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Prairie Bus
Sep 22, 2006




Caros posted:

Endgame stuff

Overall, yeah, I think it was a good game, certain worth playing. If I had one complaint it is that they really didn't do anything at all with population. We spent the game upgrading population, and ended the game without a single 1 anywhere on the board, thinking that there would be some sort of bonus for it (similar to the rioting, collapsing, fallen stuff from season 1) but apart from produce and population 1 cities being a pain if they got infected, there is zero difference between the various cities. I think they would have been better off giving bonuses for higher level cities, allowing special types of travel, bonus production or other effects in places that were doing better.

Actually, come to think of it, the whole 'produce supplies' cards seemed to be a sort of meh mechanic. I was really intrigued by the tradeoff between system wide production vs local production when we played our first game or two, but I think we only produced system wide maybe three times the whole game, and those were mostly as a result of finding the lost havens. There just never seems to be enough cubes in the stockpile to make a system wide production worthwhile.


Agreed on both counts. We probably only did system wide production the same amount. The cards were too useful to destroy, if only because they didn’t count for the epidemic cards. Final complaint - the epidemic card numbers should’ve gone on the board. It was a pain in the rear end to keep coming back to that page.

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Caros
May 14, 2008

Prairie Bus posted:

Agreed on both counts. We probably only did system wide production the same amount. The cards were too useful to destroy, if only because they didn’t count for the epidemic cards. Final complaint - the epidemic card numbers should’ve gone on the board. It was a pain in the rear end to keep coming back to that page.

Yeah, bit of a pain in the rear end that one, though I'll be honest, we jammed through the game so hard in our main play through that we had ten epidemics the moment they gave us the extra, and stayed there for the entirety of the game. Never found much use in removing cards via inoculation, because once you got the full 10 in your deck, each extra card you threw in served to fatten it up further.

One other minor complaint, The stickers. I still think the board probably would have been better overall if they could have hidden material under stickers on the board, rather than having you add the large stickers to it. We ended up having to glue ours down they peeled so much.

Prairie Bus
Sep 22, 2006




Caros posted:

Yeah, bit of a pain in the rear end that one, though I'll be honest, we jammed through the game so hard in our main play through that we had ten epidemics the moment they gave us the extra, and stayed there for the entirety of the game. Never found much use in removing cards via inoculation, because once you got the full 10 in your deck, each extra card you threw in served to fatten it up further.

One other minor complaint, The stickers. I still think the board probably would have been better overall if they could have hidden material under stickers on the board, rather than having you add the large stickers to it. We ended up having to glue ours down they peeled so much.


I should've thought about the max. We kept trying to thin the deck down, but we made a mad dash at all the different red cities in August or September and pushed ourselves to eight epidemics for the rest of the game.

Yeah, the stickers were starting to peel. It's already been said, but I'm thankful they lined the sticker placement up (mostly) with the folds in the board. It could've been a lot worse. If we're complaining about the materials, I've got to complain about the silver scratch off stuff - it kept getting everywhere.

Caros
May 14, 2008

Prairie Bus posted:

I should've thought about the max. We kept trying to thin the deck down, but we made a mad dash at all the different red cities in August or September and pushed ourselves to eight epidemics for the rest of the game.

Yeah, the stickers were starting to peel. It's already been said, but I'm thankful they lined the sticker placement up (mostly) with the folds in the board. It could've been a lot worse. If we're complaining about the materials, I've got to complain about the silver scratch off stuff - it kept getting everywhere.


I'm still getting that poo poo off my kitchen table a week later. It got into the folds of the drat wood somehow.

Still better than the season 1 scratch off cards however. Those got everywhere and were loving impossible to scratch

Huxley
Oct 10, 2012



Grimey Drawer
Mid-year rules questions re: Hollow Men.

So when we flip a Hollow Man card, we flip the next infection card then put a Hollow Man figurine on the city. Then we flip the next card and if it's a normal city Infection card we remove a cube/outbreak.

When we flip a Hollow Man card into a second Hollow Man card, do we flip the next two city cards and Hollow Man them both, or does the 2nd Hollow Man card get skipped? It sounds like the latter based on the rules but that seems too gentle to be the case.

