This is an aggressive OL opening strategy for the Ascension (raze 4 cites) plot designed to counter the hero blitz tactics discussed at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/325622 by increasing the early game pressure on the heroes. I'll use a similar format to that post.

THE ASCENTION RUSH

Motivation

Skilled heroes using the blitz strategy will get off to a strong start, and only get stronger as time progresses. The hero blitz strategy is about trading weeks on the map for easy gold and XP. Put a time constraint on the heroes, and the Blitz strategy weakens. The bigger the constraint, the more the blitz strat will be compromised.

Theory

1. RtL is a game built positive feedback loops. The OL scores well, upgrades monsters, scores even better, and then gets tons of treachery. A 5 CT swing in early copper might mean 30 CT by the end of silver.
2. The heroes are weakest at the start of the game. If the OL is going for a plot win, he should attempt the hardest part of the plot now, when the heroes can put in the least effort to stop him.
3. Cites are not equidistant from the keeps. Of the 4 cities you need to destroy, the furthest away one will be anywhere from 33% to 42% of the sum of individual distances. You will therefor be closer to winning if you sack the farthest away from your keep then if you sack the closest one.

4. This plot will be won on the overland map. Even if you have triple the conquest of the heroes, if you can't win a lieutenant encounter then the heroes will eventually reach the end of goldfinal battle.

4 closest non-Talimar city distances from the keep for OLs:

OL(sum of all 4 distances, sum of first 3 distances, percentage that farthest distance is of total): closest distance, distance 2, 3, farthest distance
Titan(12, 8, 33%): 2, 3, 3, 4
Demon, Beastman lord(12, 7, 42%): 1,2,4,5
Spider Queen(14, 9, 36%): 2,3,4,5
Wyrmm(15, 9 ,40%): 2,3,4,6
Sorcerer King(18, 12, 33%): 3,4,5,6

Execution
This opening is a variant of the transport gem Talimar rush. Instead of rushing Talimar, you will rush a far away city.
1. Pick an OL. With the ascension plot you should be looking for one with good prospects for destroying cites. As the table above shows though, the city distances are actually very close for most OLs, and if you only look at the 3 closest cities, 5 out of 6 of them are with 2 spaces of distance. The sorcerer king is out in the boondocks though, so I'd recommend not taking him. The Wyrmm doesn't get his special lieutenant until gold, and the spider queen is reputedly a weak avatar in the final battle, so you might not want them either.

2. Start with a transport gem and some 5 XP card. I generally go with focused and take out some of the super lame cards (dark balm, 2 bane spider swarms are standard targets).

3. At the start of your turn, use the transport gem to teleport Alric to a far away city. If you start south of Talimar, use Frostgate. Otherwise, you might instead want to use Riverwatch or Dawnsmore. Since this is a city distant from your keep, the heroes will have to try to get you out before you can sack it. So assuming that they buy the staff, they will have 3 hero turns to prepare before they have to move to intercept you for Frostgate or Riverwatch, or 4 weeks for Dawnsmore. But for Dawnsmore, they will also have to buy the boat prematurely. 3 hero turns is not a lot of time to get strong enough to face Alric, especially if the heroes are only doing 1-2 floors of each dungeon per the blitz strat.
4. Don't forget to put a siege token on the city on turn 1. The transport gem has no limits on when in the OL turn it is used, so you can fly Alric there, and then have Alric use his action to siege the city. This is different from the hero teleportation rumor, which states that in place of their regular move, the heroes can move anywhere on the map.

5a. If the heroes are trying to stop you and reasonably competent, they will attack Alric the turn before he starts rolling to sack the city, and they will do so without letting you get to 25 conquest. In this case then the turn before they attack you, buy big trouble. Use big trouble when they move to attack Alric. Unless you get box canyon and have a chance of killing all the party, your goal for this fight is to get everyone low on HP, but not dead. You should especially focus on ranged and magic characters, since if they die vs Alric then soaring razorwings will give you a win. Remember that per the new FAQ, they can't visit the temple before the Alric encounter, only afterwards. A lost encounter would also be reasonable.

5b. If the heroes let you get 25-35 XP before fighting Alric, you should upgrade a monster category. If you are the beastman lord or Titan, go for beasts. Humanoids are terrible on the world map, and are practically no shows in lieutenant encounters. You can upgrade humanoids to improve your keep defenses in Silver.

Note that even though Alric has weak Eldritch minions, if you are the Demon King you should still upgrade Eldtich at this point rather then doing something else like big trouble or a treachery. Otherwise the heroes may risk a 1/3 chance of the city falling to do another easy dungeon.

