Hello!

What's it with Empire? Everytime I lose, I feel it's too complicated and slow a deck to be useful, and everytime I win, I feel like I'm cheating... Why is every way to victory paved with solutions that seem more like exploiting than clever playing?

Here's my latest "trick" I used to beat Chaos with.

City Gates (battlefield), Shrine to Taal (battlefield) and Johannes Broheim (battlefield). Result: a flying monkey who was able to give me half a dozen cards per turn and hit for up to 8 skulls (after this he wiped himself out with Blood for the Blood God) depending on the number of developments I had in my battlefield.

Here are the mechanics:

1) At the beginning of my turn: Shrine to Taal boosts Johannes.

2) At the end of the kingdom phase, Johannes flies from the Battlefield to the Quest zone.

3) Johannes gives me a load of cards and at the end of the phase flies to the Battlefield zone.

4) Johannes gives Chaos a hard spanking in the combat phase.

Rinse and repeat.

The City Gates I mentioned above were used to increase the number of developments by two each turn (one Forced, one voluntary).

Had I put Shrine to Taal and the developments to my Kingdom Phase, Johannes would've been able to give me 7 resource tokens, 7 cards and 7 damage in his best turn (as I said, Johannes died at the start of the turn when he was given a power of 8).

What do you think?

I dont understand why should not place the combo in kingom, it will give you far more resources and there is no difference in a blood for the blood god for 7 or 8 damage because Johannes has only 4 hitpoints.

Whitmire said:

I think I'm missing the rules question(s) in this thread .

Current win-loss tally after 50 plays (18 including the Skavenblight Threat):

Chaos: 14-12
Dwarves: 10-16
Empire: 14-12
Orcs: 14-12

Empire has been the biggest gainer, they started 1-5, Orcs have come down from their glory days.

Because Empire is comborific. When you get what you need when you need it Empire manipulates its mechanics to do things no other race can do, it almost feels like cheating. This represents the speed, adaptability, and drive of the human forces.

When you don't get the cards you need in the right order at the right time, it feels like there are just too many moving parts (no pun intended) and that your deck just can't synergize the way the other races do. This represents the fact that the Empire is a totalitarian regime, and that its forces can get bogged down in the red tape of no action without approval, and no one wants to stick their neck out to make a decision that turns out to be the wrong one without the ability to say "I was just following orders!"

This is the way Empire works. It is possible o create decks that play a little more consistently... because they don't depend on combos to do the heavy lifting, unfortunately as far as I can tell they don't have the cards yet for this to be a positive improvement in consistency. IOW you will lose more often, but you will like you are in better control of your deck while you do so.

The rules question, I think, was whether this is "exploiting" or not. Judging by the responses, it's working as intended.