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Leder games Oath chatter
Really excited to get this and get started on a chronicle!
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1. The teach is a slog. I went through the scripted turn 1 play through and that alone took an hour and a half. It did do a pretty good job of teaching the game but the subsequent first game still took another three and a half hours.
2. Having a player that isn't rational (in the game theory sense) completely unbalances the game. Oath is like a tensile structure, if everyone is not pulling against one another the whole thing collapses.
On point number 2, I don't know how I feel about it - any player playing by the rules is free to play poorly but a player that is unable or unwilling to read the board state makes the game capricious in a way that isn't entirely fun (for me!). Now one argument could be made that you can play Oath in a roleplaying-like way which would justify some of the decision making but that definitely makes it a different game, one which I'm less keen to play. Just writing out that paragraph makes my skin crawl as I realise I sound like some weird gatekeeping elitist that gets annoyed by suboptimal play but I had a game yesterday which really tried my patience. I know I have no right to complain about suboptimal play, the suboptimal player is usually me!
To set some context, we had our intro game a few weeks back and in the last round of our somewhat grueling game I was Chancellor and was about to lose to an Exile on a most sites ruled vision. I was best positioned to deal with the Exile and mustered my forces before deciding to save my last two supply instead of campaigning, forcing the next player (who also had a reasonable chance of winning through a vision of the darkest secret) to deal with the problem. I laughed like a villain and they decided to negotiate for a citizenship instead of drawing out the game. Even if they could've potentially prolonged the game for the chance at a win, I still found this a satisfying conclusion as it set them up for an easier win next game.
The combination of the new Chancellor's and citizen sites mean that their empire was massive in the most recent game. And these had plenty of denizens with useful powers on them so the two of them started with a nice advantage. The chosen victory condition was People's Favor and at some point relatively early I recovered it with six favor and I had five warbands to protect myself while I hid in the Hinterlands. This was a reasonably strong position which I managed to hold for a full turn while the others durdled around. As a potential usurper win rolled around, the Chancellor was unable to stop my win and the citizen sat between him and I. The chancellor decided to recruit but lacking the supply to fight with me, gave all of his troops (10+) to the citizen to stop me (who had 7 or so of his own). When I pointed out that the citizen would keep these troops on his board after the campaign he decided that it was unimportant as they were on the same team. In any case, this decision made a certain amount of sense and the citizen decided to muster some more and then seize the People's Favor from me in campaign. Now this is where I got frustrated - afterwards the chancellor seemed to focus on keeping the People's Favor with a strong economy while completely neglecting the threat of his citizen who owned the Darkest Secret. In fact they went out of their way to clear out banks favorable to me which prevented me from buying secrets to buy the Darkest Secret for myself - I didn't even need it to win (I already had the vision of most sites faceup), I just needed the game to keep going! In the end the citizen won (aided by a brilliant reveal of Ancient Bindings which they'd been sitting on all game). Due to being cash poor and now secret poor, there wasn't much for me to do except try and hit my vision in hopes that the citizen didn't win on a coin flip roll. They did - it wasn't satisfying. In writing that out I realise it makes me sound even more ridiculous than I feel but I'm not sure how to reconcile that with how annoyed I was by a the Chancellor playing so unpredictably and not to their own benefit.
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Thankfully, someone made a nice if/then app that basically does the same thing as the insanity provoking mind of the prince sheet, but presents it bite size sequential order: clockprince.seiyria.com/
That app won't make sense unless you've sorted out the Prince map at least once or twice but once you do it's an improvement.
Like I said, novelty, I know no-one here messes with solo stuff. I'll probably try it again if I'm bored one of these evenings to see if it moves fast enough to give a little flavor of the game.
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One consequence of the bot is that the Darkest Secret becomes much less valuable for its ability due to the constant drawing from the world deck.
re: Solo Oath in general - as much as I love Oath, it's hard for this to displace other superior solo experiences such as Arkham Horror.
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My main thought is that the Prince makes a much better Chancellor than an Exile. This is particularly true if the Chancellor has a big empire with lots of powers as the Exile is unable to leverage those same advantages for himself. I've found the singular focus of the Exile Prince on the Oath means a Chancellor with a strong advantage can trap the Prince in a loop. In my most recent examples, I was playing the Oath of Protection and I was able to exploit the Prince by letting him explore locations to reveal new relics before either beating them off him or by buying them before he could afford them. As a second example, when playing an Oath of Devotion, coupled with a ruled site with Book Burnings, I was able to purchase the Darkest Secret and maintain sufficient secret advantage that I place more secrets on the Darkest Secret and burn off any interim gains on his part while also keeping his army's low.
One option I've considered is flipping a die to see which role the Prince would play just to shake things up at the start of a game (being Chancellor of a stable empire forever isn't going to be a ton of fun). Another option I've considered is making the Exile pursue visions or introducing a second Clockwork Prince that treats their first Vision drawn as his main objective just to put some pressure on the Chancellor.
Feel free to check out my chronicle here: oath.vision/view-chronicle/2o6Od7EGkc8xS9yLlyW0 (and ignore the misplayed True Names to a site :S)
In any case, this experience made me think about our last game and one thing I've realised - when an empire looks too strong, seizing sites just to be disruptive is actually a reasonable play to ensure a more balanced game next time around. For example, if instead of playing to win outright, I started playing to make garysax's empire a bit smaller next game (once a loss for me looked kind of certain) means we wouldn't be dealing with all of his different powers in the next game.
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www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/2622426/it-happening/page/2
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I hope this thing does well, I would love to get a creative expansion to this. It needs 0 more content, it's SO huge as it is. The expansion should be really conceptually different; Cole has talked about adding an invading country to the civil war which is the type of thing I'm talking about.
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- Jackwraith
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