The Book of Super Soldier

[tcglkn]

Originally Posted by Tornado

He needs to start losing games for me to believe that.

Did you even read the test results? He dealt 3 wounds and 4 wounds in those games. He didn’t dominate the opposing army...

[MrNobody]

The 4 wounds to Annihilus was a big deal, but that was a very lucky roll. (Wasn’t quite all skulls, but I think it was close?) But yeah, other than that, both games had him feel like the rest of the army was pulling the weight.

The Soldiers are just super-effective all of the sudden. Cap is great as always, Bradley is a top-tier figure mover, Bloodshot is a murder machine, Sgt. Rock is a killer leader once he’s in position, and the Joe stuff is just going to add more icing to the cake. Even Bucky did more damage than Super Soldier in game 2, just by virtue of going nearly every turn.

[LordVenoc]

He seems to have a massive target on his head by nature of his big stats and how juiced they can get with Soldiers. Throw in a protection power and he can easily feel like the necessary early target. Meanwhile other soldiers are able to milk bonuses longer. IMO a lot of his strength is in how he affects targetting priority rather than just pure damage output.

[MrNobody]

For me, it was just hard cause it’s the kind of army where there is no easy first target. Go after SS first, and you’re dealing with his Cap-boosted defense and Bloodshot’s Cap-boosted attack. Go after Cap first, and you’re dealing with SS switches as well as Bloodshot again. And that was without even throwing Rock in, who’s another high priority target.

X-Men are always going to struggle with Cap’s defense, but it gets even worse when every turn focusing on Cap is met with a Bucky/Bloodshot/Grunt offensive in retaliation. I may just need more experience playing against the faction, but I wouldn’t be surprised about Tornado’s “soldier tax” theory being true.

[Yodaking]

I agree with LV that other things need to be considered beyond just damage output, damage absorption and impact on opponents tactics are both very significant contributions.

If you truly feel his armies can win consistently without him holding up to his current point cost, then you need to admit we screwed up somewhere else and add points to some other cards that he's been playing with. So where do you propose the points go to if they don't belong on his card? His armies clearly are not struggling to win or are even match-ups at the moment. Something needs to be done to balance the armies out so whoever is facing these Solider army builds feels like they have a shot to win with more than just a couple of very specific counter draft armies.

[Dr. Jekyll]

I agree with the fact that he is not necessarily doing a whole lot of damage. He does soak up at least 5 points of damage that could have gone somewhere else though.

I'm wondering if he would be as good without his Soldier synergy at this 350 cost.

If his cost needs to go up in order to keep the game balanced, I'm down with that. I just don't want it to go so far that he's just not worth the point cost.

[IAmBatman]

Fwiw, I get 375 on the calculator for this version, so I'm not sure it's fair to blame the Soldier faction too much in this instance. Though, obviously, with Man of War, any boost to attack or defense he gets in the faction is really good.

He basically has an attack of 8 and, if he's not facing special attacks, a defense of 9. He doesn't have the range or speed of a Hal Jordan, but he's basically got better Life, Attack, and Defense, as well as a special attack.

[japes]

Man of war seems like a huge power with an attack and defense defaulting at 6.

I also want to say that looking over all the test from the guys I feel strongly are good testers (no offense to the guys I don't know I just trust some guys I have experience with) The only match that his team dominated was with SGT Rock. Even at 320 without Sgt Rock they were very close games and even some losses there. Granted I don't know if there were changes there other than points but seeing the 320 results and now wanting to jump up to 360 based on a bunch of test with some Rock guy I've never heard of makes me think we need to go back and look deeper at what this guy actually did in his test.

I know he's a combo of Superman and Cappy but you can't go with Superman stats and hope he comes in low to mid 300's Find out where you want him thematically and decide if you want to drop his attack/defense or let him be a beast and lean into it. If he's 370 on his own then fine live with it. Don't jack him up though because of what other Soldiers are doing or what will happen is this guy will just never get drafted since there will be better value soldiers.

Lets stop the cycle of thinking every unit after a missed unit needs to account for those lost points.

[Dr. Jekyll]

Originally Posted by IAmBatman

Fwiw, I get 375 on the calculator for this version, so I'm not sure it's fair to blame the Soldier faction too much in this instance. Though, obviously, with Man of War, any boost to attack or defense he gets in the faction is really good.

He basically has an attack of 8 and, if he's not facing special attacks, a defense of 9. He doesn't have the range or speed of a Hal Jordan, but he's basically got better Life, Attack, and Defense, as well as a special attack.

Holy crap!! Why did I move forward at 320 then? I had to have dropped the ball somewhere along the line. 320 and 375 is a drastic difference and I haven't changed any stats since we started playtesting.

[Tornado]

Are you saying Rock is under cost?
If so then please review his tests.
Those tests were done by me, Arch, LV and Karat.
A solid group and Rock went 7-7.

[IAmBatman]

All right, after looking through some comps (Supergirl (I), She-Hulk, Green Lantern (Hal), Mister Incredible, etc.) with folks on Discord, and realizing the protection power was once per round only (whoops) I've adjusted the calculation some and between comp and calculation, I think he's probably in the 330-350 range.

[tcglkn]

I didn’t get to run my test today but I’ll run it tomorrow and see how he feels at 350.