Peter Cox
Bosnia & Herzegovina
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Well, I got the expansion. Great expansion for a number of reasons. Felt like it fixed some of the niggles I had with the game, except one: lack of warfare.
The declare victory and hold out for a year help towards the end, but not for the other 90% of the game.
I've played with the new cities, and to be honest - thought they DO encourage fighting over them, I don't like using them, because:
1 - the fighting just becomes a back and forth over a couple of hexes, so the game becomes a bit more unsurprising/rote as to what players will do.
2 - unbalances the order cards so that Rally Support is overpowered, Acquire Power becomes almost obsolete.
3 - often the dragon rune cities wind up getting nuked, so if you play with the extended dragon rune rule (7 instead of 6), you end up with the game going on longer than it should.
4 - You can't fortify them or anything, so there's not really much strategy to holding them other than just charge loads of troops in sit them there.
5 - Makes initial map placement/starting positions more likely to be imbalanced.
I feel as if something needs to be done to make attacking ANYWHERE more rewarding, so players don't wind up turtling constantly to avoid starting a war with someone and letting the quiet players quietly get to victory.
I feel like something more fundamental needs to be adjusted in the rules than merely making the cities more powerful. Not a bad idea, but ultimately it feels like a bandaid that throws up too many other problems without really fixing the underlying issue.
EDIT:
Maybe some kind of reward if you conquer territory on a turn. Or some kind of penalty if you fail to conquer at least one piece of land on a turn?
Perhaps every year where you fail to conquer at least one territory, you have to return one or two of your facedown rune tokens?
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Paul Beakley
United States
Tempe
AZ
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Or...it could be your group's groupthink. Or it could be a disconnect between your expectations for the game and what the game actually does.
When we played with the expansion, there was a noticeable uptick in overall agressiveness. I thought warfare was too lightly touched in the original game, and -- personally -- felt it was weighted correctly with the expansion. Feels about right at this point. No turtling, everyone's pretty much balls-out all the time. That's at our table. YMMV.
Totally agreed on many of your points though: Acquire Power feels weak now (although I strongly suspect with more plays, folks are gonna get re-interested in grabbing titles faster). There is probably a greater chance of getting stuck with a truly shitty starting position (although perhaps smarter map-setting by the players would help this, i.e. don't put a bunch of cities together at the edge of the board). The game goes on about an hour longer than it used to -- to my mind this isn't a bad thing but it surprised us the first time it happened. I thought it had a lot more to do with the "your runes are now revealed" bit of having to hold on for a year, which makes the game very nearly identical to the epic variant.
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Peter Cox
Bosnia & Herzegovina
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Quote: Or...it could be your group's groupthink. Or it could be a disconnect between your expectations for the game and what the game actually does.
The former point, sure. But we've played it a fair bit, and found the problem fairly consistent. We've never had this problem with any other game. From other people's comments, I don't seem to be alone. There's certainly an element of groupthink, but it's not like we just decided these things arbitrarily - it's as a result of playing the game and observing the dynamics.
Partly the problem is that when you have a situation where you can win via the hero questing system, then conquering is encouraged less compared to other games. In fact, the more we've played it, and discovered the value of heroes, the more the problem has developed.
Partly, you just make a simple cost/benefit analysis when you're considering an attack. Much of the time, it feels like the cost simply outweighs the benefit, which is bad.
Certainly, by increasing the benefit of the city spaces, FFG have changed the dynamic, but there's also a fair few unfortunate side effects.
You're latter point, I guess I agree as well, there is a disconnect with my expectations. But I don't think my expectations are unreasonable?
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Paul Beakley
United States
Tempe
AZ
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I think FFG is very good at setting the wrong expectations for their games. I don't know how they keep doing it! But they're awesome at it. See: Android.
Probably putting "wars" in the title was a bad play. But it sounds all badass to play Runewars, versus say... Runefinding. Runegetting. Whatever.
I guess when I hear folks -- and you're not the first! -- to complain that there's not enough warring going on in Runewars, I lump those complaints in with the folks who think heroes are "irrelevant" (to the core game). And I'm like bwuh? They're a third of the rune-getting game!
Dunno...at this point it feels more like aesthetic differences than actual problems with the game. It rewards some behaviors and punishes others, but -- mmmmaybe excepting the change in Acquire Power dynamics -- doesn't seem like anything's really "broken".
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Peter Cox
Bosnia & Herzegovina
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Lol - yeah runegetting doesn't really have the same marketing potential.
No, I agree the game is superb, nothing's 'broken' as such, and to an extent it's a matter of taste. That's part of the great things about many FFG games - that you can pick and choose elements to your taste.
I don't completely agree that the complaint is equivilent to heroes to being irrelevant - they're vital. Though some people feel they're not intergrated to the rest of the game at all, which is perhaps more fair enough.
But I think they've done a decent job of integrating the heroes more with the generals option (I still think it could do further imho)
But in contrast to the hero integration problem, I don't think they've nailed the 'more wars' option with the free cities idea. Nice in concept, but in practice it's problematic imho.
I'd like to see a better dynamic put into place personally.
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Tiago Nunes
Portugal
Odivelas
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Acquire power maintained its power level, now that there's one more title and it's very powerful.
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I feel like the commanders were a fix for a problem that didn't exist, they are the only option from the expansion that my group has stopped using, heroes worked fine pre-expansion.
The commanders just added more rules and clutter, we mostly ended up dueling with the commanders anyway instead of moving them with our armies.
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Peter Cox
Bosnia & Herzegovina
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Quote: Acquire power maintained its power level, now that there's one more title and it's very powerful.
While the merchant's guild title is better, when you have multiple cities that will give you 3 or 4 influence, the primary ability really does lessen its value level, while hugely increasing Rally Support.
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Paul Beakley
United States
Tempe
AZ
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petercox1001 wrote: While the merchant's guild title is better, when you have multiple cities that will give you 3 or 4 influence, the primary ability really does lessen its value level, while hugely increasing Rally Support.
Another theory I've had on this is that the new development cards are so sweet (and to be fair, novel) that I noticed an uptick in harvests as well. So it's not that AP really dropped in use, it just got displaced by more of the other plays and there are only so many seasons in a year!
What RW needs is a five season year. That'd do it.
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Peter Cox
Bosnia & Herzegovina
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Haha, maybe. I do like that all the cards have a bit of value now. I see more variation in player strategy now, which is excellent.
Generally I think the great value of the expansion is that it adds variation to the game - people can adjust strategy with different units, developments etc.
I dunno about other people, but I'm still no seeing a lot of interesting strategy with the fighting though - unexpected attacks and the like - mostly because if you use the free cities, they become too dominant in the back and forth fighting - you simply CAN'T let someone hold them too easily, and other areas are so much more defensible with fortifications, so people just keep attacking the cities constantly. And while - yes- it's fighting, it's not very surprising or interesting. In fact it pretty much forces people into a single strategy.
So then there's less variation, which is sort of a bummer :/
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Scott Lewis
United States
Castle Rock
Colorado
Dread Our Coming, Suffer Our Presence, Embrace Our Glory (Solonavi War Cry)
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The interesting thing my games with Banners has shown is that the new cards that produce Desolation and Cryomancy tokens can be pretty interesting when used right, especially in conjunction with the cards that destroy cities. The Free Cities take a beating.
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Posted Fri Jan 27, 2012 12:31 am
