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  #121  
Old October 30th, 2010, 12:55 AM
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Re: Horned Skull Brutes Pre-Release Discussion Thread

The fun is in winning and trying your hardest to optizmize your army strategy, not in hoping your opponent's Sudema autokills your Q9 and leads him to victory.

I couldn't imagine rooting for my opponent's pieces to kill mine.
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  #122  
Old October 30th, 2010, 01:17 AM
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Re: Horned Skull Brutes Pre-Release Discussion Thread

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Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate View Post
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Originally Posted by Grungebob View Post
If you take for granted the theme inherent in each Heroscape unit, then it doesn't matter what so called tier your army is in, you will always be the loser.
I must have missed that part of the rulebook. I assumed winners were decided by who had the most points left at either the end of the scenario or after a set number of rounds.
You must be a super fun guy to hang around with at a party
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  #123  
Old October 30th, 2010, 10:30 AM
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Re: Horned Skull Brutes Pre-Release Discussion Thread

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Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate View Post
The fun is in winning and trying your hardest to optizmize your army strategy, not in hoping your opponent's Sudema autokills your Q9 and leads him to victory.

I couldn't imagine rooting for my opponent's pieces to kill mine.
I agree that optimizing your strategy is fun. I have no doubt that Q9/Raelin/Deathreavers/10th Reg would beat Obsidian Guard x 5. I don't think that either side would have fun in this battle. Maybe you would.

I'm not a fan of high variance units like Sudema. I do like to play battles of well integrated and roughly equally matched armies. If I had to think of my favorite HeroScape battle, it would be Blade Gruts/Grimnak/Tornak/Arrow Gruts/Swogs/Krug/Mimring vs MDG/Roman Legionnaires/NGS/MBS/Roman Archers/Roman Gladiators on a very large map. The Roman/Marro army won due to well played Roman Archers. While I wouldn't bring Roman Archers to a tournament, they are fun to play and can be devastate opposing heroes. If this game were only about Q9, this would be a simpler and much cheaper game. I'll admit that it took me a while to realize that.
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  #124  
Old October 30th, 2010, 11:23 AM
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Re: Horned Skull Brutes Pre-Release Discussion Thread

Heroscape is not chess. It is not a game with a static set of player assets and a finite and predictable board. Saying that playing what you consider a weak unit is no fun, means that you are missing how the game plays and is designed. If you draft and counter draft from the available resources of the involved players, it doesn't matter how competitive individual units are in your metagame world, your battle or scenario will have a dynamism to it that creates a more cinematic experience than a game like chess. The problem is that many of you think that Heroscape needs to be more like chess where your skills at the game are recognized.

Perhaps you do this so you have something to show for your involvement, but to me it is a sad ending to the original intent of the game which is to create fun and dynamic games that spark the imagination of kids, and bring out the kid in old guys like me.

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  #125  
Old October 30th, 2010, 11:32 AM
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Re: Horned Skull Brutes Pre-Release Discussion Thread

Quote:
Originally Posted by Grungebob View Post
Heroscape is not chess. It is not a game with a static set of player assets and a finite and predictable board. Saying that playing what you consider a weak unit is no fun, means that you are missing how the game plays and is designed. If you draft and counter draft from the available resources of the involved players, it doesn't matter how competitive individual units are in your metagame world, your battle or scenario will have a dynamism to it that creates a more cinematic experience than a game like chess. The problem is that many of you think that Heroscape needs to be more like chess where your skills at the game are recognized.

Perhaps you do this so you have something to show for your involvement, but to me it is a sad ending to the original intent of the game which is to create fun and dynamic games that spark the imagination of kids, and bring out the kid in old guys like me.
Here! Here! Well said GB! Too bad prebuilt armies developed the competitive scene instead of draft and scenarios.

Guess I'm getting back into Scape
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  #126  
Old October 30th, 2010, 11:34 AM
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Re: Horned Skull Brutes Pre-Release Discussion Thread

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Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate View Post
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Originally Posted by Grungebob View Post
what you call "imagined narrative", is far more important than winning. Theme transcends wins and losses. Theme not only brings your victories(probably imagined in your case) to life but gives your losses more flavor as well. Heroscape was designed to create a battle story in about 30-60 minutes. Without characters to star in the story, you might as well just use poker chips and generic abilities.
I would imagine that my victories are much more common You would be more likely to use Brandis Skyhunter, Master of the Hunt, and other junky "theme" units against my Top Tier army.

Using poker chips would essentially eliminate hit zone differences, sighting, etc since Heroscape is designed around the figure's 3d features. Beyond that though you are right. If the 3d problem was solved the poker chip way would be just as fun. Gameplay almost entirely alone is what determines how great a game is, not the bells and whistles such as theme.

