Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Tue Sep 10, 2013 3:02 pm

It may not speak well for my sanity or my having-things-to-do-with-my-time, but I've decided that today is a day that feels right for playing another Sentinels solo game. Originally, I figured I was going to have to repeat a villain, and having played a game apart from this blog for every foe except Omnitron, I resigned myself to repeating against him (and even announced that intention on the Sentinels official forum, hence I feel compelled to go through with it), but I figured I could at least show you guys the last of the four original Environments. However, in selecting heroes, I worked under several constraints which left me with the only three choices being Tachyon, Visionary, and Fanatic. (Haka was too much of a potential spoiler with Savage Mana, plus I've used him twice before; Legacy is ruled out for the same two reasons, Tempest because I played him twice in a row earlier, including against Omnitron, plus he and Ra are both too strong and need to be left out of this match if Omnitron is to get a proper "can he beat the heroes" test, and the other three heroes rely so much on Equipment that Technological Singularity utterly crushes them.)

Then, just as I was preparing to start this post, a package arrived! It was my order of more Sentinels product off the website, arriving just in the nick of time to liven up this rather dull game just a bit! I'm still going to fight Omnitron in Megalopolis, and I still want to try out the Tachyon/Visionary pairing, but I didn't like having to play Fanatic, one of my least favorite heroes (and, again, a potential spoiler in this match due to End of Days...less so than against Dawn or Voss, since Omnitron doesn't start the game with henchmen in play, but still). So, keeping with the "all female heroes" theme that I had earlier stumbled upon, and giving Technological Singularity a better target than Fanatic's handful of Relics, I'm busting open one of my newly ordered promo heroes, Unity, an Israeli technopath who builds robotic "golems" to fight for her. I have no idea how she's going to play, but I've been lookign forward to trying her out since the first time I looked in the box, beholding a divider labelled "Unity" with an interesting picture of looming mechanical behemoths behind a tomboyish grease monkey, and no deck to be found. (The main Sentinels box comes with dividers for the first two promo decks, the Unity and a Villain named Ambuscade, as a way of enticing people into buying these "mini-expansions". Heck, it worked on me...so as soon as the box arrives, what do I find? More dividers. Welp, c'est la vie.)

Let's take a look at the heroes' opening hands, just to give you a first glimpse of what Unity is all about (since her turn won't come up for a long while), but after that I will return to the policy of only describing cards that are actually played, or at least discarded under significant circumstances.

Visionary: Mass Levitation (you've seen this one in my previous Visionary games; it reduces damage dealt by Environments), Foresight (a somewhat weak Limited which lets Visionary stack her deck a bit and draw a card - nice, and arguably better than using her Enlighten power on herself, but not possible to share with others, so I have a tendency to consider it inferior overall), and two copies of Wrest the Mind (this Ongoing, sadly Limited so the duplicate won't be useful until later in the game, lets you mind-control a Target other than the Villain or one of your fellow Heroes; in exchange for 3 psychic damage to the target and Visi herself, each instance of damage the target deals is redirected as you choose, so you can have the villain's Minions shoot each other or even the villain himself, for as long as both Visi and her victim can stand the strain of her controlling him).

Tachyon: Fleet of Foot (each player draws a card and you get your play back), Accelerated Assault (1 melee damage to each target), and 2x Hypersonic Assault (the same as Accelerated, except that the damage is sonic instead of melee, and each target that sustains damage from it is prevented from dealing any in the next round - one of Tachyon's very best cards, and somehow I almost always draw at least one copy early on).

Unity: Okay, having actually looked at her cards, I find myself wondering if I've made a terrible mistake playing Unity. Two of the cards in her hand are "Mechanical Golem"s, named Swift Bot (a robot resembling Tachyon) and Platform Bot (a miniature version of Baron Blade's Mobile Defense Platform). Unfortunately, both of them say "This card cannot be played during your play phase"; the only way to get them out is to use her Power, which destroys an Equipment in order to play a Mechanical Golem. And the only Equipment in her hand is Volatile Parts, whose ability works with Mechanical Golems that are already in play, so she'll have to play it simply to destroy it, and will be down two cards that turn. The last card is Robot Reclamation, which lets Unity get up to five Golems from her Trash onto the top of her deck, then draw one of them (or just draw a card, if you didn't move any Golems, in which case you generally should just not play the card). This is not quite as bad as I thought, since at first I missed the fact that Volatile Parts was Equipment...but still, I was excited to play a hero who relied heavily on getting out Targets other than herself, and it turns out that it's not quite so easy.

Well anyway, I'm not quite sure what I've gotten myself into here, but there's only one way to find out: Let's Play!
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.

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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Tue Sep 10, 2013 3:38 pm

Omnitron of course starts off the match by flipping into Rampaging Robot form, then playing two villain cards. First, there's an S-84 Automaton Drone (which looks suspiciously like an army of Terminators); this Drone has HP equal to the number of heroes, and fires off at the highest-HP hero for damage equal to its own HP at the end of the villain turn. A lot like one of Voss's Shocktroops, in this particular matchup, lacking the advantage of immunity to Lightning damage, but being tougher and deadlier in games with more players. Omnitron then flips up a spectacularly poorly-timed Terraforming; Megalopolis hasn't produced any Environment cards yet, so there's nothing for Omni to convert into more Villain cards. Thusly, all that really happens this turn is that the Automaton comes out and shoots the HP leader for 3; before I swapped Fanatic out of the game, she would have been the target of this attack with her imposing HP of 30, but her replacement is tied with the Visionary for the usual minimum of 26 HP (a few promo heroes have 25 instead, in exchange for a stronger Ability than any normal hero gets), so Tachyon's 27 turns out to have the lead, and she gets walloped. Still, not a terribly strong opening for Omnitron 2.0.

Visionary wants to use Enlighten at least once before switching to Foresight, so since her Power is spoken for this turn, the only card she has worth playing is Wrest the Mind, even though the S84 makes for a fairly pathetic target. At least she's got a backup. She targets Unity with Enlighten, giving the weird promo hero (in flavor terms, she's an intern with the "Freedom Five"...I'm still due to play a "theme game" featuring only those five heroes, but I might substitute Unity for Tachyon since I've played her less, or for Legacy since I just don't like him that much) some more options to choose from on her turn, so that her next play isn't absolutely guaranteed to be "play Volatile Parts, then Bot-Hack it into Swift Bot"). And it makes one heck of a difference; Unity draws Scrap Metal and Spare Parts, both of which are Equipment cards that do little to nothing useful while in play, but offer useful options to Unity or can simply be Bot-Hacked. Unity happily discards the wimpy Platform Bot, knowing that Robot Reclamation is totally going to be a thing later on, and then Visionary draws a card and ends her turn.

Tachyon plays Fleet of Foot, draws a second one, plays that, and draws another copy of Accelerated Assault; I'm certain this deck wasn't sorted into order before, so apparently I managed to shuffle into this suspicious duplication. Since Visi is planning on Wresting the S84's next (and last) instance of damage to Omnitron, there's little benefit to Tachy playing Hypersonic Assault to damage Omni and the S84 by 1, but she decides she might as well do it anyway, since it'll stop Omni from dealing any damage in the upcoming round, and delay the damage that Visi must take from Wresting the Automaton until the round after that (possibly giving Unity time to get out a "heroes take 1 less damage" effect, if there is such a thing in her deck). Except, of course, that since Omnitron is currently in his Rampaging Robot mode, he reduces damage dealt to Devices (including himself) by 1, so both kinds of Assault are useless, and she opts to simply not play another card. Meanwhile, the other heroes are up two cards, so she uses her Rapid Recon power to peek at her next card, finding it to be a third Accelerated Assault and happily discarding it, before drawing a card that's actually new (this game, that is; I think we saw it when I Lets-Played Tachy before, and I know I have in games which I wasn't blogging).

Unity plays a Supply Crate, which lets her draw a card when it enters play; if she left it there for the whole round, she could break it open and draw two more cards, but for right now she's more interested in encorporating the entire box into a Swift Bot by using her Bot-Hack power. Swifty lets Unity play an extra card during her play phase, but unfortunately, like apparently-all of the Golems, can't actually be played during that phase, so you don't generally get the extra play that same turn. You do, however, generally get the extra draw which Swift-bot also grants each turn, even on the turn you play it - thusly, while "play equipment, then destroy it to play a Golem" is normally giving up "card advantage", in this case she actually gains 1 card in the course of the turn (Spare Parts and Swift Bot both replace themselves, so if no other card draw were involved, you'd have five cards at the end of the turn in which you played both from a four-card hand). Finally, whenever something targets the "hero target with the lowest HP", the 6-HP Swift Bot is going to take the hit instead of an actual Hero who's been left vulnerable; of course, sometimes damage is being dealt to all hero targets, and it won't take very many of those salvos before Swift Bot stops functioning...but hey, that's what Robot Reclamation is for.

Welp, time for Megalopolis to show you what it's made of. I've played in this Environment twice and am thoroughly tired of it, and I could have replaced it with one of my shiny new promo Envs, but I'll save them for another day, just so you, dear reader, will have officially heard about all 18 of the decks in the basic Sentinels game (with Unity being the only one who isn't which I've thus far described). The first Environment card of the game is...a Plummeting Monorail! This 10-HP target won't do anything until the start of the next Environment turn, when it will deal 5 damage each to the two highest-HP targets. Omnitron is pretty much guaranteed to be one of those, but right now either Unity or Visionary would be the other, so allowing the thing to happen might not be wise, especially given the risk of Omnitron drawing his other copy of Terraforming and turning the Train into one of his Devices.

That's one round; since we're on a whole new page, I'm going to do every round as a separate post, even if it's really short and uneventful, to make it easier for me to track how long the game goes on. I won't necessarily do this in future Let's-Plays (rest assured, there will be some; I have three more heroes, four new Environments, and a staggering six Villains to premiere, though I'll try to confine myself to once a week hereafter), but for right now I'm giving it a shot.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.

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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Tue Sep 10, 2013 4:28 pm

I'd get these LPs done a lot faster if I didn't periodically get sucked down rabbit-holes on YouTube while I'm looking for mood music to keep myself amused. Anyway, let's move on with round 2.

Omnitron flips to his Factory form, then plays the Ongoing Component Interpolation Beam. Until the heroes manage to deal 7 damage and thereby destroy the component - a lot harder in a 3-hero game without Legacy than in a 5-hero game with one - they'll take 1 damage for every card they draw, which wouldn't be much this early in the game, except that Advanced Omnitron's factory form, instead of reducing damage dealt to Devices by 1, increases damage dealt by them. Thusly, the Interpolation Beam is actually dealing 2 damage for every card drawn, and that will add up fast. It's a good thing Tachyon didn't wait to be Fleet of Fleet of Foot of Foot.... Anyway, it moves on to EOVT, and the first thing that would happen would be Omnitron bringing out a previously destroyed Device or Component. But as usual, such a thing has yet to exist, so it moves right on to the Automaton blasting the HP leader for 4 damage, rather than the previous 3. Now seems like a good time for Visionary to Wrest the Automaton's Mind, dealing a full 4 damage to Omnitron (who is not one of the villains who can heal, IIRC, so every point knocked off his 100-HP total counts). Wresting the Mind of an Automaton doesn't kill it in a game with more than 3 players, but in this case it does, and Visi herself takes 1 less damage than either she or Unity would have, if she hadn't Wrested the thing.

