Is equipment useless?

Games Sentinels of the Multiverse
1

I just bought SoTM on steam. I bought the original edition years ago, but never got around to getting any of the expansions, because I rarely get to play the game since it requires at least 3 people.

I've beaten all the villains, even beat baron blade on advanced. I tried to do it again just for fun. My team was tachyon, wraith, bunker, tempest, and absolute zero. I was doing perfectly fine, until he drew a 'devious disruption'. Killed tempest, and brought everyone else down to less than 10. Some less than 5. 2 were knocked out the next turn. Next turn, lost wraith. Next turn, toxic seawead, after I had just drawn 3 cards with tachyon.

The other three have cards that forces you to destroy all your equipment, and baron blade has one that just screws you over if you have any. Up until now, I was only playing equipment-heavy heroes (which would be pretty much be half the heroes you have available) against baron blade. Having even one with the other three is just suicide.

How can you possibly play an equipment-heavy hero when all 4 of the villains have cards that screw you over if you try? I mean, absolute zero is practically useless since he can't even do anything unless he has at least 3 pieces of equipment out.

2

You can do a lot to prevent those cards showing up, depending on the heroes you've chosen, e.g. Visionary, Wraith's Infrared Eyepiece, etc.  Alternatively, you can simply recover from the loss.

3

Oh dear.

AZ can be played without his equipment, he just requires a lot more thinking.

And destroying hero cards is one of the things you have to plan for, you can mitigate it but not playing equipment or manipulating the villain decks so that the destruction effect comes out at a time that doesn't hurt you, or any number of other strategies.

 

I think I'd direct you to the Handelabra live streams so you can see hwo others deal with these problems.

https://www.youtube.com/user/handelabra

4

Useless? That's a bit of an exaggeration. Sure, he's better with equipment but he doesn't need it, and he can still do things without any equipment in play.

5

While it's a bit of an exaggeration, I can understand the frustration. Without his modules in play, you pretty much have to skip Zero's power phase, and it makes his one shots like Frost Bound and Hoarfire less effective. While he can be effective without his modules, he's probably still not going to be contributing as much as some of the other heroes on your team.

6

As a side note, Blade, Dawn, and Omnitron have some of the nastiest board wipe cards in the game; as the expansions add more villain variety, equipment should be safer (on average).

7

That plus I think most of the other destructive effects only target a specific number of things (rather than all of them) and/or aren't a one-shot so you have a round in which to deal with them (unless the environment brought them out or something) before they actually go off.

8

Heh, I never noticed that warlord voss has no board removal besides that one flagship...

Are the villains from the expansions as hostile towards equipment? Thinking about picking up the mini-expansion on steam. It's only like 1 or 2 dollars anyway. The villain for that is 'ambuscade', which I know nothing about. The hero is 'unity', which relies heavily on minions, though she has to destroy equipment to summon things it looks like.

9

Ambuscade has no equipment or ongoing destruction.

10

Amubcade has no destruction. Mostly he is all about dmaging heroes. He also only has one ongoing so ongoing destruction is less useful against him, although when it comes out, you'll really want to destroy it.

Unity creates minions. Her base power trashes equipment (she has lots, it's fine.) but some of the equipment allows you to disacard or destroy itself to place more. Her minions are not Equipment and so are immune to ongoing/equipment destruction, although they take damage like everything else.

 

11

Ambuscade doesn't break anything as far as I recall, though I haven't played him much. As for Rook City, (Coming Soon!) Plague Rat has no destruction at all and everyone else has some, but none can board-wipe you like the base game can.

12

That said, all of the destruction in Rook City is all strategic decisions. Kill the Fence and take retaliation damage and push the Chairman towards flipping, or leave him around and lose up to 2 pieces of setup a round and let the operative heal a lot. The matriarch either hits you or destroys your stuff. Spite puts it back in your hand every round, but he has other issues

13

Ambuscade, as has been mentioned, doesn't break your stuff - he just has a whole bunch of ways to shoot at you or blow stuff up in your face whilst occasionally going invisible and thus being immune to damage. He often manages to chain one-shots and can be pretty damaging but on the whole isn't majorly difficult. He also has a relatively low hp total of fifty.

Unity's thing is her bots. Like PWatson said, they're neither equipment nor ongoing (their only keyword is "Mechanical Golem", which all of them have) but they do have hp so they are hero targets, thus anything which hits "all hero targets" or "the hero target with the highest/lowest hp" and so on will target them, and some of them don't have much health to begin with. But they can do a variety of different things and if she gets set up with a bunch of them you can expect Unity to utterly destroy pretty much anyone :D. Also worth noting is that her bots all have the condition that they can't be played during Unity's Play phase. She has equipment which can be used to put them out in her Power phase and her base power itself can destroy equipment (hers or someone else's, it doesn't matter, but I can only think of one or two occasions I've broken someone else's stuff) to put bots out. The important part is that the bots can't be played during Unity's Play phase. Anyone else's Play phase, or Power phase, or anything else? That's fine and that's one reason she really loves heroes such as the Adept (Infernal Relics) or Omni-10 (Shattered Timelines) who can let her play cards out of turn :D. With Unity I find that games can go one of two ways. One is that you can start with either all bots or all equipment and take ages to get hold of whatever you didn't start with, meaning you may achieve very little in terms of contribution to the group in general. The other is that you do get what you need - bots and the equipment necessary to play them, and then manage to keep said bots in play long enough to just destroy everything. One single bot (of which there are three copies and might possibly be one of my favourite "characters" in the game) can do about fifteen damage in a single hit, or something (and acts during Unity's End phase), if you can get set up with enough other bots to cause his damage to be that high. That's with no external help from anyone else. A good game with Unity is a really good game. Just be prepared for the fact that this doesn't always happen.

