Yeah, I swear I saw one of lordkosc’s gangs do that on the ship on Wharf, but he assured me it was an urchin!
Sisters are expensive (hence why I think 5 lanterns for a free one is good value!) but they’re really handy when you’re dealing with tanky gangs and late-game assassinations.
Semi-final result against @belouski: geggis wins 5 v 4. belouski got hemmed in by henchmen in the mid game and late on I managed to spring three traps, one on his thief and two on a couple of truancy officers. I thought it was in the bag by that point but he managed to secure another one or two VPs and, had I not blocked the church off, I think he could have won in his last turn.
I’m really enjoying the Wharf adjustments for the ship. Makes that whole area a lot more appetising.
Gangs don’t get to move after eviction. But sometimes you don’t see them because they can pop out on any side of your building, depending on the path your opponent took to get there - so they could be fogged.
(Also: yeah, if your opponent has Orphanage level 2, it could be an urchin doing the evicting.)
I think there’s room for improvement in the animations that play during eviction, to make it absolutely clear which unit type is actually doing the evicting.
@Goatgoatgoat, are gangs supposed to level up after evicting the last urchin from a building? I’ve noticed they don’t level up if they don’t evict the last urchin (for example, evicting one urchin from a three-urchin building).
Good game! I had bad luck with the retinue blocking me in, but you expertly played off of it, leaving me with little to do. If I hadn’t had two trading houses, it wouldn’t have been close.
I’m amazed how many truancy officers you threw out at the end there. There was the freebie but then two more paid the following turn. The orphanage was a little out of reach for us thanks to henchmen blocking that wing of the map.
Yep, this is intentional, to mirror the level-up-on-kill behavior. Admittedly it’s a bit strange, and I’m considering changing it so that you level up whenever you evict any urchin.
Playing against LordKosc who has been regularly drubbing me without mercy. I suppose the law of averages might have finally kicked in but maybe a balance issue raised its ugly head???
I somehow hobbled onto the track for the Sisters and already had the first assassin victim VP. I was able to stack up gold and easily had the next three assassinations. By that time, I had enough Lanterns for the second bribe - game over.
Seriously, LordKosc understands this game better than I do and I forfeited twice earlier as I had no answer to his early vast leads. This game came as a total surprise and I’m just wondering if the Sisters may be OP? Dunno. Maybe they need a cooling off period? They’re already very expensive, so adding +1 gold for each use could wind up making them no use at all.
Anyway, food for thought. Tim, this is a wonderful game. Keep at it!
Still not too keen on the league. 1) Updates - and we’re hoping we get them - might ruin games in progress. 2) still no rulebook. I know the game a lot better but it’s always nice to be able to refer to the rules. 3) May still be balance issues - yes, I realize that is actually a plus too, but we could do that with unranked/rated play. 4) most importantly, I never play games on PC (until this amazing game came along!)
Haha, this is the @Zebracadabra who was saying a few posts back that they are very expensive and a huge investment! Now you see why :-)
I don’t think The Sisters are OP though. They’re the last upgrade along a certain research path and they’re expensive to purchase after that (the most expensive in fact). Not to mention, they require a route to the target and that’s not always easily attainable. Unless you’ve got a steel/poisoned knife to dispatch an assassination target’s 2HP body guard you’ve got to expose a gang or upgrade your knife to physically clear a path to the target. Depending on your circumstances, these can be tough decisions!
If any adjustment was going to be made I’d be okay with seeing how increasing The Sisters’ unlock by a lantern would shake out. Might make The Hard Stuff a bit more appetising too.
I’m still not convinced Antihero strictly requires a manual or rulebook simply because your actions are so limited and the feedback is sufficient enough to work out what will happen in most cases. I think between the tutorial and the in-game descriptions there’s not much room for misinterpretation and, even if you do misinterpret something, it’s a quick lesson. I dunno, perhaps I’m missing something! I think if there is going to be a rulebook it should be nothing more than a Help section accessible in the top left (similar to Chaos Reborn) that just features a few screens of basic information. I think the game’s elegant enough to not warrant much more than that to be honest.
I admitted as much to @Goatgoatgoat privately by email - that the game could also be about the exploration aspect of discovering what’s in the fog. That would obviate the need for anything other than a robust tutorial. I’m not at all sure which route is correct.
I also don’t think The Sisters are OP, but I am considering a slight nerf to them anyway: changing them to do 5 damage rather than infinity damage. The idea is that a Sister could still take out a full-grown gang… unless you have the Strangefellows Level 2 upgrade (so this would increase the value of that upgrade). And a Sister could take out the first two assassin contracts, but further contracts wouldn’t be such a foregone conclusion. (These changes would probably accompany a small drop in the gold price for hiring a new Sister - maybe they go for 7 gold rather than 8.)
There are a couple reasons I’m considering this. The first is that they limit the game’s design space a bit. For example, I have an idea for a scenario involving very high HP units that need to be whittled down over time, but the assassin makes this impossible (without adding a special case forbidding the assassin from attacking that unit or otherwise mitigating their damage somehow). And the second reason is that I think this would make usage of the Sisters more interesting in normal scenarios - it would no longer be the case that, in the end-game, 8 coins = victory point; and as mentioned above, it would make Strangefellows 2 more of an interesting end-game upgrade to hold onto.
