Online Season 16 - CONGRATS DYSOLE

[superfrog]

Originally Posted by MegaSilver

superfrog deferred to me.

We are playing tonight after 8 PM CT.

We're pushing back to 10:30 ET/9:30 CT.

[vegietarian18]

Well, belgarath and I just finished one of the wackiest games I have ever played. I had Cyprien, Nicholas, Deathstrike Thralls x4, Sonya, and Isamu, while he had Shurrak, Marcu, and Fire Elementals x8. I opened with Cyprien, and a bad Eternal Hatred roll forced Marcu into a corner of the map. Cyprien swooped in on his second turn and escaped. After I lost a turn on Cyprien, Nicholas went coast to coast with an overextend and fled from the same place his brother did. My next two turns were on the Deathstrikes, and I used Return to the Grave on the rest of my army to end the game while I had a lead on points. Strangely enough, this is the first game I have ever won where I never attacked an enemy and only my own figures.

[belgarath]

All I can say is WOW! I have lost a lot of games but I think this was the quickest I have ever lost! I set vegi up with the perfect army and I had no clue. I really don't know what to say. Is there a JV for online heroscape??

Good game vegi and good luck. And thanks for explaining to me what happened because I had no clue.

[MegaSilver]

Originally Posted by superfrog

We're pushing back to 10:30 ET/9:30 CT.

@superfrog

Okay, I've finally gotten back inside from the farmwork. Had to clean out a new place to dump feed before unloading a trailer full of it, hence why I was going to be late. I'll be ready in 10 minutes from now.

[superfrog]

Just finished with MegaSilver.

He started out slowly, keeping in range of Raelin's aura with his Romans, and mostly focusing on MBS as their warlord. I started a bit of a slow roll with the skeletons, and had Cyprien our front. MBS picked off two skeletons, which were saved by Necromancy, and Cyprien was able to kill MBS with a combination of Chilling touch and his normal attack. At that point, I had over-exposed Cyprien, and he was swarmed by Romans and the Azurite Warlord, who went for Furious Wrath, but rolled only 1 skull. The Romans landed 3 wounds on him though, so on the next turn, Cyprien flew away and escaped.

After that, my strategy was to get rid of the rest of my army before he could escape any figures. He started killing skeletons left and right, and I was just feeding him. Finally, I had 3 skeletons left, and his Azurite Warlord was 1 turn away from my start zone. This left me with 3 options.

1: make my skeletons take leaving engagement attacks. Unfortunately, that's not required in the rules. I tried, but Mega declined to roll.

2: (what I did) engage Azzy with the one skeleton in threat range, and have my second skeleton kill the third one. The second one died to Wannok, and after an initiative switch, I had one attack to prevent the victory. I had to roll all skulls, get a defensive whiff, and successfully roll for my LEA. That didn't happen and MS won.

3: (the best option) have my skeletons attack each other, killing two, and let the last one die to Wannok, which is not optional. Unfortunately, I didn't think of that.

[Soundwarp SG-1]

Originally Posted by vegietarian18

Well, belgarath and I just finished one of the wackiest games I have ever played. I had Cyprien, Nicholas, Deathstrike Thralls x4, Sonya, and Isamu, while he had Shurrak, Marcu, and Fire Elementals x8. I opened with Cyprien, and a bad Eternal Hatred roll forced Marcu into a corner of the map. Cyprien swooped in on his second turn and escaped. After I lost a turn on Cyprien, Nicholas went coast to coast with an overextend and fled from the same place his brother did. My next two turns were on the Deathstrikes, and I used Return to the Grave on the rest of my army to end the game while I had a lead on points. Strangely enough, this is the first game I have ever won where I never attacked an enemy and only my own figures.

Looking over your chat log, it seems you choose not to roll for Vanish at one point, but isn't Vanish a mandatory power?

[Ixe]

Hmm, I must admit the format felt a little weird to me playing it tonight but reading @vegietarian18 's post about that game gives me some pause. I like when formats can mix things up a bit and add a new angle to the game, but it sounds like that was an entirely different beast. This is one of the few Heroscape examples I can think of where you can play and win the game without even interacting with your opponent.

I applaud your ingenuity for putting it together and executing it, vegie. Still, seeing this gives me pause on seeing this format again if it can really be played in such a non-interactive and exploitative manner.

