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Most spirits need help to be effective, that’s why it’s a good co-op game. The spirits that are broken are the ones that can do everything by themselves on tempo, or are so good at supporting that they pull the team ahead of invader tempo. Volcano being on your team just means a successful strategy can involve herding most of the invaders into the volcano AoE. Simultaneously killing a big swath of buildings to defuse future explore/builds is a great way to get ahead, and lots of efficient offense spirits have similar gameplans.
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Nov 28, 2023 06:49
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In a tram with Finder and Towering Roots volcano might be one of the less strong spirits, but only because of how over top powerful Finder is. It's a good pairing tho. Who was the 4th spirit? (Volcano is still very strong. And that is a good team for them!)
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Nov 28, 2023 07:01
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ConfusedUs posted:Volcano owns. Especially if you focus on small eruptions instead of saving up for the big one. Every time I play Volcano I end up going "Erupt for X=2, kill a town" almost every turn.
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Nov 28, 2023 07:13
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F* you guys who already have Nature Incarnate. My kickstarter copy was supposed tobarrive before Spiel, butvthey messed up the European import taxes, so still waiting. 
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Nov 28, 2023 08:12
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Volcano single handedly lost us the game the other day, they're obviously terrible  (they exploded down to one disc and we hit one of the few 'everybody loses a presence' events that turn (we just mulliganed it))OperaMouse posted:F* you guys who already have Nature Incarnate. My kickstarter copy was supposed tobarrive before Spiel, butvthey messed up the European import taxes, so still waiting.
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Nov 28, 2023 08:27
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God I fucking love Diablo 3 gold, it even paid for this shitty title
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Impermanent posted:In a tram with Finder and Towering Roots volcano might be one of the less strong spirits, but only because of how over top powerful Finder is. It's a good pairing tho. Who was the 4th spirit? Yeah that's basically what I'm saying, it doesn't really have Shenanigans that would make it one of the best spirits but its a strong offensive spirit. It has drawbacks, but also very powerful abilities that more than compensate for those drawbacks. 0-range powers especially feel great in volcano's hands, those aren't designed to be range 1 and it shows. Anyways the 4th spirit we had was Dances Up Earthquakes. I can't really comment on the power of that one because none of us really know how to play it well, but it seems like it could be very powerful in the right hands.
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Nov 28, 2023 08:27
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OperaMouse posted:F* you guys who already have Nature Incarnate. My kickstarter copy was supposed tobarrive before Spiel, butvthey messed up the European import taxes, so still waiting. Yeah, it's not like they can do anything about it but it does remain extremely frustrating.
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Nov 28, 2023 10:09
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Arzaac posted:Anyways the 4th spirit we had was Dances Up Earthquakes. I can't really comment on the power of that one because none of us really know how to play it well, but it seems like it could be very powerful in the right hands. Dances is incredibly powerful. Draft as many Major powers as you can. Play them so that they all go off at the same time. Stall until then, you're good at it. DUE is way better at the "one good turn" playstyle than Volcano because of how flexible that one turn is.
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Nov 28, 2023 10:35
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OperaMouse posted:F* you guys who already have Nature Incarnate. My kickstarter copy was supposed tobarrive before Spiel, butvthey messed up the European import taxes, so still waiting. 
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Nov 28, 2023 11:12
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Volcano definitely needs 1-2 small eruptions because its easy value once your innate to place destroyed presence kicks in. I don’t think I’ve ever fired the huge one, usually just one shot of the 6 is enough to tip over the game. Also I’ll be bringing a full spirit island set to Pax Unplugged if anyone is going. PM here or find me in the SA boardgame or Gencon discords
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Nov 28, 2023 16:31
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ConfusedUs posted:Dances is incredibly powerful. Draft as many Major powers as you can. Play them so that they all go off at the same time. Stall until then, you're good at it. My plays so far are making me think Dances is the most powerful spirit in the game. Against lower level adversaries, you don't even have to plan your future turns all that intensively, just dump anything you can get your hands on into layaway and keep a couple of powers you play every turn. Past a certain point, you can just hammer the first growth option to keep a steady parade of new majors marching into your layaway pile and reclaim your every-turn handy cards (some fast-phase control/push-pull is nice to make sure you make the most of your majors when they go off). If you also have good fire and earth element production per turn, you can get the quake token game going as well, which is just ridiculous.
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Nov 28, 2023 16:45
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I like doing the huge volcano eruption for the spectacle of it, but I wouldn't risk setting it up unless we were already comfortably winning or I had an ally backing me up.
