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Author Topic: Pandemic Legacy (probably will have spoilers)  (Read 12280 times)

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ConMan

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Re: Pandemic Legacy (probably will have spoilers)
« Reply #25 on: December 06, 2020, 05:13:53 pm »
0

We did an extremely similar trick in one of our games, probably around July as well. It was even the card that we threw in just because we'd had a pretty good run and so our funding was so high we already put all our "must have" Event cards in the deck and decided to throw that one in just for funsies.
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GendoIkari

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Re: Pandemic Legacy (probably will have spoilers)
« Reply #26 on: December 06, 2020, 10:35:08 pm »
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You mean a pretty bad run, if you had a lot of events?
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ConMan

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Re: Pandemic Legacy (probably will have spoilers)
« Reply #27 on: December 07, 2020, 01:10:53 am »
+1

Yes, that would be right.
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Tables

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Re: Pandemic Legacy (probably will have spoilers)
« Reply #28 on: December 29, 2020, 06:32:43 am »
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Season 0 mini playlog. My partner and I have played the Prologue and January, I'll list some highlights here. Will spoiler tag everything except the Prologue.

Prologue game: 2 objectives - An unknown city in Europe, and a known city Novosbirik

Basically an introduction game, it went smoothly enough. We played the Dispatcher like (move another pawn or team up to 3 spaces for an action) and Scientist (form teams with only 4 cards). We weren't able to form teams for a while, but once we did, things started going smoothly. We formed a Neutral team midgame, a Soviet team a little later and an Allied team towards the end. The unknown city ended up being Rome, I believe, which was allied, and we opted for just waiting until there were few enough cities that we could place teams in all of them, since we didn't quite have enough Europe cards or a Safe House in Europe to aquire targets.

What we learned from this first game is that forming the right types of team and aquiring targets is hard - you need a safehouse in the right allegiance or the right continent respectively, and while getting 5 cards is potentially easier than in regular Pandemic, being at the right location with that safehouse adds an extra complexity to it.

January game 1: 2 objectives - Known targets in Sao Paolo and Santiago, and unknown city in Asia

Unsurprisingly, no new mechanics at the start of this game, and no new ones midway through. We played the Dispatcher like again, but I switched to playing the Operations Expert. We had a very rough start - my partner went first and couldn't treat anywhere important, so we opted to move us both to Mexico City and she would take the card for 4 Neutral cards (as we need 2 neutral teams). Then a turn 1 Escalation lead to 3 incidents by the end of turn 2, with nothing we could have done about it. We got one more incident soon after which might have been preventable but only just.

From there the game progressed reasonably smoothly - we got the incidents under control, and with our early neutral team was able to mop up all of the neutral hotspots. Next we formed an allied team, and I was able to acquire targets in Asia, identifying Soviet city Peking. Unfortunately we hadn't drawn many Soviet cards by this point. IIRC at 3/5s of the way through the player deck we had drawn 5, with 1 under the objective card, meaning 8/14 were still in the deck. And I'd just used 2 to identify the target city.

We had the board fairly clean except for three cities with 3 agents before the final escalation was drawn, so we were confident about not losing to incidents - it was just time that was the question. Or so we thought. I moved a team to mop up one of the final 3 agent cities before the final escalation was drawn, as we got me positioned so I would be able to form the final team and finish the second objective on my final turn. Then we drew that final escalation, placing 3 agents in Leopoldville. I removed one of the 3 agent cards with Resilient Population equivalent. And then infected Leopoldville, causing the 5th incident. The incident effect? Add an agent to all cities with an incident in Africa, causing the 6th incident immediately. Drawing another incident effect, add an agent to all cities with an incident in Africa. So we went straight from 4 incidents to 7 in a completely impossible to prevent situation, lovely. Partner's final turn finished one objective, and just needed to not draw the one remaining city which could have an incident and we would win!