Prairie Bus
Sep 22, 2006




Huxley posted:

Mid-year rules questions re: Hollow Men.

So when we flip a Hollow Man card, we flip the next infection card then put a Hollow Man figurine on the city. Then we flip the next card and if it's a normal city Infection card we remove a cube/outbreak.

When we flip a Hollow Man card into a second Hollow Man card, do we flip the next two city cards and Hollow Man them both, or does the 2nd Hollow Man card get skipped? It sounds like the latter based on the rules but that seems too gentle to be the case.


no matter how many Hollow Men Gather cards you flip in a row, you only infect the next city you draw. If you draw all four in a row and then draw Istanbul, you just put one guy in Istanbul. Hollow Men Gather cards don’t count as an actual draw for infections, so it’s not too gentle. And you can guess that it’ll get worse later.

uncle blog
Nov 18, 2012

Anybody who's completed the game have some non-spoiler impressions? I've heard people complain that it's much easier than the first one. Is that really so? If so, any tips for making it more balanced?

Huxley
Oct 10, 2012



Grimey Drawer
We are starting June tonight, so right at halfway. We have the same W/L through 6 months as we did in S1 (3 losses so far).

There game definitely isn't as tense as S1. I think I said in the main thread that base Pandemic and S1 are like constantly putting out fires while S2 is more like a SimCity board game where you build fire stations and hydrants.

I think the lessons they learned from S1 make this a better Legacy experience even if the underlying game isn't as tight

Huxley fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Nov 28, 2017

Prairie Bus
Sep 22, 2006




Huxley posted:

We are starting June tonight, so right at halfway. We have the same W/L through 6 months as we did in S1 (3 losses so far).

There game definitely isn't as tense as S1. I think I said in the main thread that base Pandemic and S1 are like constantly putting out fires while S2 is more like a SimCity board game where you build fire stations and hydrants.

I think the lessons they learned from S1 make this a better Legacy experience even if the underlying game isn't as tight

I've finished the game, and I 100% agree on the feeling of the theme. There are still fires to put out, but it's missing the urgency of Season 1. I appreciated that you're building up rather than just trying to preserve. It works very well with the legacy system.

Caros
May 14, 2008

uncle blog posted:

Anybody who's completed the game have some non-spoiler impressions? I've heard people complain that it's much easier than the first one. Is that really so? If so, any tips for making it more balanced?

I think it depends a little on what you do. Choices of where to go and when drastically alter the difficulty of a lot of the game. Certain mechanics introduced, as well as one specific character, can also make the game really, really easy if used correctly.

Overall I'd say you don't have to worry too much about balance, though that is just my view on it.

Huxley
Oct 10, 2012



Grimey Drawer
Another Hollow Man question (mid-year spoiler):


So it's the first turn after our first Epidemic and we're flipping 2 Infect cards. The first card we flip is a Hollow Man, and we flip the next Infection Card and put a Figurine. Then we flip another Infect card and remove a supply cube.

Are we done or do we flip one more Infect card?

The way we interpreted the rule originally (The Hollow Man card does not replace your Infect draw) makes it sound like the Hollow Man card doesn't count as an Infect, but the Infect card behind it does. My wife got worried that the Infect card you draw after the Hollow Man IS the Hollow Man card that doesn't count toward your 2 Infect and we need to be doing one more. But this feels like it could get crazy quickly, as you could technically go Hollow Man into Infect four times and still need to remove 2 cubes.

Which ... maybe that is what happens. We've only played 1 month and 1 loss the first way so it's not a huge cheat at least.

pbpancho
Feb 17, 2004
-=International Sales=-

Huxley posted:

Another Hollow Man question (mid-year spoiler):


So it's the first turn after our first Epidemic and we're flipping 2 Infect cards. The first card we flip is a Hollow Man, and we flip the next Infection Card and put a Figurine. Then we flip another Infect card and remove a supply cube.

Are we done or do we flip one more Infect card?