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Nov 28, 2023 17:44
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Dances is definitely one of the more broken spirits, I think the whole gimmick with future plays is pretty easy for the advantages you get, and it doesn’t really subtract much from your turn to turn impact. I think they overtuned it because the mechanic is kidna complicated, and they didn’t want it to feel weak if it wasn’t being played optimally. If you want to get into pure power comparisons, this guy did a series on all the spirits and aspects and ranking them (linking the final vid with the full tier list). It is based on extreme difficulty like 12+ and with 1-2 players, so important to know anything he’s saying about viability is with that in mind, but the general comparison doesnt change. There’s a full tier list at 32 min, but the description mentions he’s already changed it lol https://youtu.be/2QqsTOm9-KA E: suppose i can just link a screenshot, on phone so sorry if poor resolution 
Fellis fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Nov 28, 2023 |
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Nov 28, 2023 18:39
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RedRevenge is top notch. Highly recommend
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Nov 28, 2023 19:23
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I can't put the Time spirit into anything but the "how the gently caress do I play this" tier. The only spirit I still find inscrutable.
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Nov 28, 2023 19:42
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I don’t really understand Fractured Days either. I’m often in games with new or inexperienced players so the really complex spirits like them that add things for everyone largely haven’t seen play.
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Nov 28, 2023 20:05
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Fractured Days is the one spirit nobody in my group touches. A couple of us tried it once or twice and found it super ineffective. I'm sure it can do a lot in the right hands since it has a couple of effects that are conceptually very powerful, though. I'm surprised to see Lightning's Swift Strike Immense and Bringer of Dreams and Nightmares so low down, but maybe that's just a result of this tier list being made in games with only 1-2 spirits. edit: Also surprised to see Vengeance as a Burning Plague so high up, that's one of the few spirits that stood out to me as feeling a bit undertuned. Maybe I'm just playing it wrong? Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Nov 28, 2023 |
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Nov 28, 2023 20:12
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When I have described Fractured Days Split the Sky's kit as "a bunch of complicated ways to barely do anything that if you align just right might allow some forward progress" I've been told that Slip the Flow of Time is three of the most powerful effects in the game, and you can do them multiple times in a turn. Which, sure, I guess. But I'll never play in a group that gets deep enough into the game to make use of that, and I drat sure won't ever have the mental capacity to play it in a two handed solo game.
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Nov 28, 2023 20:22
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Generally when I'm playing Fractured Days, I slow roll the first 3 turns stalling + ramping up as much presence as I can to build up my hand and presence tracks and then start hammering the sun growth to simultaneously pick up big majors + extra energy to play them with while also handing out repeats like candy. You can definitely jump into a more active playstyle earlier, and if you're playing super mega hard difficulties you will often have to, but at regular human difficulties (10-) I find it's a lot harder to gently caress up if you take the extra time to max out your tracks before you get too spendy. The Past Returns Again and Pour Time Sideways are pretty much just there to be fodder for majors. They can be really powerful but the cost is enormous so you can't afford to play them unless you have the board set up absolutely perfectly, which probably isn't going to happen before you need to jettison them for something more immediately useful.
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Nov 28, 2023 20:32
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Vengeance as a Burning Plague is a really interesting spirit because very little about it works like any other spirit, and the things that it wants to do in order to grow in power properly are things you normally avoid. The biggest thing about Vengeance is that its whole kit synergizes with getting punched in the gut. You get your disease tokens from getting presence destroyed, you can easily place presence in places where it will get destroyed, you get to treat blighted lands as badlands tokens - everything about the spirit is much more powerful on lands where it has been owned. Vengeance basically wants to play kinda like an underdog action hero - you want to get smacked around really hard in the first part of the fight and then come back stronger than ever as you tilt the advantage away from the invaders. Newer players in particular have a hard time with Vengeance because its easy to get locked into a firefighting "blight is bad" mindset, since so many other spirits are negatively affected by blight on the island. But Vengeance wants to actively court it, kind of like Wildfire. One popular way to play the spirit is to go for card plays as quckly as possible to take advantage of its really good innates. The fastest way to do this is to do something like: growth 3, top track, play fetid breath, try to take a good power with beast or fire, -> g2, top track and bottom track, play plaguebearers and sudden fevers -> g2, bottom trackx2, play fiery vengeance and your other card. Sometimes events will gently caress that up though, ymmv! One quirk of the spirit, due to how it plays, is that although it can make the game harder for everyone early on, it is a great buddy to anyone whose lands start blighting too much. You have the power as this spirit to fairly easily fight fires on problem lands on your teammates' boards.
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Nov 28, 2023 20:44
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Fractured Days is the one spirit nobody in my group touches. A couple of us tried it once or twice and found it super ineffective. I'm sure it can do a lot in the right hands since it has a couple of effects that are conceptually very powerful, though. I thought RedRevenge's tier lists were for larger games? Which might actually account for BoDaN, I find it really wants a sweet spot of having a partner or two that can coordinate with but not so many that the fear pool gets too large for you to have an impact. IIRC they're also for very high difficulty games, and Vengeance is definitely a "when the going gets tough" spirit. Although they're not even that particularly high; 20+ different spirits have at least one aspect ahead of Vengeance's ranking in that list.
