To be fair, the topic title is somewhat misleading.

There IS treachery in Sea of Blood. However, from what I've seen (from the online rules and glancing at the Avatar sheets that have been posted, which admittedly isn't all of them), it might as well not be.

In regular Road to Legend, the ONLY reason to get Treachery is for Lieutenant fights. In the dungeons, it is next to worthless. That is because good heroes will spend most of the game blitzing only the first dungeon level and then leaving. They will only do more floors once they can do two floors in the same number of turns it previously took them to do one. What's more, good heroes will always prioritize getting Wind Pact, which can drop you shiny new Treachery card if it's in your opening hand for the level. In general, the Heroes are probably giving you about 4-5 turns in a dungeon. That means a 3 card initial hand, plus 8-10 cards. However, it gets worse. Your last turn or two will probably be futile, since the Heroes will have killed all the monsters and are just maintaining an anti-spawn position while they collect the treasure and leave the level. There are VERY few treachery cards (or cards of any sort) that help you in this situation. So really, you will only draw 4-6 cards that will be useful. So let's say you get 9 cards - with all the expansions, your deck is 48 cards. That's less than 1/5th of the deck. And, as I said, good Heroes will have Wind Pact, so if your shiny card is in your opening 3 cards, you won't get to use it either. So it's actually only if you draw it in the first 6 cards that it will be useful - that's 1/8. AND you need to actually have the threat to play it, and a situation to play it in.

So...10 or 15 or 20 conquest for a single card that I'll only even SEE once out of every 8 dungeon levels, let alone actually play? Let's be generous and say that you have an amazing Treachery card that gives you a guaranteed 3-CT Hero kill every time you play it and this card costs 0 threat (note: if you find this card, let me know). If you paid 15-CT for the Treachery to get it, that means it will take 40 DUNGEONS just for it to pay back its cost and break even. No thanks.

Of course, in RtL, it all worked out, because Treachery is absolutely crucial to the lieutenant fights. Actually using it in dungeons from time to time was just a (very) marginal bonus.

From what I can see, Sea of Blood changes this in two ways:

1) No more treachery in Lieutenant fights. And from what I can see, no other place to use treachery other than dungeons.

2) The 2 Avatars that I've seen have MORE expensive treachery than the ones in original RtL!! They pay 15-15-20, depending on color, without having a 'cheap' 10-suit.

So treachery got 10 times worse and MORE expensive? It's sad, because the treachery cards are cool and a fun part of the game, but no Overlord with any modicum of skill should ever buy it under those circumstances.

I expect completed dungeons to be much more common in SoB, due to the buried treasures. Four map pieces means completing four dungeons. A group that wants to get half the treasures has to do 8 complete dungeons.

In RtL dungeons get completed as well, due to rumors and legendary areas. I've gotten great use out of my treachery. Granted, if a group wants to do nothing but blitz, you're better off not buying it. But not every group believes that to be both a) optimal and b) fun.

If they are going to deny Lts treachery cards then I want my other copy of Crushing Blow back into the OL deck.

Since that's a Road to Legend errata, and we have 0 Sea of Blood errata, you've got it.

Have you actually seen one of the new dungeons? They look small, but often have lots of obstacles and rune-locked doors; you have to cover a lot more ground than in RtL. One dungeon has the heroes starting in a cage (with only a 1/3rd chance of escaping per hero per turn); if they actually want to play the dungeon the OL will have plenty of time to collect threat and draw cards...

I'd love to see some of the new dungeons, but nobody has posted them at BGG yet.

Treachery implementation has always been VERY poorly designed. Everyone agrees that a few Treachery cards are FAR more powerful than the rest, and yet the rule to allow the Overlord to choose his Treachery cards remains, resulting in the same Treachery card picks most of the time. I've always promoted a change to the Treachery selection rules that revolved around randomly selecting the Treachery cards added to the OLs deck.

