We just played through the first two Baron Blade scenarios in The Day Freedom Falls, using the apparantly canonical heroes of Ra, Legacy, and Tachyon. We had fun. We had a bunch of questions, many answered here in other threads. Two stuck out.
It seems very, very difficult for Baron Blade to win the first scenario. He can Sprint up buildings and then teleport to near the next target—but then must climb back down to street level. Our Baron Blade got three tokens, I think. Is this scenario supposed to be anything like fair?
In the second scenario, Baron Blade drops Impulsion Turrets that create a Radius 2 field of Hazards, each of which does a funny Push attack. Push can freely slide, and movement by a Push activates Hazards. What limit keeps this from being a perpetual motion machine?
For example, consider a flat desert containing an Impulsion Turret. Hapless Ra walks up to it. Two hexes out, it rolls to push him. It gets 2 net successes, and so moves him east one hex. That triggers a hazard—generated by the same Impulsion Turret—so it rolls again. It gets 2 more net successes. What happens now? Well, certainly it can move him west one hex, though it's not clear to us whether it then has 1 left to move him or 3. This can continue indefinitely? That can't be right—but we can't figure out what happens instead.
If there's a soldier nearby, at least it can shoot after each of the juggling turret's passes.
Even if we invent rules we don't see text for, like a Limited effect on Hazards generated from a single source, two turrets and a soldier or two can really screw with a hero. Perhaps that's intentional; stand back and hit them with Inferno. We ended up with a turn in which Ra stood up from being incapacitated, Inferno'd the board clear, and was—by the end of the Baron's turn—pushed once by a teleporter, pushed seven times by one turret, five times by another, and shot five times by a soldier. That took quite a while to play out.
Are we doing this right? Are we missing something?
I'm pretty sure he can teleport directly onto objectives most of the time. To my reading of the line of sight rules, once he's on a height 3 space he can see (and thus teleport to) any space height 3 or below as long as there isn't a height 4 space along the way, and if he's teleporting from a height 4 space he can go literally anywhere on the board (except possibly his starting tile, if tracing a line through an out of bounds region blocks LoS).
Combine that with his Sabre Battlesuit for that extra bit of defense and I made it to 5 and a half markers before I was taken down for the second time in our starter game. Of course, I also made no attempt to engage either hero and the only hero incapacitation was me Maniacal Gloating over Tachyon, who had worn herself to a nub with Lightspeed Barrages. I expect the hero matchups make a significant difference, though.
"Line of sight can be blocked by elevation, but not by characters or other targets. If there is a hex of elevation higher than either end point between the attack's origin and the target, then line of sight is blocked." - page 8, top paragraph.
So if he's on a tile with elevation 3 and is trying to teleport to a tile with elevation 1, there can't be any tiles with elevation 2, 3, or 4 in between the two end points - at least, that's how my group read the rules. Could someone confirm or refute that?
For the first Baron Blade scenario it is actually pretty even, Baron should not ever worry about attacking heroes. What he should do is:
1. Avoid line of sight and range from heroes.
2. When you can splice.
3. If heroes are dumb and build up tokens disrupt them, otherwise periodically run up to a squishy hero, switch in redistributor and dodge. (4 defense dice, a defense+1 token or two and a dodge token mean they pretty much have to risk killing their ally to attack you) This helps you get from point A->B without getting nuked down.
4. Always wear your armor.
You aren't there to fight, you are trying to stay away from the heroes. If you get one hit on an objective go somewhere else, it is much better to have 3-4 1 hit objectives than 1-2 that they know you need to hit twice. You want them to have more ground to cover, and less time to spend in one place.
One of my favorite moves is switching to kinetic redistributor and running where you could splice, within 2 of a hero or two and then dodge. The next turn you switch in your teleporter, splice the generator and get out of there. Pay very close attention to which heroes go between your turns, and move accordingly. Kinetic is great to use before Tachyon's turn, since you can't run from her anyway, or any melee heavy hero like Legacy. Hide like crazy from a Ra or Bunker.
and that's just what happened to us! If I'm missing something, I think it has to be in the Implosion Turret card—not near my set now, but perhaps it says the effect of the Hazards is "The first time in each turn each enemy enters each of these spaces, it attacks…" or "The first time in each turn any enemy enters any one of these spaces, that space attacks…" One of these allows a short period of Turret Juggling, but a finite one. The other one allows each turret to push once per turn, total. Maybe balance is somewhere in between? I can't see enough of the game to tell yet.
While those are good strategies, I disagree that the hero and villain sides are on even footing just from looking at the victory conditions. The way I see it, if the villain makes a mistake and gets knocked out, they lose one of their limited revives. The heroes, on the other hand, get punished by having Baron Blade move 4 hexes; pretty much any character with high speed or mobility can catch up to him with a move or two. The penalties for mistakes are just too different in scale.
Our heroes have even started incapacitating themselves to avoid even this small penalty. A popular strategy has been to use Bunker's Grenades or other AoE attacks as "clean-up" tools, damaging the villain and taking out any nearby low-heath heroes in one attack to deny the villain their incap bonus.
Ultimately, I think scenarios need to have a limit on hero revives as well as villain revives, otherwise "focus fire the villain and damn the consequences" will remain a powerful strategy for the heroes.
Baron Blade scenario 1 is not about fighting the heroes.
It is Baron Blade trying to avoid the heroes and splice power. There is no reason to waste an action on an attack. You move, sprint, teleport, splice and dodge. Baron Blade isn't there to fight the heroes. If you fight the heroes you will never win.
It's like Omnitron-V scenario 1, if the heroes are trying to fight the drones and completely ignoring Omnitron, Omni should win, If Omnitron doesn't flip/capture a point each turn the heroes should win.
Baron Blade scenario 2 is about fighting the heroes, Baron Blade 1 is about staying away from the heroes.
When Heroes make mistakes they don't die, they let Baron get a couple of splices in a row without getting attacked.
Seriously, the only damage I do as Baron Blade is through redistributor, slash and burn if a hero is a sure kill (if you take an action to attack a hero and they don't die you made a mistake) or diruptor (if people are going to hand you the game, take it).
