned en masse. Meanwhile your summons don't level with you, can't do anything when they spawn, they exhaust with the summoner, you can't choose when they go, their cards always go into lost and they aren't even controlled by you. Why even base some characters around summons who are so nerfed into the ground that they rarely survive beyond a few rounds or deal no meaningful damage? Another issue is the retire system making your party occasionally unplayable. Even if you wish to polish a turd character with card stickers, the cost and limitations are really high and you will be forced to lose the character anyway. The only solution is to spoil the game and find out what are the good classes when you pick journey cards . While I enjoy gloomhaven a lot, overall it's like skyrim. wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle and despite fundamental, huge issues it's claimed to be a masterpiece. I think its success is more to do with it being the only game of its type most people have experienced rather than excellent game design. I can't recommend GH to anyone over oathsworn or JOTL, both of which are objectively less masochistic experiences. haddedam fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Mar 3, 2024 |
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Mar 3, 2024 10:22
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Tekopo posted:I still think some of the worst design in GH when I played it was anything that could summon more enemies, which made for wildly swinging difficulty for a scenario that featured them simply based on how quickly the enemies summoned more enemies. Oozes still do Ooze stuff, don't get me wrong. I personally think Summoners are cool because they force a priority shift. They're individually not that strong, but they can swing a scenario. They do add more rng - but you know they add more rng. If you want to control the randomness, you control or kill the summoners.
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Mar 3, 2024 15:31
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Gloomhaven player summons are broken good, the game just doesn’t have any innate mechanism to teach you how to handle them beyond being the person handling monster turns. Circles in our run-through just totally clowned on the game: one loss card would often do upwards of 20 damage and once we added Music Note to the party thinga really got broken. We never were one of those groups routinely playing on difficulty+2, but we sure could have with that group. Frosthaven makes changes that render summons even better, IMO, and Prism may be my favorite class in tne game. All that said, you need the right players working together, and both games are overly sensitive to party composition. The right set of characters substantially change the game dynamics. That’s certainly something my gaming groups enjoyed—every retirement completely shifts the dynamics of the game—but I can see where another group might hate it. Frosthaven has better character design, but higher learning curves for characters, and that can get frustrating in that period where you don’t yet understand how a character works and wind up with some wasted turns. If you do enjoy the game, it’s a ridiculous amount of gameplay and variety in a single box, and without the amount of prep work that an RPG requires. What are the similar games-in-class that manage to outdo Gloomhaven? I’ve played through some of the FFG “tactical app-driven combat” games and they’re more streamlined but suffer from the “read the developers’ minds to figure out how to proceed” effect in a way that, say, Mansions of Madness avoids by not being a long campaign where scenario 2 choices will matter for months of real-time play.
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Mar 3, 2024 16:47
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Narsham posted:Gloomhaven player summons are broken good, the game just doesn’t have any innate mechanism to teach you how to handle them beyond being the person handling monster turns. Circles in our run-through just totally clowned on the game: one loss card would often do upwards of 20 damage and once we added Music Note to the party thinga really got broken. We never were one of those groups routinely playing on difficulty+2, but we sure could have with that group. Wait what how, player summons are generally regarded as bad or at least extremely hard to use effectively because they are almost always going to attack the wrong target because rng works against you and then just die pointlessly so your big loss card achieved nothing. Like I LIKED circles but playing felt like doing 4D chess to be able to play slightly around the level of effectiveness of much simpler classes
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Mar 3, 2024 17:10
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My current Gloomhaven playthrough group is maybe 15 missions in and hasn't lost a single scenario. My first playthrough got cut short by the pandemic, so total I have maybe 25 or 30 scenarios under my belt. If Gloomhaven is super hard and it feels like it's being driven entirely by the RNG, you're playing it poorly. We've obviously had a lot of close calls in that time, and a few scenarios coming down to the last turn before we were all exhausted, but it's not just a complete luck fest. Summons in my opinion are meh (although I'm currently playing as two minis in a 4 player group), but if you want to get the most out of summons the group needs to plan around what the summon is going to do. If they just pick cards ignoring the fact that there's a summon (or several) on the board, then the summons are going to be kinda worthless. If the whole group acts like a team and plans around what the summons will do (assuming current board state) then you can get a lot out of their presence, even if they mostly just act as an extra meat shield.