She of course drew that city, giving us a pretty frustrating loss that felt rather unfair - 6 incidents out of 8 were completely unpreventable, the remaining 2 potentially we could have dealt with but it'd have meant other sacrifices. Bad draws also left most events in the 2nd half of the deck, along with most of the Soviet cards - and we had a lot of hotspot Soviet cities that had come up from the infection deck. Technically it was an "Adequate" pass, we move on to February - but it still felt pretty annoying. I reckon that we probably could have won the game with slightly more optimised play, it's hard to say though.

We decided to spend our 2 upgrade points giving the Politician to the Operations Expert (eventually I'll remember their new names... think this one is Hospital Administrator?), target city Washington. As a character who can get around quite easily, having the option to go back to Washington for 2 actions and a card at most at any time, and then give a card to someone else, feels pretty strong.
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...spin-offs are still better for all of the previously cited reasons.
But not strictly better, because the spinoff can have a different cost than the expansion.

Tables

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Re: Pandemic Legacy (probably will have spoilers)
« Reply #29 on: May 31, 2021, 05:28:35 am »
0

We've just had another annoying Season 0 game. August, but I can describe it without spoilers quite easily. Though for reference if you want to know what this month's objectives were: Stop the 4th trial in Asia (Baghdad (S), Karachi (N), Shanghai (S), Bangkok (N)), Infiltrate Sabik's HQ in Leningrad, bug the 5th control centre in North America (Toronto)

Things were pretty rough early on - turn 1 Escalation, and 1st card in 2nd pile was also an Escalation, leading to 3 early Incidents in Buenos Aries (2) and Tokyo. We managed to clean up okay from this, by around the 4th pile of cards I think there were about 10 agents left on the board in total, no city with more than 2, with two Escalations left. We had completed one objective, had enough teams out (or cards in hand) for the final two, so just had to position everything and win.

We drew the 4th Escalation around this point, but were able to move one spare team to the city (Algiers) which got three agents. So I took my turn, and at the end of that it was clear  we could win with all three objectives complete by my next turn. A few cities got a third agent added - Warsaw and Lima, and Tokyo got a 2nd. Partner took her turn and completed the 2nd objective. Then she drew the first card of the final pile... and drew the 5th escalation. Now all of a sudden we had gone from no danger hotspots, to having three of them, in about 2 turns. Infection card draw, and we get an incident immediately, adding an extra agent to Tokyo. Then Tokyo came up, causing another Incident. Then Warsaw, causing an incident there, adding another agent in Warsaw, causing a 7th incident there, then adding a third agent in Buenos Aries. Then Lima was drawn, ending the game on incidents.

Sometimes, Season 0 just kicks you while you're down. As mentioned we had the game pretty much under control, most cities with no agents, just a few on 2, incident cities on 1 agent, and a guaranteed win on my next turn. Then the game just casually goes from that pretty good position to a loss in three infection phases, with almost nothing we could have done to prevent it. Still, we completed two objectives and so got the adequate rating, and while a few cities got added surveillance we avoided losing any cover for the game. If you want to know exactly how we did for the objectives (obviously major spoilers): We ended up with Baghdad getting exposed and bugging the lab, I had the cards to get through Sabik's HQ through the harder route, and 3 neutrals to use in the basement. Just needed one more turn to do it. And while I didn't read it, the debrief entry for this number was clearly extremely long, so I feel like I missed a lot of potentially juicy information by failing this objective :(.
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...spin-offs are still better for all of the previously cited reasons.
But not strictly better, because the spinoff can have a different cost than the expansion.

GendoIkari

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Re: Pandemic Legacy (probably will have spoilers)
« Reply #30 on: May 31, 2021, 02:17:31 pm »
0

Just had a really awesome finish to our July game. We had been doing pretty well throughout the game; looking like we were probably going to win without much trouble. But then a very unlucky draw created a quadruple outbreak and we were left at being on the brink of death.

We had already discovered the cure to 2 diseases, and met 2 other objectives, so we just had to find the cure for red. We actually had red with level 3 positive mutations, which normally means we find the cure quickly, but the only person drawing any red cards was the Soldier, who can't discover cures, and she had 3 red cards. We had the New Role event in the game (and in hand), with the plan of switching out Operations Expert to something more useful after they had placed a bunch of structures. So I pointed out that we could switch the Soldier to the Scientist, and that would actually instantly cure red and win the game. So the event that I normally think is not that great and very situational completely saved us from what looked like a loss.