With that Interpolation Beam out, now seems like the best possible time for Visionary to play Foresight, using its power instead of her own; this puts a card into her hand without counting as a "draw". Two of the upcoming cards are Mind Spikes, so she puts one on the top and one on the bottom of her deck, but the third one is Mental Divergence, which is just an insanely useful card - especially so in this match, as it can destroy Ongoing cards such as the Interpolation Beam outright. She puts that one into her hand right away; it's too bad she'll have to wait a turn to use it. She then opts not to draw a card at the end of her turn (this is legal, I've confirmed); drawing a Mind Spike one turn sooner isn't worth taking 2 damage for, when next turn she can get rid of the thing that's damaging her, and will take 1 less damage even if she leaves it there.

Since Omnitron is now capable of taking 1 damage, Tachyon plays a Hypersonic Assault; this knocks Omni down another HP, but more importantly it stops him from dealing damage this round, enabling Tachy to draw her card for the turn (confirmed via Rapid Recon to be her all-important HUD Goggles) without taking damage. The Monorail also gets hit for 1 and is prevented from dealing damage this turn; apparently it's plummeting very slowly, and will keep crashing turn after turn until it's destroyed somehow. (I'm picturing it falling off an incredibly high-up rail above the futuristic city of Megalopolis, resembling the ending scene of Batman Begins; combine that with Tachyon's speed and the situation almost makes sense).

Unity uses Swift Bot's extra play to get out both Volatile Parts and Scrap Metal in the same turn; the latter can essentially be used to repair any number of Mechanical Golems, but right now it's not worth waiting for, so she keeps the Volatile Parts out in case their 2-damage-per-destroyed-Golem proves useful, and puts out an eminently destroyable Golem, the 1-HP Bee Bot, which does nothing while in play, but whose destruction inflicts 2 damage on one target (and then 2 damage on another, thanks to Volatile Parts), plus destroying an Ongoing or Environment card. Swift Bot then lets Unity draw two cards without interference from Omnitron, one of which is immensely useful and will be her top priority for playing next turn.

After the Monorail fails to deal damage, Megalopolis put out another 10-HP target, called Targeting Innocents. This deals H-1 damage to each hero target at the start of the next enviro turn, plus it can get an "Impending Casualty" out of the villain Trash, not that we've had one of those yet. So unless Tachy uses up her other Hypersonic Assault, when it won't even hit Omnitron, the heroes are in for quite a pounding at the start of the next Enviro turn.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.

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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Tue Sep 10, 2013 4:55 pm

Omnitron becomes a Robot again, first flipping out an S-83 Assault Drone, a 4-HP target which deals damage to all the heroes each turn based on the number of Drones in play. Currently that's only 1, but Omnitron will add at least 1 to that when he flips, and is almost certain to add 1 more when he brings his Automaton back into play on his next turn, unless the heroes destroy the Interpolation Beam, in which case there's a half chance of that coming back instead. And then, he'll flip up one more card, which might be yet another Drone, so it's possible the Assault Drone could be dealing as much as 4 damage at that time, and will be a bit hard to kill in the meantime. The second card flipped up is a normally-nasty One-Shot, Sedative Flechettes; under other circumstances, this would hit each hero target (including the Golems, of course) for 4-6 damage depending on the player count, but since the damage comes from Omnitron himself instead of a Drone, Hypersonic Assault has prevented it. However, the Flechettes also destroy all Hero Ongoing cards, and this isn't tied to the damage in any way, so Visi loses her Foresight, having only gotten to use it once, and skipped her normal card draw that turn so it wasn't even terribly profitable. With the Flechettes resolved, the Assault Drone deals its measly 1 damage to each Hero Target, scratching Unity and her Swift Bot for the first time, as well as destroying the Bee Bot and unleashing its two 2-damage zaps. Since these would be reduced against Omnitron or his Drone, she opts to direct them at Targeting Innocents instead.

Visi plays her Mental Divergence this turn, using it to destroy the Interpolation Beam, so that she can at least draw a card (more specifically, so she can draw the Mind Spike she put on top of her deck last turn, even though this hardly deserves the privilege). As usual, she would have liked to play more cards and use more powers than she's allowed to.

Tachyon plays her HUD Goggles, giving her an extra play this very turn; she debates whether it's actually worth using this, but opts to toss off one of the less-than-spectacularly-useful Accelerated Assaults, despite the fact that it only damages the Environment targets this turn. The Train is only scuffed at this point, but Targeting Innocents is down to half its starting HP. Tachy then uses Rapid Recon, drawing the card she saw.

Unity plays her super-awesome card, the Modular Workbench; now, instead of destroying her Equipment, she need only discard a card to make her Golem for the turn. First, though, she plays Robot Reclamation to draw her first Platform Bot, having since drawn another one, and leave Bee Bot on top of her deck; she then discards one Platform Bot in order to play the other, draws the bee Bot along with another new card (I love Swift Bot so much), and ends her turn.

Finally, the Plummeting Monorail actually makes contact; Omnitron and Tachyon are the two hardest targets in play, so each of them gets smacked in something resembling the face for 5, which becomes 4 in Omni's case. Tachy is now down to 18 HP, which promptly becomes 16 as the Targeting Innocents strafe the whole city; Platform Bot reduces damage it takes by 1, much as Omnitron is now doing for his own team, so each of it, Omni, and the Assault Drone lose 1 HP, while the heroes and Swift Bot are hit for 2. (Unity and Swift Bot have taken the same amount of damage, which is the number of HP Platform Bot previously had and the amount Swift Bot has now; Visionary has sustained as much damage as Unity and Swift Bot together, while Tachyon has lost as many HP as both of the other heroes and Swift Bot combined, 1 more than Omnitron has suffered. Don't ask me why I felt compelled to point all this out.) After that, Police backup arrives; the cops deal 1 damage to Omnitron, but it bounces off his 2.0 Robot body. Naturally, his next action will be to expose his vulnerable spot; apparently watching "Star Wars" has taught him nothing.

Moving on to round 4....
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.

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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Tue Sep 10, 2013 5:33 pm

Omnitron unfolds himself into Factory shape again, then plays exactly what Unity was hoping he wouldn't: Technological Singularity. Fortunately, the Mechanical Golems aren't Equipment, so they survive unscathed, but the shiny new Workbench and the Volatile Parts are both destroyed, and the base damage of 2 each of them would deal is increased by Self-Aware Robotics Factory's advanced text, so Unity suffers a total of 6 damage after having been all but unscathed so far. (Oh, wait, I forgot to have Platform Bot deal 3 damage to a target at the end of Unity's last turn; we'll assume the chosen target was Omnitron, which may not have been quite the most tactically preferable choice but is at least a reasonable one, so the damage was reduced to 2 and Omnitron has suffered a total of 12 damage so far.) Tachy meanwhile loses her HUD Goggles, almost unused, and drops to 13 HP; she's really beginning to regret getting hit in the face with a train, but at least she can be fairly confident it won't happen again anytime soon. Omni then pulls out the Interpolation Beam again, so the Assault Drone's damage is just 1 for itself and +1 for the Factory. Wait, it's actually 1 plus the number of drones counting itself, so it should have been 2 last time, and its' 3 now; those numbers I quoted at the end of the last round were all wrong. Platform Bot wasn't in play at the time, but it's destroyed now as it sustains 2 damage after its reduction; good thing I at least remembered to have it deal its damage once. Thusly, the proper HP count of all heroes, as of the end of Omnitron's turn is as follows: Visionary 16 (she was actually at 19 after the last enviro turn, and has since taken 3), Tachyon 9 (15 last turn, minus 6), and Unity 13 (previously 22, but since slammed for 9), with Swift Bot very thoroughly destroyed after its three turns of faithful service.

Visionary's Mental Divergence is the only Hero card left in play! As the HP leader, she's about to get hit with a train, which the heroes can't really spare the time to destroy, and since she has plans to use her Power this turn (and still likes having the Monorail damage Omnitron, even if Targeting Innocents is always bad news), she doesn't want to play Mass Levitation, but instead puts down a Decoy Projection, a 5-HP "Distortion". While the Train will still actually hit her, she'll redirect the damage to her Decoy, destroying it but remaining unscathed. If something could reduce the Train's damage by 1, the Decoy would survive and absorb the next entire hit she sustained, but this is unlikely to occur. Destroying the Interpolation Beam again with her Divergence, she draws a card to end her turn.

Though seriously inconvenienced by the loss of her HUD Goggles, Tachyon still gets a free play this turn, putting down Pushing the Limits and gaining an extra play with which to play the second Hypersonic Assault. There's no reduction in effect right now, so Omnitron and his Drone both take the damage, as do both Environment targets, and all of these receive a "You Cannot Deal Damage" marker (the game includes five of these, and four are now in play; I can definitely see having a need for more than you're given, while many of the other similar tokens included with the game seem less likely to prove useful). Using Rapid Recon, Tachy decides that her "destroy 1 ongoing or environment" card is worth keeping at the moment, even though there's no strict guarantee it'll still find a target the next turn; she then draws an extra card for Pushing the Limits (which she'll likely destroy on her next turn, rather than taking 2 damage to keep it, given her HP; if the heroes are very lucky, Omni's second Flechettes will come out while he's still unable to deal damage, and will destroy PtL before she would have thrown it away anyhow).

Unity is not listening to Tachyon's complaints about loss of Equipment; she has lost everything, and has nothing left in play to Bot-Fix into one of the cards in her hands (all of which are Golems, except for one One-Shot which counts the number of Golems in play; it would deal 1 damage to everything all by itself, but this is too much of a waste of its potential. So she draws two cards - both of them more Golems - and ends her turn in a state of abject misery, just one rounds after having been in incredibly good shape.

After the two neutered damage-dealers have failed to deal damage, Megalopolis produces Rooftop Combat, a card which destroys all other environment cards and prevents new ones from being played; while it's sad to lose the Police Backup right before it would actually have helped, the heroes certainly don't mind having Targeting Innocents go away, and the Train was at best a toss-up as well, even if it has accounted for more than half of the damage Omnitron has taken so far (and deeply influenced Visionary's choice of her last card play, which might have been more profitably spent otherwise). Besides monopolizing the Environment at the expense of all other cards, Rooftop Combat increases all damage dealt in both directions by one, which is going to hurt with the Assault Drone stabbing every Hero each turn, but will also make it easier to get rid of the damn thing before it regains the ability to deal damage. And it will start hurting Omnitron sooner than he will start hurting the heroes with it, although if the heroes manage to deal him 10 damage in one turn, Rooftop Combat ends and Environment cards will resume being played.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.

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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Tue Sep 10, 2013 6:20 pm

After flipping, Omnitron plays a second Interpolation Beam, followed by the S-85 Repair Drone, which heals him for 3 since there are two Drones in play. Fortunately, nothing else happens this turn; the Assault Drone would deal 4 damage this turn if it was allowed to deal damage at all, but the Drones don't heal each other, just their parent, so even with damage reduction now applied to all Devices, the Rooftop Combat cancels that advantage, and the chances are fair of it being possible to destroy the wounded Drone, possibly even both of them. Dealing 7 damage to Omnitron will also be a lot easier, even if not quite as easy as it would be in a non-Advanced game.

