Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

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Re: Let's Play: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Post by willpell » Sun Sep 29, 2013 3:13 pm

Okay, I had intended not to do any more Let's Plays, but I've decided to make an exception for this game. I'm listening to YouTube blogs and it's got me somewhat distracted, so I want a record as I play so that I can avoid losing track of what's happening. Plus this is my fourth game against Omnitron (two previous solos on this thread plus one offline game), so I want to be very sure I've done it right and haven't made errors like in the Unity/Tachyon game. And I'm using the environment "Time Cataclysm", which I've only played in once before (it's the last environment I haven't tried twice), and it completely melted my brain during that game, so I'm gun-shy about trying it again.

The heroes for this game are Fanatic, Ex-Patriette, Absolute Zero, and The Scholar. You guys haven't seen Ex-Patriette before; she's the daughter of Citizen Dawn, who was tormented by the Citizens of the Sun and her own mother because she didn't have super-powers, and finally had had enough after she lost her right eye, leaving Insula Primalis and becoming a mercenary gunslinger. Thusly, her deck revolves almost entirely around guns; she has Ammo cards which improve her Guns (they don't need Ammo just to operate; she presumably has a functionally unlimited supply of normal bullets), cards to search extra Guns out of her deck, (too few) cards to improve her Ammo supply, (way too few) cards that let her fire multiple Guns in one turn, and so forth. I find her to be at just the right balance point of simplicity and complexity; she gives you more to do than Ra or Legacy, but doesn't tax your brain as much as Absolute Zero or The Visionary, so playing her is just fun to me. Peculiarly enough, I chose these heroes for various reasons and then noticed that all of them have 29 HP, except for Fanatic who has one more than that; totally did not do that on purpose.

Anyway, it's a bit silly of me to continue using plural pronouns for what is obviously a masturbatory self-indulgence, but we'll pretend I'm still doing a public service to people who might consider trying the game. So, by all means, 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 » Sun Sep 29, 2013 4:58 pm

Round 1

Omnitron, as always, starts off by flipping to Rampaging Robot form, then plays two cards. First, there are Sedative Flechettes, which is definitely a nasty opening salvo, but tends to be even worse later in the game; all the heroes take 5 damage right off the bat, but there are no Ongoings to destroy. And Omnitron's second card is Terraforming, which does nothing on turn 1 because there are no Environment cards in play. So, no targets entered play this turn, and the heroes are free to beat on Omnitron this turn, and there won't be any Components or Drones to resurrect when he goes to Factory mode next turn, so the heroes will be probably be free to beat on Omnitron next turn as well. I forgot to specify that I'm playing on Advanced, but I am, so Rampaging Robot Omnitron will have damage reduction for that first round, but not the second, and he will have almost nothing to show for it that turn - if he puts out a Device which fires the same turn, it'll be +1 damage, and if he fires his other Flechettes that'll be +1 damage to everything, but that one card is all he'll gain a bonus to, and he'll be getting hurt pretty severely. So, first turn of the game hurt a fair bit, but nowhere near enough to make me feel as if this game will be difficult.

Fanatic, as usual, starts the game with End of Days, her ridiculously gamewinning board-wipe, in her hand. Less usually, she doesn't have any reason to play it; I've learned never to play her against Dawn, Voss, The Dreamer, or other such villains whose "threat level" is largely based on them starting with a bunch of mooks in play, because she utterly gelds them by wiping out the starting army. Fortunately, Omnitron is only a semi-minion-based villain, and End of Days won't be a power card against him. With Fanatic at the top of the turn order, and my general policy of not peeking ahead to see what the subsequent heroes will be doing during my solo games, her playing End of Days to get rid of a dangerous card played by Omnitron, such as his Electro-Pulse Explosives, is possible but must be based on the assumption that the 29-HP Brigade has no other way of dealing with the threat, and don't have so much stuff on the table that End of Days will destroy them worse than it hurts Omnitron. (With Zero especially, that's exactly what it would do; he can do virtually nothing after his stuff is destroyed. Of course, Omnitron might pull Technological Singularity on him, so he's at risk anyway; he'll likely play a bit conservatively and try to avoid this danger, so maybe he won't be quite so ruined if End of Days happens. The Scholar, being based on Ongoings, will fear Omnitron less now that he's wasted one of his Flechettes, and so he's more likely to build up enough that he would beg Fanatic not to End the Days.) With that option thoroughly rejected, Fanatic looks at her other cards, rejects one of them as having no target and the other as being unable to stay in play for, Fanny has only one card left that she can play - her Aegis of Resurrection. It'd be hilarious if she lost that to TechSing; "Omnitron hacks into her ancient templar breastplate and causes it to attack her". But since her "Exorcism" power is worthless against damage reduction, she has no reason to play a card, and simply draws two cards for her turn. One of which is another copy of the card which she couldn't keep in play this turn; isn't that special.

Moving on to Expatriette. She has a Gun in her hand, but it's not one of her better ones, and with the risk of TechSing, I don't really want to play it right now. So she plays Arsenal Access, her very potent Equipment tutor, allowing her to reveal topdeck cards until she finds two Equipment, then put one or the other of them into play. It's a bit dangerous to use Arsenal Access without a gun, as she might find Ammo cards that are useless without a Gun to play them into (I'm not clear on exactly what happens if you try to play them in that case; I'll check the forums if it comes up), but her deck contains as many Guns as Ammo and a few other Equipment besides, so I'll risk it. She gets an Ammo card and a Flak Jacket, which protects her from one 3+-damage hit; not able to use the Ammo, she has no choice but to take the Jacket. Moving on to her Power phase, she uses the Power "Load", which lets her play an extra card; as default powers go, this is one that nearly every other hero would like better than Expat, and I'm a little saddened that she's the one who has it, since usually she'd rather devote her Power phase to firing a Gun she just played, or else draw two cards in hope of finding a Gun. Here, she Loads an Ongoing, glad that Sedative Flechettes has passed and hoping that the other copy won't show up for a while; the card she plays is Hair-Trigger Reflexes, which lets her automatically deal 1 damage to every Target that enters play. (Most of her damage is of course Projectile, and this is not one of the exceptions.) She draws her card for the turn, and is done; if she continues to make use of Load, she's likely to run out of cards, and that alone makes her interestingly different from a lot of heroes.

Absolute Zero is holding his Isothermic Transducer and could play it this round, but since 1 damage won't affect Omnitron this round, that would simply be setup for the next round, when he could play Frost-Bound Drain to deal 3 damage to Omnitron and 3 damage to himself, with the latter being dealt again to Omnitron by the Transducer. In view of the risk of TechSing, he'd rather not play an Equipment on that basis, especially since he'll have no use for his power phase (if he had the other Module, which lets him heal himself with Cold damage, he'd happily play that and gain 1 HP with his "Thermodynamics" power as his whole turn, after having been walloped by those Flechettes. But as it is, he takes the two-card-draw turn (one of them being a second Transducer), putting both him and Fanatic at six cards while Expat has only three.

Scholar doesn't have any aggressive cards in his hand, so he devotes himself to being the "party tank" for this game; he plays Keep Moving to search an Elemental out of his deck and thereby obtains Solid to Liquid, increasing all his healing by 1, and then Keep Moving lets him play an extra card, so he plays Flesh to Iron (apparently he's now made of liquid iron, which is somehow just as tough as liquid iron but even better at healing). He uses his "Better Living" power to gain 1 HP which becomes 2 HP, leaving him at 26 and the HP leader of the team, so hopefully his Flesh to Iron will enable him to soak up some damage to the group. (Normally it reduces damage by 2, but next round Omnitron and his Devices will be dealing +1 damage, so he'll take 1 less damage than is printed on the cards, while all other characters take 1 more.) Drawing a card, he ends his turn at 3 cards in hand, just like Expat.

And finally, the environment. I don't like the Time Cataclysm, because it seems to be made of one leftover card that was cut from each the other Environment decks (except the Final Wasteland, and including one Environment that doesn't yet exist but is presumably coming next spring when the mega-expansion "Vengeance" releases), with no thematic connection between them, and with three time-travel themed cards thrown in to try and connect them all. The picture on the back is a neat visualization of a "rift in time", but that doesn't suffice to make the deck feel cohesive; there's no sense that the heroes are actually following some path through the events of their past and future, it's just a bunch of random, contextless snapshots of unrelated locales and events. Anyway, I have to play it once in a while in order to keep my game fully rounded, and today is one of those times.

The first card from the Time Cataclysm today is Surprise Shopping Trip; seemingly set in Megalopolis after the Rook City villain "Spite" finds himself there and goes breaking and entering. He might have been transported there by a time anomaly, but we don't really know; perhaps he just took off his mask, hid his little drug ampules under a jacket, and rented a car and drove there. Either way, his presence there somehow causes 1 Melee damage to every target for each card that enters play, but goes away at the start of the next enviro turn. So, a brief episode of ultra-violence (fortunately I'm pretty sure this is not heightened by factory-mode Omnitron, since the damage is presumably coming from Surprise Shopping Trip...though I'd probably better check that), where every card played or put into play produces an explosion of fists in every direction, and then it ends after one round. Let's see Omnitron try to put a Drone into play now. I'm immensely gratified to know that Advanced Omnitron will be in factory mode during the entire Trip, so he won't ignore all the damage that hits the heroes whenever anything plays a card. The Scholar will, unless Flesh to Iron is taken out somehow - even if the damage goes up due to Omnitron's advanced text, it'll still bounce off him. But the other heroes will be hurting something fierce, especially if Expat does any Loading. They might want to avoid playing cards so as not to get battered, but doing so would only give Omnitron an advantage, and they will take at least 1 damage each when he plays his card for the turn (if he had a Drone or Component to raise, that would produce another 1 damage since it's "entering play" even though it's not "played", based on the wording of SST), so on the other hand, perhaps Omnitron will pull a Component, do himself 1 damage, and the heroes will play six more cards that wouldn't otherwise damage him, thereby destroying the Component. We'll see how it goes.

Welp, that's one round. Let's move on.
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 7:03 pm

Round 2

Omnitron flips into factory mode, plays the Adaptive Plating Subroutine, and takes his first damage of the game. This makes him immune to Melee damage because of the Plating, which makes him immune to every damage type after he takes that damage, until he takes another type of damage and becomes immune to that instead. Nothing else happens on Omnitron's turn, but if any of the heroes plays a card in the upcoming round, the heroes will all take a melee damage, but Omnitron won't because he's immune now. The only way to break that would be to deal damage to Omnitron with a power, but the only one of these four heroes who can do damage without a card in play (and they don't have any of the necessary cards right now) is Fanatic, who deals 1 melee damage and then 1 "radiant" damage. So if Fanatic skips her play, she can hit Omnitron for 1 Radiant, and then the next character's SST damage will hit him. But no matter what happens, Fanny is missing out on 1 melee damage, from either her Power or SST, because of the Plating.

Fanatic decides that it's worth taking action to spare the other heroes from a bunch more melee damage. She plays Consecrated Ground, first triggering SST but then destroying it, and then dealing 1 radiant damage to up to three targets. Having only one target, she hits Omnitron, setting his Plating to "radiant", and then she Exorcises him, setting it to "melee" again and then "radiant" again. So, 3 damage to Omnitron so far, and it only took 2 rounds. Plus the SST is gone, after only battering all the heroes except Scholar for 2. Finally, she draws Absolution, her awesome magic sword; very likely, next turn she'll play that, heal by 1, and then hack Omnitron for 2 damage through his reduction, instead of her Exorcism bouncing off completely.

Expatriette could destroy the Adaptive Plating this turn, but I decided to look ahead at AZ's and Scholar's turns and confirm that they aren't going to be dealing the same damage type twice in a row, so it's not important to take the Plating out right now. I did this because if Expat played her Onging/Environment destroying card, she would have two cards left in her hand: a Gun and a card that tutors up a Gun, and in either case she would then be able to use her Load power (which I wish was called "Lock and Load" instead, just because it would sound less Ammo-specific) to play that one, but she couldn't fire it this turn, and thus there'd be limited point in playing it. So instead, she uses her card play for the turn to put down an Assault Rifle, which like Consecrated Ground can hit up to 3 targets if they exist, but deals 2 projectile instead of 1 radiant to each of the available targets. She shoots Omnitron for 2, leaving him immune to projectile damage, draws a card - another Assault Rifle, and they're Limited so she's not allowed to double-wield them - and ends her turn, still at 3 cards in hand.

Absolute Zero still has nothing terribly impressive to do, but at least he can do something this time. He plays the Isothermic Transducer this time, and then Thermodynamics himself for 1 fire damage, hitting Omnitron for 1 cold damage. That wasn't much of a turn, but at least he accomplished something besides just getting the Transducer into play.

Scholar has to discard two of his three cards to keep his Elementals, so he pretty much has to play his last card, Know When to Hold Fast, giving up the entire rest of his turn to simply draw five cards. (This is a better deal than Absolute Zero will get out of Glacial Structure, the card he drew at the end of his turn, as that lets you trade your play and draw phases for 3 cards, plus the 1 you get during your draw phase; Scholar has skipped all those phases except Play in order to gain 1 more card than Zero would by taking those phases.)