By the end of the campaign, we won 3 of our games with this exact same trick.
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Tables

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Re: Pandemic Legacy (probably will have spoilers)
« Reply #31 on: September 26, 2021, 05:17:13 pm »
+1

We've just finished November in our S0 playthrough. Since our August game things have been going much better. We found ourselves in a slightly strange situation really where (minor spoilers) we knew less about Sabik's motivation than we'd like, failing objectives relating to him often due to poor luck, but we knew a lot about most other things going on. Things have definitely been good fun since then, some of the aliases we've created are real monsters. The most notable one being (October asset & a lategame objective spoiler) a Soviet Alias with Dr Roberts in Novosbirik, and the night vision goggles, and a visa to Novosbirik. Basically, start each turn in Novosbirik with 6 actions, 8 actions if you are infiltrating PEARL. And if you don't need that many actions, you can bank them for later. I did discover after the game we missed a rule about having a max of 3 time tokens at the end of your turn, we had up to 6 saved at one point - but I don't think this would have affected the outcome as the way we spent them was basically "there's no point doing that action right now when you can do it next turn".

(Minor spoilers for S1 and S2 lategame) November felt like a turning point in the story in both S1 and S2, with objectives and story massively shifting towards the endgame objective. But in S0, we hit November and (MAJOR S0 spoilers) Sabik asks us to join him, causing a split story depending on which way you go. We decided to side with Sabik, despite the objectives about him often being incomplete! This gave us a completely different legacy deck for the final two months, which was almost as big of a surprise as the fake bottom of the box. I'm keeping all the cards at this point as I want to compare to the original legacy deck at the end, see how different everything plays out if you choose to reject his offer. We actually found this to be a relatively easy month to complete overall, oddly, though part of that might be due to playing 2P and how our characters are set up, as well as just good luck with draws (we had two very early Escalations but quickly cleaned them up, leaving us with little threat for several turns)

Really looking forward to playing December, hopefully next weekend or the weekend after.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2021, 05:18:19 pm by Tables »
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...spin-offs are still better for all of the previously cited reasons.
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Tables

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Re: Pandemic Legacy (probably will have spoilers)
« Reply #32 on: October 10, 2021, 05:01:17 pm »
0

Just finished our final game of Pandemic Legacy Season 0, and with that, we have completed all three seasons! We got a very good score in Season 0, with 9 Succeeding and 3 Adequate evaluations (i.e. 9 total wins, 3 partial wins), leading to getting the best possible evaluation.

Overall I'm not sure which season I'd say is best. Season 2 has the whole exploring and more non-linear design, which is REALLY cool, but balance wise that makes it a bit lacking - it can become massively easier if you manage things well, or massively harder if you fall behind. Season 1 is a bit rough around the edges in a few places but otherwise does the concept really well. It's the only one that really plays like regular Pandemic, to begin with at least. Season 0 is a bit different, but it feels like it self balances the best out of all of them, at least from what I can tell, and that's nice. The way objectives work is REALLY fun, and keeps things quite fresh and different compared to S1 and S2. However its Incident mechanic (equivalent to Outbreaks) is very chaotic and kind of un-fun, two of our Adequates were because incidents decided to kick us hard and just stack up 2-3 at a time after Escalations, with little we could do to stop them. I would say play Season 1>2>0 personally, and if you can only play one, play S1.

I think you could definitely build a (non Legacy) Pandemic spinoff with many of the mechanics from Season 0. Random objective cards that you draw each game, with an assigned difficulty. Perhaps each card having an easy and hard version, so you can fine tune the difficulty (e.g. a known city objective might have an easy version needing 1 team, and a hard version needing 2 teams). Possibly randomly drawing and adding restriction cards to increase difficulty, maybe even as a way to bring the difficulty back down slightly, an option to shuffle and pick 1-2 assets per player with a reduction in difficulty per asset chosen? I'm sure you could fine tune something out of it, especially considering the multiple different types of objectives that eventually get revealed.
« Last Edit: October 11, 2021, 03:01:30 am by Tables »
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...spin-offs are still better for all of the previously cited reasons.
But not strictly better, because the spinoff can have a different cost than the expansion.

