I love manuals too and found the AE manual to be poorly formatted and in need of some editing (for basic style as well as to bring it up to date with the current version of the game. It’s almost as if the manual was written when the game was in beta or something). The blog entries are much more readable and illuminative about the gameflow.
Speaking of “in need of some editing”. :)
But, yeah, fair point. However, if you truly loved reading manuals, you wouldn’t mind reading even bad manuals.
-Tom
I think you forgot your monocle today, Tom. Don’t you know we’re supposed to use big clunky words in place of simple ones when we’re not randomly capitalizing because Games are Art and our Verbiage must elevate the Discourse?
No, no, keep commenting! I like knowing that someone is actually reading my drivel. :>
There’s a section on army experience on page 17 of the manual. Basically, any army with a hero gains experience. You get a point every turn (which I hadn’t realized!), and points for destroying enemy units. You lose points for adding units to the army, and lots of points for removing units.
Experience gives the army a bonus to its fate, up to +8 fate for an elite army with >150 xp. Fate allows you to reroll dice; +8 fate is pretty damned awesome.
Armies also get prestige points for destroying enemies. Enough prestige, and the army becomes legendary and gets a bonus to its supply range, movement points, fate, and has the penalty for operating out of supply reduced. Legendary armies are also pretty damned awesome.
Just a quick clarification - heroes give a point every turn, but heroless armies can still earn kill experience (and prestige).
I’m fairly sure I’m your senior, so I’ll take that as a compliment :p
[…] I can’t imagine it’s going to be any easier to plow through Bill’s blog entries about the game.
-Tom
The problem isn’t the word count, but rather that the “get playing, newbie” section of the manual and the game’s interface are both pretty crap. It’s just a bad combo.
Fortunately, much like the Dominions 3 manual, Bill’s blog entries do a pretty good job of explaining how to get playing. They don’t do a good job of explaining all the details of the game, but that wasn’t what I was asking for (the manual manages that just fine).
Great little game though. I just wish I’d noticed the time a bit sooner. An hour’s sleep or so would have been nice before work :´(
On turn 17, I make my second hostile contact: The same recce team discovers Erik Mai, a Human hero, out for a walk unescorted. I’m puzzled by what he’s doing out here alone. While it’s tempting to have my Chameleons attempt to capture him, I decide against it–they’d need to unstealth, which would leave them vulnerable, and their odds of making a successful capture or kill aren’t very good. I send Necrosis in their direction in hopes of catching Mai before he vanishes.
It’s time for me to move my operations forward. I want to bring the fight to the enemy, not sit around until I discover an overwhelming army on my doorstep. Coloboma and the 1st Mutant Infantry leave base to found an outpost in the center of the map, at the extreme northern edge of my supply range.
While they’re on the way, a recce team discovers the bleached bones of some unlucky soul. On the corpse is a Gespenst Cloak, a device which can attach to a hero to add the ability to cloak. I’m at my hand limit, so I’m forced to discard a card (Pack Artillery) to take the cloak, but it’s worth it. I deploy Kinase and attach the cloak to him; I intend to team him up with a Chameleon recce team for base patrol. His Pathfinder ability will allow me to keep them scouting for incoming enemies without paying any AP cost.
The next turn, I discover what Mai was up to–he’s moved on, leaving behind a shiny new Human energy collector. Clearly, I need to destroy it. First things, first however: Coloboma has reached his destination. I build a Hidden Gord outpost. My supply area now covers almost the entire map.
By the way, the one big thing that’s completely not obvious at first and is yet essential to playing the game is the way armies work.
You command armies, not units. In order to get a scout team moving around the map, you need to:
- Deploy a recce unit by dragging it out of your hand onto a base.
- Create an army by clicking on the rectangular army box at that base and then the “new army” button.
- Assign the recce unit to the army by dragging it out of the garrison into the new army.
- Go back to the map, right-click the army box, and select your new army to give it movement orders.
This seems complicated just to get someone moving around (and it is), but it makes a certain amount of sense. The Coldstream Guards have been active since 1650; clearly, the actual soldiers that make up the regiment have come and gone over time, but the unit remains. Same with armies in AE.
Also, spend all your spare AP in the early turns creating empty armies. You’ll be happy to have them later, when AP are scarce.
A big ditto on not activating Cults for your first games. I played around some with the demo and learned some of the basics, bought the game and started my first full game with default settings. There wasn’t one single resource hex in my entire supply area, and I got no cards for new Keeps so I abandoned that game 25 turns in. Started another game and everything was hunky-dory, I would have beaten the Free Mutants easily if it hadn’t been for the gawdamn plague. Almost all my installations were infected and being forced to spend all that AP and cards on curing four of them and trying to kill/capture Plague Bearers had the Mutants assassinating my Heroes left and right. Got a real kick-ass army together that blew away anything the Muties could throw at it but I had to give up the game anyway. At four. In the morning.
posting to remind myself to get this game
CONTACT. WE HAVE CONTACT.
Chameleons discover the Machine Empire’s HQ, far to our east. The Machine Empire’s completely unguarded HQ. Nobody home–or so it seems. This intel is not guaranteed to be accurate, since recce is not 100% effective.
Still.
I agonize over the decision, and order Coloboma to move out, leaving our forward outpost unguarded. Fortune favors the bold, and if the Machine HQ is indeed unguarded or underguarded, I might have a chance to cut their head off before they can react.
On the next turn, I deliberately avoid buying initiative dice. I’m hoping to sneak in and get a quick kill on the Machine HQ; if I do this after their move, they won’t get a chance to react before the turn ends and they’re wiped out of the game. As I hoped, they go before me.
I sneak my recce back for a second look, and…disaster. The first pass completely missed the fact that the Machine HQ is a fully operational battle station. (Ahem.)