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Mar 3, 2024 17:26
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Summons are another mechanic that doesn't really scale with table size. Yes, nominally when you go from 2p to 4p the numbers for summons don't get any worse than the numbers for attacks... but having a more enemy-dense environment makes things dramatically worse for summons whose AI consists of "go forward and punch things." At 2p it's massively easier to manipulate enemy and summon positioning so that the summon can survive long enough to get a couple attacks off (which is all they really need to be good value, although that still feels bad to some people who want them to be more like permanent companions.)
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Mar 3, 2024 17:39
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Glagha posted:Wait what how, player summons are generally regarded as bad or at least extremely hard to use effectively because they are almost always going to attack the wrong target because rng works against you and then just die pointlessly so your big loss card achieved nothing. Like I LIKED circles but playing felt like doing 4D chess to be able to play slightly around the level of effectiveness of much simpler classes That's the thing, they are crazy good as long as you put a much, much higher degree of effort than any other class requires. 
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Mar 3, 2024 18:00
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I'm playing a summoner and we don't have the "meta party that makes the game fun". Honestly the class is better as a healer and giving an extra move to the beastmaster every once in a while. When used to spawning weak rear end summons that can't solo even the weakest enemy due to lack of scaling, and get left behind once you are done with a single room, I just ended up with short and frustrating games. I hope in ed2 summon cards have stats that are modified by players level, they are allowed to move before or after and you get to control them. Any of those would buff a mechanic that is so nerfed into oblivion, that there are only a few edge cases where the summons are not any% exhaust speedrun strats.
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Mar 3, 2024 19:15
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Summons are damage machines that need to avoid taking damage and the Summoner has tools to force the summons movement to both avoid taking damage and keep up with the party. It's also a good move to use your character as a blocker for your summons if your party is unable or unwilling. It's a class that's difficult to play at a level where it's as good as an average brute but when played well they're actually a good class, provided the scenario doesn't gently caress them over. Not as good as the really good classes and lacking in a flexible game plan, but above the average in your standard scenario. I'm not saying it's perfect. It should have had at least 1 repeatable summon, as well as an option for a frontline summon that could provide cover for other summons so that they're not so dependent on team composition. Summons also badly need true health scaling, both in GH and FH, rather than relying on items to fill that role. Like is it really so much trouble to add level divided by 2-4 to each summon's health?
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Mar 3, 2024 19:47
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Azran posted:That's the thing, they are crazy good as long as you put a much, much higher degree of effort than any other class requires.
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Mar 3, 2024 19:59
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(spoilers for both haven games I guess) Considering how great the summon character and the trap character are in Frosthaven, I have no doubt they managed to vastly improve those two niches in Gloom 2ed. At least I hope so because there's no way I'll ever touch 1ed Circles again after witnessing the glory that is Prism. Then again, it didn't help that some other classes were way overtuned, because why would I ever coordinate my turn around your 4 hp attack 2 goblin or whatever the gently caress you wasted a card on when I can just disarm/kill/curse the entire room and win the scenario
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Mar 3, 2024 21:35
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In completely unrelated news, with the on again off again Heroscape re-release announcements and whatnot: Why are there not a million sets of files for people to 3d print Heroscape compatible tiles? There are a handful of them on the usual sites, but it's surprisingly not much. I've actually never played the game but in this era or FDM proliferation it feels like something there would be a lot more of.
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Mar 3, 2024 21:42
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What the hell have I done? 