The way we interpreted the rule originally (The Hollow Man card does not replace your Infect draw) makes it sound like the Hollow Man card doesn't count as an Infect, but the Infect card behind it does. My wife got worried that the Infect card you draw after the Hollow Man IS the Hollow Man card that doesn't count toward your 2 Infect and we need to be doing one more. But this feels like it could get crazy quickly, as you could technically go Hollow Man into Infect four times and still need to remove 2 cubes.

Which ... maybe that is what happens. We've only played 1 month and 1 loss the first way so it's not a huge cheat at least.


It counts. So one for the Hollow Men, one for the regular effect, that's your two.

I finished, did not find it easier than S1, we had the same or slightly worse win rate. I loved S1 and thought this was better, and my entire group agreed.

Caros
May 14, 2008

So here is a fun 'glitch'. Spoilers for Africa and some late game stuff.

Our second group has emptied our infection deck. Like, completely.

We have the full 30 card inoculation, and with the scientist running around we've managed to remove all remaining locations from the infection deck. We'll be adding more as we recon, and I know that cards will come out of the innoculation deck once it wears off, but... it is really weird.

My biggest concern right now is the game ending effect I think will happen as the inoculation box kicks back in. When an epidemic hits we will end up drawing a random card from the inoculation box, then pulling it 2-5 times in a row. Statistically we'll be pulling hollow men rather than infection cubes, but it basically means that we immediately drive down the population of a city every time an epidemic hits.

I really don't think they accounted for this.

Prairie Bus
Sep 22, 2006




Caros posted:

So here is a fun 'glitch'. Spoilers for Africa and some late game stuff.

Our second group has emptied our infection deck. Like, completely.

We have the full 30 card inoculation, and with the scientist running around we've managed to remove all remaining locations from the infection deck. We'll be adding more as we recon, and I know that cards will come out of the innoculation deck once it wears off, but... it is really weird.

My biggest concern right now is the game ending effect I think will happen as the inoculation box kicks back in. When an epidemic hits we will end up drawing a random card from the inoculation box, then pulling it 2-5 times in a row. Statistically we'll be pulling hollow men rather than infection cubes, but it basically means that we immediately drive down the population of a city every time an epidemic hits.

I really don't think they accounted for this.


Hoo boy. Endgame : How quickly did you find the scientist that you were able to clear out the infection deck like that? Did you just rush to Johannesburg? There are a lot of variables, but I figure the scientist can trash between 7-15 infection cards a game, playing optimally (and getting a little lucky). You just like getting into weird situations, huh? I still laugh at finding Hollow Men in February.

I can’t remember when the inoculations run out - August? I’m guessing you’ve got nothing to explore until August anyway? When do shelters show up? October or something?

Caros
May 14, 2008

Prairie Bus posted:

Hoo boy. Endgame : How quickly did you find the scientist that you were able to clear out the infection deck like that? Did you just rush to Johannesburg? There are a lot of variables, but I figure the scientist can trash between 7-15 infection cards a game, playing optimally (and getting a little lucky). You just like getting into weird situations, huh? I still laugh at finding Hollow Men in February.

I can’t remember when the inoculations run out - August? I’m guessing you’ve got nothing to explore until August anyway? When do shelters show up? October or something?


We found her very quickly. I think March? Our group lucked into a few things coming together (oddly spoiler free) that allowed us to reveal the continent and ultimately search for her in the same month (I think it is the mexico city card? The one that allows you to pull from the discard).

We just cleared, (I think) June, so we're going to have at least one solid game with no infection deck before things go to poo poo. That said, I think you are right about the shelters. I was concerned they we'd be getting kicked in the head by the instant population loss from the placement of four hollow men, but the more I think about it, I think we'd have to be pretty incompetent to not finish the game before getting to 4+ infection on a turn.

I do like season 2, but it just seems weird to me that they didn't account for this. I literally stopped our game and spent 30 minutes searching when we found the scientist in our first game because I was curious about what would happen with her power causing you to run out of cards. The only reason we didn't have it that time was that we went thin on inoculation thinking that the snapback for doing it would be worse than it was, similar to the military bases from season one.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Question about the game's fiction as an interested observer, spoilering for the sake of passerby:

What are the faded exactly in this game?