14

Past the initial 4 villains the game gets lighter on destruction.  I don't think there is any universal destruction other than Apostate's Apocalypse, which activates at start of turn and can be stopped with ongoing destruction before then.

A lot of villains have a couple of Destroy (H) equpment/Ongoing card cards, but you can get past that if you build smart.

Also Rook City introduces Mr. Fixer, who has a card (Salvage Yard) that lets every hero take every equipment card in their trash into their hand. (it is awesome)  And later Sky-Scraper supports Equipment users with a granted power to search for an equip and put it into play.

If you enjoy the game the season pass is a really good option, as the coming expansions add a lot of variety and awesome fights, and it covers 11 heroes, 19 villains and 11 environments.

15

Play your cards, use them, accept their destruction.

Equipment cards, as ongoing cards, are not meant to be permanent - they are here for some time, you take advantage of them, and then you lose them, often with a few HPs to round the deal. But it is worth it because while you have them, they give you the edge you need to slowly drive the villain to defeat.

If you have the luck to put together and maintain a good equipment combo, the hero will feel awesome - but none of these heroes is meant to be played with a big equiment combo everytime. It is not rare for Bunker to only play with one Equipment card available. AZ often has to play a long time without having his two module combo. They still can do a lot - but the contrast with what they can do with a big combo makes them feel less effective. It's like playing with Legacy : there is a big difference between a Legacy with 4 ongoings and a Ring in play, and Legacy without it - they almost feel like two different heroes.

AZ is the hardest to play without equipment. Self-damage is always hard to accept, and his base power is useless without modules. But keep in mind that you don't need the modules all the time. You'll need them to heal - so you can heal the self damage you deal yourself now later, when you finally get the modules to play with, so use your cards right now.

Most SotM fights, whatever the villains, are about rythm. The rythm at which you build your heroes to make them more effective, the cycle of buil-up / destruction / build again, the fast or slow inversion of advantage (from the Villain having lots of cards out at the beginning while heroes have nothing to the opposite), the rythm at which you can take damage and or resist it, etc. You take a beating in the first round. Then slowly fight your way back - until the villain gives you a beating again, and the cycle starts a-new.

I am in the habit of explaining to new players ( not that I suggest you are a "noob" ) that SotM, being a game about super-heroes, is built around the idea of sacrifice : to win, you have to accept to lose bits of your power. Be it your HPs, your cards, maybe even your character (incapacitated side is often useful). We , player , tend to think in terms of "leveling up" : you gain new, permanent advantage over time. SotM is more a game of small, temporary power-ups, slowly leading you to success. Unless you are very lucky and you can put together a big combo, like a fully equiped AZ or Bunker or RA, master of volcanoes, or Visionary, invulnerable ether-twisted demoralizer.

You have to keep fighting. Whatever the odds, whatever the frustration of having all your work undone. Even if you feel you can't play optimally - or powerless. Heroes never give up. :smiley:

I remember very well my first games of Sentinels - at first the villains seemed unbeatable. It took a lot of rematches to find how to survive and win, lots of discoveries. And lots of readjustment from a RPGer's mindset to a "whatever the cost, I won't let you win, Blade !" mindset :wink:

16

The rules actually say that you can play with 2 players. They both play 2 heroes. I once played 3 while a friend only played 1 while I was trying to teach him the rules.

17

Yeah, nearly all of my games have been played 2 player where my wife and I each take two heroes (though that looks to be changing as my daughter has adopted Tempest)

18

The only time I don't play with just two people is at the monthly London meet-ups, where there's usually four or five of us. Otherwise, I'm playing with my partner. I prefer to just concentrate on one hero so I do that while he has two. I did try playing with two as well, early on, but decided I preferred to just stick to a single one.

19

I'm used to playing 4 characters on my own, so 2 at once shouldn't be much of a problem. My mother has yet to really learn the game, but that's mostly because we play it so rarely. Perhaps playing it with her more often will help. Plus, I have her play Ra all the time, since he's obviously the simplest. I'd figure he'd make a good introduction for someone who's still learning how a turn transpires.

20

I hate to say it, but the solution to this problem is inevitably for me... Wraith in first player slot. Get her IE out and use it to fiddle any equipment or ongoing destruction to bottom of deck, with the side effect of determining which type of damage Legacy should be immune to. But as others said, one-turn destruction was drastically toned down in future villain and environment decks (worded carefully to not include La Capitan), probably due to the very complaints you are making in this thread.

AZ without equipment is frustrating. He can have some Start of Turn damage out, but his one-shots are often suicidal and he doesn't get to use his innate power. Be certain to save trash searchers and duplicate modules to get it back into play as quickly as you can, just in case.