While Visionary could Wrest the Mind of the Assault Drone, causing it to deal its at-least-5 damage to Omnitron and then die to psychic feedback (the forum has confirmed that this does indeed prevent it from moving on to the next of its original targets, though if it survived, it would hit the next target and Visi could Wrest that too, keeping this up until either she or the Drone ran out of HP), it seems unlikely to be the best use of the card, given that I know Omnitron has things like Electro-Pulse Explosive in its deck. So instead, she just plays a Cerebral Hemorrhage (making the bloodless robots bleed from their nonexistent brains - the Assault Drone doesn't even appear to have a head, although it's beetle-shaped, so perhaps the front of its body is intended to count as a head). Reduced by Rampaging Robot Advanced but increased by Rooftop Combat, this kills the Assault Drone completely, leaves the Repair Drone just as damaged as its predecessor, and knocks Omnitron down to a mere 88 HP. (SET OmniDamagedThisTurn = 2. IF OmniDamagedThisTurn >= 10, RUNSCRIPT "Destroy RooftopCombat". IF OmniDamagedThisTurn >= 7, RUNSCRIPT "Destroy AllComponents". ELSE ENDSCRIPT.)

Left with her Power yet to use, Visi has a couple of choices. She could destroy Interpolation Beam, but this doesn't seem ideal, as it won't damage anyone until after the Hypersonic Assault effect ends at the start of Tachyon's turn. Tachy and Unity can still try to deal 5 more damage to destroy the component, and if they fail, they can skip drawing cards or just eat the 2 damage (Omnitron isn't increasing it, but Rooftop is). Visi would kind of rather either get back her second Wrest the Mind or her Foresight, give Tachy cards (and let her discard a Burst, which will matter in a minute) with Enlighten, or do something about the way Unity would be whining about her misfortune if she were an actual player. Tachyon confirms that she'll be able to destroy the Component - easily if she's Enlightened, or at the cost of 3 damage otherwise - and Unity really is up a certain Creek whose name I need not mention, sans oars, so Visi Enlightens her, but sadly she doesn't draw any Equipment, although she does at least get one potentially useful One-Shot, plus a second copy of the one she had, which will become incredible once she manages to keep a few Golems in play. Unity discards one of her two copies of Raptor Bot, who can deal quite a lot of damage if you can stick a few Golems in play, but whose 2-HP fragility makes it hard to keep in play; Visionary then draws a card and ends her turn.

Tachyon doesn't like having to deal herself 2 damage keeping Pushing the Limits in play, especially because it becomes 3 damage due to Rooftop Combat (there's some question as to whether this is even legal in view of the latest ruling; it's definitely been established that if you don't take at least 2 damage, it doesn't count, but it wasn't clear whether the damage has to be exactly two, or if three damage is counted as including two; the latter makes mathematical sense, so I'm ruling it that way for now), dropping her to just 6 HP. But it's necessary, because she'll be able to draw two cards at the end of turn, and that would be 4 damage if she didn't get rid of the Interpolation Beam, and she can't quite do that while playing just one card. So she suffers the hit, then plays Sucker Punch, outright destroying a target with 2 or fewer remaining HP, which in this case would be the Repair Drone. Sucker Punch is one of Tachy's "Burst" cards, and it makes 5 of them that she has in the trash now (along with two Fleet of Foots and two Accelerated Assaults; due to its immense utility, Hypersonic assault was NOT made a burst). Tachy's second play is Lightspeed Barrage, almost unquestionably her single most powerful card, and one of the best raw damage-dealers in the game; it deals damage equal to the number of Bursts in the trash (all in one chunk, so modifiers are applied to the final total, preventing it from going utterly nuts with Rooftop Combat out against something other than Rampaging Robot Omnitron, or being completely neutered by RRO's reduction if Rooftop Combat weren't out). That can be a really insane number in the late game (I'm certain it's gone above 10 in past instances, and might have gotten close to 20), but in this case it's just enough to crush Omni's Component right before it would start dealing damage again.

Tachy then uses her power, finding that she's coming up on Research Grant, an Ongoing which lets her use her Power to draw cards rather than just cycling them; she debates whether it's worth playing a card that might just die to Flechettes, but since it will at least replace itself and offer slightly better card control, she decides it's worth having, even in place of whatever else she might have drawn. (It's not a Burst, so there's no advantage to having it in the Trash anyway). At end of turn, she draws it and one other card, one which isn't incredibly useful to her since it relies on her taking damage for maximum effect, and she doesn't dare let herself take any more damage than she can possibly avoid. That card is a Burst, so she would have Rapid-Reconned past it in a heartbeat, but that's the way it goes sometimes.

Unity's only possibly-useful card is Hasty Augmentation, and she debates whether it's worth playing it, or if she should just draw two cards. But since she'll draw one card anyway, she targets Visionary with it, enabling her to use her Power, on the condition that Visi uses Enlighten on her. This enables Unity to draw two more cards, then discard one, exposing her to a total of three new cards this turn, at the expense of Hasty Augmentation and her discarded card, which is a duplicate Bee Bot. Unfortunately, she didn't get any Equipment this turn either, and couldn't play it even if she had, so she ends her turn without using a Power, and draws a card which will actually be useful next turn, even though it's still not an Equipment.

Rooftop Combat remains in play, and Round 5 ends.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Tue Sep 10, 2013 6:55 pm

Still down only 17 HP, Omnitron becomes a Factory, and then plays his other Sedative Flechettes; it actually does something this time! Damage dealt by Devices is being increased by 1 in this form, and another +1 for Rooftop Combat, so the normal damage of 4 goes up to 6, and Tachyon instantly dies, having made the ultimate sacrifice in order to destroy that Interpolation Beam without Visionary's help. (Since I'm not in the habit of peeking at the Incap side until it actually comes up in play, and Tachyon has never died in any of my previous games, this would be my first time seeing this side of her...except that I did in fact peek before the game this time, for no particular reason.) The damage to Unity doesn't exactly tickle either, whereas Visionary doesn't take damage, but redirects it all to her Decoy, thoroughly destroying that, and then she also loses her Divergence due to the secondary effect of the Flechettes (that's the second time they've taken out one of her Ongoings). Fortunately, he didn't play a new minion, so when he shuffles his deck and pulls up the Interpolation Beam again (well, one of the two at any rate), the players are left with nothing but him to deal with, and he doesn't deal any more damage for the moment.

With their only reasonably-heavy hitter destroyed, the two surviving women are in bad shape; Visionary has drawn Brain Burn, and could use it to get rid of the entire villain Trash at the cost of 9 damage to herself, counting the boost from Rooftop Combat. But this doesn't really seem worth it, and Unity is down to only 7 HP, so Visi decides she'd better act as a meat shield for her. She Mind Spikes Omnitron for 4 damage, not having a better plan, and then skips either Enlightening anyone or drawing a card for her end of turn, since card draws currently cost 3 damage apiece.

As I said before, today is my first time seeing Tachyon's Incap side; I've remarked before that Visi is all-destruction after she dies, while for Tachy it's the absolute opposite - she does nothing but let other players get extra cards, either in hand or in play. By making Tachy play a card, she could deal 3 damage to Omni and destroy the Component, but this would still leave Unity quite useless, so instead, rather than letting Unity draw a card and take 3 damage, she puts a card from Tachy's trash into her hand. While getting back Modular Workbench is extremely tempting, there's actually a better option - wait, no there isn't. If Scrap Metal were in Unity's hand, playing it now would be spectacular, but...wait, what the heck am I doing? The Golems all say Unity can't play them during her own Power Phase, but Incapacitated Abilities are specifically not Powers, and even if this was a power phase, it wouldn't be "yours" according to any of the cards in her hand. So in fact, "One hero may play a card now" simply lets Unity get out a Golem without jumping through any hoops - Tachyon dying was the best thing that could have happened to Unity. Unity puts down Turret Bot, her toughest Golem of all; it's got a whopping 9 HP, much more than Unity herself at this point, and unlike the Raptor and Platform bots, it deals its damage at the start of Unity's turn, so it normally suffers a delay before proving useful as anything other than a meat shield, but now it'll get to fire off its 3 damage right away. And even without the +1 from Rooftop Combat, that would suffice to take out the Interpolation Beam, as well as converting all the damage on Omnitron into a single sexy 25-damage chip.

Moving on to the rest of her turn, Unity plays Brainstorm, drawing 2 cards without Interpolation troubles, and then blasting Omnitron for 1 more damage (it's lightning damage, because it's a "brain STORM", geddit? geddit? eh? eh? - also, it could hit up to two other targets if there were any), increased by 1 by Rooftop Combat, which brings it up to 10 damage in one turn and finally destroys the thing. No more +2 damage turns for Omnitron for a while, even if hurting him will get harder again. One of the two cards Unity has drawn will be incredibly useful to her next turn, and potentially even better the round after that. For now, unable to usefully use a power, she draws a card (another Hasty Augmentation) and ends her turn.

Megalopolis hasn't gotten to play a card in a while, but while it's eager enough to resume, it's not terribly creative, as it does practically the same thing as before - increasing all damage by 1, but this time doing so with Close-Quarters Combat, which converts all damage into melee as well as increasing it (this would be damn inconvenient against Warlord Voss with his melee-immune spaceships, but against Omnitron I doubt it will make any difference, other than short-circuiting Absolute Zero if he were in this match, and slightly sabotaging Unity's AZ ripoff Cryo Bot, which is really not as good as her homages to Bunker and Tachyon - the flavor text even makes light of this fact). Lasting only a single round, CQC won't combo with Omnitron's damage increase, and will counteract his reduction, so it's at least partially in the heroes' favor - but they're getting awfully beat up, and Omni does get to shoot first, so it's not exactly a happy sight either.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Tue Sep 10, 2013 7:31 pm

Going back on the rampage, Omni pops out a Disintegration Ray and an Electro-Magnetic Railgun, both fearsome damage-dealing Components (if they fired right now, the Ray would deal 4 damage to Visi, and then the Rai-lgun would deal 2 damage each to her and Turret Bot, though not to Unity...both of those numbers are before adding any bonuses, such as the one from CQC...which, now that I read it again, is actually Cramped Quarters Combat, and lacks a hyphen), but fortunately both limited to firing at the start of Omni's next turn (when he'll have his Advanced damage bonus back, but CQC will have ended by then). For now, he's done nothing - but if the two heroines can't batter through his reduction for 7 damage, they will be in seriously deep trouble.

Unity confirms that she'll be able to deal 7 damage all by herself, at least this turn thanks to CQC, and possibly in subsequent turns...if Omni can be kept from destroying the golems, she can definitely batter him fast enough to keep him from keeping a Component in play. So, with some hope that her sacrifice won't be fatal, Visi plays Brain Burn, her usually-useless magic bullet for villains with a heavy Trash-recycling mechanism. It's unfortunately more of a club than a scalpel (especially since it deals melee damage to her right now); it can't just put the Devices and Components from the trash on the bottom of the deck, but has to also include Sedative Flechettes and Technological Singularity and Terraforming, all of them potentially devastating if the game continues long enough for them to reappear. (Also, re-reading the Assault Drone, it was actually supposed to just hit the HP leader, not everything; the game would have gone very differently if I'd played that properly, as Unity's Golems might have stayed out and Tachy might not have died.) She ends up stacking them as follows:
* Both Flechettes at the very bottom,
* The slightly tougher Assault Drone atop the weaker but more damaging Automaton Drone,
* Technological Singularity, since I'm not sure any Equipment remains in Unity's deck, Visi has never had any, and Tachy won't be needing her HUD Goggles anymore,
* Both Interpolation Beams, since their damage can be avoided by not drawing cards,
* The Repair drone, since the worst it can do is prolong the inevitable,
* and on the top, Terraforming, which might do nothing at all if the Environment cooperates.

