I've played Citizen Dawn in the Ruins of Atlantis 4 times now and can't seem to beat her. Does anyone have any suggestions on some good Hero combinations or strategies to go up against her?
You have two choices when dealing with Dawn - try to beat her without letting her flip, or try to survive long enough for her to unflip. If you get lucky with the citizens that turn up, you may find it easiest to just focus fire on her and try to get rid of those 80 HP, but if Truth turns up you'll be in trouble, and if both Truth and Return with the Dawn turn up, you might as well just get used to the idea that you have to weather the storm. Damage mitigation is crucial in the latter case, whether it's something that the card plays force you into, or your strategy from the beginning. You're going to take a lot of damage of a lot of different types, in a lot of different amounts and distributions; this makes her a lot harder to adapt to than Warlord Voss, but on the plus side she isn't invincible while her minions are out (excepting Truth, and to a limited extent Anvil and Spring), nor does she have an alternate win condition or anything equivalent to Forced Deployment.
Any random set of heroes can take on Dawn, but there are some that special utility against her:
Parse lets you control the villain deck with various ongoings, and her Buffer Overload lets you cancel an ill-timed Devastating Aurora or unwanted Citizen. Parse also has a lot of abilities to provide irreducible damage, to get around some of the nastier Citizens.
Visionary also has deck control powers and cards, and her Brain Burn card means you can afford to kill a couple of Citizens, since they'll end up at the bottom of the deck and not in the trash.
Haka can use Savage Mana to prevent Citizens from going to the trash.
Team Leader Tachyon provides everyone with a stupid amount of card draw, which can help against the Citizens that make everyone lose cards.
Wraith has limited villain deck control with Infrared Eyepiece, and Megacomputers are useful in Atlantis to minimize the threat of the kraken and gun turrets. She's also a consistent damage dealer once she gets rolling.
For a grudge match, I'd probably pick either Visionary or Parse or Wraith, Haka, and Team Leader Tachyon. Depending on how you want to play, you could add an additional hero or two such as Legacy (he makes everyone better) or whoever else your favorite hero is.
There are a couple of heroes I wouldn't play against Dawn: Expattriette is a bit iffy, and Unity will probably lose her golems if the team doesn't work together very carefully. The Sentinels might get battered down before they get a chance to be effective. Still, there's 20+ heroes you can field against her, and 5-6 that are especially effective.
Parse is amazing vs. Dawn, that irreducible damage for one round is ridiculous, and catching a Devastating Aurora is the best.
Visionary too. Not as epic as facing the Captain, but pretty epic.
Why do you keep losing? Is it one specific thing, or different ones?
Dawn is one of the harder villains of the game. Ruins of Atlantis is one of the more brutal environments to play in. And…you have no idea why you keep losing?
No matter what advice we give you, you are just going to have to understand that you will lose more games than you will win in that setup. But thats the fun of it! Just trying to manage expectations here. You choose a very unforgiving setup.
If you're having trouble grasping what Dawn can throw at you, try a different environment such as the Freedom Tower, the Block, or Insula Primis. Other than that, you have to keep in mind that she has 2 Devestating Aurora's. All games against Dawn revolve and hinge upon where those DA's are and how you're going to deal with them. Suggestions of Parse/Dark Visionary/Wraith are perfect for scouting those out. Ongoing destruction is also going to be really missed if none of your heros have any (the above 3 have decent destruction options as well as deck manipulation)
Funnily enough, we played against Dawn in Atlantis last night…and we kicked her arse, it was great :D. Let's see, who did we have…it was TLT, Mr Fixer, and Tempest, in that order. Starting set-up for Dawn was Blood (not too bad) and Truth (argh), and then she played Winter (meh) on her first turn. We managed to deal with Truth in a few rounds. A Kraken came out in the first environment turn and as there were Citizens around, never focused on any of us before we killed it a few rounds later.
TLT obviously let the rest of us get out a bunch of cards, which was nice :). She also used Blinding Speed on a Toxic Seaweed which came out about halfway through the game. Was generally useful with the card draw and offered a few plinks at some of the bad guys too :).
Mr Fixer (played by myself) had plenty of tools and styles within a few rounds. I put out Dual Crowbars first but wasn't able to hit two things until the Kraken came out (since Truth was the only viable target for a while unless I wanted to hit myself or something - no Driving Mantis in play so no benefit to doing so ;)). Then I used Meditation to put out Grease Monkey Fist for more damage. Then I drew a Harmony (via TLT I think) a round or two later so had even more damage. We also had a Phosphorescent Chamber…well, two in fact, through the course of the game, whose damage we took advantage of as much as possible. I also got a nice set-up in which I played Bloody Knuckles for even more damage in the same round that Dawn had put out an ongoing (first it was Channel the Eclipse, then the following round it was Return with the Dawn), then Tempest played Ball Lightning on his turn to dish out some damage and nuke both Dawn's ongoing and my Bloody Knuckles (the latter at my request) so I didn't risk getting heavily pounded by anything. I think I did quite a substantial amount of the damage during the game, but not much else (though nothing else was really necessary).