Follow up

Thats all to this opening. Either you get the hardest city razed(and a +5XP bonus towards your first monster upgrade), or you force the heroes to make sacrifices to stop you. After the monster upgrade you should get the rest of your lieutenants out and start sieging other cities. I like to spread them out, and only have 1 per city being sieged, to make the heroes have to spend more time chasing you around. Remember that half the time it takes to siege a city is just getting to it. 2 lieutenants could put 4 wall markers on a city 3 spaces away down to 0 in 5 turns, or to 2 different 3 distance cities in 7 turns. If the heroes have to spend all their time battling lieutenants, you will win.

Counters

This is a hard strategy to counter, because it gives the heroes very little time to get strong enough to defeat Alric. If you go deeper in dungeons, you risk letting the OL get an early monster upgrade. If you ignore it, then the OL gets an XP boost and you'll be forced to spend a lot of time chasing down lieutenants in the future.

The worst hero outcome is to attack Alric and lose, since the OL will be getting conquest and the heroes get nothing. So if you don't think you can beat him, better to do another dungeon or train for a week and risk the 1/3 chance of the raze. Remember that even if the OL sacks the city, he is still a long way from winning, so don't give up.

Other Notes:

This strategy is similar to the transport gem Talimar rush, but the heroes will have much less time / resources. For Talimar the heroes will get at least 4 turns of dungeons. After they can train in Talimar and upgrade the walls to get a 5th turn. They also won't have to buy the staff of the wild, and will have more gold to train with. The rewards are much less also for this opening, but your hero players won't swear off RtL if you succeed.

Well done, an excellent strategic write-up. Exerting map pressure is indeed precisely what the Overlord needs to do in order to counter Hero blitzing. I recently started a game as the Sorcerer King, hoping to see if the whole "Skeleton Snipers + eventual Silver Eldritch + Sorcerer King's Eternal Power ability" is as strong as people claim. My finding was that it is not. Careful heroes can avoid taking major casualties in the dungeons by bailing early and because of the Sorcerer King's horrible Keep location, he is unable to exert any map pressure at all.

One small thing you omitted from your analysis is the defense value of various cities. In particular, Riverwatch has a lower defense (3) than any other city. Not only that, but it has both the Great Market and an excellent alchemist, making it a very attractive target. So although the Heroes can get their one turn faster than Frostgate, you can burn it one turn sooner. On top of that, the Heroes will not have the opportunity to stop in Greyhaven and stock up on potions on their way to stop you like they could if you were in Frostgate. Because of these factors, if I was one of three 'northern' Avatars, I would pick Riverwatch as the target for sure.

Two more caveats: the first is that there IS a drawback to this opening that you don't mention, and that is that you don't get to start with Siege Engines. Siege Engines is definitely a VERY powerful upgrade for pursuing the Ascension plot. This opening basically burns your farthest city NOW in exchange for making all your closer cities take longer; as well, Siege Engines is very useful for putting early pressure on Tamalir to make it difficult for the Heroes to visit distant training locations (notably Olmric's Hut). The second is that I don't think this idea is necessarily restricted to Ascension. I think it is also a reasonable thing to do with Obsidian Shackles - in fact, perhaps even more so. This is because you're much more likely to raze the city on the first roll with the OS plot, and not having Siege Engines is much less of a downside than it is for Ascension. In OS, you still want to burn cities and preferably do it early to increase your per-turn pension, because the sooner the pension goes up to 2 or even 3 CT per turn, the Hero strategy of exchanging turns for easy dungeons gets much less desirable, and you will also want to deprive the Heroes of assets, like the Great Market, alchemists and certain skills.

So is the grand strategy of this method to put the game into "gold mode" except do that in silver?

Basically I mean that the heroes can enter your dungeon (which they could normally only do in gold) soon as you kill the last city and spend 20 threat.

At this point, its only advantagous, if the heroes don't have gold weapons otherwise you've done them a favour...

Cheers,

SB

Stillborn said:

Not exactly a favor. Don't forget that every turn after you start the Ascension ritual, you can put a comet token on a temple within 3 spaces of your keep, giving the heroes -1 max wounds and -1 max fatigue during the final battle each turn they delay. Also, if you interpret the card such that the heroes have to get to your keep on the overland map to be able to enter it early, then you can get all your lieutenants near your keep and attack the heroes when they move towards it.

Stillborn said:

You're correct, although it's not specific to this strategy, but rather the plot itself. If you're doing the Ascention plot you want to destroy all the cities and build your temples ASAP, ideally before gold level. Gold weapons are overpowered, so they need to be avoided if you want to have a chance. But, even if they can purchase some gold treasure not all is lost - in my campaign I forced the heroes to enter during the beginning of gold level. They had some gold weapons but had to forgo fatigue/health upgrades and some final skill purchases.