I'm not interested in any of the damage for moving questions, though if you want my opinion, I'll give it.

I'm more interested in a rather complex question about Cthugha's other slumber ability. It states that whenever you draw a Weather mythos card, it is discarded with no effect and a new card is drawn. Does this add or subtract from the difficulty of the game in any way? Aside from keeping other types of environments in play longer and ignoring things like "The Rails are Out" (That one threw me when I first saw it!).

Essentially, what I'm asking is does this change the gate mixture in a noticeable way? Given the possibility that every gate doesn't necessarily have a few weather environments attached to it, are some gates more likely to open than others in their frequency group against Cthugha?

More importantly, how can we use this to better seal away the fiery Ancient One? Has anyone looked at this?

I think ColtsFan posted something in my original IH thread. I'll see if I can find it.

EDIT: Oddly a good thing that Brian doesn't post as much in the AH section (or FFG forums for that matter), easier finding it.

"For Arkham Horror only, lose 1 each at: Graveyard, Woods, Historical Society, Hibb's Roadhouse, and Black Cave

For Dunwich Horror only, lose 5 at Gardner's Place, 2 at Wizard's Hill, and 1 at Whateley Farm

For Kingsport Horror only, you lose a Gate Burst at Independence Square

For Innsmouth Horror only, you lose 2 each at Esoteric Order of Dagon and Devil Reef, and 1 at Marsh Refinery

For CotDP only, you lose 1 each at Independence Square and Silver Twilight Lodge plus a 2 Doomer

For KiY only, you lose 2 at Black Cave and 1 each at Independence Square and Graveyard

For BGotW only, you lose 1 each at The Historical Society and a Gate Burst at the Grave Yard"

Dam said:

Strange, it makes Innsmouth locations less likely, though in a fairly balanced way. You lose nearly 33% of Dunwich locations (nearly 25% on Dunwich cards) (though I'm sure that wasn't even taken into consideration.).

flamethrower49 said:

Asbestos?

Avalanche?

Maybe the player named "flamethrower" shouldn't be asking about this...

Cthugha??? IS THAT YOU???

Dam said:

It's pretty clear, from that, that Cthugha was taken into consideration when deciding which Innsmouth weathers should have which locations on them. The weather events are fairly evenly 'distributed' so that the relative frequencies are affected as little as possible. Of course the other expansions' Mythos cards were created without the knowledge that there'd ever be a need for the Mythos deck to work without weather cards, so the selection there is a bit random. The base game is probably the most affected, since it gets rid of gates are already low-freq locations. Sealing Hibb's and the Hist Society becomes even less worthwhile.

Aside from the gate issue, does anyone have a good enough grasp of the Mythos deck to say whether Weather cards are generally more or less favourable than headlines/rumors? In other words, does Cthugha generally make the Mythos deck more dangerous or less dangerous?

thecorinthian said:

Weather cards often give + or - to stats. In most cases, there's only a zero net effect. In some of the expansions weather is all all negative. Whether this is more negative than the alternatives is probably a judgment call. Usually the Mythos is not your friend, though monsters are sometimes removed (and just as much added). So I'd say the net effect is not much in terms of the card effect.

The other effect is that the other environments will stay out longer. An environment comes out almost every other turn. Weather is the most common environment. So urban and mystical environments will stay out longer and that's an overall negative.

While the effect is interesting to watch at Independence Square, the Graveyard, and poor Gardner's Place, I don't think that really should be enough to change our sealing patterns against Cthugha. It seemed like there were more weather environments than that.

At any rate, I'm inclined to agree that the Mythos effect is not usually going to be nice. So in this case, the subtle increase in difficulty comes from the increase of the chance of rumours. Or other nasty mythos cards. I like it.

Going by the base Mythos set alone (since that's what I've looked at) what you really lose is a certain monster movement pattern. I have no idea whether this trend extends to expansion Mythos (and I'm too tired to check now) but in the base game all of the Environments are either "plus on white/moon on black" or "squares and diamonds on white/circles on black." If the trend holds, you'll see slightly fewer of those, though of course that doesn't really affect the difficulty at all. I only bring it up because it was a relationship I'd looked at before, in designing a replacement Mythos deck.