Glory to Rome is 1 of the Best board games of the last decade but some people cannot look past the cartoony "theme" whereas I could care less.
I'm sorry, man, I have to say it: you're a jackass. For you it's all about min/maxing and having an uber-competitive build. Meanwhile, you've totally missed the point that you're playing with robot rats and bone zombies and doggins. Oh, wait, that's right - you don't play doggins because they're not TOP TIER.

I'm surprised you even have opponents. This is pretty much the definition of fun murdering. Being so focused on winning indicates more about you and your character flaws than anything else.
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  #127  
Old October 30th, 2010, 12:17 PM
Devil's Advocate Devil's Advocate is offline
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Re: Horned Skull Brutes Pre-Release Discussion Thread

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Originally Posted by mad_wookiee View Post
theme" whereas I could care less.
I'm sorry, man, I have to say it: you're a jackass. For you it's all about min/maxing and having an uber-competitive build. Meanwhile, you've totally missed the point that you're playing with robot rats and bone zombies and doggins. Oh, wait, that's right - you don't play doggins because they're not TOP TIER.

I'm surprised you even have opponents. This is pretty much the definition of fun murdering. Being so focused on winning indicates more about you and your character flaws than anything else.[/quote]

I would say that a bigger character flaw would be trying to insult individuals who have a different perspective than you do Just because you play to not optimize your points does not mean otherwise and it is sad if you think others need to act in the exact manner you do.

I do not understand your point regarding robo rats, zombies, etc. Why would the type of unit affect my strategy of whether I try my hardest to win or not.

I would never think: "since I am using fantasy creatures in this game I will not try as hard as I do in other games that use Victory Points or money"

Since you play games not to win, when you pay Puerto Rico do you try to maximize your Victory Points or do you instead simply build the buildings that you like and pretend that you are a Plantation owner. By your comments I assume the latter.
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  #128  
Old October 30th, 2010, 12:17 PM
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Re: Horned Skull Brutes Pre-Release Discussion Thread

This is an odd place for this old debate to break out, but whatever, I'll chime in. I guess I inadvertently started it with my math-scape.

The "would Heroscape be a good game with poker chips" question came up when people were complaining about the quality of the D&D sculpts. Many people, myself included, noted that we care more about the awesome new powers and strategies than the (arguable) small decline in average sculpt quality. Some anti-D&D folks came back with the obvious "would you play with cardboard cutouts, then?" question.

For me, the answer is: well, probably yes if I knew how awesome the gameplay was, but the draw would not be as high. The aesthetics of this game are really pretty awesome. We have the best mass-produced terrain in the gaming world, period, and the figures are pretty high-quality. I probably never would have even known this game existed if a friend hadn't been drawn to those aesthetic aspects and introduced me to it.

Aesthetics and theme represent a bar that a game needs to clear to draw my interest. Gameplay is what keeps me coming back. As amazing as Heroscape's aesthetics are, I wouldn't have gotten heavily into the game if I hadn't realized almost immediately that this was a very well-designed game with a ton of tactical depth.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich10 View Post
I agree that optimizing your strategy is fun. I have no doubt that Q9/Raelin/Deathreavers/10th Reg would beat Obsidian Guard x 5. I don't think that either side would have fun in this battle. Maybe you would.
I've played a half-dozen games or so where the matchup felt that slanted. It's not a very fun experience. I'm competitive to a fault, but I don't get much pleasure out of winning a game like that. It's worse than being on the losing end of a slanted game, I guess, but neither end seems all that fun. I don't play the game to get cakewalk wins.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Grungebob View Post
Heroscape is not chess. It is not a game with a static set of player assets and a finite and predictable board. Saying that playing what you consider a weak unit is no fun, means that you are missing how the game plays and is designed. If you draft and counter draft from the available resources of the involved players, it doesn't matter how competitive individual units are in your metagame world
I agree that Heroscape is not chess, however, one of the great draws of Heroscape, for me, is something it shares with chess: the way a relatively simple set of rules for gameplay produce a extremely rich set of strategies.

More to the point, I think that you're hitting on something that killercactus and I have been beating the drum about lately. Devil's Advocate is simply expressing the degenerate endpoint of the view of the game you get from looking only at double blind prebuilt armies. As you point out, the game was originally conceived to be played either in scenarios with set armies, or as a drafting game. The narrowing of the game to a relatively small set of "tier 1" figures is not a result of game design, it's a result of a particular way of playing the game (double blind prebuilt armies) that has happened to become very popular.

If tournament play shifts more toward drafting events, the view of the game that D_A is expressing here (e.g. "the Master of the Hunt isn't as good as Kaemon, therefore he is a waste of points") will no longer make sense, even from a minmaxing, hypercompetitive point of view.
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  #129  
Old October 30th, 2010, 12:46 PM
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Re: Horned Skull Brutes Pre-Release Discussion Thread

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Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate View Post
Because winning is more important than an imagined narrative.
I like both.