Having suffered her 9 psychic 10 melee damage, Visi moves on to her Power phase, choosing to Enlighten herself even though she's close to death, since she's rapidly losing her ability contribute anyway, and Unity seems to have matters in hand thanks to phantom-Tachy's assistance. She draws a Decoy Projection which, if she gets the chance to play it, will help her survive long enough to play anything else, along with a Cerebral Hemorrhage; she discards Mass Levitation, since she has a card that can stack the environment deck and help avoid the risk of it damaging her.

Now, the two surviving geeks argue bitterly over which one gets a nod from the ex-speedster (who, I will mention at this juncture, happens to be a lesbian); getting to play Decoy Projection now will help keep Visi from suddenly dying, which seems to outweigh even the tremendous benefit of Unity getting to play a Golem without having to jump through the usual hoops. So Decoy Projection comes out, and it moves on to Unity's turn.

First, Turret Bot shoots Omni for 4. After that, if Unity can play only one card, there's absolutely no question which one it needs to be: Construction Pylon, whose inherent Power is to play two Golems while destroying itself. One of these needs to be Raptor Bot, whose squishy HP of 2 might get it killed by a stiff breeze on the next turn, but which will at least get to deal damage once first, finishing off the Components and thus protecting the heroes (or at least Turret Bot, since he's now the HP leader and thus would bear the brunt of most of the attack). For her second play, she could choose a Bee Bot or the aforementioned Cryo Bot (he's immune to cold damage, which very few things deal, and retaliates against all damage he takes, which is less useful than you might hope since he has to actually be getting targeted, and has only 7 HP so he's often not in the villains' crosshairs), but far and away the best choice is Stealth Bot, a metallic simulacrum of Wraith, who has only 5 HP but takes 1 less damage from each source, and can take damage in place of the heroes as often as necessary until killed. With three Golems in play and a +1 from CQC, Raptor Bot deals 5 damage to Omni, but of course one bounces off his Rampaging clothes; even so, this is plenty to destroy the components, and leaves him with 65 HP.

CQC ends, and then Impending Casualty comes out; this is one of those Enviro cards which is hardly worth paying attention to what it actually does, because you can dispose of it so easily that it hardly even matters what the risk is. But for the record, the risk is that it deals 3 damage to each hero unless they destroy an Ongoing card; all of this happens at the start of the next turn, so by far the preferable option is to simply discard one card at the end of the turn it comes out, and thereby not having to deal with it. Unity happily dumps a Bee Bot, which is hardly worth the bother of getting it into play unless it's the only Bot you have, and the Casualty no longer impends. Yet another round draws to a close...
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Tue Sep 10, 2013 7:57 pm

Factory Omnitron busts out another Technological Singularity, but fortunately the heroes have no Equipment in play, so the card is blank; with only three cards in the discard pile, I can't usefully shuffle it, so I'll just flip a coin (by which I mean go to Invisible Castle and roll 1d2; yeah, I'm glad Omnitron isn't destroying my Equipment, as I wouldn't last a week if I lost access to the Internet), and it turns out that the Railgun comes back. Omnitron isn't doing any damage during this damage-boosting round, and he's not protecting himself, so it's definitely time for the heroes to start taking him to pieces fast, so I can finally end this game.

Visi may not have strictly needed to play the Decoy Projection ASAP after all, but since she did, she takes full advantage of a window in which to play something she couldn't make a priority earlier: Prophetic Vision, which lets her choose which of three cards will be the next Environment. It turns out to be a complete no-brainer; Traffic Pileup is a 10-HP target that would stop the heroes from drawing any cards, and Hostage Situation is everyone's least favorite card, as it stops them from playing any, so while the Pileup might have been tolerable out of the two, Visi is immensely happy to see another Police Backup as the third, even if Omnitron will be invincible to it again the turn after it comes out - they'll at least manage to get in one shot at him this time. (Rooftop Combat and Terraforming aside, Police Backup is normally only destroyed by Villain effects which force the heroes to discard a card, whether they like it or not, and Omni doesn't seem to ever do that, so Terraforming is about the only thing he has which gets rid of the cops; were he not Advanced and thus able to shrug off their attacks half the time, they'd have a fairly significant effect on him).

Visi now gets to Enlighten someone, and she'd really prefer it was herself, since she's down to just 3 cards again, while Unity has 5 - they may not be the best five, but still, she has them, and gets to start her turn with three bots in play even if she can't produce any more. So Visi does indeed draw two cards, one of which is another Mass Levitation that she happily discards, and the other is one of her best cards - Suggestion. When she plays this - which will be now; Tachy was going to have her put Mental Divergence or something back into her hand, but this is so much better - it enables her to get two cards out of the villain trash, putting one on the top. So, with Unity confirming that she has no plans to play Equipment, Visi gives back the Technological Singularity so that Omnitron can play it again (as one of his two cards for the next turn, but still), and meanwhile banishes the Disintegration Ray to the bottom of the deck.

With Stealth Bot out, able to take the Railgun's damage and reduce both instances of it by 1, the heroes hardly even need to destroy a Component, but they don't actually get a choice in this case - Stealth Bot deals 3 damage at the start of Unity's turn, and Raptor Bot will do 4 more at the end, with no reductions or increases at the moment. Since she doesn't actually need to do anything herself, Unity simply draws two cards in between the operation of her two Bots; the component is destroyed as Omnitron falls to 58 HP, and then the police show up to ping him for 1 more.

(Before I end the round, I'll make one observation. I'm immensely glad that I put Visionary ahead of Tachyon in the player order for this particular game, because with Tachy's "put a card from the trash into a hero's hand", if she went right before Visi, the latter could spam Suggestion or Prophetic Vision every turn, entirely removing all randomness from the environment turn and from non-Rampaging turns of Omnitron. Not that this isn't a good way to get victories, of course, but that's not quite the whole point of the game, or I wouldn't be playing on Advanced in the first place. Edit: The combo is still possible of course, but requires a full round of setup this way, and thus is less of a shoe-in.)
Last edited by willpell on Tue Sep 10, 2013 8:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Tue Sep 10, 2013 8:32 pm

Omnitron's Robot Rampages are getting steadily less impressive as Unity gradually out-Skynets him with her Golems; had I not accidentally cheated in his favor earlier, she might have cleaned his clock by now, but as it is, the game drags on into round 9. The only card other than the blanked Singularity which he plays this time is a Repair Drone, who heals him of just 2 HP since it's by itself.

Having nothing she especially has to play, Visi debates doing the just-draw-two-cards turn, but she'll get to see one more card if she Enlightens herself, though she ends up with the same number; there's no chance Unity can talk her into getting the Power instead under these circumstances. Demoralization is a blank in half of the turns in this match, unless the Environment boosts it, and doesn't start working until the turn after it's played anyway, so Visi discards that in order to keep the other card she drew, even though it's just a Mind Spike. She then draws her other card for the turn - another Suggestion. Tachy coaxes that out of her more corporeal buddy during her turn, and Omni's 2-card trash disappears again, the singularly uneventful Singularity being set up to happen yet again (doesn't that kind of contradict the "Singular" part?), while the Railgun joins its fellow Component-weapon on the bottom of the deck.

Slightly annoyed to have been passed over on Tachy's turn, since she has a great new Golem in her hand and no Equipment or other ways of playing it, Unity starts her turn by having Turret Bot shoot Omni for 2 (through his rampage advancement), since there aren't any bonuses applicable anymore. In hopes of getting an Equipment to Bot-Fix, Unity plays Inspired Repair, even though her Golems have no damage for it to heal, simply so she can draw a card and then play one (the latter being an advantage critically missing from Robot Reclamation, or else she'd use that and simply not reclaim any robots). She does indeed draw and then play Scrap Metal, passing on the opportunity to play her extremely powerful one-shot and kill the Repair Drone (it would after all just come back on Omnitron's next Factory turn); it's worth it, because what she gets instead is Champion Bot, an 8-HP tin-plated version of Legacy (whose chest-mounted lantern sybmol actually sheds light, unlike the real one), who adds 1 to the damage dealt by all of Unity's golems and the fairly rare instances of her dealing (lightning, generally) damage herself. This adds damage twice over to Raptor Bot's attack at the end of this same turn, since he counts the number of bots in play and gets a bonus from Champion Bot; the total would be a staggering 6 damage if not for Omnitron's Rampaging shields, and even with that bonus, it drops him to 52.

Impending Casualty comes out and is immediately taken care of by Unity's freshly-drawn Bee Bot; the cops ineffectually shoot Omnitron, and the round ends. At this point, I will break my previously-stated rule and continue to a second round within the same post, because we know it'll be a fairly uneventful one. Omnitron unfolds into a Factory again, but has nothing in the trash to rebuild, and a blank card to play for the third turn in a row thanks to Visionary. (Apparently her "suggestion" was "That was fun, let's do it again!". Brain the size of a planet small house, and he still falls for it.) The Drone repairs him for 2 HP, but that's the sum total of what he accomplishes that turn.

Visi gives Omnitron and his Drone another Cerebral Hemorrhage, still saving her wider-angle Psychic Maelstrom for when there are more than three targets in play. She Enlightens herself, discarding Mind Spike, and draws another Brain Burn which she wishes she could have drawn instead; she is now holding both Prophetic Vision and its villain-deck-targeting equivalent Precognition, so she would like to get another card play and further stabilize the timeline, but I'm honestly too bored to do that even if it risks having the game go awry and drag on even longer. So instead, "Tachyoff" gives the nod to Unity to play yet another Golem, the Cryo Bot mentioned earlier, and on her own turn Unity then plays the insane One-Shot she's been saving all this time: Powered Shock Wave, which hits all the Villain targets (not Environment ones) for 1 damage at minimum, plus another 1 for each Golem you have down (and 1 more for Champion Bot). That's a staggering 7 damage, none of it reduced, which fries quite a few of Omnitron's circuits as well as thoroughly demolishing his repair bot, who won't be back until the turn after next at the soonest.

Finally below 50 HP, Omnitron adds insult to injury by taking 1 more damage from the Police, but not before the Environment gets on the heroes' nerves a little with Paparazzi on the Scene. The heroes must discard a card each at the start of the next enviro turn to get rid of it, but in the meantime, it keeps them from using any Powers; Unity's Power is no loss at this late stage of the game of course, but Visi will miss the chance to Enlighten herself, and given the state of her hand, may just choose to draw two cards, even though Prophetic Vision might stop this from happening again the next turn. At last, round 11 can begin....
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Tue Sep 10, 2013 9:22 pm

Ugh, this has taken so long.... Omnitron rampages his way into the same pair of Component weapons as before, playing them in the opposite order this time, but it makes no difference considering where the heroes are by now, he'll never have a chance to fire them. Visi decides to make sure his next turn will be comparably uneventful by playing Precognition, banishing an Electro-Pulse Explosive to the bottom of the deck (even though she could have put Wrest the Mind on it and made it blow up in Omnitron's face; the damage from this would kill her after dealing about 24 damage to Omnitron, and while that's certainly impressive, it doesn't suffice against such a sturdy foe, nor does it stop the bomb from killing a couple of Unity's golems) along with another Assault Drone (giving me no opportunity to mis-play it a second time). The card she's allowing Omnitron to play at the beginning of round 12 is the Adaptive Plating Subroutine, a shifting damage-immunity which is a nuisance and a half in some games (and utterly ruinous when Cramped-Quarters Combat is out, but that's never for more than a round anyway), but in this case poses little threat to Unity's diverse array of Golems. Unable to Enlighten anything, Visi simply draws a card - another Precognition.