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Mar 3, 2024 22:05
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armorer posted:In completely unrelated news, with the on again off again Heroscape re-release announcements and whatnot: Why are there not a million sets of files for people to 3d print Heroscape compatible tiles? There are a handful of them on the usual sites, but it's surprisingly not much. I've actually never played the game but in this era or FDM proliferation it feels like something there would be a lot more of. I wasn't sure about Heroscape, but I've looked into Battletech and also hadn't seen much of that so I got curious as to why. I came across this comment. Reddit user Garrus1138 posted:3D printing Heroscape tiles is not ideal and has some issues. I am using PLA filament (~20€/kg) and custom 3D models for terrain pieces that I created myself. A single Hex-tile takes around 100 minutes to print and costs 0.18€. A 3-Hex-tile takes around 260 min to print and costs 0.48€. You also have to accept that the terrain pieces will not fit perfectly with your Heroscape tiles. Different filaments also shrink differently, causing the tiles to sometimes be too tight or too loose, so adjustments to the 3D models have to be made. I guess it would also make sense that imperfections might propagate over a group, even with a modern printer. Also, you can spend that printing time creating something more than just the tile like a building or model. That's my guess anyway, as someone that's never done it.
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Mar 3, 2024 22:26
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Glagha posted:Wait what how, player summons are generally regarded as bad or at least extremely hard to use effectively because they are almost always going to attack the wrong target because rng works against you and then just die pointlessly so your big loss card achieved nothing. Like I LIKED circles but playing felt like doing 4D chess to be able to play slightly around the level of effectiveness of much simpler classes Let's assume you don't get your summons killed instantly. A L1 Circles card could read Attack 2 Pierce 2 Stun/Attack 2 Pierce 2 Stun Loss and that wouldn't be a great card, but it'd be OK. Multiple turns of the attacks and it becomes better than most loss cards very rapidly. There's really three issues that lead people to see summons as bad: 1. Narrow range of effectiveness. If you're playing scenario L7, Circles is in big trouble. If Circles is your first unlock and you're still at prosperity 1, Circles' summons will seem a bit better but the necessary items to provide support won't be there. Late game and high prosperity, Circles can't keep up. 2. Comparative ineffectiveness. You can play carefully and still lose a summons to an unlucky turn. Meanwhile Eclipse is just deleting enemies. Then you clear the room and everyone rushes into the next while your summons linger behind (or run ahead and get instantly killed). Circles needs items to manage summons or needs to be willing to unsummon and recover between rooms. Also, most characters don't end up being blocked or attacking the wrong targets; summons can really get in the way in certain scenarios and you have to make adjustments going in; depending on what you do with scenario set-up, you may not know that. 3. No support. If the whole group is focused on keeping summons alive, their utility jumps considerably. The problem is that several of the characters who can tank probably won't want to or won't be able to for your melee summons. Circles can try to provide support alone, but that's insufficient. You really need a dedicated character who pulls focus from melee summons; the advantage is that you can, in turn, have the summons pull focus from that character when necessary. That means having coordination internally. At higher levels you probably need a class like Music Note who can boost all the summons in ways that partly compensate for their limitations. And yes, you have to handle Fire Demons carefully, etc. Eraflure posted:(spoilers for both haven games I guess) I thought Prism was a wonderful design and it has a lot of depth in terms of adjusting your deck to completely change how the class plays from scenario to scenario. Just amazingly flexible.
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Mar 4, 2024 01:59
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Has anyone here played the Doomtown LCG? Looks like it got an updated repackage under a new publisher back in 2022. I was always curious about it, even though it seems overly complicated and the art is frequently ugly, because I like weird west stuff and the combat system being based on poker hands sounds really fun.
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Mar 4, 2024 03:59
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Narsham posted:3. No support. If the whole group is focused on keeping summons alive, their utility jumps considerably. The problem is that several of the characters who can tank probably won't want to or won't be able to for your melee summons. Circles can try to provide support alone, but that's insufficient. You really need a dedicated character who pulls focus from melee summons; the advantage is that you can, in turn, have the summons pull focus from that character when necessary. That means having coordination internally. I think this is the #1 thing - any chance you have to keep a summon alive as a player in a group with summons, it's probably a good idea, because each round they survive multiplies their total effectiveness. If I'm going to survive the mission anyway, then throwing a card to absorb a hit as a player is a better deal than letting a summon die because it didn't cost an action to get it out in the first place. it certainly helps that some of the Frosthaven summons are *totally adorable* though.