Tempest got out Cleansing Downpour on his first turn and used it more often than Squall throughout the game, after the plinks we were getting from Dawn, Blood, and Winter for the first few turns. Nice when a Phosphorescent Chamber came out and we were able to benefit from an extra whole piont of healing :D. He put out his Shackles after a couple of rounds which was handy against Dawn, and he also used a bunch of one-shots to dish out some damage and finished the game with a Lightning Slash, I believe.
Dawn herself mostly played Citizens - after the first three we later saw Dare, Assault, and also Tears…she also played Channel the Eclipse and on the following round, Return with the Dawn (see above, in the paragraph on Mr Fixer, as to how we dealt with those). Return did bring back Truth but we were set up enough by then that he didn't really last long. We put a fifth citizen into the trash at one point but Dawn was defeated before she had a chance to flip, but I think we'd made sure that Assault was still out anyway, so she'd've flipped straight back had we got that far.
Had the game gone on any longer, though, things could've got worse for us - I checked her deck after we beat her and the next card was a copy of That Card (with the second maybe five or six cards below it). Phew! had she managed to play it, I was holding onto a Salvage Yard from the first turn so at least
So that was our game last night - we got lucky, I think, in that she didn't put out anything too hazardous and what ongoings she did get out we managed to deal with in the same round. Similarly, the environment didn't do too much - we had, in no particular order becuase I can't remember, a Kraken (only hit citizens and we managed to kill it), a Toxic Seaweed (TLT hit it with Blinding Speed), a couple of Hallway Collapses (the only reason I ended the game on less than 20hp), a Leaking Room (okay so TLT couldn't do much that round but me and Tempest were pretty well set up by then so weren't too bothered), and both Phosphorescent Chambers (we took advantage of the extra damage and weren't too impeded by the discards thanks to TLT).
In general for Dawn I would say that deck control is very, very useful (which basically means that our game last night was super risky as we had absolutely no way to see what was coming until she played it), so heroes like Parse and Visionary (either version) are very good. Those who can deal hefty amounts of damage (if it's irreducible, even better if Truth and/or Anvil are out) to a single target are good for taking out citizens in a single hit or whittling them down so someone else can finish them off. Haka is good if he can get Savage Mana out and start eating everyone, but that's one specific hero and one specific card (of which there are only two copies) so don't count on that tactic working if you decide to fight Dawn with Haka. Jim can be good with his bounties - No Executions probably has Citizen Truth on it for a reason, after all - he can't Return with the Dawn if he's at the bottom of the deck ;).
Environment destruction is also helpful if you're fighting in Atlantis, since it's one of the tougher environments. You're safe enough from Krakens as long as there's at least one citizen in play and all the heroes have a decent amount of hp remaining. But stuff like the Pillars of Hercules (giving Dawn an extra play at the start of every turn) can be your downfall if it lets her cycle through to a copy of That Card all the sooner. Basically, That Card is the bane of anyone fighting her, unless you either don't need any cards in play to be set up (Tachyon can probably get away with it, for example) or are so early into the game that you haven't had a chance to set up yet.
Remember also that it's a card game, it's random, and sometimes you can fight a villain with a certain group of heroes in a certain environment and get totally thrashed one time, then totally kick arse on the very next attempt. One time we had Sweat and Tears as the starting pair of citizens - we'd discarded half our starting hands before any of us even had a turn, meaning we never managed to really get set up before she killed us all. I think she may even have hammered it home even more by playing That Card just as we thought we were getting somewhere.
If you're finding her too difficult in Atlantis, maybe try her somewhere a bit less lethal…the Block isn't too bad as long as the inmates are attacking the guards or the villains, and somewhere like the Final Wasteland or Silver Gulch could be fun if you have the Naturalist in his Gazelle-Form-and-Environmental-Allies setup :D. Any environment which has the potential to let the villain play multiple cards on their turn is a bad thing with Dawn, since the more cards she plays, the more chance you have of That Card coming up.
Keep at it, though, and hopefully you'll find something that works…or just get lucky and get all the right cards while she keeps throwing "nice" citizens at you like Spring and Blood ;).
If I had to make a rough estimate, based upon my own personal experiences given a random group of heros, you are looking at a one win every 6-5 games on average vs Dawn in Atlantis. So I don't think the OP is doing anything "wrong". Sounds about right to me. /shrug
Also don't forget that Citizen Dawn counts herself to make her second flip, out of invulnerable status.