[Soundwarp SG-1]

Originally Posted by Ixe

Hmm, I must admit the format felt a little weird to me playing it tonight but reading @vegietarian18 's post about that game gives me some pause. I like when formats can mix things up a bit and add a new angle to the game, but it sounds like that was an entirely different beast. This is one of the few Heroscape examples I can think of where you can play and win the game without even interacting with your opponent.

I applaud your ingenuity for putting it together and executing it, vegie. Still, seeing this gives me pause on seeing this format again if it can really be played in such a non-interactive and exploitative manner.

In fairness, the only reason he could do that is due to both of the armies in play being kind of rubbish, but vegies army being sort of ok in this format, and belgrath still could have done a bit more to prevent it even with his army (his first 5 turns were with Marcu, that's a bad move in any format) . It's not really a viable strategy 90% of the time I think, it just happened that a really good player went up against a pretty inexperienced one and vegie used it to his advantage.

[belgarath]

I'm not complaining about how this went down. I was totally unprepared for this format and didn't really understand what I was going up against. My thought was to try to fly Marcu out and tie up one of his units and then get Shurrak out to take them out on the way to his start zone and then exit. It just didn't work out for me. Once Cyprien was out I put my markers back on Marcu in the hopes of tying Nicholas down long enough to keep him from getting away too. How many times do you really expect to fail the eternal hatred roll anyway? Since the dice have eternal hatred towards me, and you can see this through most of my games, I should have realized it wasn't going to work. But with 7 move and 4 attack I felt Marcu was the best chance I had to slow down the speedy vampires.

[Ixe]

Originally Posted by Soundwarp SG-1

In fairness, the only reason he could do that is due to both of the armies in play being kind of rubbish, but vegies army being sort of ok in this format, and belgrath still could have done a bit more to prevent it even with his army (his first 5 turns were with Marcu, that's a bad move in any format) . It's not really a viable strategy 90% of the time I think, it just happened that a really good player went up against a pretty inexperienced one and vegie used it to his advantage.

Perhaps I am over blowing things. In seeing him attempt that, my Ninja army, for instance, could have potentially beat his 290 in points and at the very least force him to adopt a strategy that requires interacting with me. However, I think there are plenty of armies here that couldn't meaningfully stop the first two from getting through, race that number of points, or then do anything to prevent the ritual unit suicide that took place.

I'm only saying that we should keep a close eye on the rest of the games in this format and see how they play out and, when it comes time to reflect on everything at the end of the season, consider the implications of what is reasonably possible in this format and whether or not that is something that we'd care to repeat. Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea of the format. It only just takes a few combos like this to turn the game from the high strategy, high variance Heroscape into non-interactive army building.

I suppose I could also ask if there are elegant and subtle solutions we could adopt to prevent games from playing out like this. Things like deathreavers, for instance, only scatter from your opponent attacking them rather than any figure to stop them from having effective movement bonding with your own units. In a similar vein, could we consider a tweak to the format where the game ends after your last figure escapes or your opponent destroys the last figure in your army? We already acknowledge that standard rules like being forced to place your maximum army must be imposed, so why not consider a tweak that enforces a little bit more player interaction? This way the sprint-suicide strategy lets the opponent more easily set the terms of when the game ends and you need to try to get everyone out or at least kill them down to less than your total escaped points to win the game. I'm only spit-balling, but something to consider at the very least.

[dok]

If we run this format again, we will probably tweak it somewhat to reduce the incentive to get your own figures killed once you have an Escaped figure lead. Options would include (but are not limited to):

• You are not allowed to target your own figures for attacks in this format.
• If you destroy one of your own figures with an attack, that figure counts against your escaped point total.
• Once one player's army is gone, the remaining figures in the other player's army score, but at 50% of their card value.

Please note that these are discussion points are are NOT rules that apply in this event.

That said, that particular game (vegie/belgarath) was more a function of a deeply unbalanced matchup and one player who didn't quite understand the implications of the format. (Ironically, belgarath put together almost a perfect build for the Escape format without understanding what he had done!) No other game has gone down that way and I wouldn't expect it to happen often.

[MegaSilver]

Originally Posted by dok

If we run this format again, we will probably tweak it somewhat to reduce the incentive to get your own figures killed once you have an Escaped figure lead. Options would include (but are not limited to):

*If you destroy one of your own figures with an attack, that figure counts against your escaped point total.

I really like this idea to fix the format.