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Mar 4, 2024 04:31
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xiw posted:I think this is the #1 thing - any chance you have to keep a summon alive as a player in a group with summons, it's probably a good idea, because each round they survive multiplies their total effectiveness. If I'm going to survive the mission anyway, then throwing a card to absorb a hit as a player is a better deal than letting a summon die because it didn't cost an action to get it out in the first place. Early when 4hp dmg 3 is comparable to enemies, yes. Late game almost all melee summons are essentially a F tier lost card that will attack one enemy, then die and leave you with 8 cards left. Youre much better off playing summoner as an healer then. The poison spitter and slow curser can have niche use. For a class based around showcasing how good summons can be. If summoner classes best summon card is better used as a stamina potion and rest give you a choice between wasting cards so your lemmings can do less than 10% total damage of that dungeon or to be a pretty good healer, I don't think the class works as intended.
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Mar 4, 2024 09:20
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Anonymous Robot posted:Has anyone here played the Doomtown LCG? Looks like it got an updated repackage under a new publisher back in 2022. I was always curious about it, even though it seems overly complicated and the art is frequently ugly, because I like weird west stuff and the combat system being based on poker hands sounds really fun. There is periodic talk of it in the Fringe CCG Thread. The game even got an effortpost somewhat recently.
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Mar 4, 2024 09:53
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Anonymous Robot posted:Has anyone here played the Doomtown LCG? Looks like it got an updated repackage under a new publisher back in 2022. I was always curious about it, even though it seems overly complicated and the art is frequently ugly, because I like weird west stuff and the combat system being based on poker hands sounds really fun. I have a ton of both the 1st edition LCG and the original CCG. It is the best CCG for playing with both two and more than two (Netrunner is better with two but can't take more, Shadowfist is better with 3-4 but pretty weak with two). The most complex parts of Doomtown are "when do I boot to move?" and "how do I do a job?" Please do not ask me to explain them fully when I haven't played in years, but IIRC all moves boot the character except from their Home to the Town Square and from the Town Square to a non-Home in-town location. (As usual there are cards that make exceptions.) And jobs are basically activating a shootout where you choose a character to be performing the job, and if you win they're successful. I may be biased in that I'm a former MTG judge who understood layering, but it's much less complex than it appears.
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Mar 4, 2024 10:36
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haddedam posted:Early when 4hp dmg 3 is comparable to enemies, yes. While this is probably more fun for the GH thread than the board game thread writ large, my friend Alis, some other friends, and I did a playthrough for GH2e classes a while back. One was the revised Circles class. https://youtu.be/zbGitYasB30?si=X9u6igEnUnCK_jmh
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Mar 4, 2024 14:36
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Magnetic North posted:There is periodic talk of it in the Fringe CCG Thread. The game even got an effortpost somewhat recently. Thanks for this. The big post was about the CCG, though I understand that the LCG is quite similar. And everything I read about it both makes me like it more and makes the more rational side of me know I will never get this to the table. I can’t even get my friends to play Keyforge with me.
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Mar 4, 2024 14:52
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haddedam posted:Early when 4hp dmg 3 is comparable to enemies, yes. If the damage the summon soaked was damage that would otherwise have landed on a PC that would have been threatened by it, that's not necessarily terrible value. If the summon dies stupidly to damage that you could have just avoided outright (e.g. a melee enemy out of range of anything else) then that's a waste, but that's also a failure of positioning and planning. Summons do have their issues, the amount of effort it takes to get them to work is not really proportionate to the reward of having a functional class and they do not scale well with player count, but they're not outright useless.
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Mar 4, 2024 16:35
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