The Atlantean Throne Room now comes into play; it reduces all damage by 1, and allows the players to each draw a card at the start of each Environment turn. The heroes have mixed feelings about that; it neuters Expat's Assault Rifle and Hair-Trigger Reflexes completely, and similarly ruins Absolute Zero, but it makes Scholar even more invincible than he currently is, and generally curbs the danger of Omnitron while the characters try to build up some more. So they'll have to think about whether to take the extra card draws, or let the damage reduction drop just before Omnitron gets his 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 » Sun Sep 29, 2013 8:42 pm

Round 3

Omnitron puts out a second Adaptive Plating Subroutine, which is completely redundant with the first one except that it now takes two Ongoing-destroyers to take it out. He then finally brings out a Target, the S-84 Automaton Drone; thanks to the Throne Room and Advanced Omnitron, it shrugs off the one damage from Hair-Trigger Reflexes, but then dishes out 4 damage which is reduced to 3 by the Throne Room to The Scholar, whose Flesh to Iron reduces it by 2 more.

Since the Automaton's damage is based on its HP, it's important to at least scratch it, so Fanatic puts down Absolution and uses it to deal 1 damage instead of 3 to the Automaton...it now poses no further threat to Scholar as long as he stays the HP leader, except during Omnitron's Factory turns.

Again, Expatriette could have taken out an Adaptive Plating Subroutine, but she doesn't want to waste the 2 damage she could deal at the same time, to up to 2 targets, because Rampaging Robot Omnitron completely neutralizes that damage with the Throne Room in play. Since her Assault Rifle is also neutered, she simply draws two cards.

Absolute Zero is still sitting on his heavy damage card, which can batter 1 point of damage even through Omnitron's double-reduction, but he'd also take 2 damage himself, triggering the Transducer to dish out 2 which would be reduced to none. He'd definitely rather wait until next turn so that Omnitron is no longer tougher than himself. So he just plays Glacial Structure and draws three cards, plus one in his draw step.

Scholar discards to keep his Elementals running, dumping one of two Solid to Liquids in his hand besides the one in play (that's all of them in his deck, and thus he won't be able to tutor them with Keep Moving anymore) as well as the multi-target Grace Under Fire, which isn't too useful against Omnitron since he produces only a handful of targets. He then has a couple of options. He could Keep Moving to tutor a Mortal Form to Energy, then play another Solid to Liquid, heal himself for 3, and deal 1 damage to the Automaton, ensuring that even when Omnitron turns into a Factory and boosts the Drone's damage, it still won't get through Flesh to Iron. But that would leave Scholar with only 1 card in hand, plus the one he draws in his draw phase and maybe one from the Atlantean Throne Room, and he'd have to discard his entire hand on the next turn to keep three of his four Elementals, and would have to skip his subsequent turns and stay in the Throne Room not to lose them thereafter. So, not a great plan. Instead, he plays Proverbs and Axioms, a magnificent card where he gives everyone (himself included) a card and a choice; the choice is between healing themselves or taking damage to use a power, and the Throne Room is reducing the pain associated with the latter option, so it's especially attractive now (although Expat would have preferred to take the full 3 damage, so that her Flak Jacket would prevent it all). First, though, he Keeps Moving to get a MFtE, so that when he chooses the healing of Proverbs & Axioms, he'll get to deal 3 damage reduced to 1 and knock another HP off the Drone, leaving it harmless to himself next turn. He then actually plays P&E, drawing yet another Keep Moving as a result.

Everyone else resolves the effects of P&E. Absolute Zero chooses healing since his power isn't at all helpful right now; it would damage him even if he wasn't taking damage to use it, and the Transducer isn't helpful with all the reduction. Expatriette takes the 2 damage, leaving her at 20 HP, in order to Load a Quick Draw, letting her get one of her paired custom pistols "Pride" and "Prejudice" into her hand. She's taking a chance getting this much hardware out; Technological Singularity could just about one-shot in a few turns with all her Guns and the Flak Jacket. But it's worth it if she doesn't suffer TechSing this very turn, because she's got a second Quick Draw in her hand, and once she has both Pride and Prejudice in play, the pair of them will be more effective than her Assault Rifle despite doing one fewer instance of 2 damage, because both of them can target Omnitron at once. (The pistols can also hold two Ammo cards at once, not that this seems likely to be relevant in the current game.) And Fanatic of course likes getting hurt, so she takes the damage and swings Absolution again, taking a 1-HP chop out of Omnitron since the Drone has been sufficiently weakened. (There's no point in killing it right now, as it would just be reanimated by Factory Omnitron; whether it's at 1 HP or 2 makes no difference, as long as its attention is focused on a nigh-indestructible Liquid-Iron-Energy Scholar.) Now that P&E is resolved, it moves on to Scholar's power phase; he uses Better Living to heal, and can only gain 1 HP this way before hitting his maximum, so MFtE can't deal any effective damage. (Had he chosen to use a power from P&E, he would have taken 2 damage, then used Better Living to gain 2 HP, dealing 1 damage, and been unable to use Better Living again so his power phase would go to waste; thusly, this method was still preferable.)

Once Scholar has drawn for the turn, it moves on to Environment time. Expat and AZ would like the Throne Room to go away, Fanatic doesn't especially care, and Scholar would like the extra card but also wouldn't mind taking some damage, so that he can heal and thus trigger Mortal Form to Energy. Thusly, the group reaches the consensus that the Throne Room isn't worth keeping. This will mean the Automaton can scratch Scholar, but as noted before, he's okay with that. That resolved, the Time Cataclysm puts out its third card: Rift in Time. One of the three cards which is specific to the Time Cataclysm (I'm not counting one that could fit just about anywhere and has no real indicator of where it's happening, nor the one which I suspect of being a sneaky Vengeance preview), the Rift plays an extra Environment card at the end of each Enviro turn, and then destroys 1 at the start of every such turn. (In other words, it churns through "moments in time" represented by the Environment cards; this would be a LOT more compelling if the deck had more than 15 cards.)

This turn, the Rift produces a second Rift, followed by the Main Computer Room, the probable Vengeance preview I've been alluding to (I say it's a preview because its "target canton", all of which in Time Cataclysm are different to match the decks that they're meant to resemble, doesn't match any other card that exists). This one plays an extra Villain card at the end of the Environment turn, but allows players to draw extra cards at the start; if there were a Rift in Time after it, it could be destroyed after the players get their card but before the villain does, but instead it of course comes after them, so it will give Omnitron at least one free play, and can do nothing to the players' benefit unless they allow it to give him another. It has 9 HP and thus can be killed with damage, as well as with "destroy an Environment card" effects, but it's still having an immediate and negative effect on the players. That effect could have been huge, as if Omnitron got a Component this way, it would actually fire at the start of his turn a moment later, before the players could hope to destroy it by damaging him. Fortunately for the players (and unfortunately for my attempts to prove that Omnitron can win a game), it's just an S-85 Repair Drone; since Drones fire at the end of the turn anyway, he's not doing any more harm now than he would have if he appeared next round, but will just heal Omnitron by a little and then probably die horribly, since he has only 4 HP and Omnitron is about to lose his damage reduction. (That will mean he can resurrect the thing on subsequent Factory turns, and thereby heal more, but still, one of the weaker things he could have pulled on an extra just-before-his-turn 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 » Sun Sep 29, 2013 9:27 pm

(Don't ask me why I kept abbreviating Proverbs & Axioms as "P&E" last round. I'll watch that going forward.)

Round 4

Flipping back to Factory shape, Omnitron pulls another Repair Drone; between them and with a third Drone in play, the two heal him by 8 and he's only suffered 8 damage, so he's now back to full. He doesn't do anything aggressive, though (apart from the Automaton shooting Scholar for 1), as he still has no dead Drones or Components to rebuild; he's just being an annoyingly hard nut to crack.

Entirely unamused with the reversal of all the damage she was largely instrumental in dealing, Fanatic plays Final Dive to pull one of the Repair Drones into the sky and drop it on the other one, killing them both. She then cuts Omnitron for 3 with Absolution (making him doubly immune to melee; I confess I lost track of his immunity but it was probably last set to either fire or energy, and as my history of rules errors goes, this one is pretty innocuous), and ends her turn by drawing...sigh...another Absolution.

Expat can't beneficially Quick Draw her other pistol while an Adaptive Subroutine remains, so she plays her long-held RPG Launcher to destroy one, then fires her Assault Rifle, killing the Automaton and knocking Omnitron down to 95 (making him immune to projectile, though no longer doubly). She finally draws an Ammo after that, although it won't be useful next round due to Rampaging Robot Advanced.

Finally Absolute Zero is able to get into the game. He plays Onboard Module Installation to get his Null-Point Calibration Unit into play, then puts out Focused Apertures to increase his cold damage, and Thermodynamics himself for cold to heal 2 HP. He doesn't try to hit Omnitron even now, because I just realized that the combo I've considering doesn't work as long as Omnitron is Adaptive; until the Plating goes, the card I've been considering since turn 1 must still be held back. He ends his turn by drawing a third copy of his Isothermic Transducer, and of note, he also is holding all four of his deck's Modular Realignments, a card which raises an Equipment from his trash with the Modules being among his relatively few different Equipment cards, so the fact he has a ten-card hand isn't proving to be as enjoyable as I might wish.

If he wants to be able to make use of MFtE, Scholar has to stop being so damn tough...besides, he has only 3 cards in hand and doesn't want to discard them all. So he discards only one (a Keep Moving, no less) and lets the first two Elementals go. He then plays Don't Dismiss Anything, another card which gives every player a choice: put a card from their trash on top of their deck, or put the top card of their deck into play. Scholar reups his Proverbs and Axioms for obvious reasons, while Zero has no interest in reusing either of the two cards in his trash, so he plays his top card - a Thermal Shockwave, his theoretically-very-powerful self-damaging Power card, which currently isn't spectacularly useful. Expat gets back her RPG Launcher, glad that she'll be drawing it before her next turn; Fanatic considers recycling Final Dive, but instead decides to try gambling, and she gets Holy Nova, a "1 point to everyone, helping my friends and harming my foes" effect, whose damage is Radiant and thus has no trouble affecting Omnitron so far away from her own turn. He takes 1 damage, as does the Main Computer Room, while every hero regains 1 HP, and in Scholar's case that means dealing 1 energy damage to Omnitron (though it also means having no use for his Better Living this turn, as he's only down 1 HP). Thusly, Omnitron is right back down to 92 HP, where he was at the start of the round.

Scholar draws his Proverbs & Axioms at the end of his turn, then draws a new card off the Main Computer Room, as Expat gets her Rocket Launcher back and the two base-set characters also draw new cards. (Zero's is Coolant Blast, the other one of his Ongoings with a massive damage-dealing Power that depends on him taking fire damage; Fanatic gets the much less useful Prayer of Desperation, her version of Know When To Hold Fast in that it gives up her entire turn in order to draw cards, but in her case it draws until she has six cards in her hand, which she already did.) Slightly before that, of course, both Rifts in Time destroyed themselves, as there was no reason to consider letting them continue to accelerate the Environment madness. So the Time Cataclysm plays only one new card this time: Tendrils of Madness, a 7-HP target (representing the "Realm of Discord" environment, which I don't have access to except at a friend's house), which damages the highest-HP target but grants them a bonus on damage. Oh boy; Omnitron can easily spare 1 HP in order to be just as deadly during his Rampaging Robot turns as the rest of the time, and because he's tough to hurt at that time, the heroes will really not want to leave the Tendrils in play. (The damage is Infernal, so Omnitron isn't immune, but it would only be to his benefit if he was, since the bonus to outgoing damage doesn't depend on having actually been hurt.) Oh! I've completely forgotten about Expat's Hair-Trigger Reflexes this whole time, but now is definitely a good time to remember it; the Environment doesn't have reduction like Omnitron sometimes does, so she could have shot the Computer Room too, and she likely could have hit at least some of those Drones when they appeared. Sigh; I always forget something don't I?

Well, once Omnitron has traded one of his HP for a +1 damage "hat", we can move on to round 5.
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 10:25 pm

I forgot Omnitron's bonus card play during the Environment turn from Main Computer Room, and it makes a big difference, for it's another Sedative Flechettes. The damage isn't boosted since Tendrils of Madness hadn't hit Omnitron yet, but he is boosted by his Factory form, so it's still 6 damage to every hero and the destruction of their Ongoings (including Hair-Trigger Reflexes, so I only remembered to use it once, as well as Scholar's MFtE and AZ's never-used Thermal Shockwave, whose combo with the Isothermic Transducer would have been very nice as a way for this game to eventually end). Ouch.

