Went through ocean hungry grasp faq and still have a few questions on it.
1) If an invader goes into the ocean and Ocean Hungry Grasp has presence there, then it automaticall drowns or acts like its a coastal wetland and can chill there till ocean hungry grasp does something else?
2) the one power card (dont remember its name) that allows you to drown stuff if something is sitting on the coast. is that different than drowning something in the ocean?
There was something else but I do not remember it right now.
Worth noting, Ocean's only needs presence on the board to drown things in that board's ocean. So if you've gone fully coastal, you can still eat Invaders all you want. :) Took me a while to realize that.
Ahh, Ocean, one of my favourite spirits :D. Yeah, stuff that falls in the sea instantly Drowns (unless it's a Dahan pushed there with Tidal Boon, in which case you can wash them up on ANY Coastal land - potential free movement across the map for Thunderspeaker if they're around!), and Drowning means it is Destroyed so you will get the Fear for it if it was a Town or City. You can leave an Explorer with you in a Coastal land to Build a Town and then eat both in the Slow Phase with Swallow the Land-Dwellers, getting both the Fear for destroying the Town and the future Energy for both since they were Drowned rather than plain Destroyed >:). Always worth Drowning stuff if you can, for example if a fellow spirit has a choice between killing something or pushing it into the sea...om nom nom!
Yup. Of the spirits currently extant, Ocean's two best friends are River Surges and Bringer of Dreams due to their strong Push game. Serpent isn't horrible, either, but can be slow to develop.
Can't wait to see if one of the upcoming spirits ends up with a lot of push/gather.
Yup, definitely - those two probably have the most access to Push/Gather abilities :D. I can sometimes have issues (at least, in a two-player game) wherein I run out of stuff to eat because I've already destroyed absolutely everything, Invader-wise, along the coasts. But sometimes I can stretch out a bit - Reaching Grasp is a super-useful power for Ocean (as it is for Wildfire), and Sky Stretches to Shore can be useful too, if you dont have Presence in the right coastal land to use your Range-0 nommy powers on a City or something. I remember once playing a solo game as Ocean in which the furthest land from the sea was a Wetland and had become quite built-up with a variety of Invader types. That is, until I comboed Reaching Grasp with Sea Monsters and obliterated the lot in one go >:D. You would think that Ocean would be a tricky spirit to win with in a single-player game, but it's not actually that hard to get hold of some powers that let you reach out a bit further, especially since Ocean can get power cards with two of its Growth options (and the third I only tend to use on the first turn just to get out some Presence quickly and get a boost up the Plays track).
That's funny to me… I almost always go for unlocking the elements on turn 1, get the second play on turn 2, then fuel the energy track until I've got all the elements unlocked before wrapping back to plays.
Ahh, I prefer to get up to three card plays ASAP so I can start nomming Cities (I tend to put my initial Coastal-land Presence in the land with the City). Once I'm there, then I'll start on the Energy track to get some Elements. I rely on eating people and the "withdraw" Growth option for my actual Energy and very rarely unlock any Energy gain on the actual track.
See, by going to max elements on the energy track, you can accomplish the same thing - you've got one moon, two water, and one earth on the energy track at various stages, and being able to hit one water/one earth with two card plays is pretty trivial as Ocean.
But you need more turns to uncover enough of that track to access all the Elements - you can get to three card plays on the second turn (or technically the first if Green is around, even if you can't use them all till the second turn).
Similarly, I always go to three card plays on Wildfire as fast as I can, but that's more so I can reliably access my Blight-clearing Innate before I start chucking out Blight with every placement...
I hear that Finder Of Paths Unseen (F.O.P.U.) from the new Jagged Earth expansion (you can find it on Kickstarter) is incredibly good at moving stuff. But not in the traditional Push/Gather way. Also F.O.P.U. is my profile pic. : D
I don’t think this is correct… In the special rules, I believe it says you need presence in the ocean to drown invaders. You can probably still drown invaders with your innate and the one power card, but not by pushing invaders into an ocean where you have no presence.
What special rules? Ocean's special "Ocean in Play" rule says, "Oceans on boards with any of your presence are treated as Coastal Wetlands for Powers and blight. Any Invaders or Dahan moved to these Oceans are Drowned." Just checks for boards, not the ocean lands themselves.