Caros
May 14, 2008

Nessus posted:

Question about the game's fiction as an interested observer, spoilering for the sake of passerby:

What are the faded exactly in this game?

Spoilers for both seasons.

Season one had the c0da virus that turned people into zombies, more or less. Their skin faded to become translucent, and they do usual aggressive zombie stuff. Season 2 spends a lot of time hinting, then towards the end, outright states that you are the decendants of the faded from season one, that after they cured the disease, those who were faded were still genetically damaged to the point where the visuals were hereditary. Hence who everyone looks so weird.

SettingSun
Aug 10, 2013

I know a lot of people are finding this season very easy, but my group is starting to legitimately despair over how difficult of a time we are having. We just lost early September, the third in a row.What are some tips people have for up to September or so? Some highlights from our game:


-We have the scientist and the guy from Buenos Aires. I think the scientist is pretty useful but my partners don't agree.
-We have 3 forsaken cities.
-We JUST connected the whole grid save for two cities. I tried to make the argument that we should have focused on infrastructure a lot earlier. Not doing so has resulted in some losses with very little meta progress. Like connecting one city and doing one search and that's it.
-We have yet to recon East Asia, though we are capable of doing so.

SettingSun fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Dec 11, 2017

Huxley
Oct 10, 2012



Grimey Drawer

SettingSun posted:

I know a lot of people are finding this season very easy, but my group is starting to legitimately despair over how difficult of a time we are having. We just lost early September, the third in a row.What are some tips people have for up to September or so? Some highlights from our game:


-We have the scientist and the guy from Buenos Aires. I think the scientist is pretty useful but my partners don't agree.
-We have 3 forsaken cities.
-We JUST connected the whole grid save for two cities. I tried to make the argument that we should have focused on infrastructure a lot earlier. Not doing so has resulted in some losses with very little meta progress. Like connecting one city and doing one search and that's it.
-We have yet to recon East Asia, though we are capable of doing so.


For what it's worth, we double-lost July then last night one-shot August.


We've also not done East Asia yet, though I assume we are about to get forced into it. We also are nowhere near connecting the whole grid, maybe 8-10 cities still disconnected? We've been very cautious about opening up too much, only really going out of our way to connect things to the grid when we feel like that's an objective we need to hit to close out a game. Maybe that's the wrong way to play but it's the tact we've gone with. That said I believe we currently have 3 fallen cities as well.

We've also been strategic around our Box 6. We have a tally of "safe" cities, and we've tried to close out the Blue as much as we can. All of Europe and most of NA are either fallen or in the box, so we can keep the board small. We've also made a point of, if a city with only one card left in the infect is going to drop to 0 at the end of the game, we've gone out of our way to get that card out of the infect discard quickly during that game. Then we can safely bump it back up to 1 in the post-game and call it safe the rest of the way. Otherwise you have to bump it back up and continue to protect it while waiting for its infect card to come back around, risking it falling again.

I 100% expect this strategy to screw us somewhere down the line, but all we can do is play with the information we have. I figure if the game wants you to use Box 6 it must be balanced around you doing it, and if it flips around punishes you for it at the end of the year it must be balanced around that, too.

In both seasons we've always favored putting things on the board over character or city abilities. Especially as the player deck gets fat, the return on your points of putting down a permanent radio tower or supply center far outpaces just about anything else. S2 puts a lot more focus on character cards than S1 did, I feel like, so we've been doing more of that. I don't think we put more than 2-3 abilities down in all of S1.

We've built a couple of megacities with houses and towers, which makes moving cards around less of a chore.

Sloober
Apr 1, 2011

Huxley posted:

For what it's worth, we double-lost July then last night one-shot August.


We've also not done East Asia yet, though I assume we are about to get forced into it. We also are nowhere near connecting the whole grid, maybe 8-10 cities still disconnected? We've been very cautious about opening up too much, only really going out of our way to connect things to the grid when we feel like that's an objective we need to hit to close out a game. Maybe that's the wrong way to play but it's the tact we've gone with. That said I believe we currently have 3 fallen cities as well.