Round 5

Oh boy; this is the round when Omnitron really gets mean. In addition to having to deal with the Tendrils, the heroes must now try to whittle down an Electro-Pulse Explosive, a 15-HP target which blasts HP for its HP, much as the Automaton blasts only one hero, but being polite enough to wait until the start of the villain turn to do it. Since the bomb is a Device, the Rampaging Robot grants it damage reduction, and to add insult to injury, it then plays a Repair Drone to heal Omnitron by 2. No damage yet, but a big looming threat; with at least +1 and probably +2 to damage on its next turn, Omnitron and the Bomb will be capable of killing Expat outright, unless her Flak Jacket saves her - which it won't, because I just realized that it blocked the Flechettes, so she's actually at 21 HP and not in much more immediate danger than the rest of the crew. Even so, that Bomb and the Tendrils and the Main Computer Room are now all must-kill targets (the risk of Main Computer Room popping an Electro-Pulse Explosive didn't even occur to me before, or I'd have been more worried), so the heroes have a busy round ahead of them.

Though End of Days is somewhat tempting with so many ultra-dangerous cards out, it would also set the heroes back quite a lot; with his Modular Realignments, AZ wouldn't really mind, and Scholar would lose nothing, but Expat would give up half of Pride and Prejudice...and to add insult to injury, Absolution is a Relic and EoD doesn't destroy those, so Fanny would get to keep that even though she has a replacement in hand. Still, it doesn't take long to determine that the heroes are in no position to deal a total of 29 damage to three targets, even ignoring Omnitron itself, so as much as I'm tired of Fanatic playing End of Days in virtually every single game (you may remember it delaying the inevitable against Advanced Warlord Voss, but I also had a game against "The Dreamer" in which she played it twice, once at the beginning and once at the end, resulting in a very cheap victory over an otherwise extremely challenging opponent), it's clearly necessary here. She plays it, takes 2 HP off of Omnitron, and ends her turn by drawing a second Prayer of Desperation, even more useless than the first since she can't hold the spare without reducing the payoff from its predecessor. (Thanks to the exact timing, EoD will destroy Main Computer room right after it gives every player a card; that at least is a nice upside.)

Resigned to losing Pride, Expat has no cards in hand which are really worth playing right now (she does have the Ammo, but it won't ever be useful on a Rampaging Robot turn, unless Expat has a damage bonus or is trying to hit Environment cards, and those are about to go away of course), but she does have one which is very slightly so, and I always have disliked skipping a card play under any circumstances, so she plays the thing even though it might be wiser to save it: her single highest-damage Gun, the Tactical Shotgun. With it, she deals 4 damage to Omnitron, reduced to 3, leaving him at 88 HP. She then redraws her RPG Launcher, which is no longer all that big a deal...wait a minute, she was supposed to have drawn that already. Did I forget to give the players their cards? No, AZ and Fanatic got theirs, so I guess I just forgot Expat. She instead draws a new card, another Ammo.

Absolute Zero is about to lose all his stuff, but at last he's going to play his long-held card, which suffers somewhat from Omnitron's reduction but is still worth playing before he gives up his Modules (especially since he has two copies in hand), the one-shot Frost-Bound Drain. Oh wait, I forgot, that one's not useful until Adaptive Plating Subroutine is destroyed, which won't be for a couple more turns. So nevermind; instead he plays his highest-damage single attack under the circumstances, even though it hurts him 1 more than FBD and costs him his power for the turn, which would have let him heal 2, giving up effectively 3 HP just to hurt Omnitron 1 HP more, because that's where this grueling game has left me. The card in question is Cryo Chamber, which reduces fire damage to AZ while increasing cold damage to him; he can also destroy it as a Power to deal 5 fire damage (actually 4, since it's still reducing the damage before it's destroyed) to himself, which triggers the Transducer to deal 4 damage to Omnitron, who reduces it to 3. So AZ drops to 16 HP in order to put Omnitron at 80, when he could have had FBD deal all but 1 of that damage to Omnitron directly, while fire-damaging himself for 3, triggering the Transducer to deal out 3 cold which...would be increased by 1 due to the Focused Apertures, and I completely forgot about that. This changes the equation hugely, so I rewind the entire sequence.

Okay, actually, Zero does indeed play Frost-Bound Drain, dealing 4 cold damage which is reduced to 3 by Omnitron, then 3 fire to himself. This then lets him deal out 4 cold damage, and since Omnitron has adapted to the cold and can't suffer it, Zero gets to do instead have the Transducer damage himself for 4 cold, which turns into healing because of the NPCU, essentially negating the fire damage and providing one healing besides! Yes, if I'd remembered that the Transducer could be used to essentially cancel fire damage with its fellow Module in play, and even gain a bonus point (of outgoing damage regardless, or incoming healing with the NPCU) from Focused Apertures, I would never have considered the Cryo Chamber, and would probably have played Frost-Bound Drain turns ago (of course then I wouldn't have had Focused Apertures out, but still). Omnitron does indeed go down to 80, but Zero actually rises to 21 HP, and then adds 2 more by Thermodynamicking himself. So he's about to lose his whole rig, but damn if he didn't get a near-perfect turn (barring some game-ending shenanigans which are very tricky to set up) first.

Scholar plays Proverbs & Axioms again, which doesn't put any cards in play but will give all the heroes a chance to use what they have one last time before it's all destroyed, unless they'd rather just heal. It also gives them a card, helping them to rebuild after the End, and of course Scholar needs that card worse than anyone, despite not having had to discard any cards at the start of this turn (as on all his previous turns except the first). With no powers except Better Living, he obviously takes the healing himself, sad that he can't deal some energy damage instead...but I'm pretty certain the heroes have to go in normal play order, so he actually doesn't do that just yet. First, Fanatic happily takes damage in order to stab Omnitron for 2 (damn his reduction!), setting his immunity to Melee, and then Expat shoots him with either Pride or the Assault Rifle (the secondary targets of the latter don't matter since they're about to die anyway), dealing 1 more damage and setting his immunity to Projectile. Then Zero hits himself with Thermodynamics for 1 fire damage, triggering Isometric Transducer to deal out 2 cold damage because of the Apertures, so that 1 cold damage gets through to Omnitron, leaving him down to 76.

In the wake of all this, Fanatic is down to just 14 HP (holy crap when did that happen? Okay, 11 damage from two Flechettes, 5 damage from two Proverbs and Axioms, only 2 points of healing and she must have been hit by the Automaton once or something...I guess it makes sense and is at least close to the right answer, since all of the others have either healed or prevented damage and she's never tried to avoid it), Expat has 19, Zero has 20, and Scholar has 25; they then all draw 1 more card from the Computer Room (at this point the Scholar is up to 5 cards for the first time all game, while Zero has 13 and the girls are at 9 and 8, with Fanny having the slight edge due to having been so far ahead of Expat at the beginning), and then the Days End. Somehow, this doesn't stop Time from Cataclysming; out comes a Giant Mutated Specimen, a 5-HP Cockroach who deals 1 Toxic damage to each of H-1 highest-HP targets. Omnitron is still a Rampaging Robot and thus wouldn't even become immune to Toxic if his Adaptive Plating were still out; he just shrugs the damage off, but Scholar and Zero both suffer it, remaining higher HP than the women even thereafter.

And, at last, that huge and incredible round is done.
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 11:28 pm

Round 6

Omnitron plays his Interpolation Beam after resuming factory mode; while normally only a nuisance, this first Component of our game is nasty in Advanced games due to the damage bonus on Omni's even-numbered turns. Omni then gets his first chance all game to rebuild a destroyed Drone (fortunately the Electro-Pulse Explosive, while a Device, is not a Drone; I may have misplayed this in an earlier game). As was statistically immensely likely (3/4 chance), he gets a Repair Drone, which heals him for 2, and then he's done.

Fanatic has a ton of cards and not a ton of patience for Omnitron at this point, so she plays a card which I've yet to try out: Divine Focus. This Ongoing lets her focus fire on the highest-HP Villain target (which is usually the Villain themself, of course, although there are at least three villains where this isn't true - the Dreamer is an innocent child with only 6 HP who unintentionally spawns monsters, the Ennead is a group of villains with no single "main" target, and Miss Information spends half her time masquerading as an ally to the heroes and thus impossible to attack); she must discard a card every turn in order to blast, and the damage is only 2, so it's not a great exchange rate, but it happens every single turn rather than only on her own turns, and combines particularly nicely with those Prayers of Desperation - to keep it going longer than one round, she must take 4 damage at the start of her turn (after having discarded a card for damage if she so chooses), so between an HP cost and a card one, it's hard to keep it going for long, but it can do a LOT of damage while it lasts. Having played that, she slashes Omnitron for 3 with Absolution, leaving him at 75, and then takes 2 damage to draw a card, then discards her duplicate Absolution to deal him 2 more damage. (Will she keep up Divine Focus even when the damage is down to 1 next round? I haven't decided.)

Expat plays her long-held duplicate Assault Rifle and opens up on Omnitron, knocking him down to 71 HP and destroying the Interpolation Beam. She draws a much-appreciated Arsenal Access, she passes the turn, and Fanatic cuts in again to blast Omni down to 69 (the card she discards is one of two copies of Zealous Offense; she's held one since the start of the game and the other since the end of turn 1, and even with Absolution she can't guarantee that it stays in play thanks to Omnitron's damage reduction, which combined with the fact that it does nothing on the turn it's played makes it pretty useless for this match.)

Zero got a lucky break from his last card draw, getting an Onboard Module Activation; he gets to tutor out another NPCU after drawing a card (a Glacial Structure he's unlikely ever to need), and then gets his play back, enabling him to play Modular Realignment to get the Isothermic Transducer back from his trash. The Realignment then deals him 1 Fire and 1 Cold damage in that order, enabling the Transducer to zap Omni for 1 cold and then letting the NPCU heal Zero of the damage he took. He then Thermodynamics himself to gain back his 20th hit point (lost to the Cockroach earlier), draws a card and is done. At the start of Scholar's turn, Fanny discards her other Zealous Offense and zaps Omni again.

Scholar is almost out of good cards after the last few turns of constant discarding, but not quite; he plays "Get Out of the Way!", hitting every target for 1 damage (he isn't about to save this card for when Omni goes back to Robot mode!), being the first to do anything about the Repair Drone, whose ability to heal Omnitron for 2 a turn doesn't really justify giving up 3 damage to him in order to specifically attack it, not when the players have any real hope of dealing global damage. The card then heals Scholar by the number of targets he damaged, putting him 2 short of his max HP, which he then almost reaches with Better living. "Get Out of the Way!" is a much better card when Mortal Form to Energy is on the table, but The Dude Scholar works with whatever he has available. As it stands, he's pretty much back to being the party tank, and has three cards left in his hand which do nothing but help him fulfill that role, while the fourth lets him discard the other three to deal a mere 3 damage...obviously that card is a boss-breaker and generally useless before the game's last turn. He draws his other copy of one of the tanking cards, and is done.

At the start of the enviro turn, Fanatic discards the first card that she might have liked to actually play: Divine Sacrifice, which lets her deal an irreducible damage to each of up to 3 targets...that would certainly have been nice next turn as Omnitron returns to Robot form, but she probably won't be able to spare her card play. Omnitron falls to 63 HP, then the Time Cataclysm vomits forth its third and final "actually represents this Environment" card, Fixed Point. "All cards other than this card are indestructible" is the sum total of its effect, and it's destroyed at the start of the next enviro turn. So there'll be no getting rid of the stupid Repair Drone, but on the plus side, Fanny can keep Divine Focus without having to take damage (I think; I'd better check that...hm, okay I can't find confirmation so I'll just assume it works...she probably won't die anyway). It also has some fun interactions with hero cards that are normally one-turn, including Expat's Ammo and the Scholar's tanking cards, although he hasn't played those and thus probably won't get to them during this particular Fixed Point (if the enviro deck reshuffled, he might get another chance, but that doesn't seem likely right now).

Whew, what a round! Moving on....
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 » Mon Sep 30, 2013 12:22 am

Forgot to have the Cockroach deal damage last round; this time Omnitron actually felt it, but Scholar didn't mind a bit and Zero didn't care much. He'll get one more nibble on them before they'll have any chance to destroy him, but lots of other stuff will happen first.

Round 7

Omnitron gets to flip before Fanatic blasts him with Divine Focus, so he loses only 1 more HP before Fanatic either has to or doesn't have to take 4 damage (with no other effect; the question is only whether the damage is compulsory). Since Holy Nova is useless against damage reduction, Fanny discards that to do the 1 damage, leaving Omni at 61. He then plays his first card - his other Terraforming. Since it's the only thing which isn't indestructible, Fixed Point is destroyed, and a new card is played - Technological Singularity. Oh, would that have been hilariously mis-timed if the cards had been in the other order! But unfortunately, the Singularity really happens; the girls lose their weapons and take 2 lightning damage (it's impressive that Omnitron can hack into an assault rifle and make it explode in a shower of sparks, but it's doubly so that he can do so to an ancient holy sword; that must be some firmware he's installed), and Zero really gets clobbered, dropping to 15 HP (less even than Expat) and losing both his modules. It's fortunate for the heroes that Omnitron is in his more creative mode and not boosting damage; it's even more fortunate for them that he then stupidly pulls a second TechSing as his final play. The Drone heals him up to 63, and he's done.

