by Dam the Man
davypi wrote:
Rauli, I already know you are leaving out details. When you have Innsmouth in play, which you claim you do, the deep ones track can cause problems, and usualy does so in about 50% of my games. So you do, in fact, have to deviate from your formula.
But for me it doesn't. In the 32 games I've played with IH in the mix, I've bothered with it certainly less than five times. And it's not that hard to combine it with gates, if you're heading to Innsmouth in the first place. But honestly, with 20 unstable locations in my setup, I approach each game with the notion that I have 13 or 14 turns in which to slap down six seals (or more should gate bursts occur) or the doom track is full and the AO wakes. Yes, this includes 12 and 13 doom AOs as well! I'm just not getting bounces off seals and at most two monster surges (there have been 17 Mythos card games without a single surge), average is probably one or less, instead, new gates are popping up. I've had the AO wake up with only one of the four main gates in Arkham itself opened, rest of the gates were spread through the other boards.
Whenever I see people give new players strategy tips and say you want a street sweeper (someone whose main purpose is to fight monsters), I just :shake: to myself. My four investigators (solo, or 2+2 with a friend) are all-purpose investigators, everyone is counted on to seal at least one gate. But certainly none of them are wasted on something so pointless as monsters. If there are two gates equal distance away, one has a monster on it, the other doesn't, I'll head for the unguarded one because that is one known thing less than can go wrong. And what do monsters do? Terror track moves, but who cares? Some people do, but I don't, only hindrance is TL6 when Curiositie Shoppe closes, that's where I do all my shopping.
If you play just base game, once you've gotten the hang of things (especially gate distribution), you should be looking at 95% win rate. Naturally, since most players start off with just the base game and have to work their way through the learning curve, they don't start off hot. In fact, I went 2-1-4 with base game (win-draw-loss) while ending up with my current 59-24-21 numbers. These days (or back in 2010 when I last played), even with IH, I felt like a Herald is a must to give the game any real bite (I'm one of the few who likes the BGotW Heral RAW, meaning surge adds a doomer, but of course, so few surges, I'm getting doomers anyways from new gates), not excluding really bizarre combinations which can occur. Even sadder for my take is that even without gearing up for final combats (no Blessings, no shopping spree, no healing, etc.), I've won more than 50% of final combat, when, IMO, the AO should be winning those 75% minimum.