There is a longer version over at Board Game Geek but I thought I should post the short version here if anyone is trying to keep track of wins and losses.

Yesterday we finished our SoB campaign, ending with a Overlord victory. I was playing the Mistress of Serpents and the Shadow Queen and I won through cities, destroying five of them. The heroes had a pretty good group, most notably they had Thorn without which they would have lost weeks ago. We had all expansions except ToI.

My tactics as an Overlord was to get as many LTs in play as possible and siege everywhere. Simply fleeing if attacked rather than taking any chances with them (which often mean running in the first turn). In copper the heroes could not do much against this, they drove of Soriss a couple of times but even with just two LT they could not stop me from claiming at least one city in this way. In Silver things got worse when Kraken started sieging as well, and more cities fell. The Heroes eventually got the silver webb item and Thorn proceeded to teleport to the Siren, kill the spiders protecting her and then webb her for long enough that the rest could reach and kill her. Still Kraken and Soriss sieges different parts of the map and just fled one step if the heroes attacked. Eventually the last city I needed fell and I had won.

All in all, the worries some people had about LTs sieging at different parts of the map and just fleeing if attacked was totally correct. The heroes clobbered me in dungeons (when they bothered to go down there, they concentrated on the map instead) but there was no real counter for this overland strategy. With the Count or Bones it might be different as they only get one LT in copper, but with the Mistress of Serpents is pretty much game over from the start. Only Thorn gave them a chance.

Oh yes. We played without any significant house rule for the most part. We had one rule about fighting the current (you could save movement from the wheel to fight the current with later) in order to avoid random TPK.

My suggestion for people thinking of playing is introducing a house rule that says that LT are moved back to their starting position or the OL keep if they flee, although I don't have their starting positions in my head so I am not sure if it is enough.

Honn said:

The heroes didn't go down into too many dungeons? That seems kind of foolish to me. I haven't played SoB myself yet, but in RtL 90% of the heroes CT-generating potential was inside dungeons. Unless this is radically different in SoB it seems to me the heroes were denying themselves the CT they need to gain XP and build their own power base. Small wonder they couldn't keep up with the LTs if they didn't have the firepower to deal with them.

It's not just the CTs, that's also their primary way of getting treasures. I don't know why anyone would avoid dungeons in SoB or RtL as a general rule. The only reason I can see is that you're afraid you'll have to flee and lose a lot of travel time, but with SoB's changes to conquest gain, going all the way through three levels isn't as scary anymore, since eventually the OL's CT gains will cap out.

Basically, I'm completely unsurprised that a group of heroes that avoided dungeons would lose, since the only way they can win is by going into dungeons.

It's not so much that the heroes have weak stats that is the problem. The campaign I played, the hero group could dish out 50-75 damage at a range of 20 spaces(Tobin Farslayer), and they were still overwhelmed by the LTs. Once there are 3-4 LTs out there, it becomes a full time job just chasing them around the map. My group did almost all the island levels, and still lost due to 5 cities razed. When you can seige 3 cities at once, and the heroes can only push a LT a space or two away, stuff is goign to burn down. LTs only die if the heroes web them first turn or take some other action to prevent them from running away.

With the LT's are sieging, that puts pressure on the heroes to get to the end game as fast as they can. Is that not a possibility? I mean, hitting more dungeons to increase the CT total faster?

-shnar

Ok, my wording was pretty horrible. The Heroes did not in any way avoid dungeons, they went for dungeons whenever they could. But at the end of the game they had no choice but to chase after the LTs instead to protect their cities. They took dungeons when they could on the way of course, but if they had not diverted to defend cities I would have won at the start of Silver, the cities just go down too fast so they where forced to concentrate on the map in silver.

There Heroes where equal to me in conquest at the end, and that was only because I got 4 CP a week since I couldn't really kill anyone, they had for too many skills and items for that (the silver deck was pretty much empty). The Heroes where very powerful and would slaughter a LT that came to close, but even with that power they could do nothing against the LT because the LT simply ran away . No matter how hard you hit you can't kill something if it's not on the map anymore.

As for going down into more dungeons to make the game progress, they tried for a while but its not fast enough. The OL can power down cities faster than you can advance the game.

Sea of Blood might be the hardest game ever...

We are playing the lighthouse plot (random draw - lucky us, I guess, as the two other plots seem harder). 62-66 in favor of the OL and we played only 5 weeks. There seems to be more conquest in the SoB dungeons than in the RtL dungeons, as the islands (we finished all 3 levels) we cleaned up in weeks 3 and 5 yielded scores of 31-23 in our favor (pre-silver monster upgrade) and 21-34 in the OL's favor (post-silver monster upgrade). the silver age will be there soon, but that's good, as it seems that heroes really need to take as few weeks as possible to reach the end of the game.

No blitzing in SoB, for sure. It's a race. We'll see in a few months if we have a chance of making it to the end (our RtL campaign took a year and 3 months in real time)...

Wow. Well if preventing an OL victory by razing cities is really that hard, I might suggest a house rule to increase the number of seige tokens required (and/or make the raze roll harder to accomplish) as a countermeasure. Anyone have an idea how much the razing process would have to be slowed, or are we talking numbers so high it would be ridiculous?

I think its more of a question on how the LT move actually. Even if you increase the walls on each city (or other marker) they can still be a bit to far appart, the Heroes might have time to stop the siege, but come silver they will never get to dungeons because they have to spend to much time running between cities.

I am however pretty sure that my Heroes could have kept up (or at least had a chance to do so) if the LT fled back to the OL keep or something similar when they ran from an encounter. Each time they scare one away they get some respite, and they also get a measure of control over the LT, they can let them take cities/markers near the Keept and concentrated on protecting places far away.