Well, the controversy about Fixed Point has been rendered moot; discarding her bizarrely situational damage-prevention Ongoing "Undaunted", she deals 1 damage to Omni, then plays Prayer of Desperation, trading her entire turn for four cards ("Pfft, any idiot can do that" sneers Absolute Zero, while Scholar is too busy taking a nap and Holding Fast to even notice; Expat, who has no card drawing in her deck, can only look on in silently seething envy) and thus loading up her Divine Focus to continue even longer, assuming her current HP of 6 can hold out. (At this point, I've quite given up on any possibility that Omnitron will actually score a victory this game, despite all the damage he's dished out; my one hope is that he can at least manage to kill a hero or two, so I don't mind playing Fanatic as even more suicidally reckless than her deck suggests in the first place.) At the start of Expatriette's turn, she discards one of two copies of Chastize, the "put one of the mooks or Environment monsters in a box so it can't interfere" Ongoing which, like Divine Focus, hurts Fanny while she keeps it in play; not only does she not have the HP to spare, but the card isn't that useful under the best of circumstances.

Expat is tempted to play a Gun and use it, but decides instead to deal with that Cockroach before it can beat her up (she is after all second-highest HP among the heroes now, though AZ may well fix that on his turn), hitting it with an RPG Launcher which then splashes a point of fire each on Omnitron and his Repair Drone. She then uses Load to play a Flak Jacket, secure in the knowledge that it won't unzip itself and electrocute her right in her freshly-exposed midriff until after the deck is reshuffled. Fanatic dumps her other Chastize and withers Omnitron down to 60.

Since Zero's effectiveness hinges heavily on the ability to start a turn with both Modules in play, he can't accomplish much this turn; he Module-Realigns his NPCU back into play, losing and regaining 1 HP, and then Thermodynamics himself for 1 point of healing. Fanny discards another Divine Sacrifice, since she can't afford to play party tank (in addition to dealing irreducible damage, DS redirects all damage from the damaged targets to Fanatic for a round; this is great if she's Undaunted and has an Aegis of Resurrection down, but right now it would be sheer madness for her to take a bullet for Scholar or Expat) and gets rid of Omni's sixtieth hit point.

Scholar plays one of his two copies of one of his two "tanking" Ongoings, Alchemical Redirection. Until the start of his next turn, he'll take all damage in place of other heroes; without Flesh to Iron, this is going to hurt him a lot, but then that's rather the point. Better Living gets him up to 28 HP, just one short of his maximum, and his deck should still have two copies of MFtE, plus he has a Solid to Liquid in his hand; all those HP are just killing his mojo at this point. Sadly, he doesn't draw an MFtE, but rather a "GOotW!", which will help him with the whole "surviving huge amounts of damage" thing but won't do much to Omnitron...still, it's better than nothing.

As the Environment turn begins, Fanatic almost decides not to discard any more cards until after Omnitron flips; she has only one really spareable card, Smite the Transgressor (a one-shot which deals melee damage and lets her use an extra power...useful with Absolution in play, but not so much so here), and then the only thing left to discard before her second Prayer will be her Aegis, the potential lifesaver without which she will fall to 2 HP keeping Divine Focus around. Still, I did say I was hoping to kill her (incapacitated Abilities are not quite better than an actual living hero, but they can get close to it under certain circumstances), so why not; she dumps Smite the Transgressor to deal 1 more damage. The Time Cataclysm then produces a Charging Triceratops (though obviously meant to reference Insula Primalis, its flavor text describes it actually appearing somewhere else as a result of the warping time; if all of Time Cataclysm's cards made that much sense I'd like it a lot better, but nothing about any of the other cards so far revealed besides the three "natives" of the deck is in any way contextualized; they could be dropped into other decks with opaque sleeves and you'd never notice the difference, which may have been the designers' point in writing them, but it sure doesn't impress me). This 8-HP target reduces damage to it by 1, making it tough to kill (except with cards like RPG Launcher, which outright destroy even the toughest Environment cards), and gores the second-lowest HP target for 3 melee damage at the start of the enviro turn. Fanatic is more than a little worried about that one....

Round 8 is fast approaching, but not fast enough for my up-past-my-bedtime self....
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 » Mon Sep 30, 2013 1:00 am

Round 8

Fanatic actually does refrain from discarding to Divine Focus this turn, wanting to save her second-to-last card for the round when Omnitron will be able to take DF's full damage. Unfolding back into its more dangerous but vulnerable form, the villain plays an S-83 Assault Drone, then shuffles his trash and pulls out the S-84 Automaton again; the drone count is now up to 3, so the Repair Drone heals Omni for 4, and the Assault Drone is identical to the Automaton with this particular value of H, except for the type of damage (melee vs. energy) and what happens when they're attacked (damaging the Automaton weakens it, and killing it weakens the Assault Drone, while killing the Assault Drone does nothing to the Automaton). The two aggressive Drones hit Scholar for a total of 10 damage (counting factory-Tron's boosts), since it doesn't matter what they'd be targeting otherwise as long as he's Alchemically Redirecting.

Discarding her Aegis, Fanatic reduces Omnitron to 60 HP again, drops to 2 HP, then plays her Prayer and draws 6 cards. One for Expat's turn, one for AZ's, one for Scholar's, one for the Environment, one just before Omnitron turtles again, and probably 1 to keep, unless it really seems worth dumping the last for just 1 damage right before allowing Divine Focus to finally die. Luckily, she drew her Aegis and so might avoid dying, but she's also drawn a reason not to pitch her whole hand to Divine Focus after all - her mega-nuke Wrathful Retribution has finally shown up, letting her deal 28 damage by discarding three other cards plus playing this one, so she can only spare 2 cards before surrendering that option, and that's if she doesn't want to keep the duplicate Aegis, a replacement Absolution, or the spectacularly awesome Embolden, which lets Absolute Zero do some truly ridiculous tricks by giving him an extra Power each turn. The only card she's really comfortable discarding at the start of Expat's turn is Sacrosanct Martyr, which lets Fanny damage herself in order to damage others...it's a bit too late for her to start in on that strategy, and so she just Focuses on Omni for 2.

Though it will lose its utility the very next turn, Expat finally and gladly plays a Submachine Gun with which to hose down all the non-hero targets for 1 projectile damage; it bounces off the Triceratops, but does a good job of scratching everything else, leaving the Repair Drone almost dead. Fanatic discards the weak one-shot Sanctifying Strike to fry Omni down to 55; she now has nothing left in her hand but the Wrath, and Scholar warns her that he will not be able to save her from dying after her next turn, since there are only two copies of Alchemical Redirection in his deck.

Unable to benefit from the damage of Isothermic Transducer, Zero doesn't bother Realigning that Module, and instead gets his Focused Apertures; he heals 1 HP as the Realignment cools him down more than it heats him up, and then he Thermodynamics himself to heal for 2 more. It's quite sad and painful the way he has to keep sitting on his best options and just fiddle with his HP gauge while waiting to start a turn with all his pieces in play, but somehow he's still one of my favorite heroes, just for how nutso he could be if only everything were perfect. Scholar devotes his turn to playing a new Alchemical Redirection and gaining 1 more HP, and then...wait a minute. Redirect ALL damage to Scholar? That's not optional, so that means it would include the 4 that Fanatic took, and the 2-cold-1-fire dealt by Zero's Modular Realignment into Focused Apertures (I'll go so far as to undo Zero's Thermodynamicking himself and thus damaging Scholar by 2 more, but otherwise all the plays that I logged that round will stand, despite them having been a much less good idea. So Fanatic is in better shape than I thought, but Scholar is down to just 12 HP! Even so, though, he plays the second Redirection...and Fanny wishes that she'd kept discarding to Divine Focus, as she's no longer incredibly low on HP (having 6 instead of 2) and thus is slightly less motivated to Retribute at the cost of doing anything else.

Having the chance now at least, Fanatic dumps Absolution for one last 2-damage Focus on Omnitron, and then the Trike gores the second-lowest-HP target, which is no longer a 2-HP Fanatic but a 3-HP Drone. As is traditional for dinosaurs, he's helping the heroes prevail! The Automaton bites the dust and leaves the Assault Drone weakened, and then a Hurricane begins (this is the only card in the Time Cataclysm which neither references time-travel cliches nor appears to belong to a different Environment; it seems to exist for solely mechanical reasons, as it references the Anomaly card-type which all the cards representing other Environments have, and it does have that type itself, but has nothing in particular to do with the otherwise unrepresented "Final Wasteland" environment)...each of the players must return one of their cards to their deck at the end of each enviro turn, preventing them from drawing any new cards as long as the Hurricane continues, which it will if they don't kill the Trike before the next enviro turn. (Some gratitude the heroes show the poor dino for having taken out the most dangerous of the Drones.)

I can't believe how long this is taking....
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 » Mon Sep 30, 2013 1:30 am

Round 9

I forgot to have Fanatic blast Omnitron one more time before giving up on Divine Focus, but it would only have been 1 damage, and that's not really worth a card now that she's done Praying for refills. The Rampaging Robot is seriously getting down to business this turn, playing another Automaton and another Assault Drone; now there are four Drones, so Omnitron is healed by 5 (just when he was almost down to the halfway mark!), and then the bots deal 5, 4, and 5 damage - taking out the Scholar! I did not see that coming; he could have made himself invincible last turn, and if I hadn't erred on the previous players' turns, he probably would have. But hey, I wanted a casualty, and now I've got one; I've never had the Scholar die in a game, so I'll get to see how his Incap abilities (which are definitely not Incapabilities!) play out in practice.

After allowing Divine Focus to perish (as she really should have last turn; Scholar would have survived and she would only have given up a few damage), Fanatic plays her Aegis of Resurrection, unable to make effective use of her Power and redrawing a card that she put back last turn. It'll be a while before she'll have anything much to accomplish, but at least now she isn't likely to die anymore.

Expatriette didn't like putting a card from her hand back much more than the other heroes, but she did have a plan, and now puts it into effect: playing Arsenal Access, she reveals the top two cards of her deck, and one of them is a duplicate Flak Jacket she can't even play, so she definitely gets the topdecked card, a set of Incendiary Rounds to load into her Submachine Gun. Now, instead of dealing 1 projectile damage that bounces off every single non-hero target currently in play, she deals 2 fire damage to them all, 1 of which gets through to kill that damn Repair Drone, weaken the Automaton, and scratch everything else. (She could have put back a different card and just played the Rounds normally, and she'd still have Arsenal Access, but it was worth a shot at getting a Tactical Shotgun or something instead; things worked out, however marginally.) Ammo cards are discarded after their Gun is fired (except during a Fixed Point of course), so next turn she won't have that boost, but she won't need it anymore since Omnitron will be in Factory mode.

For the third consecutive turn, Absolute Zero plays Modular Realignment, and this time he does get back his Transducer; the Realignment deals him 2 cold and 1 fire, and he Transduces the 1 fire into 2 cold, hitting the earlier and more damaged Assault Drone to get 1 damage thru, as well as gaining 1 HP. He then loses that 1 HP by Thermodynamicking himself with fire for a change, Transducing another net point of cold damage to finish the Drone off. It kinda sucked to not hit Omnitron at all that turn, and it might have been the wrong decision, since Scholar's turn is still coming up....

...and of his three incap abilities, one grants 1 HP to two heroes and the other gives a card, with neither of those being anywhere near as powerful as his "One hero may use a power now", so he naturally does that. The best Zero can accomplish is 1 more damage at the cost of 1 of his own HP, and Fanatic can't accomplish anything except possibly to Exorcise herself, which would be possibly useful if she were about to Retribute but she doesn't have the cards for that. So the power goes to Expatriette, who can't usefully fire the Submachine Gun this turn without its Ammo, but can Load a card which is very nice to play without wasting your turn on it: Speed Loading, the card which pretty much makes her entire Ammo mechanic work as more than an occasional "nothing else to do" bonus. We'll see it in operation next round, so I won't detail exactly what it does, but it's definitely one of Expat's coolest cards, and soon you'll see just how cool.

The Dinosaur is still in play, so it kills another Drone (both are tied for lowest HP, so they're also tied for second-lowest, and the heroes choose to kill the Automaton for previously detailed reasons). Also, the Dinosaur is still in play, so the Hurricane continues (what exactly those things have to do with each other I can't say; it might make sense if the Hurricane was a "time storm" that was connected directly to the rest of the cards in the deck, but the art and flavor text don't indicate any such relationship). Out comes a third Enviro card for the first time since the double Rift: Marsquake! This very nasty card deals 2 damage to each target after the heroes have put back cards from the Typhoon; Fanny is left down to just 4 HP, Expat and Zero fall to 14 and 15 respectively, and Omnitron and his surviving Drone are only dinged. But the real nastiness happens at the start of the next Environment turn; besides keeping the Typhoon out, the Marsquake will destroy a hero Ongoing (currently that can only be Speed Loading), a villain Ongoing (there aren't any at the moment), and an Environment card (probably itself, but I could see an argument for the Trike at this point, as it still has 6 HP and is not proving easy to kill without sparing Omnitron).