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Nov 28, 2023 20:49
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The last time I played with Fractured Days was in 2p with my partner playing them and I might as well have been playing alone for how effective they were. To be clear it was a good time and I think after a while she leaned in to trying to be as unhelpful as possible as a prank.
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Nov 28, 2023 21:03
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Probably best not to dwell too much on that tier list, its an opinion piece by one person, even if he is a fantastic spirit island player. Case in point, here's a write-up on BGG where they use a power combo of BoDaN and Silent Mists to win games at difficulty levels of 20+, with pretty high success rates to boot! Not too bad for alleged D-tier spirits, eh?
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Nov 28, 2023 21:04
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yea RedRevenge is great but the tier list is a product of a very specific way of playing the game and likely will not translate very well to your table's meta. Most of the bleeding edge-tier spirit island players who play on supermax difficulty settings do so on the TTS mod with other people from that community, and the 'house style' of those games involves relatively little collaborative play - so spirits that are more intricate in how they might need help or can help tend to wind up underperforming.
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Nov 28, 2023 21:21
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Yeah I sort of regret posting that without the context of the video where he consistently states his critera. He definitely mentions some combo potential for lower tier spirits, but IMO its more about consistency than caps. It’s very much based in a style of play and assuming completely random setup (for instance for some spirits he indicates the specific boards they do good/bad on which I never think about). He also mentions that some spirits/aspects he hasn’t played a large amount, and his rankings are constantly changing as he plays and sees more. I think it’s interesting for discussion, but should not be considered fact. So much in this game can change based on power drafts and events and tbh that’s really not a huge amount of variance (considering starter cards/innates) compared to many other games. Ocean Hungry Grasp might be low on his list, but Ocean’s one of my fav themes so I’m picking it
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Nov 28, 2023 22:40
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Fellis posted:Dances is definitely one of the more broken spirits, I think the whole gimmick with future plays is pretty easy for the advantages you get, and it doesn’t really subtract much from your turn to turn impact. I think they overtuned it because the mechanic is kidna complicated, and they didn’t want it to feel weak if it wasn’t being played optimally. Last time I looked at this he had Hearth-Vigil lower, even if it was only a tier down if I recall, which seemed weird to me because it's absurdly powerful and easy.
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Nov 28, 2023 23:18
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Yeah, it's the nature of tier lists that they're about probabilities more than anything else. If you look at the fighting game scenes where tier lists first got really big it's pretty common that a low tier character may have an advantageous matchup against a high tier character or two, while having a much worse winrate against the rest of the cast. It seems counterintuitive to say that a fighter could be "worse" than another fighter they have a noticeable advantage against, but if you look at a lot of matches across a wide range of circumstances the higher tier characters are going to get more wins overall. It's not saying "this character is better than that character in every possible circumstance", it's saying "this character is better than that character across a wider variety of circumstances." River and Ocean are good examples of this, they're both strong spirits that dunk most adversaries extremely hard but they each have a couple bad matchups that are a big problem for them. A spirit that is merely "good enough" against all adversaries is going to win more consistently across more circumstances. Even then, though, there's going to be a lot of subjectivity in terms of where you place your benchmark and also just outright opinion. If you're targeting difficulty 10-11 then a lot of merely average spirits are going to notch more wins overall than River or Ocean, but I suspect if you started cranking things up to really stupid difficulties River/Ocean would eventually come out with better winrates because they can still get wins from the adversaries they counter extremely hard while more average spirits start struggling to consistently win against anything. If Spirit A wins 95% of the time at difficulty 10 and 20% of the time at difficulty 15, and Spirit B wins 85% of the time at difficulty 10 but 40% of the time at difficulty 15, which one is "stronger"? At that point it's just a value call. Going by consistency at difficulty 10 makes a lot of sense because most players aren't going to gently caress with the super difficulty options and straight level 6 adversaries is about the limit of what they're going to see in play, but that can create counterintuitive results where an absolute shitwrecker with a few blind spots gets ranked below distinctly less impressive but more broadly consistent spirits. the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Nov 28, 2023 |
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Nov 28, 2023 23:39
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RR would be the first person to say his list has plenty of caveats, and I'd be the second. In the video he tries to identify which spirits perform much better or worse depending on various factors. And in fairness, one advantage of his explaining his reasoning in such detail is that you can decide which reasons are valid for your style. Personally I don't care about consistency until a spirit is truly incapable of functioning under a specific common circumstance, like the wind cat not having an answer to certain adversaries.
