The other day I went up against Quachil for the first time. Playing with just Arkham and Innsmouth and was unable to seal 6 gates before Quachil woke and was utterly defeated. Three games later and still can not beat him. I am usually one gate away from winning when by some fluke the deep ones track fills or the doom track fills. That is really not the problem. When fighting Quachil how do you beat him? Am I reading his attack right or am i missing something. If you have 4 players then you only have 4 turns to beat him before everyone is devoured and that is just impossible. 3 players 3 rounds. 1 player 1 round is that right?

Yes, you need to have a dream team to have a chance against him in final battle.

My calculations:

Lily Chen with Passed Story and her skill which is not affected by any of his immunities.

Blessed Norman Withers with Passed Story. Pray for 4 successes.

Well-armed Zoey Samaras.

Maybe shotgunner clue-loaded Joe Diamond.

You should have all ancient one turn cancelling items available. If I'm not mistaken - there is 3 of those.

Still, the best way to beat him - don't let him awake.

Glad to know I'm not theonly one he gives fits too. I was worried I was doing him wrong. Thanks for the advice I am going to try it.

According to Tibs' report, Quachil has a 97% kill rate in Final battle's making him joint second with Tsathoggua to Azathoth who of course has no battle at all.

I'd argue you'd want to streamline your team as much as possible aiming for as few success as possible required. I'd suggest Daisy Walker with Red Sign of Shudde M'ell/Shrivelling and Joe Diamond with a shotgun would probably do the trick. Adding Norman for his back story could be counter productive as you adde more required successes than you take away and he's not very combat orientated so would be harder to raise to a level making it worthwhile.

If using the Epic battles variant, you'd have to hope the Ao didn't attack first and finesse opening so Daisy attacked first.

VinceT said:

Red Sign doesn't work on AOs, it only works on monsters.

VinceT said:

You have to click on the number to see the decimals. So Quachil (97.47%) takes second place, beating out Tsathoggua (97.20%). Of course, the distinction is minimal, since they're both killers. As Dam said, Red Sign does not work since the Ancient One is not a monster.

Since you get N turns to atttack and Quachil has hit points proportional to N, where N is the number of investigators, you can make a simple formula to determine effectiveness of an N-sized team.

Since Quachil kills someone every round, there will be one fewer attack against him before he kills another person. So the ratio of investigator attacks to Quachil HP is

N(N+1) / 2(13)N

For 1 investigator, that means you're getting 0.077 attacks per HP.
For 8 investigators, you're getting 0.346 attacks per HP. Assuming all attackers to be equally effective, a team of 8 investigators is 4.5 times as effective as a team of 1.

Okay. So we now know that, in general, more investigators means better chances. But it's pretty obvious that not all investigators are equally effective. I may not be telling you a whole lot you didn't already know, but I'd say you should take:

Zoey, since she reduces the immunities to resistances. Give her a shotgun and have her personal story passed.
Lily Chen's personal story passed, and her skill, will be a great help.
As MNT said, a blessed Norman's passed personal story might be of great help. Certainly, 2 doom tokens is a significant enough contribution when counting the added successes needed to be Quachil.
Joe Diamond's clue ability will come in handy, but I hate that it can be abused. That's why I play with Kevin's clue-limit rule.
Characters with a maximum Fight of 6 will be helpful here, too.

Have blessings all round, The Messenger ally, Fight-augmenting skills and allies, and even Marksman can come in handy. Certainly Grapple and Endurance will.

Using Epic Battle can make most things harder, but if you also have Miskatonic, some of the cards will make life a little easier for the investigators. Share Arkham's Fate, No Rest, Two Worlds, and even No One Will Save You can be massively helpful (luck permitting).

And, of course, make sure you have attack cancelers.

Interesting. Tibs, can you unpack that formula a little bit?

The Messenger Ally? This one which brings -1 to all skill checks? And removes doom tokens when you're devoured?

How he's going to help, when all Allies are discarded at the start of a battle?

Also, as I stated before - with right team setup and good ao attack cancelling item set.

Tibs said:

@ Tibs, sorry, did you get my e-mail?

Don't forget Daisy, who can use Livre D'Ivon to get Call Ancient One.

avec said:

Sure. For a 1-investigator team, you get 1 attack before losing the battle, and QU has 12×1 HP. I wrote 13 up there and my calculations reflect that—whoops.

For a 2-investigator team, you get three attacks: 2 on the first turn, then an investigator dies, then 1 on the second turn, then you lose.

The general expression for this is N(N+1)/2 attacks for N investigators. And, of course, Quachil requires 12×N hits to defeat.

Thus, the ratio of number of attacks to total HP is N(N+1)/2(12)×N = (N+1)/24 .