Yikes...we're into the double digits of rounds....
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 » Mon Sep 30, 2013 2:16 am

Round 10

Omnitron picked a lovely time to bust out his first really dangerous Component, the Disintegration Ray. His trash is now thicker than his deck, and from it he randomly manages to obtain the single other component, his Interpolation Beam. So now, if the heroes can manage to hit him for 7, he'll lose them both, but if they don't...well, one will die to Marsquake before the Ray fires, but the Beam will be a problem in the interim. The Assault Drone hits Absolute Zero (who now wishes he'd zapped Omnitron, since the Marsquake would have finished off the other Drone) for 2 damage, leaving Expat now the HP leader; if that Disintegration Ray does fire, she'll just let her Flak Jacket take it.

Fanny has just one card left to play, Embolden, so she puts that on AZ, scratches Omnitron twice with her Exorcism power, and redraws Wrathful Retribution, which has been her obvious choice of card to put back each time Hurricane required it. She takes 2 damage for doing that, so the Marsquake will now kill her, but the Aegis will make her get better, and then she'll have to hope she survives long enough to play WR the turn after that, having skipped her turn to draw cards and maybe gotten one from Scholar.

It might prove unwise due to the Hurricane, but Expat opts to use the first of two start-of-turn abilities which Speed Loading grants her, putting Incendiary Rounds from her trash back on top of her deck. Except, actually, no, I looked at her hand again and that is NOT the thing to do. So she ignores that ability and just uses the other one, which lets her play an Ammo, putting Shock Rounds into play on the Submachine Gun. She then plays Reload, which under better circumstances would let her put an Ammo from her trash directly into play, but her only Gun is already loaded (Pride and Prejudice can hold two Ammo cards each, but normal guns are not so capacious), so she has to settle for it going into her hand, from which she hopes Speed Loading will let her replay it next turn. She then fires the Submachine Gun, first dealing 1 damage to Omnitron first, and then triggering Shock Rounds to deal 1 damage to everything, before continuing to deal the rest of the Submachine Gun's damage. The Trike shrugs off both blasts, but the Assault Drone dies and Omnitron feels the pain, falling to 54 HP. Knowing that the card on top of her deck is not very useful, she chooses not to draw a card and thus avoids damage from the Beam.

Finally, AZ has both Modules in play, and is Emboldened besides. He plays Thermal Shockwave, then uses Thermodynamics to deal himself a fire damage, which transduces into 2 cold damage to Omnitron. He then activates the Shockwave to deal 1 cold damage, +1 for the Focused Apertures, to each of three targets. First he hits himself, gaining 2 HP instead of dealing actual damage; he then takes 1 HP off the Trike and 2 off Omnitron, who now loses his Components. (AZ still has ten cards in hand and wouldn't have minded skipping his draw phase as Expat did, but so it goes.) Finally, having successfully inflicted 5 cold damage (4 to Omnitron and 1 to the Trike), he deals himself 5 damage as the backlash of the Shockwave hits him - which in turn backlashes through the Transducer and hits Omni for 6 cold damage! That's far from the best that AZ can do with Thermal Shockwave, his ultimate meganuke and potentially almost as nasty as Wrathful Retribution (if he deals enough fire damage to kill himself, he doesn't Transduce before dying, and so the potential output of the Shockwave is not quite as high as Fanatic's WR because he has one fewer HP to spare...but of course he has to be damaging other things in order to get that of a Shockwave anyway, and he isn't discarding three cards to pull it off). At the end of his turn, AZ takes 2 damage from Fanny to retain her blessing, more because he plans on feeding Embolden to the Marsquake than out of any desire to try and do the Thermodynamic Shockwave Tango again.

Omnitron is finally below 50 HP! It is therefore an opportune moment for the incapacitated Scholar to act in a more contemplative manner; he could grant AZ a power usage, letting him Thermal Shockwave again, but it'd be less impressive this time without the Thermodynamics assist (3 outgoing cold damage and self-healing for 2, then taking 3 fire damage and blasting Omni for 4, for a net effect of 1 self-damage and 6 damage to Omnitron, while his last turn was 1 self-damage, 2 outgoing, then 3 outgoing and 2 healing, followed by 5 self-damage and 6 outgoing, for a total of 4 HP lost and 10 shaved off the villain...the ratio is much more favorable, but the total is just less epic). Granting Fanatic a card draw would make little difference, but by giving her 1 HP, he can delay the moment that her Aegis pops and increases her to a still-not-that-comfortable amount of HP which nonetheless reduces her Retribution output. And AZ also needs the healing, so Scholar grants it.

At the start of the Enviro turn, there are no longer any weaklings in play besides Fanatic, so the Trike targets the second-weakest thing it can find besides itself, which is Absolute Zero; he drops to 5 HP. The Typhoon finds other Anomalies and stays in play, and Marsquake then destroys it along with Embolden, finding no villain card to affect. Out pops a new Environment card, the Passing Tumbleweed (which is presumably all that's left of "Silver Gulch 1883" by the beginning of 1884, given how violent it apparently was); this kills other Environment cards (appropriately enough leaving the Environment eventually empty of anything save itself), and has no other effect. Its 1-HP status means it will die if Expat fires her Submachine Gun, and its ability to destroy Marsquake after Marsquake has destroyed the Dino makes that undesireable, so Expat begins planning other possibilities for her turn.

This one goes to....
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 » Mon Sep 30, 2013 3:14 am

Round 11

Omnitron is still working to prove he doesn't suck; this turn he puts down the Electro-Magnetic Railgun followed by another Electro-Pulse Explosive, so now the heroes are in for a world of hurt if they can't do massive damage to both Omnitron and his Device, while suffering his damage reduction! They've got until the start of the next villain turn...

Completely helpless to accomplish anything, Fanatic draws two cards.

Expat speed-loads her Sub-Gun with Incendiary Rounds, having foregone the topdeck ability since she badly needs new stuff. The Speed Loading will be the next Ongoing to fall prey to Marsquake. Firing the Sub-Gun, she unfortunately burns the Tumbleweed to ashes, but gives the Trike a singing, takes 1 HP off the EPE, and drops Omnitron to 45. She redraws the Quick Draw which she put onto her deck way back when the Hurricane began, and ends her turn.

As it happens, AZ has the perfect card! He plays Fueled Freeze, which outright destroys up to three Ongoings, and not only takes out the Component without having to actually damage Omnitron, but also sacrifices his own Thermal Shockwave and Expat's Speed Loading, one of which would soon die to the Marsquake anyway. This lets him deal 3 cold damage, increased by the Apertures but decreased by various armor, to the Trike, the Bomb, and Omnitron himself. If he hadn't destroyed the Shockwave, he'd have dealt out only 2 damage to each of those three targets, and could then have Shockwaved for 6 fire damage to himself after giving himself 2 HP, leaving him at 1 and dealing 7 damage to the Bomb...but then he'd have less HP than Fanatic, and the Trike would kill her, Resurrecting her but destroying the Aegis, she'd take 2 damage from Marsquake and the Shockwave would be destroyed, and the Bomb would still have 5 HP, letting it deal 6 damage on the villain turn, nearly killing Fanatic and finishing AZ off. He's dead anyway, alas, his Frost-Bound Drains and Hoarfires and other awesome cards never played, but at least this way his death will be weirdly more beneficial by leaving the Bomb deadlier, since Fanny and Expat are both going to shrug it off thanks to their protective gear. As his one last living accomplishment, he takes 1 damage to deal 1 through Omnitron's resistance, leaving the villain at 41 and himself at 4.

Scholar gives Fanatic the third card in hand she needs in order to Wrathfully Retribute, and then the Trike gores AZ down to 1 HP just before the Marsquake kills him, drops Fanny to 1, shaves 1 off Omnitron's HP, and brings the Bomb's HP down to the number of this round. All that is a bit later, of course, as the Marsquake damages at end of turn; first it destroys an Environment card, which could be itself, but I would rather damage Omnitron by 1 rather than spare the heroes from ultimately consequenceless damage, so it destroys the Trike instead of itself, and then a new card comes out: Oppressive Smog. Welp, Scholar and AZ are dead, and Fanatic actually likes being lower in HP as long as she survives, so this Environment is kind of a happy circumstance.

For the first time this game, I feel that a round was short enough and inconsequential enough (apart from the whole Absolute-Zero-dying thing) that I can move on to the next round in this same post.

Round 12

Quite the opposite of that Voss game I had...the two male heroes (one of which was Zero in both cases) are dead, while the two females (one of which was Fanatic) have survived, and in both cases the males came later in turn order, so now living heroes have to act before dead ones, which is useful in some ways and problematic in others. After Omnitron flips, the Bomb deals a number of damage equal to the round number, but none of it actually matters save to destroy the two girls' armor and give Fanny back 9 HP (or possibly 7, I'm checking that on the forums). Omni then plays another Interpolation Beam, then rebuilds his Repair Drone to regain 2 HP. (Oh, that's the answer.)

Continuing to be suicidally bold, Fanatic doesn't play her Wrathful Retribution for a mere 20 damage now to ensure she doesn't die before getting the chance; instead, she Final Dives the Repair Drone into the Bomb, dropping it to 7 HP and then Exorcising it down to 5. She redraws her fourth card, taking 2 damage, and finds it to be an End of Days! Sheesh, talk about locking the barn door behind the stolen horse. (An annoying nuance: if there are no other hero Ongoings in play, Marsquake destroys End of Days before End of Days destroys it. Apparently only the Earth's days are ending.)

Expat Quick-Draws "Prejudice" from her deck, firing it instead of her Sub-Gun since it will do 1 more damage to the Bomb, which is more important than Omnitron right now. She suffers 2 damage to draw her first new card in bloody forever...and it's a damn Reload instead of anything useful. Sigh.

AZ's first incap turn. If the Bomb were down to 1 HP, he could outright destroy it, and if he were ahead of an active hero, it'd be worth granting them +2 to their next damage instance (right now, it's too hard to guess whether the chosen hero will actually survive long enough to use the buff). So his only real option is to grant a Power usage; it goes to Fanatic, who Exorcises the Bomb again, leaving it at 1 HP. Scholar then grants Expat a Power usage of her own; she fires the Sub-Gun, destroying the Bomb and putting Omnitron back down to 41.

Though it risks making it easier for Omnitron to heal, Expat discards her duplicate Sub-Gun to destroy Oppressive Smog, then Marsquake destroys the Interpolation Beam and itself. For a moment there are no Enviro cards in play, and then a 5-HP Agent called Filter Spy comes out and shoots Expatriette (the second-highest non-Agent target, as well as the second-lowest).

And continuing again, since the tension is too great to stop.

Round 13

Omnitron flips over and then blasts out another Automaton as well as another Railgun. Fanatic is the highest HP, so she gets knocked down to 4 by the Automaton...and as it stands, both heroes will die next turn. So, yet again putting off Wrathful Retribution, Fanatic plays End of Days, doesn't bother using her Power, and draws a card. Having one last chance before she loses her Guns again, Expat plays Unload, allowing her to use two Powers since she has two Guns; she Loads her last card in hand, Reload (that's a rather nice string of names, even if the order isn't quite right), getting Incendiary Rounds onto Prejudice and then firing them at Omnitron to knock him down to 39. The two dead heroes then cooperate, AZ boosting Expat's next damage by 2 and Scholar granting her a power use; if both had granted her power uses, she could have fired Prejudice for 1 damage and 1 damage through Omni's armor, but this way, she gets to take 3 HP off him.

The last card from the Time Cataclysm comes out, a Crushing Hallway. If still in play at the start of the next turn, it would deal 4 damage to each target (and destroy any hero Ongoing cards), which might not kill Expat but would certainly come close, and would not finish off Omnitron even after Fanny's Retribution (assuming she survives to deliver that). So the heroes need to get rid of it now; Expat discards her 1-card hand and it's gone.

Well, those three rounds happened. I think it's time I hit "Submit"...the game may end next round, but may also drag on for a while yet. Already I think it's the longest SOTM game I've ever played, in rounds and hours alike, and by a fair margin in the latter case (though me screwing around with videos in between card plays hasn't helped).
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 » Mon Sep 30, 2013 3:27 am

Round 14

Omnitron flips and puts out an Assault Drone, then reanimates...an Automaton. The weaker Drone hits Expat for 4, then Fanatic is annihilated by 5 damage, her Wrathful Retribution delayed just a moment too long. Now there's no hope for a victory...Omnitron actually gets to exterminate humanity this time! But Expat gets at least one more turn, and first Fanatic gives her 2 HP, before she is forced to draw 2 cards because she has nothing to do. Zero grants her a Load to put out a Submachine Gun which she has drawn, and Scholar lets her fire it, but it just knocks Omnitron down to 35 HP and scratches his Bots. The Enviro deck is reshuffled and produces another Hurricane, and Expat puts her one card in hand back onto the deck.