We've also been strategic around our Box 6. We have a tally of "safe" cities, and we've tried to close out the Blue as much as we can. All of Europe and most of NA are either fallen or in the box, so we can keep the board small. We've also made a point of, if a city with only one card left in the infect is going to drop to 0 at the end of the game, we've gone out of our way to get that card out of the infect discard quickly during that game. Then we can safely bump it back up to 1 in the post-game and call it safe the rest of the way. Otherwise you have to bump it back up and continue to protect it while waiting for its infect card to come back around, risking it falling again.

I 100% expect this strategy to screw us somewhere down the line, but all we can do is play with the information we have. I figure if the game wants you to use Box 6 it must be balanced around you doing it, and if it flips around punishes you for it at the end of the year it must be balanced around that, too.

In both seasons we've always favored putting things on the board over character or city abilities. Especially as the player deck gets fat, the return on your points of putting down a permanent radio tower or supply center far outpaces just about anything else. S2 puts a lot more focus on character cards than S1 did, I feel like, so we've been doing more of that. I don't think we put more than 2-3 abilities down in all of S1.

We've built a couple of megacities with houses and towers, which makes moving cards around less of a chore.


Yeah we've been (thru june) abusing the box primarily as a tool to eliminate cities from coming up, so pulling out the 1s, and we've used some of the tools provided to completely destroy a couple of cities worth of cards. I've pushed for removing at least one of the 3-infection card count infection cards too, just to try to lower the risk of going from 3+ supplies to 3 virus type things that can happen

The game seems balanced around spreading your efforts around rather than laser focusing on stuff, it feels. So we try to do some searching, try to do some connecting, and a little of everything. We lost two games in a row but pulled it back and we're going in confident.

Sloober fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Dec 11, 2017

SettingSun
Aug 10, 2013

Good tips all around. It is legitimately discouraging to see some groups go "we did all the objectives already so we can't do them this game, do we automatically lose?" and noting how easy the game is all around, when my group is stressing out badly and constantly playing catch-up, and even failing that! I almost feel we're missing some fundamental strategy since it feels like we're doing so badly.

Huxley
Oct 10, 2012



Grimey Drawer
Go back and reread the entire rule book. There may be something you missed the first time or will interpret differently having played 2/3 of the game.

One of the rules people misinterpret a lot is how the Hollow Men cards interact with the Infect step:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1879297/september-rules-question

Sloober
Apr 1, 2011

SettingSun posted:

Good tips all around. It is legitimately discouraging to see some groups go "we did all the objectives already so we can't do them this game, do we automatically lose?" and noting how easy the game is all around, when my group is stressing out badly and constantly playing catch-up, and even failing that! I almost feel we're missing some fundamental strategy since it feels like we're doing so badly.

One part to consider is there is, like the first season, a rough order they want you to do stuff in, and it's implied by goals and journal entries, typically furthering the goal the way they want you to does help you get some Very Important Tools, so if they hint at X, you should try to do X. If you don't it can very much look like it just gets harder and harder every month

Bungeyjump
Nov 9, 2003
Bungeyjumpingpeopledie

SettingSun posted:

I know a lot of people are finding this season very easy, but my group is starting to legitimately despair over how difficult of a time we are having. We just lost early September, the third in a row.What are some tips people have for up to September or so?

We’re up to March, so far our record was one shotting January, followed by 3 brutal losses in feb and early March.

We found that with 3 of each city in the deck, the variance of the infection draw was utterly brutal. Multiple times we drew the third city card off the bottom of the deck, having loaded the city up as it had been drawn twice, and flipped it once or even twice off the top on the infection draw. All of our losses were to an 8th plague cube.

After we were ready to chuck the game in the bin, until in our second game in March....

We found our way to box 6, and suddenly the game became a cakewalk, we grandstanded - delaying our victory by a whole round in order to explore South America before comfortably winning.

After finding box 6 we were immediately able to run around the board trashing all the hideous things in the infection deck - the ability just seems so strong!

We’re all highly suspicious that our aggressive bundling of infection cards in to box 6 is going to come back and bite us big time, but we felt we had to take what's in front of us.

We’ve pretty much reduced the deck to 1 of each city now, which leaves us feeling much more comfortable about stockpiling out of the way cities!