So a quick shortcut to the ratio of effectiveness of two different team sizes, N and M, is (N+1)/(M+1). The extreme limits are the difference between an 8-inv team and 1-inv team: (8+1)/(1+1) = 9/2 = 4.5 .

Sorry Julia. Yes, looks like I got your email—but it was buried. I've been quite... busy lately. Such is vector calculus and electrodynamics. Next semester will be even worse, blech.

I'll have a look at it now.

Whilst I can't fault your math, I'd go further into the question of how unequal are the investigators?

I'd argue you're a hell of a lot more likely to get 12 successes out of Joe Diamond with a shotgun, especially if you dedicated to picking up sundearies such as Fight skill, than you from the next tier of possible contenders.

So, whilst going from 1 investigator to 2 changes from 1/12 to 1/8 - if the next investigator isn't at least 33% as effective as the first you've still reduced your overall efficiency. The more investigators you add of course, the easier it is to add less efficient ones because the relative difference decreases.

It's just personal speculation at this point, but I doubt there is a next choice of investigator that's 33% as good as a fully tricked out Joe Diamond. Worse, by extending the fight beyond a single round, you actually make Joe less worthwhile because second or third rounds ignore his ability that makes him so useful in the first - which means they have to better than 33% and closer to 50% as good as Joe was on that first round.

Corny as it is, if you want to spend your whole game building up to one skill check Joe knocks everyone else into a cocked hat.

It's a good point; once he's gotten his one big attack in, rules-as-written Joe isn't worth much except as cannon fodder, but if you have the misfortune to wake Quachil at a time when Joe is towards the end of the line for first player, then there's probably not much difference between classic Joe and KW-clue-limit Joe

Tibs said:

Got it. That's pretty nifty. Obviously it doesn't tell us the whole story, but it's clear that more investigators are better than fewer. Thanks!

avec said:

I disagree with this idea very strongly. I think it's premised on the idea that you aren't deliberately gearing up for final combat. If you're gearing, I think killing in a single attack is easier with a single investigator. If you gather 20 clues and a shotgun or a fight skill and a blessing, you can probably end the game in one roll. Having a second investigator makes shotguns, fight skills, or reroll abilities (all of which drastically increase your chance of a one attack kill) not nearly as effective since you'll need twice as many successes to win.

Although I should point out that vs. quachil you really shouldn't solo him because his dust deck will probably kill off your one investigator (making it impossible to stockpile clues). The stalked investigator would be better off gathering gate trophies (once the stalked investigator is devoured, the new investigator can start trading the trophies for clue tokens at the science building and get a clue collection fairly quickly). Plus you'll have extra resources for finding a shotgun (fingers crossed).

You're probably dead though ;')

That's a fair point. I wasn't trying to suggest that we don't need to look beyond Tibs' extremely simple model. I'm just suggesting that, all things being equal, it would appear that more investigators will get farther than fewer investigators. Obviously, a blessed Joe Diamond who's been gearing up will do better than eight average investigators who get caught with their pants down.

See why Q's my fav Ancient One? The 'final battle' is a mere formality where he kills you one at a time instead of all at once like Azathoth. He's supposed to be a 'problem'- the idea is to avoid facing him at all costs.

Maybe if Norman passes his Story and someone casts "Call Ancient One" spell and Joe Diamond has Fight skill and 20 Clues...MAYBE then you have a chance of one person surviving. I did the math a while back- if you have fewer than 30 Clues there's basically no chance- has anyone ever saved up 30 clues?

Has anyone ever beaten Q in Final Battle without getting the rules wrong?

Fake Ghost Pirate said:

Sure, otherwise his stat would be 100% failure ::laughter::

Seriously... JGT has ;-)

And... a blessed Joe Diamond, clue-shotgunning Quachil, with Mandy by his side... I think you can say good bye to the poor little baby

Why do I have the sudden urge to see if I can get 30 clues on Joe Diamond in a solo QU final battle?

Hypnos obviously, but do you dilute the Common Items deck with King in Yellow to get the Press Pass but make the Shotgun harder to find...

Ach. I wish I could remember all the details, but I only pulled it off once, so long ago, and I've lost to Quachil many times since then. But it was four "thugs" (High Fights: Joe, Mike) with a bunch of Fight-enhancing Skills, Blessings, Clues, and ridiculously fortunate rolls. (And yes, contrary to my usual tactics, I did indeed "give up" around Doom 9, and started to gear up for whatever last stand I could prepare.) Each roll managed to remove at least one doom token: the First Player dumped all his Clues during his "death roll", which collectively managed the other two tokens. I believe Mike took the last shot for the win.

The Universe simply wasn't on his side: that's just the only way that could have worked.

MASSIVE POST ALERT!!!