This overpowered Treachery selection mechanism was amplified in RtL Lt encounters and become the primary reason our group stopped playing RtL, and won't play it ever again. Treachery cards in RtL Lt encounters broke the game. As written, allowing the OL to choose his Treachery cards in Lt encounters, and also to attack the party every turn with EVERY Lt, made the "Hit & Run Lt encounter" tactic a boring and horribly broken part of the game. What was this? The OL buys the best Treachery cards (Crushing blows, animated weapons, etc.). Every turn the OL focused sieging one city (usually Tamilir), forcing the party to try to evict the Lts. The OL would attack the party every turn with every one of his Lts. The first couple of these encounters the OL would simply play his best treachery cards and flee. With Crushing Blow and Animated Weapons you could both take the parties equipment and HP away without any way to avoid it. The last Lt attack in every OL turn would be with the OLs best fighting Lt and the party had no chance. The Lt hammered the party.

SoB fixes most of this, thankfully, but as the OP states, Treachery is now too overpriced for it's usefulness and the OL can always still the best treachery cards. Even though it's not overpowering now, it's boring seeing the same Treacvhery cards all of the time. The weak Treachery cards are just bad in comparison. Given the choice, I prefer how SoB utilizes treachery. At least it's play balanced, I think.

The base overlord deck doesn't change without treachery, do you house rule it as well, or is it not as boring to see those cards over and over again?

Also, I can't be sure without playing, but it looks like the Overlord will get more XP over time than he does in a typical RtL campaign. The heroes can't rocket ahead of him, and blitzing is less valuable since you lose out on the buried treasures, so it's more likely to be even throughout all three tiers. Increased treachery costs might be part of a reflection of that, and decreased monster upgrades a reaction to how much it sucked to play someone with beasts as your primary critter type in RtL (though hopefully they balanced the dungeons and encounters a little better so all three types are better represented).

I too haven't seen the dungeons. If you say there's lots of Runelocked doors, that certainly sounds like they're pretty easy for the Heroes. Runelocked doors are the heroes' best friends, because they effectively bisect the dungeon and make it very easy to cover LoS for spawns.

I agree that the original treachery mechanics are a bit broken, and we've played with randomized treachery for quite some time now and it works well. Non-randomized treachery simply underscored the extreme importance of Wind Pact in RtL.

In any case, though, none of that is at issue; I'm afraid I think some people have missed the original point. That point was that the (very) rough numbers I posted are nowhere NEAR a reasonable return-on-investment for buying treachery. Not even close. There aren't even 40 dungeons in the game, after all!!! You can tell me "Oh, well the new dungeons take longer/have map pieces at the bottom so Heroes will go deeper"* - fine, DOUBLE the frequency with which you see your treachery card. TRIPLE it even - say it only takes 13 Dungeons for you to break even. In my last two RtL games that went all the way to the end, the Heroes only did ~14 dungeons (counting the 3 legendary areas) in the entire campaign. And remember, the numbers I've posted are for the magical treachery card that costs 0 threat and gets you 3 points every time you play it. In reality, I'd estimate that the very best single-point Treachery cards are effectively half that good (although this is a very rough estimate indeed).

I will also recall that, as far as I can tell for Sea of Blood, RoI (return-on-investment) is the ONLY criterion that matters for purchasing treachery. It does NOT help you directly with either of your victory conditions (razing cities, since it can't be used in Lt. fights, and winning the Avatar battle, where no Overlord cards are used at all). Therefore, the calculation of "Is it worth it?" is relatively straightforward - are you going to gain more than what you paid in the long-run by making the purchase. This is NOT the case in RtL, because Treachery can turn a losing Lt. fight into a win, which can allow you to make strategic gains and even potentially win the game instantly. This means that, in RtL, the 'value' of treachery is non-linear and difficult to calculate (although largely worth it, I think most people would agree). In SoB, the calculation is easy, and quite obviously, not worth it.

