I chose to draw because 1 damage for a card is more than acceptable. I know a hero doesn't have to draw during the draw phase.
Technological Singularity does only deal damage to the equipment's owner, so I messed that up.
Flechettes is H + 1 as stated already.
I've lost to Omnitron before when he draws this type of start. Random early Explosives can be very difficult to deal with sometimes.
Or an Explosives played outside of Omni's turn.
Had a grueling seven-hour game, but finally triumphed. Advanced Omnitron feels like still no more than a 2 difficulty; he made me sweat, but at no point did I feel that I was utterly doomed. Had I not accidentally dealt a one-target damage to all targets instead, it's not certain whether any heroes would have gone down, but since I was trying out Unity for the first time (my order box containing her arrived literally while I was setting up; I was going to play Fanatic instead, but this was so much better, having Tachyon die proved to actually be immensely helpful, as she allowed Unity to play Turret Bot right before her turn, and a bunch of other free Bots besides, and then a Supply Crate...between this and Visionary feeding her cards, Unity became thoroughly ridiculous and pretty much single-handedly dismantled Omnitron. The first Technological Singularity had slammed Unity badly and left her unable to play bots until after "Tacky" died, but she had enough sense not to keep Equipment in play past the end of her turn after that, and thanks to Visionary's Suggestions, Precognition and Brain Burn, Omnitron was completely neutered by about round 6, and after that it was just a matter of wearing him down - in large part by making him replay TechSing three times with absolutely no effect.
All told, a hilarious game...but I'm never letting Unity go last in the turn order again. :P
All told, a hilarious game...but I'm never letting Unity go last in the turn order again. :P
Any reason why? I like her last so she can benefit from extra cards, extra plays and such. I play her last even over Argent Adept, who I absolutely love last in the order.
Well my impression is that Envisioner felt she was TOO powerful that way. Certainly if your goal is to destroy all equipment before Omnitrons turns, having her last is ideal, but there are also some advantages to puting her first in turn order. She can then destroy limited equipment just before the hero replaces it. (Of course she can pretty much do this from last place as well, just not to equipment you want out during the non-player turns and you run the risk that the villain/environment will surprise you and make that hero want to play a different card)
Yeah, Unity's deck might be balanced in and of itself, but when all the previous heroes are feeding her all the help she needs (particularly when even one previous hero has an Incap effect of "one hero may play a card now"), she becomes ridiculously broken fast. Without any help at all, she might border on unplayable unless she gets a good draw, but cards like Modular Workbench and Flash Forging mean she only needs to get really lucky once in order to begin steamrolling the opposition. Having her go early means the heroes have to plan ahead a bit in order to get her the help she needs.
Her weakness is her bots have hp, villains that hit hero targts hit bots. She can be one of the stronger heroes, but there are a lot of villains she really struggles with.
Like Zero she's a late game mauler, onece they get built up they are really powerful.
That can be a strength in a lot of cases. Against Omnitron, nearly all of his attacks target the highest-HP hero, so if the heroes are in danger of imminent death, the chances are he's hitting a boss instead of them. Against Grand Warlord Voss, it's a lot more likely that the Minions are dealing damage to everything, or to the lowest-HP target. The latter might still benefit from the bots, but more in the early game when the help is less necessary. And of course all-targets damage is ruinous to Unity. Still, my basic point stands, she does a lot better when the other heroes are dropping everything else to help her, and may have trouble functioning on her own as well as other heroes do.
Everybody does better when all heroes drop everything else to help them.
Does she do worse than other heroes alone? Yep. Do others do even worse than that? Definitely.
I would also point out Unity is largely immune to Equipment or Ongoing destruction, her bots are neither.
Yeah, AZ and Unity I would say do the best with everyone helping them.
We had one game with Adept and Visionary where Unity did nothing on her own turn but draw cards or play one-shots if they were worth it. Visionary was stacking her hand, and Adept was letting her play two cards on his turn.
Unity doesn't gain as much from Adept or Visionary increasing damage, she needs universal and all hero target buffs, where AZ with TtE and an extra power each round is insane.
Legacy does best when people are helping him. After all his base power is completely useless if no one is doing damage.
I haven't found Absolute Zero to require any help. If he doesn't have a Module to make his power useful, he just draws two cards on his turn until he gets Onboard Installation or something. He's got four copies of each module, plus Installation and Realignment, and several useful one-shots. I've yet to have a terribly bad game as him.
Equipment destruction does hurt her fairly significantly at times. Most especially, it can take away her Modular Workbench, which is almost a must-have. Without it, her whole turn usually consists of putting down an Equipment, then turning it into a Bot. With Workbench, she actually gets to play a card on subsequent turns in addition to making a Bot. Scrap Metal and Volatile Parts are also Equipments she likes to keep in play, though they can be Bot-Fixed if necessary.