WhiteHowler
Apr 3, 2001

I'M HUGE!
My group just finished June, and we still haven't lost a game (this one was close though, one more infection phase almost certainly would have done us in).

Box 6 talk, no spoilers if you've opened the box: My group is super skeptical of using the box, so for the third game in a row, we haven't used it. We're definitely making the game harder, since we're getting more epidemics in the deck as we connect cities to the grid, and we're not manipulating the infection deck to make things safer. Still, we want to stick to the strategy just to see if it pays off. We're thinking the inoculation isn't what it's supposed to be.

No spoilers on the outcome of that, please. Just thought it was interesting that lots of people seem to have the same idea.

Sloober
Apr 1, 2011

WhiteHowler posted:

My group just finished June, and we still haven't lost a game (this one was close though, one more infection phase almost certainly would have done us in).

Box 6 talk, no spoilers if you've opened the box: My group is super skeptical of using the box, so for the third game in a row, we haven't used it. We're definitely making the game harder, since we're getting more epidemics in the deck as we connect cities to the grid, and we're not manipulating the infection deck to make things safer. Still, we want to stick to the strategy just to see if it pays off. We're thinking the inoculation isn't what it's supposed to be.

No spoilers on the outcome of that, please. Just thought it was interesting that lots of people seem to have the same idea.

June box 6 We were also skeptical but quite frankly being able to remove cities entirely from coming up helps out a ton, so we're just gonna roll with it

thespaceinvader
Mar 30, 2011

The slightest touch from a Gol-Shogeg will result in Instant Death!

Caros posted:

Am I reading the scientist right? Destroy an infection card? There are 58 cards in our discard, meaning I can put 30 into inoculation and have her wipe the others out in about 4~ish games. What exactly happens when you have no infection deck?

If you get absolutely no infection deck at all, the infection steps do nothing.

If you run out of cards, you tick up the marker by one, reshuffle and keep drawing, repeating as necessary, until you run out of track and/or finish infecting.

So if you only have one card in your infection deck, it gets hit every time, 5+ times. If you can survive that. Bearing in mind that Hollow Men will be arriving for a lot of that.

But it's virtually impossible to actually DO this, because the cards have to be in the discard when you go into the city, which especially with Hollow Men around is just a bad idea sometimes.

We've had Box 6 since I think early March, and we still haven't filled it at the start of July, and the Scientist has only killed 3 cards.

Sloober
Apr 1, 2011
July : We blitzd thru july focused on expanding our searches, with the advent of the radio towers getting cards together to put up supply centers became way easier, we also continued to thin the infection deck of some city cards that had multiples, trying more to reduce how often the same city came up. We won very handily and located Jade, which instantly paid dividends

August: Hollow men sort of threw us for a loop, but we spent some of the time that game doing the radio frequency searches, and connected another 6 cities to the grid, something we'd sort of neglected. One of our guys took the upgrade that let him pull cities from the discard to allow him to search a city that got connected. useful. We have almost all the regions fully connected and permanent supply centers conveniently located to let us fly around easily. We also used the scientist to go through cities with multiple infection cards and destroy them as they are available - since with jade, we know that cities won't lose more than one cube now, so we're not concerned about keeping 2 or 3 in them. We haven't thinned the player cards so we have almost all the epidemic cards in the deck

Ubik_Lives
Nov 16, 2012

Caros posted:

I was concerned they we'd be getting kicked in the head by the instant population loss from the placement of four hollow men, but the more I think about it, I think we'd have to be pretty incompetent to not finish the game before getting to 4+ infection on a turn.

I think you can't really stop the population loss. You increase the infection rate whenever you can't draw the next infection card and need to reshuffle the deck, which means you'll instantly go to a 5 infection rate unless you get a first turn epidemic.

We had a similar situation where we heavily culled the infection deck, but we left it with three cities that had all the infection upgrades, and that had permanent shelters on them. Our broken link city would eat cubes and cards, and the infection rate would still jump up quickly because the deck was so small, but epidemics weren't threatening anymore because broken links would always break the chain.