Perhaps so, but I would expect to see her be effective at least some of the time. The nemesis bonus Mom gets against her will help Flak Jacket trigger more often, and the bonus to damage against Mom will be epic if you can get both Pride and Prejudice running, or draw into an Unload. You may have to hesitate to play all your guns if you don't know where Those Cards are, but Reloading those Shock Rounds over and over will be totally worth it.
My dream team against Dawn is Visionary, Unity, Fanatic, and Tachyon. Visionary has Brain Burn and Suggestion for trash maintenance, Fanatic can make Citizen maintenance a lot easier with things like Zealous Offense and Final Dive, and Unity and Tachyon do what they always do. They also have a good bit of ongoing/environment destruction which can really help, and they barely even flinch at Devastating Aurora.
Thanks for everyone's comments. I finally beat her. I took the suggestion of using Visionary. I think that she was the key to victory. Being able to control which Villain and Environment cards are on top of the decks is huge. Allowing your other heros to draw cards was also key.
I used Visionary, Tempest, Raith, and Tacheon. Thanks all.
With the possible exception of Tacky, those are all top-tier heroes (not that the difference between high and low tiers is immense; the game is very well balanced, but some heroes do tend to perform just a bit better than others on a fairly reliable basis). All of them together can do a great job of bringing their A-game, though luck still remains something of a factor.
Tachyon is definitely a high tier hero: she does massive damage, group damage, damage redirection, damage shutdown, card draw, and ongoing and environment destruction without being particularly dependent on ongoings or equipment cards. She has her weaknesses, but all of the top tier heroes do.
Honestly, about half the heroes in the game are top tier, and many of the mid tier heroes are nearly as good. The bottom tier heroes could probably even be top tier if they only had more reliable ways to draw and play their gimmicks. A fully loaded Expatriette is insane, but she rarely gets the chance to get all her stuff out.
Here's how I would rank them, and I admit that all of the mid tier folk could be top tier in some other people's rankings.
Top Tier Heroes
Ardent Adept, Chrono-Ranger, Haka, Legacy, Nightmist, Omnitron-X, Parse, Scholar, Tachyon, Tempest, Unity, Visionary, Wraith
Mid Tier Heroes
Absolute Zero, Fanatic, KNYFE, Mr. Fixer, Ra, the Sentinels, Setback
Bottom Tier Heroes
Bunker, Expatriette, Naturalist
…
Really?
takes second look
…
shakes head
The Naturalist, a bottom-tier hero? Buh?
Tiers even existing in Sentinels of the Multiverse?
I figured that ranking Naturalist at the bottom would be controversial. I've only played a few games with him, and I might be missing a lot. But what's so amazing about him? He can achieve DR3 with some work and redirect all attacks to him (whether he wants them or not!) for a round, at the cost of minimizing his ability to do damage. Scholar can achieve DR4 and redirect all attacks to him and still be able to do damage. Legacy can make himself immune to (some) damage and selectively redirect attacks to himself, or make everyone else immune to damage, or shut down the villain deck, and buff everyone's damage or heal everyone while doing a little damage.
My feeling is that top tier heroes contribute to defeating the villain in a lot of different ways, and have the card draw/search ability to get a useful trick in hand. Bunker and the Naturalist have a lot of card draw, but they don't have as many useful tricks, so they're at the bottom tier. They're still decent heroes, and I'd expect that Expatriette, Bunker, and Naturalist can beat any difficulty 2 villain 90% of the time, and most of the difficulty 3 heroes 50+% of the time. It's not like they're bad heroes, they're just not incredible heroes like Omnitron-X or Wraith.
I don't see the point of tiers, or ranking heroes by any other criteria than your personal preferences.
As long as none of them are significantly under- or overpowered and we can still enjoy games with them, right?
I've had good and bad games with all of them (with the exception of the Vengeance heroes excluding the Naturalist, since the UK's still pretty much a Vengeance-free zone). Sure, there are some I don't enjoy playing as much as others, but there's so much variation in setup that it's futile trying to determine who's the "best" because the effectiveness of the hero is so dependent on other variables.
Silly example: I had an absolutely rotten game with Chrono the other night, against Advanced Voss. I did precisely no damage all game, and the only useful thing I managed to do was reduce damage dealt by a couple of Psi Weavers using the Neurotoxin Dart Thrower. And yet Chrono seems to be near the top of pretty much every "tier" list.
That certainly caught my eye, but there was plenty of other head scratchers for sure haha.
I mean, Unity is considered many things. "Top Teir", well, thats certainly a new one for me 