They have a Colossus: A big, mean mech that could quite possibly take out Coloboma’s entire army single-handed. Exactly the kind of unit that I don’t have any of. I don’t dare attack them.
But…can I trick them? Do I dare try? If I can somehow draw the Colossus out of their HQ, I might still have a hope of moving in behind it. There’s a formerly independent base located right next to the Machine HQ. If my Chameleons take it, will the Machines send the Colossus to destroy them? Or will they leave it at home and use lesser units to reclaim their base?
I don’t think I’m going to risk it. But it’s oh so very tempting to try.
This line is, of course, to be read with the same intonation as Sean Bean’s “they have a cave troll” from the Hobbit movie.
-Tom
What’s the risk, exactly?
I mean, if you can fall back from the colossus without getting kilt and the machines don’t have anything else in the area, it’s not terribly likely they’ll be able to conjure up something capable of killing you.
Incidentally, I doubt you can bait it. I tried almost exactly the same thing last night, only the AI could have split its HQ defence up & didn’t.
The largest risk is that I throw away a recce unit for nothing. Recce is life, so I’m reluctant to do that.
The secondary risk is that while I’m dicking around with the Machines, someone else moves in and grabs my forward outpost. I’ve deployed a unit to the garrison there, so it isn’t completely undefended, but it would be bad if someone captured the base and threw my main army out of supply.
I’m inclined to think that I’m not going to be able to lure them out of their base, and that I should pull back and wait until I finally pull a geneticist for some more unit upgrades. What I really want is a tac nuke, but only humans get those. :>
I don’t think I can crack the machine’s heavily-defended base yet. Coloboma’s army pulls back to our forward outpost.
While this drama has been going on, the 1st Mutant Rangers have been having adventures of their own. They destroyed the human energy collectors that I discovered a while back, discovered a human recce army, and destroyed said army.
Then they caught the plague.
Sick and weakened, they valiently continue on their patrol, and discover the very heart of the sickness that grips the wasteland: The Plague Hut, the home of the Plague Mother herself.
The assassin Necrosis infiltrates the Plague Hut. The Plague Mother wears a personal shield which protects her from assassins, but his skill and persistence outmatches her defenses: She dies by his hand.
The Plague Hut is a great prize, offering a substantial bonus to genetics research. I want it, and decisively move to claim it. Coloboma’s army advances to smash the leaderless cultists.
This proves to be a foolish move. The cultists take strength from their numbers. I find myself faced with slow defeat in a battle of attrition, and am forced to retreat in disarray. The attack is revealed to be doubly foolish on the next turn: With the death of their leader, the cultists vanish into the wastes. Coloboma, humbled, returns to claim the Plague Hut.
All I lack is a geneticist; I have yet to draw one. And now fortune smiles on me, since the very next card I draw is Lysis, the greatest of the mutant genetics researchers.
Aww, poor mutie. Great battle report though. And damn, 100VP?! I think I better start playing with cults enabled.
These AAR’s are the greatest marketing tools.
Lum made me really want to play HoI (but I knew better and didn’t). Tom made me install and patch FfH2, which I’m now playing (and somewhat overwhelmed by) and now I really really feel like playing this some more.
And all these games are realyy time consuming. Thanks a bundle!
The Plague Hut doesn’t have the Garrison attribute, so I can’t deploy troops there. I deploy Lysis at my forward outpost and have him make his way to the Hut to start work. While he’s moving, I remember that I’d recently deployed Karyon, a technologist, at HQ, so I build a research lab there as well. (Thinking on this, I should have just deployed Lysis at HQ. The Hut has a +2 bonus to research, but I’m probably not going to need it.)
As Karyon contemplates his research options, Chameleons monitoring the Machines ascertain that the Colossus has left their HQ.
Lysis arrives at the Plague Hut, and promptly sets to work cranking out Cobra Enzyme Guns. These sweet little devices give a bonus to attack and add the powerful Shock Attack ability. A successful Shock Attack disables the target for a round; If I need to fight
the Colossus, two companies of Razors armed with Cobra Enzyme and using assault attacks on alternating rounds might just lock it down and keep it from acting.
Speaking of the Colossus, Recce reports it appears to be advancing in my direction. This is…disturbing.
Meanwhile, to the north, the valient (and plague-ridden) first recon locate the Xenopod HQ. The Xenos are using Monstrosities as guards. Monstrosities are nasty; I’ll need to exercise care.
Uh-oh.
You know that feeling of suddenly realizing that the map is not the territory, and that your view of the world is not compatible with reality? It’s the moment of realizing that the report was due today, that your candidate isn’t going to win the election, that your girlfriend has been fed up with you for months and that it’s too late to do anything about it. In movies, it’s the moment when the protagonist discovers that his kindly mentor is the villain of the piece.
Yeah, that just happened to me.
The Human assassin Valentine Kusanagi has struck at Coloboma, whose army is still based at the Plague Hut. Coloboma survived; if he hadn’t, I’d be in trouble–his army is large enough to be useless without a hero commanding.
Simultaneously, it has become painfully clear that the Machines are making an aggressive strike at me. Their Colossus is heading straight for me; I either need to deal with it or lose my forward outpost.
Kusanagi is almost certainly still lurking and preparing for another strike, but I have no reliable way to counter her. I can’t even see her. Coloboma frantically decamps for the forward outpost; his best hope is to become hard to find. Lysis has just enough time to make a single batch of Aggression Mutagen before also fleeing.
I cannot afford the loss of the forward outpost; having my supply lines cut off would strand my recce behind enemy lines and would make it impossible for me to strike at the enemy. It’s time to fight.
good AAR. exciting. keep em coming! (also, i need to get me a job so i can buy this monster!)