One of the things I like about randomness in games is that it offers an opportunity to make up stories for what's going on.

If a Krav Maga Agent rolls no defense against a ranged attack when he had Raelin's support, I think about how unlikely that was, how that figure's back was actually turned to his opponent, so clearly he called "TIME OUT" and was tying his shoe but the Arrow Grut on the other end didn't listen.

If Grimnak rolls a 15 to chomp Agent Carr, that was a narrow escape. Maybe he ghost-walked right out of the t-rex's mouth.

But the math is fun too. Sometimes after a game, someone will say, what were the odds that that NotNW would get 4/4 skulls and your Q9 would get 0/8 shields? And I do a little mental math to figure it out. (4/4 skulls is a 1/16 chance, and 0/8 shields is 2/3^ 8 so.... 256 over... um, 3^5 is 243, 729, 2187, 6561, so... about 256 in 100000, so that's really unlikely )

Quote:
Originally Posted by fomox View Post
(I've also played many matches with great, fun people who were using Q9. So using Q9 doesn't make you a tool. But being a tool sure seems to make you use Q9.)

Last edited by Jexik; October 30th, 2010 at 12:50 PM. Reason: funny thing is that this 1/4% chance happened to me in my 1st game playing Q9
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  #130  
Old October 30th, 2010, 12:51 PM
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Re: Horned Skull Brutes Pre-Release Discussion Thread

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Originally Posted by Grungebob View Post
Perhaps you do this so you have something to show for your involvement, but to me it is a sad ending to the original intent of the game which is to create fun and dynamic games that spark the imagination of kids, and bring out the kid in old guys like me.
Well Gbob, since you're one of the people responsible for creating the Heroscape tourney environment, perhaps we should blame you for the attitudes of Devil's Advocate and those like him.

As far as my own attitude goes, I have fun winning, but if that were the only way I could have fun I'd feel like a sad, sorry little man.
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  #131  
Old October 30th, 2010, 01:09 PM
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Re: Horned Skull Brutes Pre-Release Discussion Thread

Quote:
Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate
Since you play games not to win, when you pay Puerto Rico do you try to maximize your Victory Points or do you instead simply build the buildings that you like and pretend that you are a Plantation owner. By your comments I assume the latter.
I don't play Puerto Rico, but I for one do have more fun pretending that I am a general directing his troops across the field than I do calculating who will win with math. I play this game for the fun and only for the fun. I don't care who wins, and sometimes it is more fun to lose because you know that you're a good teacher and are making the players want to come back and play again. I could stomp them everytime with rats/stingers/Q9, but that's not very much fun for me or for them. So I play whatever crazy build I want because it's fun to do. If all you get out of game is winning than you're missing half of the experience.



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  #132  
Old October 30th, 2010, 01:13 PM
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Re: Horned Skull Brutes Pre-Release Discussion Thread

Quote:
Originally Posted by Devil's Advocate View Post
I would say that a bigger character flaw would be trying to insult individuals who have a different perspective than you do Just because you play to not optimize your points does not mean otherwise and it is sad if you think others need to act in the exact manner you do.

I do not understand your point regarding robo rats, zombies, etc. Why would the type of unit affect my strategy of whether I try my hardest to win or not.

I would never think: "since I am using fantasy creatures in this game I will not try as hard as I do in other games that use Victory Points or money"

Since you play games not to win, when you pay Puerto Rico do you try to maximize your Victory Points or do you instead simply build the buildings that you like and pretend that you are a Plantation owner. By your comments I assume the latter.
It takes a much better player to win with Einar Imperium than it does to win with Q9 and rats. The fact that you are so fixated on the army choice portion of the game leaves you without an ability to appreciate the fun of winning with a suboptimal build. It stretches your ability as a player and makes victory that much sweeter. That's a portion of the game that you'll never know, and it is in fact sad that you won't. In fact, I'd argue that it makes you a worse player simply because you rely so heavily on your army and theoryscape that you don't get to stretch your tactical abilities. Do you have the stones to take Einar Imperium to a competitive event? I have, and I did better with them than I would have thought. It was a stretch experience for me. I didn't win the event but I improved as a player and that's more important to me than anything.

I don't play Puerto Rico, so I have no real comment on that. I do play other games to learn and try new strategies, not just hammer on the existing ones ad nauseum. When I play Dominion, I try to draft new cards every game just to see how they work. I try to set up odd combos to see if I can do it. I don't just fixate on Chapel or Throne Room or whatever other proven card is in the mix. That's boring and the sign of a small mind - unable to adapt and learn and grow and try things that are harder simply because it's new and different and stretches your abilities.
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