*: Note that I *strongly* suspect that the treasure map pieces will, at least in the beginning of the game, be more of a trap than anything else, as blitzing will STILL be optimal, but heroes will be encouraged to go deeper in dungeons than they should, much like Rumors often function in RtL to 'bait' Heroes into making mistakes.

Well, the runelocked doors are not area transitions, so spawning behind them is possible - of course, it depends on the actual dungeon and the current situation whether it actually makes sense to do so.

Further, blitzing doesn't seem to be the strategy any more. Party movement on the overland map is much slower and the dungeons - at least the handfull we've played so far - do not seem to be as "blitz-friendly" than those from RtL.

Darastin said:

But the spawned monsters can't open the door, so they have to sit around and let the heroes attack them first. Even then, the heroes can open the door, attack through it, and close the door in the same turn.

Can't a monster open a Runelocked door once the rune is picked up (and is therefore no longer locked)?

-shnar

shnar said:

No. Runelocked doors never cease to be runelocked. Though it wouldn't surprise me if several people use that as a house rule.

Named monsters can open and close runelocked doors (whether the heroes have the key or not), but you can't spawn those.

Not a house-rule, just mistook the actual rule. For some reason, I always thought that once you picked up the runekey, it unlocked the runelocked door, and so acted like a normal door. I didn't realize it was still "locked" to monsters...

-shnar

Indeed, the designers don't seem to have realized that many of the Rumor levels in RtL are trivial, since the Heroes just enter the boss room with the rune-locked door and close it behind them, meaning they no longer have to worry about spawns in the rest of the dungeon, or any monsters they left behind (unless of course the boss can reach the door and open it to let his friends in, but this is usually hard).

I will point out that, having reviewed the SoB rules, there is a small flaw in my very own argument - and that is that Conquest gained by the Overlord IS always useful, because the Avatar gains +2 HP for every Conquest gained, whether it was spent or not. This means that a purchase that 'pays itself back' by the end of the campaign has effectively gained you some amount of extra HP completely for free, even if it has not increased your purchasing power.

That said, I think the thrust of the argument remains sound. I find it difficult to believe that any of the Overlord's other options would offer such a poor RoI. I certainly think upgrading a monster-class - even after you've upgraded the other two - is far more effective than adding a measly two cards into your deck, given that every monster class already has 5 or 6 spawn cards in the deck already, let alone might turn out to be the level Leader.

The_Immortal said:

With still no opportunity to play the game, or see anything beyond the rulebook, it seems to me that SoB appears to have been deliberately 'turned' toward the path of increased dungeoneering.
One of RtLs biggest faults IMO was that it took an excellent dungeon game and made it entirely secondary to the mapboard game (by which I mean that the game was won and lost on the mapboard, so dungeons became distinctly secondary in importance if both sides played to their best capabilities)

The change to treachery's importance/value seems to be just another factor in the overall quest to make dungeoneering more important again.

I can't help but think that that is a good thing... (sort of like the way that the removal of telekinesis made most Lt fights interesting again) But it won't be possible to tell until we actually get the game and start playing it.

Corbon said:

IMHO, fights with Lieutenants are part of dungeoneering (overland maps are just dungeons with special rules). Some Lieutenant encounters are critical for winning the RtL campaign. However, I agree with you that doing well in (most) dungeons has much less impact on the game than choosing correct actions on the mapboard. This is unlikely to change in SoB. Dungeons will remain secondary as long as winning or losing the game depends on mapboard actions (e.g. razing Tamalir or gathering quest items or razing 5 cities) and doing well in dungeons has relatively minor impact on mapboard actions. In other words, dungeoneering will remain secondary unless 1) avatar fight is the primary winning condition for both the Party and OL; and 2) dungeoneering influences extensively the ability of doing well in the final fight. It is unlikely that SoB is much different from RtL as regards the first condition. Maybe it is different as regards the second (health in final fight depends on total CT, yet the divine favour seems to undermine the impact of this rule)