I'm not sure that's a great comparison because that's not really people helping him so much as him not being able to help other people. Even if he can't use his base power, he still has very useful cards like Take Down and Heroic Interception which can benefit the team greatly. There is almost always something to do as Legacy.
I personally have never had issues getting Zero's modulars out, but having to skip your power phase because you don't have a module out is very different from skipping your power phase because nobody else is able to make use of it that turn.
I like Zero and think he's a good character but there are valid frustrations to playing him.
Well I finally managed to lose a game to Omnitron. It wasn't easy, though; the result of a single trash-shuffle was what caused Fanatic to die just seconds before she would have blasted him down to about 9 HP. With a little more attention paid to destroying his repair drones instead of beating on himself, he would have been in worse shape. And my loss was probably entirely due to my forgetting Alchemical Redirection and letting the Scholar get killed, while short-circuiting Absolute Zero's turn, in addition to the Time Cataclysm being extremely good at f***ing up games (the other time I played there, it turned a difficult scenario into an absolute nightmare; this time it gummed up the works of what should have been an easy victory, long enough that the heroes managed to screw up a few times and start losing ground). It was easily my most epic game against him, a fact that can largely be credited to Visionary's absence, and it left me with new appreciation for Fanatic, who double-End of Daysed just as she did in my single lamest game to date, but this time she saved the heroes' bacon rather than utterly mopping the floor with the villain, so it felt much more triumphal even though the game was actually lost.
So I admit that Omnitron is not a complete buffoon; he seems to rely on longevity and lots of destruction to wear the heroes down, in a way that isn't immediately obvious. I still think he might be less likely to pull off wins, especially on Advanced, than Baron Blade, but he can definitely at least make the heroes sweat. I still want to tweak him into a deadlier version, but this game gave me an idea of how the result needs to feel...it isn't so much about letting him get more Drones into play or making them tougher, but just contributing to his current tendency to outlast and oppress the heroes.
There was one really challenging omnitron matchup we tried. If you know two other people who own the base game, Omnitron vs three copies of Haka in Insula Primalis. The real challenge is that once the adaptive plating comes out you are completely reliant on Savage Mana and the Environment to get him off of melee imunity. We tried this a couple times in a row and I'm not sure we ever actually won.
When I lose to Omnitron, it's almost always because he Singularity or Flechette, and clear all of my equipment/ongoing. Often it's because Omnitron Terraforms when there's a few environment out and he combos a bunch of things. On advanced, Omnitron often gets more damage off and tanks just enough damage to allow his components to stay in play for a few turns. Also, when I play against him, I often get Explosives 1st or 2nd turn.
Adaptive Plating often slows things to a crawl, allowing Omnitron to play his "win" cards (Singularity/Flechette).
We usually lose because of the Electropulse. That comes out early before the heroes have built up their hands and on-table resources, or out of sequence (because of an Environment draw), or the heroes just have bad luck in dealing with it, or any combination of the above, and it really cripples the hero team.
He opened with first-turn Flechettes (5 damage to everyone, though no Ongoings to destroy), and later fired off another one (6 damage that time due to Advanced Factory Mode). On the other hand, he wasted Terraforming completely on turn 1, and later another one hit only a Fixed Point (thus sparing me from a sticky rules question regarding a "take damage to keep this in play" card), plus he got both Technological Singularities in one turn, so the second one did nothing and the players no longer needed to fear his destruction until he reshuffled. So it wasn't his meanest possible game; he never got a Railgun or Disintegrator to fire (though in this case it actually took Ongoing destruction and even an End of Days to get them out, rather than just beating on him for 7), and the one time EPE blew up, there were only two hero(ine)s alive, and they both had armor that completely shrugged off the 12-point blast. So it wasn't really that Omnitron did anything terribly decisive to win the game; he still strikes me as just barely a credible threat.
I still think it was my game to lose, and my stupidity with Alchemical Redirection was the only reason I lost it. Though Fanatic's little game of chicken didn't help either. Not that she had much of a choice - the turn before she died, she'd had to draw cards in order to get Wrathful Retribution online, and the turn before THAT, she was playing an Aegis so she didn't die. Hurricane shutting off our card supply was also a huge reason for the defeat; I'm 0 for 2 in the Time Cataclysm, thanks to Hurrican and the Main Computer Room in some order.
Wait, what? Seven HOURS?
Actually the one last night was more like TWELVE. But in both of these cases, I was playing all heroes in a solitaire game, while blogging the whole game and watching videos on YouTube…the time adds up. This is why I had largely stopped doing the blog thing, making a rare exception tonight (and paying for it by being up until 6 in the morning).