SettingSun
Aug 10, 2013

My group just finished October with a win, after marking down our fourth(!) loss in a row ending September. I just don't get what we're doing wrong. We are legitimately despairing over how to connect up East Asia and also put out the numerous fires we just can't seem to contain. We also have a stupid amount of searches left to do because there simply isn't time to do them. It's discouraging. I would almost pay money at this point to see a play-by-play of a group who yawned at the game's difficulty.

Do note I still think the game is great. I'm just not sure our group "got" it and it may be too late.

Sloober
Apr 1, 2011

SettingSun posted:

My group just finished October with a win, after marking down our fourth(!) loss in a row ending September. I just don't get what we're doing wrong. We are legitimately despairing over how to connect up East Asia and also put out the numerous fires we just can't seem to contain. We also have a stupid amount of searches left to do because there simply isn't time to do them. It's discouraging. I would almost pay money at this point to see a play-by-play of a group who yawned at the game's difficulty.

Do note I still think the game is great. I'm just not sure our group "got" it and it may be too late.

Minor spoilers Our best time period came from expecting fires but expecting them in the same place most of the time, managing what's in the infection deck is one of the better things you can do, so removing stuff from the deck helps out, either by tearing up or stuffing in box 6, but it's also crucial to find the labs, since the lab abilities are all very useful, which does take searches. It's also good to get radio towers up to help push cards around. Check up on the character abilities, since they're drat near crucial to complete the game.

How many characters are you playing with? The game does get harder if you have more, due to card distribution

SettingSun
Aug 10, 2013

I've got a 4 player group, so I expected some difficulty, just not this much. Retrospection reveals that we probably aren't managing the infection deck as well as could have. 100% of our games are lost due to incidents. But recently, we're coming pretty close to losing by having too many Hollow Men out as well.

Cassa
Jan 29, 2009
Finally got some peeps who're committed, we're up to March, having lost the first half of Jan and Feb, but mostly through rules fuckups.

Ubik_Lives
Nov 16, 2012

SettingSun posted:

My group just finished October with a win, after marking down our fourth(!) loss in a row ending September. I just don't get what we're doing wrong. We are legitimately despairing over how to connect up East Asia and also put out the numerous fires we just can't seem to contain. We also have a stupid amount of searches left to do because there simply isn't time to do them. It's discouraging. I would almost pay money at this point to see a play-by-play of a group who yawned at the game's difficulty.

Do note I still think the game is great. I'm just not sure our group "got" it and it may be too late.

This is how our game went, spoilers up to October and Jade


I think a lot of the difficulty comes from how quickly you hit the havens and the labs, both of which require some searching.

If you have a character that can get cards from the discard pile, either through the swapping actions or the searching directly, you can find the havens and the labs immediately upon connecting them (or the connecting the nearby port city for a haven). The labs all give a pretty significant power, and the supply cubes from the havens are vital, especially in the early months. If you miss the card, there's no telling when it will come back given the size of the player deck.

Jade is by far the biggest offender. Protects you from immediate outbreaks from epidemics, and the Scientist can constantly improve the infection deck. Get her in early in the campaign, and it will be a cake-walk by the end. Get her in late, and she won't have the time to make an impact.

To give a rough feel for how our campaign went, we had some rough early months. We double lost March, frustratingly by a single action on the first month. Our long-term plan was to create supply centre hubs which connected to a lot of places (Denver, Lagos, Tehran, etc), so we could get anywhere quickly. We also focused on padding the player deck as much as possible. We didn't inoculate the player deck, instead relying on not using any card that would remove it from play. We used the inoculations to remove the Europe cards and the eastern US coast. But still, life was tough.

Then along came the Scientist. We created a character to find Jade, one that could connect the city, swap the city card from the discard pile, and search it. Losing only one cube during an epidemic rather than the lot sounded awesome, and we wanted that so badly. Little did we know who else we would find there, or what she was capable of.