Round 15

Omnitron plays his last card, a second Disintegration Ray, then reshuffles his trash and plays one more card, but it doesn't really matter what it is. If it's a Drone, the Assault Drone will kill Expat; otherwise, the Automaton will. OMNITRON ACTUALLY WON.

Well, that was an epic experience and well deserved to be written down. I've developed a new respect for the Time Cataclysm, which is still my least favorite Environment by far, but does have its moments at least...for a while there in the middle turns, it almost seemed to have a sort of flow or pattern (though it broke about the time the FILTER spy came out). And while I still think that Omnitron is a weak villain, probably less dangerous even than Baron Blade, it does appear that he has a certain inexorability over the course of long games, which his high HP, occasional healing, and destruction of both Ongoings and Environments make likelier. He's fairly easy to beat, but it's not the foregone conclusion I thought it was; the longer he lives, the more things start to turn his way, and that's rather fitting for an omnicidal robot after all.

With more than 12 hours of grueling fun behind me, it's high time I signed off. Perhaps you'll hear from me at least one more time, but not for a good long while.
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 Oct 13, 2013 8:15 am

Because I have a strange aversion to free time, I've decided to go ahead and blog the special six-player Sentinels game now that I'm trying it out. I've fought the villain in question, Iron Legacy (the tyrannical alternate-future version of the hero Legacy, who lost his marbles after his daughter was killed and set out to single-handedly exterminate all evil, no matter the cost), once before, and was destroyed in four rounds; IL is one of the three "Difficulty 4" villains in the game, and this six-player mode makes it even tougher, as he has a Nemesis icon for each of the six heroes that are allowed to work together against him (the "Freedom Six", as opposed to the "Freedom Five" that the game usually revolves around, minus the heroic Legacy for obvious reasons, but plus the intern Unity and for some reason Tempest). Promo versions of the six heroes exist specifically for this storyline, but I'll just be using the originals as usual. I've selected Wagner Mars Base as a relatively placid Environment to have this tough battle in.

If you've been thinking of trying this game, I'm about to show you about how epic it can get (it probably gets a little more so if you fight IL on Advanced, but I'm not ready for that). So, really probably for the almost certain last time this time I think, 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 » Sun Oct 13, 2013 9:52 am

This game will be exceptionally difficult...while Iron Legacy has a mere 32 HP (the same as Legacy the hero), he makes up for it by starting out incredibly well-equipped, with H Ongoings in play...and in this game, H is 6. Here is his starting array:

Armored Fortitude - reduces damage to IL by one, and he heals H at the start of the villain turn. He has two of these this game. It won't be possible to even scratch him until they're gone.

Superhuman Redirection - hits for 5 damage bounce off him once a turn and hit a hero instead. Two of these too, but they won't be worth worrying about until he loses the Fortitudes.

Demoralizing Presence - +1 to Iron Legacy's damage, and at the end of the villain turn, each hero deals themself 1 psychic damage.

Galvanized - +1 to IL's damage, and the card is Indestructible, meaning it can't leave play in any way.

So, isn't that lovely. IL deals +2 damage, takes -2, and heals and deflects damage besides, with the heroes-damage-themselves as an insulting cherry on top of the whole mess. At least this game is likely to be mercifully short.

Round 1

As if his innate 3 damage to each hero wasn't enough, Legacy rips a Rule From the Front on his first turn, dealing H-1 melee damage to each non-villain target - that starts at 5 in this game, but the nemesis bonus and the two boosters up it to a staggering 8, and on top of that, "each player must either discard 2 cards or destroy 1 of their cards". I haven't been able to get a confirmation from the forums as to whether the discarding is compulsory if you have nothing to destroy, but I'm forced to go ahead with the assumption that it is. At the end of the turn, IL then automatically deals 3 melee damage to each hero target (it may eventually matter that Rule From the Front hits environment targets but IL's innate attack doesn't), and again that's increased by 3 with Galvanized, Demoralizing Presence, and the nemesis rule. So with the final 1 self-damage, the heroes are each down 15 HP (from their starting amounts no higher than 29), plus they've discarded two cards, and they haven't had a turn yet!

Having reluctantly discarded the card-drawing Trust Fund, as well as a Combat Stance that would have consistently activated but not accomplished much, the 11-HP Wraith has retained two cards, one of which is her amazing Impromptu Invention. She draws a card (the basically-worthless-in-this-match Mega Computer), then tutors any Equipment from her deck, choosing the Utility Belt which lets her use two powers each turn. She then gets to play a card on top of that, and puts down her last card besides the Computer, a Stun Bolt. The Belt lets her use her innate "Stealth" power in addition to firing the Stun Bolt, which can't do any damage to IL, but does nonetheless reduce his damage by 1 until her next turn. She ends the turn by drawing Infrared Eyepiece, her supreme piece of deck-control tech; if the heroes can survive a few rounds, she'll be able to get a handle on all of IL's turns and keep his nastiest cards from coming out, unless two of them are right in a row on his deck (which seems like a realistic possibility given nearly every card I've seen, but still).

Absolute Zero has a card called Fueled Freeze in his deck, which is the best thing in the world to play on turn 1 against IL (unless you're in a game with fewer heroes and most of IL's starting ongongs are copies of Galvanized). Sadly, he didn't draw it; after discarding the too-slow Cold Snap and the trash-searching Modular Realignment (keeping the suicidal and currently useless Frost-Bound Drain by a small margin over MR), Zero plays his own search card, Onboard Module Installation, enabling him to draw a card (the also too-slow Impale) and then put a Module from his deck into his hand before playing it or something else. He takes the Null-Point Calibration Unit and then uses "Thermodynamics" to deal himself 1 cold damage, which instead becomes 1 healing; this isn't much of a turn against the kind of pressure the heroes are facing, but it's the best he can do. Drawing a second copy of NPCU, Zero ends his turn.

Tachyon discarded Nimble Strike, which does a mere 1 damage and thus is easily dispensed with, and Sonic Vortex, a multi-target damager that's not worth worrying about in this game. Like Zero and Wraith, she has ongoing destruction in her deck, and like them she failed to draw it, so Tempest is the group's last chance. First Tacky plays Pushing the Limits just because it doesn't cost her a play and will replace itself; she has zero intention of taking damage to keep it around. Then she plays Fleet of Foot, emptying her hand but letting everyone (including herself) draw a card, and giving her yet another play. And what does she draw? Blinding Speed, her Ongoing-destroyer! (Upstream of her, Wraith draws a redundant Utility Belt, but Zero gets his other module, the Isothermic Transducer, which in this match he will probably only use to heal himself of all fire damage he takes, rather than to deal damage to both himself and others.) Since it's too soon to start beating on Iron Legs, the priority is taking out the one of his damage-boosters which can be taken out, and so Demoralizing Presence bites the dust. She then uses her piddling "Rapid Recon" Power, channel-surfing past another Sonic Vortex, and ends the turn by drawing another Fleet of Foot and Lightning Reflexes, which would be one of her better cards if she had anything resembling a full hand.

Tempest started the game with two damage-prevention cards, which he keeps, and two other cards which he does not. Lightning Slash would eventually be useful, dealing 5 damage in one shot, but under the circumstances it wasn't worth keeping at the start of the game against all IL's defenses, and environment-destroyer Flash Flood is completely worthless on the first turn, so Tempest retains only the Elemental Subwave Inducer, which protects himself, and Shielding Winds, which protects everyone. He plays the latter, despite having also drawn Into the Stratosphere from Fleet of Foot; sending one card back onto IL's deck would certainly be useful, but not just yet. His "Squall" power is useless, so he just draws a card to end his turn - it's the Gene-Bound Shackles, so Squall might not be useless next turn.

The bots on which Unity relies are hero targets, and so they will lack much in the way of utility against mass-damaging IL; Platform Bot and Raptor Bot are instantly moribund, so she doesn't bother to hang onto those, but keeps a Supply Crate which can help with her card supply, and one of the best of her bots, Champion Bot, the actually Iron version of Legacy. Fleet of Foot draws her a Brainstorm, and she's immensely tempted to play it right away for the extra cards it gives, but the damage it can also deal would go completely to waste, so she plays the Crate instead, drawing her own Ongoing-destroyer which I completely forgot about, Bee Bot. She plays that rather than Champ with her Bot-Fix power, having obtained AZ's permission to trash his NPCU since he has a spare. The bee-bot won't survive Legacy's next attack, obviously, as it has only 1 HP - but it surviving is not the point, as its death destroys an Environment or Ongoing card and deals a little damage besides (though the damage won't matter in this case). Uni ends her turn by drawing Powered Shock Wave, a potential Big Boom if she can stick some Golems in play, but probably that won't happen this game, and there's only one target to hit, so it isn't a great card for her right now.

Bunker drew a Decomissioned Hardware in his initial hand, so it didn't hurt too much to discard his Grenade Launcher and Heavy Plating; he then drew another DecommWare, so it seemed obvious that he should play one and get his Heavy Plating back, rather than just dropping into Recharge Mode for more cards and the same amount of damage prevention. He uses Initialize to draw a Maintenance Unit, then draws a second Recharge Mode, and the last hero turn ends.

The Wagner Mars Base puts out a Maintenance Level, which plays another environment card, and that one is Villainous Weaponry...just what the heroes needed, another damage boost for IL. Well, this is a non-hero target with 5 HP, so if IL gets another Rule From the Front, he'll destroy it before doing any damage ("Pah, these weapons are for villains, and I am a HERO!" CRUNCH!), but if he doesn't destroy them, they'll increase his damage to the heroes and this game will continue trending in the direction of a turn-3 TPK.
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 Oct 13, 2013 12:34 pm

Round 2

The discard parade continues as IL plays Former Allies, requiring every hero to surrender a card and then playing a new villain card; the discards are Utility Belt, Impale, Lightning Reflexes, very reluctantly the Elemental Subwave Inducer, Powered Shockwave, and Recharge Mode. The villain then plays Beat Down, which damages only hero targets, so Villainous Weaponry remains intact, and unpleasantness happens. Beat Down hits all but 2 heroes in a normal game, but with Unity's Bee Bot hanging around, there's one extra target and thus three heroes are spared.

The targets with the lowest HP are targeted, so aside from Bee Bot, that means a 3-way tie between Wraith, Unity and Tempest...Wraith is protected by Stealth, so she's the obvious choice, and Unity volunteers for the other hit since she's somewhat disadvantaged in this fight (what with IL killing her bots all the time), often deals damage through her bots rather than personally, and is less likely to be able to carry the fight by herself than Tempest. The damage starts at the same H-2 as the number of targets, so 4 in this case, and Bee Bot is the first to die, so it takes out Villainous Weaponry and prevents that from boosting the damage to the other targets. That leaves only Galvanized and the nemesis bonus to enhance the damage to Wraith and Unity, so each of them takes 6, and Wraith shaves 2 off that total, leaving Uni at 5 and Wraith at 7. Oh, wait...I forgot, there are four targets, so Tempest is also hit after all, and I also forgot Tempest's Shielding Winds (I'm unable to obtain a clear ruling, so I must for now assume that Stealth, being the older effect, reduces the damage to Wraith and thus prevents Shielding Winds from first reducing it more, since it's no longer high enough to be affected). So Uni and Tempest benefit from Shielding Winds, and Wraith from Stealth, reducing all three from 11 to 7 and crap, I also forgot Stun Bolt, which also reduces the damage by 1 in each case, but this doesn't drop it below 5 for anyone, so Shielding Winds still reduce it further. So the three affected heroes are left at 8.

All of the victims of Beat Down then gain a "you cannot deal damage" token which lasts until the next villain turn, assuming any actual damage was taken (which it of course was in this case). This hurts Tempest the most since he was going to start in with his Shackles...he'll still have to play a card and not use a power, which is always a painful waste. Unity also suffers because she can't Brainstorm to best effect; Wraith doesn't really mind, since her Stun Bolt doesn't need to deal damage in order to work. And so, IL finally moves into his end phase, dealing 3 melee damage to each hero, increased by Galvanize and Nemesis but reduced by Stun Bolt, which unfortunately leaves it at 4 and thus prevents Shielding Winds from applying. (Guess Unity should have left the Villainous Weaponry alone and taken out an Armored Fortitude instead; there would have been 1 more damage to the three victims of Beat Down, but then 1 less to everyone including them!) Bunker reduces this to 3 and is left with 10; Zero has 11, Tacky has 8, and the three Beat Down victims are now all at 4. The first of them finally gets a turn thereafter.