I had forgotten to draw a card at the end of Unity's last turn, so I fixed that now - and it made a huge difference, because the card was a second Supply Crate. As usual, having a Tachywraith's turn right before her own proves insanely helpful to Unity; by playing the Supply Crate before her turn, she need not risk losing it to a Technological Singularity, and can draw 1 card for playing it plus 2 more cards at the start of her turn by destroying it (having no Golems in hand, this was the fairly obvious course). On the general principle that nothing exceeds like excess, Unity would have gladly played the second Supply Crate she drew this way and Bot-Fixed her Platform Bot into play at its expense, gaining a random card for her trouble and keeping a Volatile Parts besides...but apparently her parents or the Freedom Five or someone frown on her mad-sciencing in front of the Paparazzi, so that plan won't work. Instead, she settles for what she's got now and plays a second Volatile Shockwave, blasting Omni for 7 again and instantly breaking his components with just that one card (well okay, he had already taken 4 from Turret Bot, but still). At the end of the turn, Raptor Bot deals another 7 damage, and Omnitron is now down to 26 HP - right where Unity and Visionary started the game, so how appropriate that they're the only heroes still in said game (even if it might have been only due to my mistake with the Assault Drone). Actually, I forgot to account for his reduction, so he's got 29 HP instead, but still; he's on his way down.

Since Volatile Parts requires a Bot to actually die, and that's never plan A, Unity decides to discard it when buying off the Paparazzi, even though she gave serious thought to giving up Robot Reclamation instead, as she finds it hard to picture wanting to go up to five turns without drawing Equipment or One-Shots. Visi happily discards Brain Burn (even though she now has a Decoy to take the damage instead of her - come to think of it, that would have worked with Wrest the Mind instead, she should have let the EPE come out, and virtually its entire explosion would have been confined to Omnitron, possibly ending the game by now), and the cameras go away - to be replaced with a Plummeting Monorail. As much damage as he's taken, Omnitron is still far tougher than anything else on the field, so the Monorail will be a useful weapon against him as long as Unity has a nice tough Golem to take the second hit. Since we're getting close to the end, let's press on to round 13.

Omni brings out his Adaptive Plating, an Ongoing which isn't a Component - which, now that I look at it again, would have protected him from the Monorail after he gets hit by the Raptor, except that the Police are in the middle. Once again, I need Invisible Castle to pick what card Omnitron will get back out of his discards - it turns out to be the Railgun again. With Turret Bot and Champion Both both having more HP than the actual heroes (the Monorail has still more, but the Component weapons specifically only hit hero targets), Cryo Bot being in the middle, and Stealth Bot as an emergency damage-absorber, the Railgun poses absolutely no threat to the heroes at the moment, and in fact they would kind of like it to fire just so it could hit Cryo Bot and have him blast all non-hero targets (including the Monorail) for a cold damage. But of course, there's nothing to be done; the bots are having way too much fun taking their upstart cousin-in-metal apart.

Lacking better targets, Visionary puts her long-cherished Wrest the Mind on the Monorail; that way, when it hits the second-highest HP target, she can redirect the damage to Omnitron while he's already taking the normal amount, and with a bit of luck that might just finish him off, before the Environment deck can come up with some new nuisance (and, more importantly, before he can flip back to Rampaging form). Unfortunately, I then realize this won't work because of the Adaptive Plating; the first car of the train will hit him, switch his Adaptive Plating to "immune to melee damage", and then would be Wrested to hit him again. Still, at least Visi can Wrest the train to hit Cryo Bot, dealing 4 damage to the Train and 1 to Omnitron as well as 3 to her Decoy, all without any damage being dealt to a hero target other than the ones that are meant to get hit. It's something to do besides just playing Psychic Maelstrom for 2 damage, and I'm bored. In the hopes of moving things along, Visi has Enlighten target Unity rather than herself, for the most immediate results possible. Hilariously, Unity chooses to discard the incredibly powerful Construction Pylon, because everything else in her hand is at least potentially better right now. Visi then draws another Wrest the Mind, so there's still no threat if the other EPE should show up.

Tachyon tells Unity to play Platform Bot, then Turret Bot shoots Omni down to 25 HP, setting his immunity to "projectile". Unity plays Brainstorm, drawing two cards (one of which is the extremely useful Flash Forge, a way of trading Equipment in hand for Golems from your deck or vice versa, as well as trading in One-Shots for either or both - with a hand as full as hers, she could get pretty much every Golem out of her deck and enough Construction Pylons to play them..oh, the other one is a third Construction Pylon), and then zapping Omni for 2 lightning damage (also setting his immunity to "lightning", not that it matters). That wasn't quite enough to destroy the Component, but it vanishes big-time when Raptor Bot deals an absurd 8 damage to the unprotected Omni (melee), then Platform Bot hits him for 4 more (energy); the Police then shoot him for 1, leaving him at 10 HP, and that's still the highest. So the Monorail hits him for 5 while also targeting Turret Bot, but Visi Wrests the second car to throw it at Omnitron as well...and he finally dies. (By the way, Unity ends the game with five cards left in her deck; that's the closest I've ever gotten to a Hero deck getting to reshuffle its discards.)

Well, that game did finally go the heroes' way, but I defy anyone to claim that Omnitron isn't at least fairly difficult. Having a non-optimized party, I came quite close to losing before the heroes finally managed to stabilize; Tachyon was more useful dead than alive, and Unity might never have gotten her deck stabilized without Visionary feeding her cards. That was more than sufficiently epic for me to feel that my day was well-spent...but spent it is, and so am I. So for tonight, I will say adieu...and at some point in the future, I'll introduce you to a whole slew of new Heroes, Environments and Villains.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sat Sep 14, 2013 9:57 am

Playing two brain-melting offline games of Sentinels last night (one solitaire and one with other players, both using Heroes I don't own and with the former also involving a Villain and an Environment I lack) doesn't seem to have been enough to completely scratch my superhero-insanity itch, so here I am again. It's time I busted out some of the new content which arrived during the prep stages of my earlier game. Just for the sake of doing so, I am playing a game with all four of the Heroes which I've obtained from outside the base set: Unity the golem-builder, an itinerant alchemist named The Scholar (who can best be described as "The Dude from Big Lebowski, but with magic powers"), the time-traveling Western bounty hunter Chrono-Ranger, and Omnitron-X, a humanoid future version of the villainous robot who's been created by the original Omnitron, programmed to understand the human "weakness" called Compassion in order to defeat it, but instead motivated by it to return to the past and battle his villainous progenitor. He's not doing that today, though, because my order came with a staggering six new Villains, one of which I tried out last night. Since she was incredibly tough, I'm not going to be up to tackling her again for a while, so for this match I'm taking probably the easiest of the new villains, the one which was published at the same time as the base set but kept out as a promo, his divider left in the box as a way of teasing you into wanting to acquire him: Ambuscade, French action-movie star turned big-game hunter, who has decided superheroes are the deadliest game. (Like most of the early villains in this game, he's not entirely original; Sentinels has grown more innovative in recent sets, but here at the beginning they were pretty much all transparent homages to Marvel antagonists, while oddly the heroes tended to resemble DC characters in most cases.)

I have a different level of familiarity with each of the new heroes...Unity I've played twice before (my previous Let's Play and the solitaire game last night), the Scholar I've seen someone else play, Omnitron I've looked through his deck but not actually seen it used, and Chrono-Ranger is a complete cipher to me. When it came time to pick an Environment, I had three effective choices, two of which are tied to CR's backstory, but one of them is particularly fitting for his overall look, and I've been the most curious about it: Silver Gulch, 1883. A time portal has led Our Heroes and their nemesis into the Old Wild West, where they must survive the hostility and incredulity of the locals, defeat the villain, and get back to their own time before the portal closes and strands them. Thusly, like Wagner Mars Base, this environment imposes an alternate loss condition as well as interfering with the heroes directly...hopefully, though I've picked a weak villain, this Environment will help to keep things sporting. So, that's all the preamble...Let's Play!
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sat Sep 14, 2013 11:10 am

Ambuscade is certainly the frailest Villain I've seen, unless you count Baron Blade's sides separately; he has only 50 HP! But he starts the game with 2-4 Devices in play, 3 in this game's case, and he shoots the highest-HP hero every turn (he's a big game hunter, so naturally he doesn't target the weak even though that would result in quicker kills). For this game, his starting Devices are a 5-HP Hand Cannon, the 1-HP Sonic Mine, and an 8-HP Automated Turret. The Cannon and the Turret both deal 2 projectile damage to one hero; the Turret targets the highest-HP hero just as Ambuscade himself does, while the Cannon targets the hero with the most cards in play (currently this is a tie, so the heroes choose who they'd like to get hit). The Mine meanwhile exists to get destroyed; when the heroes hit it, it deals 2 damage to each of them, and they lose the ability to deal damage for a turn unless they prevent the damage. With all of these brought out, 'Cade plays his card for the turn, which is another Device, the 10-HP Reactive Plating. It and Ambuscade both take 1 less damage, and it deals 2 energy damage in retaliation for attacks against Ambuscade once per turn while it's out. He then fires all his guns: the Scholar has 29 HP so he's the first high-HP target, and because he's good at healing himself, he volunteers to take the next hit as well (this is the sort of decision I couldn't make about Chrono-Ranger, since I have no idea what he does; such innocence is to be cherished but quickly dispensed with). So he soaks up 4 damage, and the Turret shoots Chrono-Ranger, since he has the next-most HP at 28.

Since Unity is so disgusting with effects that let another hero play cards out-of-turn, I've stuck her at the front of the turn order this time, to try and cap her effectiveness. She's drawn one of her best cards, the Construction Pylon, in her opening hand, but unfortunately the only Golems in her hand are two Bee-Bots. So she gets those out, saving Brainstorm to reload the next turn, even though it might have been smarter to do it first. She could have consulted the hands of her fellow heroes to determine whether they were going to be able to deal any damage this turn, and possibly used Brainstorm to take out the Sonic Mine as well as damaging the other two starting devices, but I don't like to act in a way that acknowledges the fact that I'm playing all the positions...in a real game, the players can ask each other questions or even show their hands, but at least it's possible they'll choose not to, so I prefer not to have perfect info-sharing while I'm soloing the game. Uni then draws Robot Reclamation, which makes her choice of playing the easy-to-destroy Bee Bots early on seem more reasonable.

The Scholar starts with one of his best cards, Keep Moving; he gets a card out of his deck into play and then plays another card, which is always fun. The cards he fetches are his "Elemental" transmutations, which come in three varieties: "reduce damage you take", "increase healing you do", or "damage the bad guys whenever you heal yourself". He chooses the damage-reducer, Flesh to Iron, and then plays a One-Shot that's very effective against villains such as Ambuscade (or Citizen Dawn, or Grand Warlord Voss, or Omnitron, or the one who stomped me last night, La Capitan): Grace Under Fire. This lets him deal damage equal to the number of non-villain targets to one of them, which is currently 5, so he takes 4 HP off the Reactive Plating. (He could have taken out the Hand Cannon, but it seemed more prudent to work on taking down Amby's big defense so that Amby himself can be directly targeted again, hopefully taking advantage of that low HP.) He then uses his innate power, "Better Living", to recover 1 HP, putting him up to 26...this means he's now in a 3-way tie for the position of HP leader (Omnitron-X is unique among heroes, excluding a few hard-to-find alternate versions of the base set characters which were distributed as promos, in having only 25 HP at the start of the game). And thanks to Flesh to Iron, he's bulletproof! Unfortunately he's 1 HP short of being able to absorb all the hits, unless CR can manage to damage himself, since 'Cade's first attack deals a little too much damage to entirely bounce off the Iron Flesh. He draws a card, and it moves on to O-X's turn.

