Hey All,

Reading first impressions of the game it seems like there's a bit of imbalance in favor of the Daqans. I'm sure with a little practice, and different tactics the balance gap will close at least to a degree.

I'm wondering though how objectives and terrain choice might help with imbalance as well. I'm basing my thinking on playing "Skirmish" with one core box, but where players proxy upgrade cards.

If the Waiqar player chooses the objective, it looks like choosing "Escort" or "Supply Raid" could really advantage Waiqar. In Escort, Waiqar could choose to be the interceptor and castle up around the objective token, allowing for a concentration of forces and counter-charges that I think Waiqar relies on. Supply Raid is almost the exact opposite strategy... by spreading out objectives, a greedy Daqan player may stretch too thin and/or give you more turns of shooting while he concentrates on picking up objectives tokens.

In "Demoralize Their Forces" doesn't the slow Waiqar dial offer an advantage in that you can plan flank and side counter-charges for later in the turn? You just deploy your reanimates and archers at an angle near the sides of the boards with counter charging Ardus and Carrion Lancer and you should be able to bring in those flank and rear charges, right?

Then there's terrain. In Skirmish, there's only 1 piece of dangerous and 1 piece of defensive terrain. A canny Daqan player should deny the Waiqar player access to defensive terrain if possible. But if Waiqar can occupy a crumbling wall or forest that ought to be really valuable. Conversly, it's hard to imagine a Daqan player using stand-off tactics and hanging back in defensive terrain themselves. Perhaps if there's a unit he wants to hide for objective scoring purposes. But even still, that allows the waiqar player to concentrate their forces and deal with the Daqans in a more piecemeal fashion. In any case, Waiqar should still be able to use spikes to help protect a flank or channel the opponent into an area where it will be easier to gang up on them.

Anyway, my usual caveat applies to all of this: This is totally theory, having played no games and tested no tactics and could be turn out to be complete balderdash in a real game scenario.

There was another thread on this recently. I would argue we need a lot more people with the Core than the lucky fans at Adepticon (so jealous ) to create a valid sample size. Like we said in the earlier forum, most FFG strategy games have one Core faction that is a little more assault choices than tactics choices, and so often they can seem favored until people start getting the hang of how to play the tactics faction. I think planning your missions and choices of terrain will be key here, as well as the size. A Daqan player may prefer smaller terrain templates if he fields a lot of fast cavalry, but a Daqan player may prefer larger terrain to occupy in the center of the board so that he can take it and then use Profane Banner to draw fire from his other units nearby. I think that Wave 1 will change this a lot with introducing the command units for core infantry, along with some of the tricky upgrades like Greyhaven Channeler and Wind Rune.