Wraith plays her Infrared Eyepiece, using that power first; she discovers that both of the upcoming villain cards are Iron-Fist Strike, which will deal an amazing 7 damage to the highest-HP hero (currently slated to be Zero, but he can fix that by fire-damaging himself to put Bunker in front), as well as destroying two hero Ongoings. Only two currently exist, and Unity definitely can't help with that since there are none in her deck (she is unique in this regard), while Bunker and Wraith also specialize more in Equipment and Tachyon has only a handful of cards that sit on the table at all. So unless Tempest and Zero can really cary the day, Shielding Winds is doomed; it's distinctly questionable whether Tachy should keep Pushing the Limits out, as it costs her 2 HP but will provide an easily disposable target for one of those two destructions. Having shared her tactical data with her teammates, Wraith draws a Micro-Targeting Computer, then goes Stealth, not wanting to repeat the Stun Bolt / Shielding Winds mishap. She ends her turn by drawing Razor Ordinance; once damage can actually be dealt to IL, she'll be well set up to deal some, assuming she's alive at the time.

The only thing Zero can usefully do is play his new NPCU, but he doesn't actually want to heal in view of the situation with Bunker and Iron-Fist Strike, so he opts to Thermodynamically hurt himself with fire instead (on very rare occasions, using Zero's suicidal power "out of the box" actually proves beneficial). He then draws his multi-target Hoarfire.

Tachy has no need to Push the Limits given her possession of only one card, but there aren't any more Ongoings than there were, so she decides she'd better keep it around, and thus drops to 6 HP. She plays her Fleet of Foot, giving everyone a card; Wraith finds (gaaah! I accidentally clicked on a link, and I'm immensely thankful that this text didn't vanish into digital oblivion as I feared it would) Throwing Knives, which are not likely to be useful in this match, and Zero gets another Impale, which ditto. Tachy draws and plays Quick Insight, letting her draw three cards and discard all but one of them, which she can then play thanks to Pushing the Limits! Research Grant is an Ongoing that would be nice to have or could be fed to the Iron-Fist Strike, and Hypersonic Assault is normally a must-keep card, but against all this redirection it can't get through...so Tachy goes with Blinding Speed and takes out the first of the Armored Fortitudes. Now, it's actually conceivable that the heroes could batter through 7 damage in one round and get at least 1 of it to stick! Tachyon Rapid Recons her way past a Lightning Reflexes with some regret, and instead gets HUD Goggles that are similarly useless in the current situation, with Fleet of Foot being the tasty filling in this if-only-I-had-cards sandwich that she draws the bottom 2/3 of at the end of her turn.

If it's good to know what the villain will do next turn, then it's even better to know what he'll do the turn after that, so Tempest knocks Armored Fortitude "Into the Stratosphere", putting it on top of the villain deck so it will then be replayed. Normally he would then become the first hero to deal damage all game, as Legs is now completely vulnerable to hits for 4 or less damage and will not heal on the next turn. But since he was Beaten Down, he can't do any more this turn except draw Otherworldly Resilience...which, come to think of it, he already drew due to Fleet of Foot and could have played this turn, but oh well. He instead draws Grevious Hailstorm, an upgraded version of his innate power and thus not exceptionally useful in this match, as his end-of-turn card.

Unity drew her bot-healing Inspired Repair off Fleet of Foot, and at the start of her turn she pops the Supply Crate for two more cards, the "tutor" Flash Forge and her make-two-bots-at-once multi-tool Construction Pylon. Since she has only one Bot in hand at the moment, and feels like risking that there will be Equipment among the other players she can destroy, she goes damn near "all in", keeping only the bot and Brainstorm as she Flash Forges the other half of her hand, obtaining Stealth Bot and Swift Bot, her versions of Wraith and Tachy. Knowing that Iron Legacy will kill her and Tempest on his turn otherwise, Unity converts Wraith's Stun Bolt (which won't make much of a difference at that point) into Stealth Bot, who has 5 HP, reduces damage to itself by 1, and can take damage in place of the heroes. When IL goes to hit all heroes, he'll target Stealth Bot directly if she's still around, but she can get herself killed intercepting some blows first, and thus spare the heroes who will otherwise die (notably her creator). Unity then draws Scrap Metal, a potent tool for recycling and rebuilding damaged Golems, but too slow to be helpful in this match.

If Bunker plans on tanking, then it stands to reason that he might like to get out a Maintenance Unit, so he heals himself up to 12; apparently AZ didn't need to hurt himself on his turn after all, oh well. Bunker also had an Auxillary Power Supply which helps with cards and powers, thanks to Fleet of Foot, but this seemed a lower priority than the potential to maintain near-equilibrium with IL's damage while in Recharge Mode, taking only 1 net damage per round as long as no new nastiness appears. He ends his turn by picking up an Omni-Cannon, which won't be useful for a long time.

The only character who even slightly minds reshuffling their trash is Bunker, so the heroes have no problem getting rid of Maintenance Level; once that's gotten rid of, an Oxygen Leak comes out and is instantly sealed by Bunker discarding his Omni-Cannon, so that he now again has something to choose with DecommWare on a future turn. With that nice little ribbon tied around it, the second round finally 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 » Sun Oct 13, 2013 1:32 pm

Round 3

Iron Legacy replays his Armored Fortitude, having still not taken any damage, and then dishes out his usual 5 to each of his nemeses; assuming the older Shielding Winds applies first and then her own reduction, Stealth Bot takes 2 standing in front of Unity and 2 more standing in front of Tempest, leaving her still alive to even take damage for Tachyon before annihilating herself. Wraith was not protected by her golem-bot alter ego, nor does she benefit from both of Shielding Winds and Stealth, but either way she is left at 1 HP...still no incapacitations! Without any interference at all, Absolute Zero takes the full 5 and is left with that same amount, while Bunker's Heavy Plating (also being later than Shielding Winds) reduces the damage he takes to just 2, leaving him where he was before he played the Maint Unit. For the first time, it begins to look as if the heroes have a chance, though it's vastly unlikely they won't suffer at least one casualty and more likely several. (Then again, it's been quite a few games since I've lost more than one hero, so I'll at least sort of enjoy the novelty.)

The almost-dead Wraith decides she doesn't want to go down without at least scratching the villain; Stealth isn't likely to save her, and she rather misses her Stun Bolt, so she plays Razor Ordinance, her best damage-dealer, and deals 3 damage to Legs, reduced to 2. For the first time, he's been hurt! She then uses the Eyepiece to decide whether his next card is still Iron-Fist Strike, and decides that instead, it will be Iron Justice, which deals 1 less damage and forces discards instead of destruction. She'll probably be the one to discard, and will have to dump her whole hand, but she has stuff aplenty in play so this is quite acceptible. She draws Inventory Barrage and Impromptu Invention, both very good cards, but since she's likely to die moments after being forced to discard them, it's only logical to do so.

Daring to hope he might yet get one more turn, Zero plays his Transducer and heals himself for 1 with cold, drawing a second Frost-Bound Drain.

Tachy lets Pushing the Limits go, and then for the third time this game, she plays Fleet of Foot so everyone can draw. Wraith gets a Combat Stance, and Zero the questionable Sub-Zero Atmosphere. Tachy gains a Sonic Vortex, and plays it just because she can, first chaining it through HUD Goggles; she deals 3 damage to Legs, reduced by 2, dropping him to 28. He's not yet past the point where he'll heal it all with Armored Fortitude, but he's getting there. She Rapid-Recons past a Research Grant and draws Accelerated Assault, her 1-damage-to-everyone card which isn't the damage-preventing Hypersonic Assault (although they are both Assaults), but merely a Burst that does nothing special without a card to look for it in the trash.

Fleet of Foot causes Tempest to draw Vicious Cyclone, a card of questionable utility which he won't survive to use, and plays his Gene-Bound Shackles since he doubts that he can survive any longer than Wraith even with the aid of Otherworldly Resilience. All it would take is a Villainous Weaponry, and Shielding Winds wouldn't save him, so he decides he'd rather push some damage through now, using Squall to hit for 3 which becomes 2. At this point, any damage Unity or Bunker does will stay, while otherwise Armored Fortitude will heal him to full. Far too late, Tempest draws Reclaim From the Deep.

Though the damage bounces off Armored Fortitude, Unity plays Brainstorm anyway, and she gets exactly what she needed: another Bee Bot! (Apparently Armored Fortitude cannot compete with a mechanical beesting.) She also gets a Flash Forge but who cares. Ignoring Champion Bot yet again, she Bot-Fixe's Wraith's Razor Ordnance into the Bee-Bot, then draws - another Bee Bot! Oh, if only she had more HP! (Oh, I forgot the Fleet of Foot card, so she also gets Robot Reclamation, potentially recycling Bee Bots or Stealth Bot in future if she lives long enough. The order makes little difference since she would have drawn the Bee Bot first and couldn't have played it instead of Brainstorm; the only other option would have been Scrap Metal, which would have undone the Bee Bot at end of turn, so it made quote thoroughly no difference.)

Having drawn a second DecommWare from Fleet of Foot, Bunker cannot deal even 1 point of damage (if he could, he'd pop the Bee Bot to make sure Iron Legacy doesn't heal), and going into Recharge Mode would save him 1 damage per instance but prohibit him from healing for 2, so since two instances of damage are known to be headed his way and the environment deck might produce more, he does indeed go into Recharge Mode, drawing Flak Cannon and Adhesive Foam Grenade as possible future plays.

Wagner Mars Base plays the card I was both hoping for and dreading - Fire in the Biosphere. Each target takes 2 fire damage, which does pop the Bee Bot first and destroy Armored Fortitude, so the damage the heroes did was not a complete waste - but the damage doesn't affect Iron Legacy at all (he's immune to the environment, at least on his first side), so Wraith is killed outright before she could pitch her hand to the Iron Justice she arranged, and Tachyon drops to 4; Bunker is completely unaffected due to his reduction, and Zero takes the 2 damage but his Transducer then spits out 2 cold, which he uses to heal himself since he doesn't really feel like dying just yet. So the two armored heroes are fine, but everyone else must destroy an Ongoing or take 2 more damage, so Unity perishes and Tempest must ditch his Shielding Winds not to do likewise instantly, ensuring that he can't protect the other heroes anymore, and he'll still die when Legacy attacks at the end of the next turn. Tachyon is also doomed since she doesn't have an Ongoing to pitch and thus drops to 2 along with Tempest; only the two armored male humans (like IL himself, though his armor is not a powersuit but just a simple breastplate and shoulder pads) will survive, and not for very long.
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 Oct 13, 2013 3:59 pm

Round 4

So now there's only one hero Ongoing in play, and it's meant to self-destruct eventually anyhow; in retrospect, shifting from Iron-Fist Strike to Iron Justice was a severe miscalculation. But the damage is done; Bunker takes a total of 8 damage, 2 of which bounces off his armor and drops him to 4. Fortunately, he and Absolute Zero are tied for the highest hand size, so either one can ditch everything; being no longer the more obvious survivor, Bunker chooses to take the hit and dump his entire hand. Damage then goes around, calculated at 5 per hero, reduced by 2 in Bunker's case, to leave him and Zero both at 1 HP while the others succumb.

I decide that this is not a good time for my usual "play each hero's turn in a vacuum" approach, and decide that it's worth looking at all four Incap heroes to strategize how best to apply their abilities. All of them except Tempest can grant a card play, whereas he alone can grant a power; Unity and Tachyon can both grant a card draw instead, while Wraith can destroy an Ongoing. As for the third abilities of these three, both Unity and Wraith can grant HP (although for some reason, Unity is restricted to healing only the lowest-HP hero), while Tachyon has the ability to give someone back a card from their trash, placing it in their hand; Tempest offers the same ability except it's restricted to Ongoing cards. But Tempest has the most exciting of the abilities by far, as it's one that might just save the bacon of the two surviving heroes, possibly forever - Legacy seems to exclusively deal Melee damage (except for the "deal yourself 1 psychic damage" effect of Demoralizing Presence), and Tempest can grant all heroes immunity to a damage type for an entire round! So assuming someone can discard two cards to put out the Biosphere fire, and another one is not then produced, the heroes might just be invincible for the rest of the game! (Unless of course IL has a trick up his sleeve which I don't know about, which seems likely.) I had always wondered why Tempest in particular was added to the Freedom Six in IL's timeline, and it seems likely that this mechanical ability might be tied to the storyline, though I don't know which way the causation goes.

Anyway, it's time to put the theory into practice. Wraith grants Zero a card play, which he uses to deal himself 2 cold damage, instead gaining 2 HP; he then deals IL 2 fire damage, himself 1 cold damage which heals him to 4, and himself 1 fire damage which Transduces 1 cold damage which heals him, so he goes no lower in HP. Now he can actually survive hitting himself with Frost-Bound Drains on his turn (the initial cold damage can't target him, but the Transducer output can, so as long as the fire damage doesn't kill him, he can essentially ignore it and just deal out 3 cold). He then proceeds to do exactly that, before Thermodynamicking cold to heal himself up to 5. (At the end of the turn, he draws a useless Modular Realignment.) Tachyon grants him a card play to FB Drain again, dropping Legs to 18 HP; Tempest grants melee immunity across the board, and Unity heals Bunker by way of idiot-proofing. Bunker stays in Recharge Mode and draws three cards for a completely skipped turn - Ammo Drop, which could draw cards for the destruction of Legacy's remaining two Ongoings but that's not a very big deal, and two copies of the self-damaging External Combustion. He could easily discard these cards to snuff out the Biosphere Fire, but since he shrugs off the twice-2-damage with his armor and Zero Transduces it all into cold to heal itself, there's no real reason to bother.