Granted, life was still tough, but it was slowly getting better. The Scientist would prioritise destroying cities with a single infection card, dropping the number of cities we would need to protect with cubes, and locations that were hard for us to get to. It also meant she could hoover up any cubes on that city for the Radio Operator to redistribute, and that current infections would be spread out over more cities (if you remove a card and have an epidemic, some other city will take that city's place in the order of the deck, a city that probably has cubes on it from the opening distribution). Upgraded infection cards were coming up more frequently. Entire areas of the map were becoming clean, concentrating our forces. Even with cities being connected, more were being removed each game.

The Hollow Men turned up and stalled us for a bit. We had no answer to them, and we kept getting turn one epidemics. Our player deck was at the low point for player cards per epidemic. Our small infection deck was working for and against us. The damage was concentrated, but quickly threatened to start chewing through population in-game. The board was ignored; communication towers were erected and cards were hurled at the Labourer, who dropped supply centres down as quickly as possible. The Scientist was not immune to this, and destroyed very little during this time.

Then the shelters and East Asia came up. Our small infection deck was back to working in our favour. Our player deck was being padded back out again. Cards that leaked out of the inoculation box were usually just thrown back in. Games were deliberately dragged out to perform more card destroys, more searches, more recons. When East Asia was connected, our Labourer, who could swap any coloured cards from their hand and the discard pile, had the time to connect up one more red city, collect the two red cards (once per turn), do the SE Asia recon, have a look around there, wander back up and connect another red city and collect those three red cards back, and build a supply centre in Jakarta to give us a permanent base candidate in the region. And then make the other two supply centres. In a four player game. There were still some plague cubes making it out onto the board, but not enough to threaten a loss.

As the campaign began to wind up, we had a core infection deck with three cities in it, a 3x Broken Link city, a 2x Well Stocked city, and a 2x Rebirth city, each with permanent shelters. You'd also have anything you connected last game, which would be dealt with in this game. Luckily, the inoculation deck was mostly filled with the 3x infection card cities, so we could even put some supply cubes on those cities for epidemic protection. The game was officially in cake-walk mode. But all of this could be traced back to the decision to take a character upgrade that would let us connect and search for Jade right away. If we hadn't had done that, if we had connected up Jade's city before knowing about it, maybe even if we hadn't been as quick on the recons as didn't get the Scientist as soon as we did, the entire game would have been drastically different.

So I understand your pain, because I totally get how our game could have been different if not for a bit of luck early on.

Cassa
Jan 29, 2009
New action question, only up to May and still not recon'd from Cairo.

Shuttle Flight, did we miss a sticker, as the only mention of it is the player cheat cards, and nothing in the rules book.

Also we've lost four games in a row welp.

Huxley
Oct 10, 2012



Grimey Drawer

Cassa posted:

New action question, only up to May and still not recon'd from Cairo.

Shuttle Flight, did we miss a sticker, as the only mention of it is the player cheat cards, and nothing in the rules book.

Also we've lost four games in a row welp.

It goes at the top of page 10. Check back on cards from that box.

SettingSun
Aug 10, 2013

Cassa posted:

New action question, only up to May and still not recon'd from Cairo.

Shuttle Flight, did we miss a sticker, as the only mention of it is the player cheat cards, and nothing in the rules book.

Also we've lost four games in a row welp.

Do you recon Europe? Because Shuttle flights are more or less the reward for doing so. Should have gotten the relevant stickers out of that.

Also don't feel bad about losing so much. Our group lost 4 in a row and we're just starting November.

Cassa
Jan 29, 2009
Hmm, may have lost the rule book sticker. Could someone share an image so we have it for the rulebook?

Cassa fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Jan 16, 2018

Saguaro PI
Mar 11, 2013

Totally legit tree
Question about the upgrade 'Lockdown', which lets you destroy an infection card when it's drawn by having a player discard a card of a matching colour: Does the effect of the draw, that is removing a supply cube or placing an infection cube, still take place?

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Sloober
Apr 1, 2011

Saguaro PI posted:

Question about the upgrade 'Lockdown', which lets you destroy an infection card when it's drawn by having a player discard a card of a matching colour: Does the effect of the draw, that is removing a supply cube or placing an infection cube, still take place?

Only if it specifically mentions 'without effect' or 'prevents', since that's wordage used in other things, i think. (it's still good though as thinning cards down from in the deck helps a lot)

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