When the game was released it seemed that the game mechanically was vaguely in line with the theme of the two different conflicts, like you couldn't charge into a political conflict and you couldn't do courtier stuff on the battlefield. A few packs later, do people feel there's a thematic distinction between the two? I suppose I ask as we see trolls with high political stats, tetsubos that give a political bonus and other peculiar stats. I understand, it's all for game balance and it's for the best as we don't want to end up with characters with a lot of dash stats because it might make more sense thematically (an intimidating Hida has as much political clout as an Otomo!).

Does it still feel like political/military conflict or just blue and red conflicts?

Trolls had an advanced society in the old game (before they were turned into shadowlands monsters) so there's no reason they can't resolve a dispute with words and agreements. The threat of getting clubbed can also be highly motivating to use words over swords. Political conflicts don't necessarily have to be highly structured court room debates. And military conflicts don't have to be a pitched battle either. One of the other threads had a really neat conversation about this, and how provinces like shameful display and meditations on the tao were perfectly fine "provinces" in the story aspect of the game.

8 hours ago, Hordeoverseer said:

Does it still feel like political/military conflict or just blue and red conflicts?

Yep. Same mechanic with different stat.

13 hours ago, Hordeoverseer said:

When the game was released it seemed that the game mechanically was vaguely in line with the theme of the two different conflicts, like you couldn't charge into a political conflict and you couldn't do courtier stuff on the battlefield. A few packs later, do people feel there's a thematic distinction between the two? I suppose I ask as we see trolls with high political stats, tetsubos that give a political bonus and other peculiar stats. I understand, it's all for game balance and it's for the best as we don't want to end up with characters with a lot of dash stats because it might make more sense thematically (an intimidating Hida has as much political clout as an Otomo!).

Does it still feel like political/military conflict or just blue and red conflicts?

At this point in the game, there is very little distinction between the two conflict types outside of a handful of card restrictions and Military being easier to buff. I suspect FFG tried to differentiate between the two types more in testing, but that proved to be too cumbersome or confusing.

Hopefully we'll see more conflict specific cards down the road, like they tried to do with Breach of Etiquette, but even then given how the Core set through Elemental cycle has been pretty vanilla and winning a conflict ultimately being about stats, it's going to be hard for them to turn it around without some sort of explosive card. I could see FFG adopting some sort of "Shadows" mechanism like they are using in GoT 2.0 and limiting it to only Political conflicts for example to make the two more unique, but who knows.

I think in a world crawling with Shinobi, “Shadows” military actions are more than reasonable.

But I agree on the whole that the two different types of challenge are not well demarcated. I just wonder whether there’s going to be enough deck space at 40 cards for people to start including many more politics or military only challenge only cards? Surely you just set yourself up for bad matchups? Or the game just becomes a relatively uninteractive race.

14 minutes ago, Ersatz Nihilist said:

I just wonder whether there’s going to be enough deck space at 40 cards for people to start including many more politics or military only challenge only cards? Surely you just set yourself up for bad matchups? Or the game just becomes a relatively uninteractive race.

I think that is definitely a problem you run into at this point, especially with neutral cards like Court Games and Ornate Fan just being generically good, but extremely bland. Even Banzai can technically be used in a Political conflict assuming you need the Mil strength for some reason like LPB or Rout. Conflict specific cards basically need to be extremely powerful in their niche, but if they are too strong then it becomes oppressive. It's a really difficult design space FFG is sort of boxed into at this point, but I definitely think they have the talent to think of something.

On 7/15/2018 at 2:37 AM, llamaman88 said:

Trolls had an advanced society in the old game (before they were turned into shadowlands monsters) so there's no reason they can't resolve a dispute with words and agreements. The threat of getting clubbed can also be highly motivating to use words over swords. Political conflicts don't necessarily have to be highly structured court room debates. And military conflicts don't have to be a pitched battle either. One of the other threads had a really neat conversation about this, and how provinces like shameful display and meditations on the tao were perfectly fine "provinces" in the story aspect of the game.

I can get behind the whole idea of the provinces but I feel this is really too much to really make sense with the troll. I guess in this case they should really be renamed to Social and Martial Conflict.

Admittedly, it's going to be hard to make sense of it in cardboard form and the old game had difficulties coming to grips with this. I have found memories of my Yasuki Jinkies negating an action from an oni then turning around and obliterating it in my next action (via, I forgot the name of the action card that requires you to play it first and use the next action. Emperor Edition was **** of an edition).

It seems like FFG had the intention to keep it flavourful but then things got muddled along the way, which I'm okay with. Courtiers have slightly higher political stands and bushi have slightly higher military.

20 minutes ago, Hordeoverseer said:

I have found memories of my Yasuki Jinkies negating an action from an oni then turning around and obliterating it in my next action (via, I forgot the name of the action card that requires you to play it first and use the next action. Emperor Edition was **** of an edition).

Emperor was best.

That's the one! I don't know if Emperor was best...it was wild and crazy but probably also the height of non-interactivity in the game.