The formula's perfectly accurate in theory, but suggests a course of action that will probably never work in practice.

Joe Diamond (alone) is not only better than eight "average" investigators - he's better alone than ANY team of eight, or than any other team of almost any size.

Because each investigator adds 12 hitpoints, the threshold of usefulness, in terms of number-of-combat-dice, is higher than just "anything above zero". An eight-person team gets 36 attacks, therefore needing to achieve an average of about 2.66 successes per attack in order to defeat QU. Any investigator averaging less than that number with his/her own combat checks is making the battle more difficult rather than easier. The number of dice being rolled on any individual combat check is mostly quite limited in this battle, so the ability of strong characters to make up for the deficiencies of weaker ones is not generally all that great (with a couple of exceptions). The attack-cancellers help a bit, but they still only get the average down to 1.6, and even the optimum 8-person team (according to my very rough calculations) will still have four people who can't reliably meet that, even when blessed.

In fact, I think (i'm not sure, but I think ) that it's impossible to assemble more than about five investigators whose average successes meet the 8-team standard. You can have

- Joe Diamond, or someone-with-Fight, or Joe-with-Fight... (and then lots of clues and, ideally, a shotgun).

- Someone fighty with Martial Arts (who is just getting quite a few dice).

- Someone fighty, with Grapple.

- Someone fighty, with Fight (and lots of clues).

- The Chef, dual-wielding some pretty mondo magic weapons.

And obviously, bless 'em all! But then you've gotta have at least three deadweights who (even when blessed) cause the others to need to do better; and everyone else except Joe was only just keeping their head above water anyway. In other words: investigators who are good enough to fight QU are so rare that in an 8-person team, the advantage of having them is obliterated by the burden of all the deadbeats whom you have to pad the team with. In fact, it's even bleaker than that : the only way to get as far as FIVE average-beating investigators is by distributing resources to four of them which would be better off assigned to Joe Diamond (or to a guy with the Fight skill). The ability to meet the required average will determine whether an investigator is a help or a hindrance, but every investigator who is less than your best is still bringing the average down - so if you have total control, the optimum strategy is to build the smallest possible number of super-fighters, i.e. one. Joe Diamond, and the skill 'Fight', are so overwhelmingly useful for this that any other method is barely worth pursuing.

Now, for the purposes of yer actual factual game of AH, you're not able to equip investigators that precisely - skills are scattered randomly and clues are not swappable - and, more importantly, you may not know when QU will wake up, so you may not know who will be the first to die.The number of things in the game that will make a meaningful difference against QU is very small, and it's even smaller with smaller teams of investigators, because the number of attacks is less and so the average successes needed is higher, meaning that bonus items are less significant.

The "sweet spot", logically , would be the number of average-beating investigators you can create without adding ANY deadbeats. If you draw investigators at random, this will often be impossible as you'll get some idiot with Fight 3 or something; the chances of getting no deadweights for a small group is obviously better than for a large one, so err on the side of small. The key point is that for teams of one, two, three, four, or (maybe) five investigators, you have a slim chance of being able to get enough dice. Once you're up at six, seven, or eight investigators, unless one of them is Joe Diamond, there aren't enough resources in the game to equip them well enough to give you a better than even chance. And unless the team is really top-tier stuff, they're even gonna drag Joe down with them.

Of course none of this takes any account of Final Battle cards, Call Ancient One, or indeed what actually happens during the game itself. In a way, the real sweet spot is 'zero' investigators because then QU has no hit points and you sort of win without ever actually playing AH at all.

tl;dr:
the formula doesn't account for the sheer crumminess of most AH investigators, which guarantees that an 8-person team will be useless

The formula does absolutely consider all things to be equal. Thus it's more of a guideline than a rule. The most important thing to take away is that if you thought of another investigator who would help in final combat, but you're worried about if adding him/her would make the battle harder, then more likely than not it would be easier instead.

A single investigator who can push clue tokens to an ungodly advantage breaks the formula, and clearly an 8-investigator team requires eight carefully selected characters.

The more I integrate with humans, the more socially aware I become. I've recently noticed that telling someone that two plus two equals four is often one of the most aggressive things you can do. This conversation may be a case in point.

Tibs said:

Oh yeah, no disrespec' meant to the formula. I was just pondering whether a decent team of 8 was possible. Dunno why it took me like 800 words to come to no particular conclusion. Didn't have time to write a short letter so I wrote a long one, etc, etc.

Joe Diamond isn't the only useful thing: 'Fight' skill does the same job.

avec said:

I suppose that's an interesting exercise in Advanced Theoretical Arkham Mathematics ;') however, eight investigators caught with their pants down are still going to get eaten even if they, theoretically, have a significantly larger infinitesimally small chance of survival than a small group of random unprepared investigators ;'D