Omnitron-X plays an Electro-Deployment Unit, one of several of his Equipments which are "Components" designed to remind players of the original Omnitron; if O-X takes 5 damage in one turn, he loses all his Components, but since he doesn't have 3-5 heroes ganging up on him, it's a fair bit less likely that he'll be hit that hard, compared to his "parent". The EDU will allow Omni to either draw or play a card at the start of each of his subsequent turns, for as long as he keeps it in play...that's likely to add up rather nicely in time, and his low HP currently means Ambuscade won't likely bother him for a while. He then uses his power, "Timeshift", which has a legion of applications...by revealing the top card of any deck, and either playing or trashing it, you can either give your allies free plays, flip them past cards they didn't want to draw, or trash all but the most innocuous of the villain's or environment's cards (targeting those decks is less effective as a rule, since you can't put the weaker cards back to prevent the next play, but it still might be effective in some cases where you have a pretty good idea of what's coming next, especially if Wraith is spotting with an Infrared Eyepiece or something). Normally, Timeshift should target Unity in the hopes of giving her a free Bot, but right now Ambuscade is likely to shoot Unity with his Hand Cannon, so in the hopes of changing that, O-X gives the Scholar a timeshift, hoping to put out an Ongoing so that Scholar will become a valid target for the Cannon, which will then bounce off his Iron Flesh. It doesn't quite work out that way, but the effect proves useful even so: Scholar gets Transmutive Recovery, which lets him regain 2 HP as well as drawing 2 cards, so he's now high-HP man again and will remain so even after Ambuscade's main attack. Thusly, while the Hand-Cannon won't hit him, the Turret will. Omnitron then ends his turn.

Now it's time for me to see what Chrono-Ranger is capable of. Unfortunately, he's drawn two cards which search his deck for a card, and since I don't know what to do looking for, I don't want to play these right now, and the third card looks less than useful right now...oh, wait, by a strange roundabout chain of effects, it actually is useful. He plays the Temporal Grenade, dealing 1 damage each to 3 targets, as well as being able to destroy an Ongoing or Environment card...he may later regret wasting that last option, but anyway. Unable to scratch Ambuscade or his Hand-Cannon, CR puts 1 damage on the Hand Cannon, 1 on the Turret...and 1 on one of Unity's Bee Bots, which then self-destructs and deals 2 damage to the Reactive Plating, scratching it for 1. More importantly, this brings Unity down into a 3-way tie for the most cards in play, so the Hand Cannon can target something besides her...so the Scholar will indeed be able to absorb Ambuscade's whole fusillade this turn (unless he busts out a surprise of some sort), leaving him down only 1 HP! CR then uses his innate power "Quick-Shot", which may be the most redundant power on any hero character card, since the Temporal Grenade was the only one of the cards in CR's hand which didn't have a "deal 1 projectile damage" rider in addition to its other effect. Versus damage reduction like the Plating, this power isn't terribly useful, but just for something to do, he puts a bullet in the Automated Turret before drawing a card to end his turn.

Environment time; let's see what Silver Gulch is like this year of time. Out comes Sustain the Portal, a "Time Portal" card, which lasts only for one turn. One player may discard a card to discard the top card of the Environment deck; I have no idea why that would be desireable, so I choose not to have any of the players dump a card, as they have none that they stricly can spare. So all that happens is that, at the end of the turn, Sustain the Portal deals 2 damage to every target and destroys itself. Which means that it's hitting the Sonic Mine and setting it off! It also takes 1 HP off Ambuscade (the first thing to do so), 1 off his Ablative Plating, and 2 off each of his other devices; the 2-damage blasts from Sustain the Portal and Sonic Mine both bounce off Scholar's Iron Flesh, but the other three heroes all lose 4 HP, and Unity's second Bee Bot dies, which could polish off the Hand Cannon if it were worth bothering, but will instead scratch the Ablative Plating again. Quite a violent portal, that!

Moving on to Round 2 now....
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sat Sep 14, 2013 12:06 pm

Fortunately for the heroes, the timing on the Sonic Mine means that it basically just damaged them; they regain the ability to deal damage before they would have had a chance to deal any. Ambuscade now plays one of his "Trap" cards, which do nothing when played, but are shuffled face-up into the villain deck, and then go off whenever they surface again. Omnitron-X is definitely not going to be Timeshifting the villain deck this game.... It's distinctly difficult for me to shuffle a face-up card into a deck without having some idea where it ends up; I had to close my eyes, but at last I was able to render it so that I had no idea where the Trap wound up. (I'm not sure whether it's valid to shuffle this honestly and then open your eyes to discover that the Trap has immediately gone off.) Having more or less wasted his only card play, Ambuscade then wastes the rest of his turn shooting at the Scholar, getting only 1 point of damage through, exactly as the heroes planned.

Unable to Bot-Fix anything since Omnitron refuses to let her take apart his Electro-Deployment Unit (which he narrowly avoided losing to the Portal, but hasn't actually gotten any use out of yet), Unity opts not to waste her Brainstorm yet, and just draws two cards for her turn...one of which is another Construction Pylon.

At the start of his turn, Scholar needs to discard a card to remain in Iron form, and happily does so, dumping his other Elemental form, Solid to Liquid, which increases his healing powers and thus is less useful while he's playing the party "tank". He then plays Proverbs and Axioms, enabling each player to draw a card, then do their choice of two things: regain 2 HP, or take 3 damage to use a Power. Given that there's nothing to Bot-Fix, Unity of course takes the healing, and the Ranger's power isn't worth taking damage for even if he weren't rather beaten up...but despite being rather low on HP, Omnitron figures that his power is strong enough to be worth suffering for, and there's little chance that he'll take 2 more damage during Scholar's own turn and lose his Component, so he Timeshifts on Unity's deck...which, fittingly enough, gives her another Brainstorm, frying the Hand Cannon and Turret for 1 each. The Scholar doesn't really want to heal at the moment, since he has several effects that are only effective when he heals himself and thus likes to keep himself a little damaged, so just for giggles, he takes 3 damage, which is reduced by 2, and uses his power to heal himself of a third. He then uses his power normally for the turn, actually healing by 1, rather than the 2 he could have, and ends his turn.

At the start of his turn, Omni-X plays Ablative Coating through his EDU; the Plating cards are X's version of Omnitron's Adaptive Defense Subroutine, but each of the three different varieties he has protects against 3 or 4 of the 10 damage types in the game. He could then use his normal play to put down Defensive Blast, an exceedingly narrow card which is sometimes powerful enough to be worthwhile - it deals 1 damage for each damage type that the currently-deployed Plating protects against, versus all the non-hero targets. Ablative stops melee, projectile and toxic damage, so this would result in 1 damage of each of those types to each victim...but unfortunately with the Ablative Plating out, not only would Ambuscade himself take no damage from this, but he'd zap O-X for 2 damage because he tried, and the only upshot would have been the destruction of the Turret and the Hand Cannon, the latter of which is already almost destroyed. So instead, he rewinds to the start of his turn, draws a card with the EDU instead of playing one, and then plays the Coating normally, sitting on the other cards in his hand for now, and using Timeshift on Chrono-Ranger just to be fair, since he's the only one of O-X's allies not to profit from it as yet. This doesn't prove terribly useful, as the produced card is Ranger's Mark; it gets one of CR's "Bounty" cards out of the trash, but I haven't seen any of those yet and have no idea what they're even good for. It's not a complete waste, but pretty close...CR gets to shoot something, so he takes out the Hand Cannon, to Omni's great relief since he was now going to be the target of it on Ambuscade's next turn. Granted CR was going to shoot something on his turn anyway, but oh well, it may have been helpful to get that extra 1 point in, even though it doesn't currently seem so. Omnitron draws a card - his second copy of Defensive Blast, dammit - and ends his turn.

Having been informed by a reliable source that Omni-X has a card to spare, Jim Brooks the Chrono-Ranger first plays Jim's Hat, which gives him an extra play each turn, and then fills up his hand with "Just Doin' My Job", letting each player (including CR himself) discard a card to let CR draw a card. Jim dumps his Displaced Armory equipment-tutoring card, since I'm reluctant to use it, while Unity dumps the weaker of two disposable Equipments, Scholar dumps a card that lets him spend one turn immune to damage and heal himself for 2, and O-X of course dumps a Defensive Blast. Thusly, CR draws 4 cards, then Quick-Shots the Turret Bot once before ending his turn and drawing one more card. (The resulting five cards leave me with a distinct impression of having failed to shuffle adequately.)

The game hasn't felt very Western so far, but at last Silver Gulch produces a Gunman, the 6-HP Matthew Hayes, a sniper who shoots the lowest-HP target (other than fellow Gunmen) for a whopping 4 damage. This would pierce even Omnitron's plating or destroy one of Unity's bots if she had one, but fortunately for the heroes, the current lowest-HP card in play is the Turret Bot (sadly, had CR not shot this, it would have been tied with Ablative Plating and the players could have chosen for Hayes to target that instead, which would have destroyed it even though it's much tougher).
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sat Sep 14, 2013 12:54 pm

Having lost all of his starting toys, Ambuscade decides now is a good time to Vanish, searching his deck for a Personal Cloaking Device. Weirdly, this 9-HP Device causes Ambuscade to flip when it comes out, and then does nothing else. Flipped into "Invisible Stalker" form, Ambuscade becomes immune to damage (but somehow you can still shoot his Cloaking Device, even though it's presumably attached to him). Okay, now Ambuscade starts attacking the lowest-HP hero, which is Omnitron-X, so he takes 3 damage...it's Energy now, so his current Plating doesn't help with it.

Having obtained O-X's permission to destroy the Ablative Coating, since he's got a spare in his hand (the ability to usefully discharge Limited cards in this way is the upside to Unity going early in the turn sequence, though I still think it's not as big an exploit as letting her go last), Unity plays a Supply Crate to draw a card, not wanting to waste Brainstorm until there's a better target. Unfortunately she doesn't obtain a better Bot to manufacture than Raptor Bot, whose HP of 2 mean that it's likely to get killed by Matthew Hayes, who otherwise would have finished off the Reactive Plating...but she's sitting on a Robot Reclamation, so that's an acceptible risk. And anyway, it's dealing 2 damage, so it can scratch the Plating down to its own HP, making it a valid target for the Gunman.

"Get Out of the Way" is one of Scholar's most powerful cards, able to damage every non-hero target for 1 and give him back that many HP, with a devastating combo with Mortal Form to Energy, the Elemental which deals damage whenever he heals. Unfortunately, with Ambuscade and his Plating, now is not really the time for blasting everything for 1, so Scholar opts to discard "Get Out of the Way" to keep his Flesh to Iron going, even though he's no longer the focus of 'Cade's attacks. Being badly depleted of cards, he decides it's time to play Bring What You Need, but first of course he'll Keep Moving, since that's a free play and he might as well. He gets Mortal Form to Energy, then uses the Power of Bring What You Need to draw two of the top three cards of his newly shuffled deck, putting the third back on the bottom; he disposes of another copy of BWYN, then draws a card and ends his turn.

O-X has a lot of nice cards, but none of them suit the situation at hand, so he draws a card with the ERU again, plays his Ablative Coating, and gives the Environment deck a Timeshift, since one of the cards he's failing to get used depends on Environments being in play. The Explosives Wagon (which does about what you would expect) seems like a good card to not have while Ambuscade is immune to damage, so he puts that in the trash, then draws a card and ends his turn.