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Dec 1, 2023 02:04
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Played my third ever game today. To recap the first two played on the easiest possible base setup, game 1 took quite a long time with learning everything but we ground out a win eventually, game 2 was much more reasonable speed with Lightning being MVP. So game 3 we decided to step it up just a bit and use the blight card, draw for powers, and use the moderate spirits, Spread of Rampant Green and Thunderspeaker. Man this took forever. Just learning the new spirits and all the power cards and such just made every decision take a super long time. We almost won the game on turn 6, which seems like it would have been a relatively brisk victory, turns wise, but that was 3 hours into the game. We had a fear card that we needed to clear the only building left on the board and it didn’t so we called it a night. Came back the next day and won 2 turns later. I had so many sacred sites on the board I basically just used Green’s special rule to sacrifice presence and prevent the invaders from doing nearly anything at all, and it was very easy to pick off the last couple buildings at that point. Speaking of winning, it’s quite anticlimactic. Just reviewing the board and the cards played and it’s a bit like “alright well this power could do this or this, but that doesn’t really matter because this ravage won’t do anything here, and we take two blight but that doesn’t matter, and they build here, but that this random minor power takes care of that in the slow phase and… we won. Ok pack it all up I guess.” It doesn’t really feel like you finally grew into a great and powerful spirit and vanquished your foe with an epic burst of power.
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Dec 1, 2023 05:26
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Elysium posted:Played my third ever game today. To recap the first two played on the easiest possible base setup, game 1 took quite a long time with learning everything but we ground out a win eventually, game 2 was much more reasonable speed with Lightning being MVP. Second, when you start adding adversaries into the mix, things ramp up in stage 2 — that castle with a flag adds, on average, another build’s worth of stuff each turn (which is why it’s missing from ‘Coastal lands’), meaning that the difficulty keeps rising steadily and it’s not just a jump up from 1 terrain for about 2/3 of the game to 2 terrains for the final 1/3.
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Dec 1, 2023 05:46
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SettingSun posted:I can't put the Time spirit into anything but the "how the gently caress do I play this" tier. The only spirit I still find inscrutable. The guy behind that tier list has played several thousand *4 player games* which is just incredible to me. That doesn't consider any other player count.
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Dec 1, 2023 07:00
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If you know you've won a turn or two before you actually execute the win, you should probably up the difficulty.
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Dec 2, 2023 22:31
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RedRevenge is really fun to play with. I’ve def learned a lot from him. The discord server is honestly not as hardcore as people make it out to be. It’s definitely a good place if you really want to push into max level adversaries or even weird combinations of dual adversaries. But people are also happy to sandbag a new spirit while they teach someone to play on a lower difficulty as well.
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Dec 7, 2023 19:00
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Pretty tempted, but I honestly don’t know if they would every really get played. Will probably only be able to get the base game on the table a couple times a year as it is, so I’ll probably just end up playing on the app instead. 
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Dec 7, 2023 20:36
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Elysium posted:Pretty tempted, but I honestly don’t know if they would every really get played. Will probably only be able to get the base game on the table a couple times a year as it is, so I’ll probably just end up playing on the app instead. What about playing solo? There's something satisfying about two-handing the game by yourself -- no worrying about varying skill levels, etc., and playing at your own pace. I also enjoy the tactile setup and play of the game (teardown, not so much). I'd rather break out the game than play it on the app. Just a thought; I'm probably an outlier in this.
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Dec 7, 2023 21:01
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Meatbag Esq. posted:The discord server is honestly not as hardcore as people make it out to be. Yes and no? Part of the reputation comes from new members not realizing what they're getting into when they join a game for the first time. My own experience was a lot of passive aggression at when I was taking longer than the rest of the table to resolve events (literal seconds). I realize this isn't indicative of the discord as a whole, but it's also not isolated to a few people. I would still recommend it to anyone who enjoys Spirit Island, but with the caveat that you need to curate your experience. It's the reason I pretty much just play games on the app with that group.
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Dec 7, 2023 23:56
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Yer all nuts Fractured Days is wild. Nothing else makes me feel like "literally a wizard" the way that spirit and all its bullshit does *picks up Fractured Days board* *puts on robe and wizard hat*
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Dec 8, 2023 02:10
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Lol I’m an idiot. So I picked up the extra Horizons spirit boards, without even considering the fact that they don’t come with the special power cards for the spirits.
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Dec 10, 2023 17:19
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Oh no 😞 Jagged Earth arriving today! Cheers to you, Elysium, for pointing out the sale. I mean, I'd seen it, but the reminder made me bite the bullet cause yeah it's not going down 50% for another year I bet
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Dec 10, 2023 17:50
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How viable is one-handed solo play? I don't have the brain to want to set up two spirits and two island boards but want to play
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Dec 11, 2023 22:38
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