Thursday, January 21, 2010
Anticipated Metagame Shift
After playing a few games with Empire of Evil and seeing how things went down at Gen Con, I am anticipating a need for a shift in the metagame. More and more there are new cards that allow for penetration during attacks. This is either by Stealth, Superleap, cannot be intercepted (e.g. Hegemeister or Scramble Suit), stop intercepting (e.g. Blue Meditation, Dust Storm), or healing (e.g. The Willow Bends...). Relying on interceptors to stop attacks is becoming far less reliable. I think this is going to necessitate a shift back towards more direct removal. Zap denial had fallen out of favor somewhat because of the amount of counter denial with some of it even being punitive, Who's the Monkey Now and Brain Fire being the biggest. I, however, think that without zap, it will become increasingly hard to mount effective defenses. So either zap will need to come back or more creative (most likely site based) defenses will evolve.
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I thought there was a specific goal in EoE to try and make the game faster and more brutal, due to some complaints about games stalling and waxy character build up. If it wasn't intentional, then they certainly managed it unintentionally.
ReplyDeleteMore punch through, take more sites - I thought that was the mantra. In multi, this just means people will have to work together more to stop someone who snowballs, which to me sounds like it will create more 'who twitches first' games, which aren't fun - I mean, games that build up to one or two attacks, where's the fun?
In duelling, I fear it's going to be hellishly difficult to curb the brutality of EoE.
Yes, punch through is much more common. My concern is that traditional defense (my characters will intercept your characters) is becoming woefully inadequate. Either your interceptors are going to be run over or avoided. This actually leads to another version of character build up. Since your characters cannot effectively intercept, they won't. They will end up staying on the board longer to mount a counterattack. All that ends up disappearing faster is sites. Games will become potentially more degenerate with lots of characters massed before a few sites that they cannot protect. Thus the need for increased denial cards to smoke attackers that you cannot stop with your characters.
ReplyDeleteThere really needs to be more incentive to kill characters in combat.