L’utente Stefan pubblica una preview sul canale Discord della Archon. Praticamente la prima che ho trovato dall’arrivo dei KS.
Eccola di seguito:
“Friends of might and magic, this weekend I had the privilege of playing 2 scenarios (coop and then a 1 vs 1 according to tournament rules) with a buddy who ordered the base pledge while I wait for my pre-shaded bigbox. I was also allowed to take the game with me and will now play some solo campaigns over the week.
I would like to say in advance that the game is great and does everything right 95% of the time, so you can look forward to a really great box! However, I won't be able to go into everything positive here, so everything I don't mention is excellent, or at least very well implemented and well thought out. For the most part, I'm going to go into things here that we might have preferred to have solved differently. (Also this are just my first few impressions)
As I said, the first game was coop (so that I could explain him the rules of his own game first and we could look at each other's cards to clarify open questions
)
The game lasted 10 rounds and 5 hours (with rules explanation), the difficulty level was normal. I was Dungeon and he was Necropolis, the aim was to defeat 19 neutral units in Dragon Utopia. The tactical aspect and exploring the map was a lot of fun, even fighting neutral units in just one round was perfectly fine and 90% doable, which surprised me a lot and made sure that the fights were done in 3-7 minutes. We won the scenario easily and then we did a fight against each other just for fun with all the units we had at the end. And here, unfortunately, we immediately noticed the imbalance:
He played Vidomina, which had the start and special ability Necromancy. This means that after a battle, if he has such a card in his hand, he can improve a unit for half the gold price. Because he had up to 4 of these cards in his deck over the course of the game, he could ALWAYS pay half the money for each unit.
This led to the fact that at the end of the Szanario he already had all the units on the improved side and didn't know where to put the money, while I was just able to recruit the Black Dragon on the normal side in the last turn 10.
This of course led to me losing the "just for fun battle" by a landslide. We did the math and realized that he saved about 60-70 coins in total with these abilities.
And to be honest, I've been playing the PC game for 20 years and have 10 years of board game experience, I've hardly ever lost my units except for a few bronze units in combat and in my opinion I did everything possible to get the most out of it (sure, maybe I could have had 5 more coins with one or the other artifact if I'd had more luck drawing, or got 3 more coins on resource rolls) but I don't know for the life of me how I could have made up for this money advantage if we'd been playing 1vs1.
Of course, on the other hand, these cards also block the cards in your hand during the battle. Because you could just as well have powerful artifacts or spells instead. But we agreed that this small disadvantage doesn't outweigh the huge advantage. (Probably all other Necro Heroes are better balanced because they will usually only have 1 of these cards and can therefore only provide 15-25 gold in a szenario)
So Necropolis fans will be happy this faction is broken like in the PC game. (Just kidding)
In the second tournament rules game, we played Tower vs Castle for 14 rounds and 6,5 hours.
Here it was much more balanced in terms of construction and unit strength.
In turn 7, our two main heroes had a battle, where he won with only a few iron golems. Then I defeated his secondary hero and we both kept taking mines from the opponent's side. Finally, in turn 12, he took the Grail (3 victory points) and I took the Dragon Utopia (3 victory points). Which is why I finally had to attack him in turn 14 in order to win.
We had both a hero of magic and through neutral battles he already realized that I had strong spells. So he used an artifact that forbade both of us to cast spells during the entire battle.
So we both had the 5 strongest units of the fractons on the pack side and fought without cards.
Unfortunately with a disappointing result: I won and only lost the Tier 6 Units and turned the Griffins from many to the few side, while his entire army crumbled.
After 6 hours of pure playing time, we were really expecting an epic and balanced battle, but unfortunately this battle couldn't give us that.
Of course, I had better luck with the dice, but we were surprised that this could have such a big impact.
The conclusion from the scenario was that the first 6 hours were really fun, but the final battle was not worthy of the time spent playing.
Here, too, we didn't understand why, for example, the Angel has 10 life and 8 attack and the Titan, which is much stronger and more robust in the game, only has 8 life and 6 attack points on the upgraded side. What's more, if one of the Angel units dies, the Angel can revive it (in the form of ignoring damage) which also blocked a hard last attack from the nagas against my tier 6 unit once.
It may seem like the game is bad, but that's not the case at all.
There were also many aspects that worked well, such as deckbuilding, exploring the map, building the city and much more...
And in general, after 2 scenarios, it's not possible to draw an overall conclusion, that was just our first impression. I'm still hyped to get this bigbox and to play the game this week in solo mode!!!
Maybe a few final pros and cons:
Pros:
- Exploring the map is just as much fun as in the PC game
- The deckbuilding is well thought out and the variety is huge
- Almost every unit has individual abilities like in the PC game
- There is a lot of nostalgia while playing
- The leveling of the main hero is well implemented
- The game looks fantastic, the graphics are great, the miniatures look very high quality, rarely seen such high material quality
Cons:
- The city tiles are too tightly dimensioned, you really have 0 millimeters to play with. To insert the last tile you have to press all the other tiles together again. The cardboard is bound to wear out after 5 games at the latest. And if you want to place a tile in the middle you have to put all other tiles from one side out first. (Maybe plastic would be better, but I think there will be a replacement very soon...)
- The rules have a lot of gaps, we had over 10 questions in the 2 games, most of which I have also asked here on Discord in the last few days and have not really gotten a "correct" answer. For example, what is the point of caputuring the enemy city in tournament mode? According to the rules, this doesn't give you anything, but it's not in proportion to the fact that, for example, every mine at the end earns you a victory point, but the enemy city doesn't. In the same way, we found it nonsensical to be able to lock the fastest neutral ground units in the corner so that the opponent has to spend more movement points to extend his battle for one turn. That's why we've decided as house rules that the neutral army is always deployed according to bot rules and the opponent can only determine their actions. And there were a few more such cases where there was no right solution, or it didn't make sense thematically.
- (The last point is the balancing, because both games were quite unbalanced. But I don't want to specify this point at this stage because we only had 2 games)”
Osservatore
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