Chrono Trigger Ranger now plays two cards because of his Hat; first he puts down Hunter and Hunted, which increases damage dealt by and to him by the number of Bounties he has out, and then he plays Sudden Contract, the other of his "tutors" that I've been putting off playing, to get a Bounty from his deck and puts it into play, then deal 1 damage which thusly becomes 2. Taking the first Bounty I find so as to preserve some mystery, I get By Any Means, which is played on a target to increase the damage it takes by 1, going to the Trash when that target dies...and CR's "I probably didn't shuffle that well", in addition to duplicates of both H&H and Sudden Contract, also has two copies of a card that brings all his Bounties back from the trash. So this was a rather good choice...because after placing this Bounty on the Personal Cloaking Device, Jim shoots it twice, once with the rider from Sudden Contract and once with his Power, and in both cases deals 1 damage which becomes 3 thanks to H&H and the Bounty. (The nice thing about H&H is that, while it's like many cards that have a downside and can be destroyed by using your Power, it costs a lot less when you do this, because his Power is fairly weak and is duplicated by the effects of a lot of the cards he plays.) Finally drawing a card...a replacement for Diplaced Armory...he ends his turn and the Hero round.

Rather than the Explosives Wagon which Omnitron rendered retroactively nonexistant, the Environment deck produces a Stout Barrel, a 5-HP "Cover" card which takes all the damage that would be dealt to a Gunman...this is not as good as it sounds, as each Gunman has the ability to take 1 less damage for each Cover card in play, but the Barrel redirects the damage from them to itself, and it's no longer reduced. (Somewhat less sanely, the Gunmen can also take cover behind the Explosives Wagon, but this does them little good because the Wagon increases all damage by 1, so they take the same amount of damage as if the Wagon didn't exist, while everything else takes 1 more. Between that and a very severe explosion when the Wagon is destroyed, it was definitely a good move for OX to get rid of the thing.) With that accomplished, Matthew Hayes shoots one of the 2-HP targets in play, hitting the Reactive Plating for more than enough to destroy it, even through its reduction.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sat Sep 14, 2013 3:00 pm

Ambuscade is momentarily down to just one Device, but he then plays Armed and Dangerous, which gets a Device out and then shuffles the deck (that Trap just keeps shifting position!), then plays another card. He puts out an Automated Turret, then flips up his new card, Quick Stim-Patch...and reveals Rigged to Detonate! I've asked on the forums to confirm this, but currently I'm assuming that the Trap happens before the card that revealed it, so the highest-HP hero, Scholar as usual, takes H damage, which is of course reduced by Flesh to Iron (the fact he still takes some damage is actually kind of a good thing, as it means Scholar is now capable of healing and thus triggering Mortal Form to Energy, which I've confirmed doesn't deal damage unless you actually healed). Random side note...to go by the art of Rigged to Detonate, Ambuscade appears to be a partial Gambit homage in addition to Kraven the Hunter, as he seems to have the ability to project energy from random objects, this being how his Traps work. Anyway, the Stim-Patch now actually happens, healing Amby by H, not that he's actually taken that much damage yet. The villain trash is now reshuffled, including the just-triggered Trap (it'll need to be played again to 'reset' it), and another card is played...unfortunately for Cade, it's another Vanish, so it does nothing since he's cloaked from the first one. (The fact that Haka's Savage Mana is the only way of keeping the Cloak permanently destroyed was probably deliberate in this case, as Haka is Ambuscade's Nemesis, and Ambuscade can potentially attack Haka more often than Haka can attack back, although it can go the other way dependent on luck.) It then moves on to EOVT finally; Ambuscade shoots OX for 3, dropping him to 12, then the Auto-Turret fires at Scholar without effect, and the heroes get to act again.

Not having any Golems in hand at the moment, Unity breaks open her Supply Crate at the start of her turn to draw 2 cards. She plays her Modular Workbench, then discards a Construction Pylon to put out a second Raptor Bot, not having to cannibalize OX's Plating this time. At end of turn, the two Raptors get to deal 3 damage each, and they'd very much like to take out Matthew Hayes, but he's hiding in a barrel and OX assures her that he won't survive long enough to shoot again. So instead the Raptors chew on the Turret, leaving it down to 2 HP like them; now Hayes can shoot that instead.

Scholar decides he's been in Iron form long enough, but discards another copy of his one-turn-damage-negator (I misspoke earlier when alluding to this card, as it doesn't make him immune to damage; instead, it reduces the damage to 0, which would be an important distinction if we were playing against the Advanced version of Cade, who deals irreducible damage in his invisible form but still fails against something completely immune to damage) in order to keep Mortal Form to Energy. Scholar then plays another Proverbs and Axioms, drawing a new copy of Get Out of the Way, and giving Unity a third Raptor Bot which she plays by Bot-Fixing OX's Plating after all, taking 3 damage for the right. O-X takes the healing of course, as does CR, and Scholar hurts himself for the full 3 in order to Bring what he Needs, drawing the cards which aren't other copies of MFtE, since he can always tutor that with Keep Moving. Since the number of relevant targets for his damage is not large (Omnitron seems to regard the Environment deck as a solved equation, and 'Cade remains cloaked until his next turn even after losing the Device), Scholar wishes he could Bring What he Needs some more with his regular power usage, but you're not allowed to use the same Power from the same card twice in a turn, so he has no use for his regular Power but to heal himself by 1, letting him deal 1 damage with MFtE, for which he has no more useful target than the Barrel.

Omnitron-X uses his EDU to put out an Elemental Exochassis, the Plating card which covers fire, ice, lightning and "energy" damage, the latter being what Ambuscade would deal on his next turn if nobody destroyed the Cloak; at least this way he'll be protected if he's targeted. He then plays Bio-Engineering Beam, which gives him the Power to outright destroy Matthew Hayes and thereby protects the Raptor Bots (ironic, since the card's art shows him disintegrating an actual Raptor with the Beam), and then lets him fire 2 damage, just enough to destroy the Automated Turret.

With the duplicate H&H being the only one of his seven cards that doesn't shoot something, CR is deeply annoyed with Ambuscade for being immune to damage right now; in the hopes of finding something else to do with his Power for the turn (besides destroying H&H, which would just waste a later card play getting the new one out), he plays Displaced Armory and searches his deck for an Equipment (I no longer feel as though CR has many secrets for me to worry about spoiling). He turns out to be a cyborg, something I didn't realize before, and has both several different Bounties and several Equipment, with no duplicate copies of either, so my starting out with lots of redundant cards was just bad luck (or bad shuffling). With the exception of Jim's Hat, all of the Equipment in the deck deals damage, but at least one card does something else that's useful even when the target is damage-proof: the Neuro-Toxin Dart Thrower, a card basically identical to Wraith's Stun Bolt, except that the damage is Toxic rather than Projectile. Besides the Equipment, Displaced Armory also lets Jim shoot something, so he destroys the Personal Cloak, then for lack of a better use for his Power, he puts a bullet into the Stout Barrel. Actually he does those things in the other order, because his shot deals 1 extra damage as long as he has a Bounty in play, so bringing the Cloak (and its attached Bounty) down needs to wait as long as possible; he deals 2 damage to the Barrel, then 3 to the Cloak to destroy it. (And this was me being spectacularly stupid, as I completely forgot my plan was to tranq Ambuscade with the Dart. But I won't go back and fix it, as my accounting was confused enough by the time I realized this halfway through the next turn.)

The Enviro deck produces another Stout Barrel. Well that was exciting. Let's move on to the next round.

Ambuscade flips back up, then...Vanishes again. ARRGH! Well at least it wasn't a waste for Omnitron to play his Elemental Exochassis; he takes 1 damage instead of 3, leaving him at 13 HP.

Unity has so much hell to unleash, but can't find anything to unleash it on! She draws two cards rather than bothering to do anything, but the Raptor Bots reduce the new Stout Barrel and the Cloaking Device to 1 HP each, figuring that CR will have little trouble finishing them off.

Though sad to give it up when he has no immediate way of replacing it, the Scholar dumps Mortal Form to Energy, since it hardly seems worth discarding a card to keep it when he can't actually damage anything significantly. He then plays one of the few cards which is of significance in this "nothing worth killing" round: Don't Dismiss Anything (how fitting). This One-Shot gives each player two options (the Scholar is definitely a team-friendly hero, though a lot more fun than Legacy or even Visionary), either putting a card from their trash onto their deck, or the top card of their deck to play. Unity of course takes the free play, getting a Robot Reclamation...that wasn't so hot under the circumstances, she'd rather have taken back Scrap Metal, but at least she can choose not to recycle her Bee Bots and just draw a card for free. The card she draws is Turret Bot, and it would have been on top if she'd Brainstormed and then drawn one card normally, instead of drawing two cards and keeping Brainstorm in her hand; le sigh. The Scholar has some very well-stocked Trash, and his deck is erratic enough that a random card at the wrong moment may not necessarily be worthwhile, so he decides to take back his Proverbs and Axioms, since that's such a ridiculously good card for the party as a whole. Having no trash except two Platings, Omnitron debates taking the random card, but figures that setting up a Defensive Blast for next turn is more likely to come in handy; CR is strongly tempted to recycle one of his tutors, but decides that it's better to try and get a random card which will let him destroy the Cloak without taking his turn, enabling him to take a snooze on his turn and draw two cards, setting up for hopefully a very good turn after that. Instead, he gets the Bounty card "Kill on Sight" (with a picture of Ambuscade!), which draws him three cards when the target dies. Had the Cloak already died, it would be amusing to see the Ranger take out a bounty on one of the Stout Barrels, but as it is, the Cloak is of course targeted. With all that having been just his card play, Scholar then uses his on Bring What You Need, and is disgusted to discover that his next three cards (counting the recycled Proverbs and Axioms) are all quite strong; reluctantly he classifies Grace Under Fire as the weakest one, since there aren't many targets left (as an aside, the existence of several cards which count the Targets in play means that Scholar is a great fan of leaving Stout Barrels in play), and banishes it to the bottom of the deck. Finally he draws one more card and ends his turn at last.

O-X uses the ERU to draw his Adaptive Plating, then plays a Focused Plasma Cannon, a second Component; this is risky since he doesn't know what the Environment deck is about to do, and he might lose both Components, but he's setting up for a card that could be quite strong on his next turn. Leaving Chrono-Ranger to play an actual turn if he wants to finish off the Cloak, Omni uses his Timeshift power on the Environment deck, finding the card Temporal Event, which would get a Time Portal out of the deck and put it into play. Knowing how inconvenient Sustain the Portal was last turn, not knowing what other Time Portals might do, and not having veto power over the card that Temporal Event would bring out, he trashes the Event itself.

For his first card play, CR takes out a Sudden Contract; I debated taking a Bounty that would draw him one more card when he destroys the Cloak, but instead I kept looking through the Bounties and found them all...with the last one being "No Executions". Placing this on the Personal Cloak...isn't actually a good idea, because Vanish gets the Cloak out of either the deck or the trash. Oh well, nevermind. He also thought about "The Ultimate Target", since Ambuscade certainly seems to qualify, but since he's planning on getting his bounties back from the trash, he takes a disposable one for now - the aforementioned other card-drawer, "Dead or Alive". This is a nice one to keep out for a long time, as it heals CR every turn, but under the circumstances the only thing to do is put it on the almost-destroyed Cloaking Device, which is then taken out by the damage "rider" of Sudden Contract, letting CR draw four cards thanks to the two Bounties. He then uses Ranger's Mark to bring one of the Bounties, namely "Kill on Sight", back from his trash and then immediately kill its target...which is indeed a Stout Barrel as I joked before! Drawing three more cards, including The Ultimate Target (which is definitely going on Ambuscade next turn!), CR finally moves on to his Power phase, shoots the other Barrel just because he can - dammit, I did it again! This time I'm letting myself go back and fix it; he shoots the Dart Thrower at Ambuscade, giving him a "-1 damage" token even though the damage doesn't actually affect him. He then draws his eighth new card this turn (which is No Executions) for a total of thirteen cards in his hand, and is finally done.