Instead, the Fire stays and is joined by another enviro card - the Self-Destruct Sequence! (Those panicky Martians, assuming the base was doomed just because the original six heroes at one point had 2 HP left among them. Clearly they don't read comic books at all.) Two Enviro cards turn into the "countdown pile", and the heroes will all die if it's ever empty; they've got one turn to safely ignore it completely, or can keep it preoccupied forever at the cost of one hero's turn each round (this counts incap heroes, so with the amount of redundancy among the three females, this is easily done), but getting rid of it permanently will require getting the countdown pile up to a staggering eight cards in this unique six-hero match.

Round 5

Having been reduced below 20 HP, Iron Legacy finally flips; I've never seen his inverse before, so this is a moment of discovery for me. He is now "Motivated by Desperation" rather than being an "Ironclad Tyrant"; damage to him is reduced by 1 (which, hilariously, makes it harder than ever to trigger the usually-ignorable Superhuman Redirections, as blasts of 5 damage are reduced to 4 and not redirected, due to his character cards having been in the game longer than the Redirections even though they didn't have the reduction effect before). Fortunately he's still only dealing melee damage, and he's lost his immunity to enviro damage, but he does heal himself by a lot, and returns to his original side if he gains enough HP. So he plays a card, Flying Assault - which deals H-1 projectile damage. Starting at 4 and increased by Nemesis and Galvanized, this ends killing the two surviving heroes outright, with one point of damage to spare. Oh well, I suppose it was a bit much to expect that he might have been completely neutralized by just one card effect.

***************************

The game is properly speaking over, but I seem to have a thing for alternate-history battles on Wagner Mars Base, so let's keep that up. I'll proceed with the game on the assumption that his next card was Iron-Fist Strike instead, switching it for the Flying Assault (which would also have destroyed a couple Equipment cards if it hadn't wiped out the heroes completely, but that'd just make the two surviving stragglers in power-armor even more pathetic). So in this hypothetical timeline, Zero was targeted for melee damage but ignored it, due to Tempest having made him go all squidgy or something, and Bunker dropped out of Recharge Mode since that was the only hero Ongoing left. Legs then made an equally-ineffectual punch against Bunker, and then regained 7 HP, putting him at 25; it'd take only 1 point of damage to stop him from flipping back next turn, and that 1 could come from the Fire in the Biosphere (which hits non-hero targets only once).

Wraith granted 2 HP to Zero, putting him safely outside the range of the next Flying Smash, and Zero played Impale on IL before healing for 1 more with Thermodynamics, and drew another Modular Realignment. Tachy gave back Bunker his Recharge Mode so he could remain immune to the Fire, and Tempest granted melee immunity again. Unity healed Bunker to 5, not quite getting him out of the danger zone, and Bunker replayed his Mode and drew another copy of it, along with a Flak Cannon. The countdown pile ticked down to 1 (the discarded card was a Meteor Swarm, which I would have loved to have seen earlier but was dreading now), Villainous Weaponry came out, and the Fire dealt its damage which the two heroes ignored, scratching Iron Legacy and even burning the Weaponry down to 3 HP.

Round 6

And now, Iron Legacy brings out Final Evolution, which deals each non-villain target 1 Toxic damage, which becomes 4; Zero falls to 4 and Bunker to 1. Apparently immunity to melee damage doesn't come even close to completely negating Iron Legs. He heals another 7 to end up at 31, and now he'll regain 2 more each time a hero uses a Power. Except he won't, because Wraith immediately uses her incap ability to destroy that card.

At the start of his turn, Zero deals 2 damage with Impale...which is only 1 damage, except it's actually 2, because this whole game I've been forgetting that the Nemesis rule lets the heroes deal extra damage to him too! So let's see, just how many points of damage did I dumb myself out of? No damage at all was dealt to IL until round 3, when Wraith hit him with Razor Ordnance; Tachy played Sonic Vortex, and Unity could actually deal 1 damage with Brainstorm. Then, in round 4, damage was done three more times, all of them by Absolute Zero, so the official game end had Legacy at 12 HP, and in the alternate timeline he was not even close to unflipping, most recently ending up at 25 before Impale hit him for 2 more. So it's good to know that my goof didn't affect the game before (or at all, if by "the game" you mean only the part where I didn't cheat to keep it going past its random-but-rules-legal end). With that out of the way, Zero plays no cards and uses no power, instead drawing two cards (one of them a third Modular Realignment, and the other a Cryo-Chamber which can make them all vaguely useful).

Being the weakest link by far, Tachy skips her turn to delay the countdown, Tempest does what's obviously necessary, and Unity heals Bunker to 3. Not daring to drop out of Recharge Mode, Bunker opts to skip his turn for the countdown again rather than drawing three cards, and he discards his Ammo Drop to seal an Oxygen Leak on the enviro turn, while IL burns down by 1 and the Villainous Weaponry to 1.

Round 8

IL plays Former Allies, so Zero discards his Cryo-Chamber and Bunker an External Combustion. IL plays Iron Justice, which does no damage but costs Zero his entire four-card hand, since Bunker is down to 3. IL rises to 29 HP.

Wraith gives Bunker 2 HP; Zero does 2 with Impale, then draws 2 cards, a Module Installation and the Fueled Freeze I'd been wishing for on turn 1. Tachy works the Countdown, Tempest grants immunity, Unity heals AZ to 6, and Bunker works the Countdown again while still in Recharge Mode (it must work by wireless), discarding the other Meteor Storm in the deck so that issue needn't be worried about for a few turns. A new Villainous Weaponry flips out, and Fire in the Biosphere damages it, destroys the old one, and knocks IL down to 26, not enough to stop him from returning to his first side.

Round 9

IL brings out Demoralizing Presence; though he can't hurt them himself, and none of his damage bonuses apply, the two surviving heroes do take 1 self-damage each, though Bunker's bounces off his armor (apparently, being nigh-invulnerable cheers him up too much to be Demoralized), so AZ joins him in the 5-HP club.

Wraith skips her turn for the Countdown, taking the last card from the enviro trash. Zero's Impale hits IL for 3 now that he's no longer reducing damage, he Module installs just to draw a card (a Cryo Chamber) and get a spare Transducer in his hand, and then he blasts Fueled Freeze to destroy all three of IL's destructible Ongoings. IL takes 4 damage and the Villainous Weaponry is destroyed. He then draws an NPCU. Tachy skips her turn, requiring the enviro deck to be reshuffled; it is known to contain 2 Meteor Storms, 2 Oxygen Leaks, all three Villainous Weaponries and a Maintenance Level, along with one Pervasive Red Dust which neither surviving hero wishes to see. Tempest grants immunity as always, and Unity heals Bunker to 7, so he finally dares to drop out of Recharge Mode. He plays and fires a Flak Cannon, blasting IL down to 15, then draws an AuxPS.

Discarding his two duplicate Modules, Zero bids a sad adieu to the Fire in the Biosphere, which won't damage IL this turn and would damage Bunker; the countdown pile loses a Villainous Weaponry, so two remain in the deck. (The remaining four cards on said pile are known to be some combination of Pervasive Red Dusts, another Fire in the Biosphere, and probably a third Oxygen Leak.) And what comes out? Friggin' Meteor Storm.

Round 10

IL flips, plays his other Galvanized, then goes up to 22 HP. Since Zero can no longer deal damage to himself in order to heal, Wraith skips her turn to get rid of the Meteor Storm, though I can't say as I wasn't tempted to leave it there, letting both IL and the two surviving heroes sit there healing and drawing cards forever, see if I could put together a combo that would eventually win. Zero deals 2 damage with Impale, plays his Cryo-Chamber to increase cold damage dealt to him, and heals himself for 2 with Thermodynamics and the NPCU, drawing Focused Apertures which can boost his cold damage again. Deciding to ignore the Countdown this round, Tachy grants Zero a card play so he can get the Apertures out, then Tempest grants immunity as always (he could have finally done something else if the Meteor Storm had stayed, but there weren't any really good options), and Unity gets to heal either hero since they're tied, so she picks Zero since he lacks Armor. Bunker plays his AuxPS, then shoots IL for 3. The environment chains a Maintenance Level into a Meteor Storm. (As thin as the enviro deck is getting, I'm forced to speculate..if Maint Levels ran long enough without anything getting destroyed, all other cards from the deck would eventually be in play, the Self-Destruct Sequence would come out last, and the countdown pile would not be able to start at 2 cards because none could be found, so it would instantly end the game. The Meteor Storm can't last forever without a little effort from the heroes.)

Round 11

IL pulls another Flying Assault, whose 8 would kill Bunker even through his armor and leave 0=1, if not for him being too busy punching meteors to spare the heroes much effort...he does however at least manage to destroy the AuxPS and Zero's Transducer, then heal up to 24, the worst possible spot for his HP to be stuck in during a Meteor Storm.

Wraith again skips her turn to remove the Meteors; Zero has no card to play, but Impales Legs for 3, then gains the same from Thermodynamics, and draws a new Transducer. Tachy works on the Countdown, Tempest does the usual, and Unity heals Bunker, who then takes 1 damage playing External Combustion, dealing 3 to Legs. It begins to seem unlikely the heroes can ever outrace his 7 healing a turn, and Bunker draws a DecommWare and decides he doesn't want to reshuffle his trash to get rid of the Maint Level, though Zero happily does it just to get his best stuff back. Oxygen Leak and Pervasive Red Dust come out, so all Equipment is destroyed (that H value of 6, man oh man!). A little math proves that the Oxygen Leak could deal 7 toxic damage to Legacy through his armor, so the heroes decide to risk leaving it in play.

Round 12

IL plays Rule from the Front, forcing Bunker to discard his card and Zero to destroy Impale (which now that i think of it, should it have been destroyed long ago? no, it wasn't in play when Ongoings were destroyed). He heals his usual 7, putting him exactly up to 25. Wraith gives Bunker 2 HP. Zero plays his Transducer, takes 1 damage and powers 1 point through IL's armor with the nemesis bonus, then draws Thermal Shockwave - geeze, where was that when it was needed? Tachy lets Bunker draw a card - a Gatling Gun! Since the calculated damage from the Martian Atmosphere is a known quantity, while IL's potential damage output is dependant on a card play, Tempest continues to immunize against Melee. Unity grants Bunker a card play before his turn, letting the Gatling Gun come out and immediately fire for 2 damage to Legs. Bunker then skips the rest of his turn to draw two cards, discarding one to keep the Gatling Gun.

At the start of the enviro turn, a bunch of things happen in sequence. The countdown pile ticks down to 2 cards; the heroes both opt to reshuffle and the Maint Level is destroyed. IL and the heroes all suffer the expected 8 damage from the martian atmosphere, with only IL reducing it by 1; Bunker falls to 2 HP and Zero to 3. (At this point I remember suddenly that Oxygen Leak stops fire damage, so Zero couldn't have fire damaged himself to cold-damage IL, and both regain 1 HP.) Discarding their only cards in hand, the heroes get rid of the Red Dust; Bunker gets to put his Heavy Plating into play after discarding it, since it's an Equipment, while Thermal Shockwave is an Ongoing and thus AZ gains no such advantage. Finally, the Enviro deck plays another card - a second Oxygen Leak! The heroes have no cards to discard even if they wanted to, so the Enviro turn ends.

Round 13

IL plays Iron-Fist strike; with the heroes melee-immune and having no Ongoings, this has absolutely no effect, so he just regains his usual 7 HP. Wraith grants 2 HP to Zero and he draws two cards, neither of them a One-Shot that he can play for any effect. Tacky grants Bunker a card draw which is an AuxPS, and then Tempest performs his bold maneuver - switching his immunity from Melee to Toxic, he grants the heroes the ability to breathe the Martian air! Unity gives Bunker another card, which doesn't help him any, and Bunker shoots IL for two with the Gatling, plays the AuxPS and pops it for 3 cards, draws one more card and discards it to Heavy Plating.

The countdown ticks down to 1, and then the two oxygen leaks deal 2 instances of 9 damage each to IL (10 cards in the pile, one reduction), leaving him at 3 HP! Mars plays its final card, Villainous Weaponry.

Round 14

For the second time in the game, IL rips Flying Assault at just the right time to kill the two surviving heroes; this time, the alternative would be that he got sucked out into space at the end of the turn, so there will be no more alternate history today! As with my last such game, even manipulating the timeline on my favor didn't stop a tough villain from destroying the heroes on Mars, just made it take a hell of a lot longer.

Well, that's it. This time, I really am done, I'm pretty sure of it, at least until next March or so when a new expansion arrives. I hope at least a few of you have enjoyed these LPs at least as much as I enjoyed writing them (but don't ask me how much that was, as I honestly can't tell anymore).
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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