GendoIkari

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Re: Pandemic Legacy (probably will have spoilers)
« Reply #33 on: October 10, 2021, 09:21:36 pm »
+1

I should be starting season 2 soon. Our group played through Betrayal Legacy first instead. Almost done with that, it’s been great.
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Tables

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Re: Pandemic Legacy (probably will have spoilers)
« Reply #34 on: October 29, 2021, 03:52:24 am »
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I recently started planning out a perfect Season 2 playthrough, seeing just how far you can push the score if you get perfect luck, and it seemed like the kind of thing some of you guys might be interested in. Massive, massive spoilers however, even from the start: https://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/2749564/perfect-run-hypothetical-season-2-playthrough-perf
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But not strictly better, because the spinoff can have a different cost than the expansion.

Tables

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Re: Pandemic Legacy (probably will have spoilers)
« Reply #35 on: February 05, 2022, 04:30:25 pm »
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Something I realised the other day about all three seasons of Pandemic Legacy is how it fixes an issue that regular 2 player Pandemic has. This contains minor spoilers for season 1 (if you've played January you're safe), and a few minor ones for season 2 (one of which I'll spoiler as it relates to a late game mechanic)

Specifically, in regular 2 player pandemic, one of the uncommon but extremely annoying things that can kill you is hand space limit. With only 14 cards between two players, you can end up in situations where you each have 3/4 cards of different colours, unable to make a cure, and until you get lucky with draw order, it's tough to get out of - you end up discarding or using lots of cards that could have gone towards cures.

In Season 1, this is quickly solved by one disease no longer needing to be cured. With only three colours to collect, you can safely discard one colour and not need to worry about it ruining a cure.

In Season 2, there are only three colours. On top of that, the mandatory build 3 supply centre objective you have at the start of the game doesn't require three in different colours - and this makes things even easier as the deck in Season 2 isn't just a fixed set of cards of each colour, you'll be adding more cards into it and potentially even removing some. Later in the game you do add a fourth colour, and need to collect some sets of that fourth colour, but the game also gives you far more control over your hands, and more ways to trade cards around. The awkward card split issue can still happen here, though.

Season 0 has only three affiliations on cards, so the issue is completely circumvented from the start. In exchange there's quite a bit of other info on cards that can be relevant at different times (region, and that mysterious number in the corner), but I feel like this plays more into deciding how you utilise cards rather than difficulty collecting sets.
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...spin-offs are still better for all of the previously cited reasons.
But not strictly better, because the spinoff can have a different cost than the expansion.

Kuildeous

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Re: Pandemic Legacy (probably will have spoilers)
« Reply #36 on: February 28, 2022, 10:09:42 am »
+1

I'm 2/3 into Season 0, so I can't read Tables' spoiler. Hopefully I'll remember to come back and read through.

Though the timing is weird playing Season 0 during a pandemic and now amid Russian aggressions, it's a fun game. Still has that Pandemic mechanic of flipping cards and making certain cities worse until bad things happen. I agree that the incidents in Season 0 are harder to account for, but I think I kind of like that because letting a city reach a critical point can cause a sense of dread. Are we going to flip a card that screws us entirely, or will we be safe? We had a tense moment where we lost a safehouse in Europe, and three of us were hiding out in a Moscow safehouse. Fortunately, we had another safehouse in Europe, so we sacrificed that one. But it was close.

I think I still prefer Season 2 because of its exploration and building. I really enjoyed those. I also enjoyed constructing the spreadsheet to track what was happening with our cards. We were able to affect things so that we knew we could ignore certain cities (especially those hard to reach) in future games. It was really handy, but not everyone gets off on spreadsheets like I do.
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