Silver Gulch produces a Water Trough, which is more Cover, a 7-HP target which reduces fire damage to Gunmen and increases Lightning damage to everything. So far, it's a pretty boring Environment, though of course Omnitron-X is much of the reason for that.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sat Sep 14, 2013 3:45 pm

Again having ceased to be an Invisible Stalker and become a Superhuman Hunter again, Ambuscade plays a new card, Snatch and Grab; it's a good thing I went back and had Chrono-Ranger tranq him despite having forgotten at first, because now he's dealing damage twice to the highest-HP hero, who is Chrono-Ranger himself. This deals 2 melee and 3 energy damage to CR, who fortunately doesn't have any Bounties out at the moment, so the damage isn't increased by Hunter & Hunted. After that, the new highest-HP target is Scholar, who of course likes getting hurt so he can heal himself, so Ambuscade's 3 projectile damage is rather welcome.

At last, Ambuscade is out in the open, and the heroes plan on tearing him a new one before he can slip away again. Unity fires a Powered Shock Wave, dealing 4 damage for her three Golems, +1 for the Water Trough. She first plays Inspired Repair just to draw a card without costing her play, hoping to stumble upon Champion Bot, but failing that she Bot-Fixes CR's Dart Thrower into discards some Volatile Parts to her Modular Workshop to create a Platform Bot, selecting it over the much tougher Turret Bot simply because it deals damage sooner. With there now being four Golems in play, the Raptor Bots each deal 5 damage and then the Platform Bot does 3 more, leaving Ambuscade down to 27 HP just one turn after he revealed himself.

The Scholar plays Keep Moving again, getting Mortal Form to Energy out of his deck without losing his play, and then was about to play Get Out of the Way, which would currently deal a total of 4 damage to Ambuscade through the MFtE combo, but in the interest of trying to end the game, he instead uses Know When To Turn Loose, discarding his whole hand to fry Ambuscade for lightning damage equal to the number of cards discarded, with 1 added because of the Water Trough. Dumping 6 cards, he does 7 damage, then heals himself with Better Living to deal 1 more damage through Energy form. Ambuscade is down to 19.

At the start of his turn, Omnitron plays a card with the Electro-Deployment Unit, and the card he plays is Defensive Blast; he then deals 2 damage to Ambuscade (who is not a Gunman hiding in the Water Trough, although in this case it wouldn't matter because the damage from Focused Plasma is irreducible). He then uses his normal play to put out Slip Through Time, an Ongoing which lasts for one turn (assuming it's not played out of turn, which is probably the reason it wasn't made a One-Shot), allowing you to play an extra card (normally replacing itself...though, of note, the card you drew during your draw step could be the one you play during your end step) and use an extra power at the end of your turn. Omni then devotes his normal power usage to Defensive Blast, discarding the second Adaptive Coating to deal damage for each type represented by his current Elemental Exochassis - 1 fire, 1 cold, 1 energy, and 2 lightning because of the Water Trough. This damage hits Ambuscade as well as the two environment targets, demolishing the Barrel and dropping Ambuscade to 14. For his time-slipped play, OX plays Self Sabotage, destroying his Components and dealing double their damage to one target; the ERU and FPC are converted into 4 damage, and then with his final Power, "Tronks" uses the Bio-Engineering Beam to destroy the Water Trough and deal 2 damage to Ambuscade, leaving him at 8.

At this point, much fun as it would be to play the Bounty Board and get three Bounties back from the trash, leaving Chrono-Ranger with sixteen cards in hand, that's not the mission anymore. His normal play is instead to put "The Ultimate Target" on 'Cade; if the b******d was going to live any longer, this would let CR use a Power on each of Amby's turns (since he's always dealing damage at least once, whichever side he's on), but as it stands, the only relevant effect is that CR deals 1 extra damage to that target. (This is different from "By Any Means", which makes the target take extra damage from everyone, not just Chrono.) Jim's Hat gives him an extra play, which lets him use Eye on the Prize, dealing 1 damage which becomes 3 due to the Bounty (remember, CR still has out Hunter and Hunted); this also lets him draw a card and play a card, and he then plays another copy of the card, dealing another 3 damage and drawing another card, then playing a third Eye on the Prize, finally finishing off Ambuscade without it even getting to CR's power phase (heck, he still could have played another card!).

Well, that's that; Ambuscade doesn't exactly make it easy on you, but since he doesn't seem capable of destroying Ongoings or Equipment, unless he manages to finish you off while still invisible (a distinct possibility since he deals the same damage either way), an outcome like this one seems probable. It certainly made a nice contrast to last night's game against La Capitan, since part of her shtick is making it impossible for the heroes to keep a card in play. Overall, Sentinels in general seems to be very swingy, with things snowballing in one direction or the other; in some scenarios and with some hero-teams, you just never really have a chance, while other times you can curbstomp the villain without breaking a sweat. Still, while individual matchups might be a bit lame, the game as a whole remains irresistable to me, so there will be more of these LPs as I have time for them.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Wed Sep 18, 2013 6:59 pm

I have decided today that there will probably not be any more Sentinels LPs, unless folks request them. I've discovered that playing solitaire takes about 1/4 as much time when not blogging it, so I will no longer use this as a justification when I want to spend my day flipping cards to amuse myself, as I can flip a good deal more of them in less time if I don't have to type up the results after each operation.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by ThroughTheWell » Thu Sep 19, 2013 11:32 am

It is cool that you have found a game activity that you enjoy so much. Thanks for shareing what you did.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Thu Sep 19, 2013 12:33 pm

If you'd like to get into the game yourself, there's never been a better time. They will very soon (like in the next month) release their latest, standalone expansion, "Vengeance". You can just buy that, and (assuming that what they've told us is true, but they're not the kind of company that you expect would lie to their fans) you'll have a playable game in one box, with five new heroes and a "team" of five villains (this is new and we don't know how it works; one of the five hero decks is actually a team of four heroes, and we don't know how that works either), as well as one environment. The Heroes have just been announced, including a shapeshifting African ex-industrialist who now defends the environment as The Naturalist, a dimension-hopping super-soldier whose energy blades have earned her the codename KNYFE, the aforementioned four-member team called The Sentinels (consisting of Mainstay, Writhe, the Idealist and Doctor Medico), the hard-luck quasi-heroic rogue Setback, and an archer with super-Asperger's Syndrome by the name of Parse. The villains are adventurous lady thief Ermine (nemesis of The Wraith...no word yet on whether they'll eventually pursue a forbidden romance), self-replicating Communist survivior Proletariat (assigned as the nemesis of Absolute Zero, though the reason for their enmity is unclear, past the fact that they're both old farts who grew up on opposite sides of the Cold War), wrathful ex-Army muscleman Fright Train (who has a grudge against Bunker because he was passed over for the opportunity to pilot the Bunker suit), Friction the reverse-Tachyon, and presumably a revamped version of the game's iconic villain Baron Blade. We don't yet know what the Environment will be, but it's speculated to be the Headquarters of either the Freedom 5 or Baron Blade's villainous analogue to it.

I may take exception to the "no more LP's" policy when Vengeance comes out, so that folks who are considering buying it can get a preview from me (even given my relative poverty, there is little question it'll be in my hot little hands within a week of hitting stores). I have no idea if there's enough variety in that one environment and that single villain team to make the box as replayable as the Enhanced Edition (and even that starts to get a little old after eight or so games), but hopefully they've at least tried to make this true, and it'll be interesting to see how it turns out.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Thu Sep 19, 2013 7:51 pm

Addendum: If a Vengeance playthrough does happen, it won't be until March of 2014, as the game is only being presold now; it won't actually exist for another 6 months.

I may decide I'm bored enough to do a few "theme" games on here in the interim (such as my much anticipated Iron Legacy vs. the Freedom Six match, and its prequel involving the Five and Miss Information). But I definitely won't blog when playing just random games anymore. Far too much work for no real payoff.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sun Sep 22, 2013 6:34 pm

Just finished one of the two theme games I was debating LPing, the game's iconic Freedom Five versus their psychotic secretary, "Miss Information" (one of two "mini-expansion" villains you can buy for $5 and toss in with the $40 base game, giving you another foe to face now and again without paying the $20 for a full-size expansion...the latter is more cost-effective since you get eight decks for the price of four mini-expansions, but if you want to keep the raw dollar cost low, six villains for $50 will start to bore you much more slowly than four villains for $40). It was an interesting match that finished neck-and-neck (being an extremely narrow victory, but probably it would have been a loss if I hadn't made a couple rules errors or dubious judgments in their favor)...but I'm glad I didn't LP it, because at least the first four rounds consisted of the heroes drawing two cards each turn (Absolute Zero and Bunker, having both used a card to draw 4 during some of those turns, ended the game with 14 and 13 cards respectively), with hardly anything actually happening. See, because the game starts out with the heroes not knowing that their assistant is secretly plotting the game, she isn't even a target - she has no HP and can't be damaged until she flips, which happens only after she plays 2-4 "clue" cards, and in this case that took a long time happening. So meanwhile, she was putting out "Diversions" (some of them targets with HP, others being possible to destroy only by losing your stuff), and making it impossible for any Ongoings or Equipment to stay in play, so there was hardly anything for the heroes to even try to do until some targets came out.

Once she flipped, things got bloody fast, as she deals huge amounts of damage and still plays her cards as usual (you would think the heroes would stop paying attention to the Diversions after she starts beating them up, but somehow it doesn't work that way). As always I'm a bit less than sure I did my math right, but if I calculated more or less correctly, the game ended with two heroes having been slain, the third (Absolute Zero) knocking himself out to reduce Miss Info to 5 HP, and then a Plummeting Monorail killing her and only almost killing Bunker, with both him and Wraith left alive at 1 HP. Legacy had died in large part because of two plays of Take Down, a card which prevents the villain from playing cards but makes him take 2 damage; he also had once healed all the heroes by 1, which pretty much amounts to the reason any of them failed to die, so clearly he was a superstar in this match despite not surviving it. Playing in Metropolis for the fourth time (out of 22 games to date, with 11 other environments I could be using) was painful, as a Hostage Situation deprived the heroes of card plays in one round and Paparazzi on the Scene prevented them using powers in another, but it was the most thematically appropriate setting by far, and of course it provided the Plummeting Monorail which delivered the final blow.

So, that's not a Let's Play per se, but a quick summary of one of the most grippingly close-fought games I've ever seen. These are a better use of my time than full LP's, so you may see a few more of them, whenever I have a comparably memorable game that I'd like to discuss.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sun Sep 29, 2013 2:36 pm

This is a placeholder post.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.

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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sun Sep 29, 2013 2:36 pm

willpell wrote:This is a placeholder post.
So is this.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.

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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sun Sep 29, 2013 2:37 pm

willpell wrote:
willpell wrote:This is a placeholder post.
So is this.
Also this.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.

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