It is stated in the Rules that you simply add the Expansion Cards that have no Treachery Costs to the OL Deck. So is it correct, that the more Expansions you possess, the bigger the OL deck is? This seems a little unfair to me, no?
Does the OL in RTL still get 3 Conquest Points when he runs out of Cards? Cos that means a Disadvantage for OLs with more Expansions to me.
Nimrod said:
It is stated in the Rules that you simply add the Expansion Cards that have no Treachery Costs to the OL Deck. So is it correct, that the more Expansions you possess, the bigger the OL deck is? This seems a little unfair to me, no?
Does the OL in RTL still get 3 Conquest Points when he runs out of Cards? Cos that means a Disadvantage for OLs with more Expansions to me.
Yes you add them. Even with all the added cards from expansions, it adds like 4 turns or so to the OL deck. Its not a big deal, especially if you buy Focused as an upgrade and especially if you use Evil Genius.
Thx for the answer but whats evil genius?
Its a Power card that lets the OL draw 3 cards a turn instead of 2. Get that out the first level and you'll fly through the deck, especially if you are brutal about discarding.
There's also an event Trechery card called "Urgency" (I THINK that's what it was called anyway) It's a power card that lets the overlord discard two cards from the top of the deck every turn as well. I've played as the heroes when both it AND evil genius was in play early in the dungeon, and the OL through some fancy footwork managed to burn through the deck three times over the course of the dungeon (in my defence, it was a rumour dungeon, so the bottom floor was bigger)
Ah yup, didn't find the card when checking last time. Thx a lot mate
Yes it is a disadvantage. The base deck is 36 cards, and the expansions add 12 extra cards.
This means:
The easy fix I use is removing 6 spawn cards of the OL's choice (while keeping at least 1 Skeleton, 1 Beastman and 1 Bane Spider spawn). Whether you do this for the campaign or let the OL change it every dungeon for more variety is up to you.
The difficult fix is a new OL deck I have constructed and will play test tonight :-)
While you are naturally free to do anything you want, this to me smacks heavily of loading the OL deck. I mean, I can think of 6 spawn cards I would easily get rid of between the expansions, making it more likely you are going to pull traps and event cards. And with the low spawn rate of RtL due to the reinforcement token, I think this would actually give the OL a big advantage.
I'll be interested to see how you playing of it goes.
48 instead of 36 cards is a 33% increase in time the heros have before the OL decks. It would be just fair to increase the reward for the OL by 33% from 3 to 4 CT, just to have the same ratios as in basic Descent.
I think this is the exact reason they gave the OL the upgrade that removes four cards from the deck. Granted, if RtL is the only expansion you're using, that's a bigger advantage than if you have all the expansions, but on the other hand, there is a lot more variety in the threat cards now. It's a balancing act. Personally, I find that the OL and heroes are fairly evenly matched in the bronze and silver levels of the campaign. So while, relatively speaking, it takes longer to burn through the deck, and with 48 instead of 36 cards, that means that the particular card you're waiting for will be, on average, 6 cards (3 turns) deeper in the deck, you have to also look at whether or not your game suffers for it, or if the new game elements and new tools at your disposal adequately compensate for it.
I agree that a lot of the missions in the expansions are quite tough for the heroes, but I kind of like that myself. Makes it a REAL victory when you win! There ARE a number of new spawn cards, but as you already mentioned, the power cards will be seen less frequently, and it will take longer to burn through the deck. Which way does this tip the balance? I'm not sure, myself...
Edit:Quotes dont work again...
QUOTE Osaka:
I agree that a lot of the missions in the expansions are quite tough for the heroes, but I kind of like that myself. Makes it a REAL victory when you win! There ARE a number of new spawn cards, but as you already mentioned, the power cards will be seen less frequently, and it will take longer to burn through the deck. Which way does this tip the balance? I'm not sure, myself...
The problem is not balance, but the influence of luck on the deck.
With a larger deck changes for not getting a specific type of card is way higher. At the Vanilla game yesterday (36 OL cards) I only got 1 spawn card in the first 18 cards of the deck, while 1 in 4 cards is a spawn card.
The example might seem wrong, because the spawn ratio increases with the extra cards, the amount of trap cards is exactly the same in the base deck meaning you could go through a short dungeon (or 2 RTL levels) without ever seeing a trap card, or even worse: a power card.
With a larger the deck the extremes increase both in occurence and effect giving a random twist to the OL that only gets compensated by the random skills from larger decks in Vanilla, and not at all in RTL. Since I really don't like this random effect I am both changing the OL deck and Skill decks to reduce the card-draw effect on the changes of winning or losing the game.
Since you would probably be right if you say that it will even out of the course of 20-30 games it might be fine to continue with the default implementation. Just realise that some of those dungeons will be a walk-over for the heroes (wind pact) while in other dungeons they won't be able to get past the first room (especially with "The Thing in the Pit" (AoD, first mission). I want a more flattened gameplay experience where all scenario's are interesting and challenging, and you will hardly ever loose or win because of your card draws.
QUOTE Parathyon
48 instead of 36 cards is a 33% increase in time the heros have before the OL decks. It would be just fair to increase the reward for the OL by 33% from 3 to 4 CT, just to have the same ratios as in basic Descent.
Since you will only get through your deck once each scenario (otherwise the heroes deserve to loose), you will either get 0 conquest instead of 3, or 4 instead of 3.
The question is therefor whether the original deck had an arbitrary size, or whether it is something that was playtested and put on 36 cards for balance purposes. I guess we will never know, but the 48 deck feels wrong for me.
QUOTE Big Remy
While you are naturally free to do anything you want, this to me smacks heavily of loading the OL deck. I mean, I can think of 6 spawn cards I would easily get rid of between the expansions, making it more likely you are going to pull traps and event cards. And with the low spawn rate of RtL due to the reinforcement token, I think this would actually give the OL a big advantage.
I'll be interested to see how you playing of it goes.
Yesterday I used a 36 card deck in scenario 3 of ToI, and that went very well. They could have made it without me going through the deck once and the number of spawns I had was nice (though a bit unbalanced throughout the game, see above)
Next friday will I finish a campaign in the final keep, and we'll either use the 36 (without Focused, It feels like it is here to balance the expansions) or the -6 spawns deck. I ll post afterwards how it went.
Results with the 36 card deck so far (as promised):
- During the first 3 scenario's of ToI I only managed to get through the deck while the heroes where particullary slow and deserved the conquest loss, so that is fine. (I played those scenario's 2 times each, once as OL and once as hero(es)). Using normal descent rules on all other aspects (no things like the RTL spawn marker) it was really close. The heroes won 4/6 with 1 conquest left, lost once in the before-last-room because they were sloppy with spawn prevention and the 3rd scenario was a walk over once because of 2 reasons: Wind Pact (banned from now on in my games) and the runelocked doors heroes can close and the OL can never open because of the zero-move boss. My suggestion is to balance this by unlocking all doors once the final room is opened (personally I would also add a green die to the boss attack, so it can actually harm tanks (for sure) and may let it battle, since it cannot move (not yet tested).
- During the OL-Keep (Great Wyrm) I managed to go through the deck exactly (got Evil Genius in the last 10 cards). Since it was a five level dungeon I think it is obvious I would never have made this if the deck was 8 cards (+12 - 4) larger so I am happy with the result. Final conquest: OL 26, Heroes 34, so that was not as bad as expected (the final battle was as anti-climatic as told by countless of others who had been there before)