Extreme difficulty: has anyone legitimately beaten the core set campaign on it? If so, how?
Posted Nov 23, 2016, 11:41 PM UTC
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Apologies for the long post but I have been mulling an expert run and the following is my thoughts. Hopefully it is worth the read. I realize now I used resources pretty loosely but I can't think of a better word atm. Consider my use more as the combined resources at your disposal and not the literal game resource tokens.
I haven't done the math so I don't know what the statistical probability is but I think there are two major hurdles that are really difficult to overcome with the current card pool. Impossible? Unclear, but very difficult for sure. If I am overlooking anything else obvious please point it out. I'll be using the Expert settings for the core campaign since it is all I have to reference.
The first, any skill check you need to be up by 1-3 for a decent chance for success and 4-6 if you want good odds. That is, if you are doing a fight action and your Combat is 5 and the enemy's Evade is 4 being 1 up is decent, but odds are you'll need to get a significantly better spread. You notice I don't even bother with the -8 token as you might as well consider it an auto-fail. Trying to stack against -8 is a massive waste of resources, but you do need to be mindful that it could mean an instant wipe in some situations so stacking against negatives even if an 'auto-fail' is vital.
My current theory is that stacking as many skill checks around 3-4 above as possible is the best balance of using assets and committing burner cards, while not starving yourself immediately. This adjusts based on the importance of the action and consequences of failure, but you get the idea. If you tried to stack every skill check to be 6 above you would run out of resources rapidly and make subsequent checks that much harder to climb above. Likewise if you sit around 0-1 above you will probably fail so often that Mythos and Agenda wall will grow too high to overcome. Speaking all in averages, of course, again it depends on the situation.
The second, upgrading. Getting experience points is going to be much more difficult. The risk of going after more points versus how many resources you have to trade to make those successes is tough. Being able to offset the costs of card upgrades by weaker versions is huge to counteract this. The problem is with the card pool so small the number of options are incredibly limited. Likewise your secondary class tops out at level 3 cards so the benefit there cuts off rather quickly the deeper in you get.
I want to emphasize this is all hypothetical based on my playthroughs of lower difficulties. I have other scenario runs I am undergoing first before I try to tackle this behemoth so the reality could be way different than I expect.
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If you're doing a fight action you don't compare your combat to the enemy's evade. You compare it to the enemy's combat.
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Hah! Write a thousand words and of course I would fumble on something so simple. Thanks, you are correct. What I get for writing essays while avoiding holiday familial obligation.
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Also I think secondary class tops out at level 2 not level 3.
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I don't have my cards handy but I thought all the investigator's secondary class is 0-3 on the back? If 2 is the limit then that just makes it even tougher.
I don't think there will be a sure-fire "this is how you beat Expert" strategy anytime soon. You are going to need a rock solid grip of your options and read each situation and react accordingly. A good thing, imo! And the fact that they can customize each campaign's difficulty with the chaos bag and deal with power creep, even if minimal compared to CCGs, is so good.
From Roland:
There it is. Yeah, that is tough. Every victory point is going to count so being capped at level 2 upgrades means with the current card pool you can save maybe 1 or 2 points with most characters? This will improve loads when the pool increases and more upgrade paths open up. In the mean time, woof.
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From Roland:
Deckbuiling Options: Guardian cards level 0-5, Seeker cards level 0-2, Neutral cards level 0-5.
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Keep in mind your skill checks can't go below zero. This massively lowers the impact of the big negatives against low difficulty checks for characters with events and items that add to your final result.
For example, Wendy can succeed against anything 2 or less even if she pulls the -8 so long as she has that event that gives +2 when she would fail.
It also means you can't automatically die to something like Rotting Remains.
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For example, Wendy can succeed against anything 2 or less even if she pulls the -8 so long as she has that event that gives +2 when she would fail.
This does not work. You add up all the modifiers, the +2 does not add to the final result but to your skill value.
The only way you can auto win is by making the target number 0.
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Not sure on the specific cards, but I believe the general rule is anything below 0 is considered 0 for the sake of the check, but you still jave to dig yourself out when calculating modifiers. So if you're at 4 and get -8, you'd treat it as 0, but if you also got +6, it would only bring your total up to 2.
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Ah, I misunderstood. My bad!
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Yes, this is what I was alluding to while trying not to get too wordy. If your health or horror is around 5 or less the chances of a -8 taking a huge chunk is real difficult to overcome even with the 0 floor (expert would be actually impossible without that rule, can you imagine?) Even if you stack your skill check quite high you could still end up taking 3-4 out in one go, and that is quite the hammer that can drop at any time.
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What do you mean by "legitimately beaten"?
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Your parents have to have been married before the beating began.
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Do you mean in any difficulty? Because I was wondering this myself. I've only ever seen R1 of the end scenario in the campaign. I've come very close to slaying Umordhoth but 3 clicks is just not enough to do it I'm afraid.
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No, I mean the highest difficulty setting.
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Then that is most definitely impossible. No math required.
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Nope. It'd be, I'm guessing, almost statistically impossible
I feel like you might be able to beat Scenarios using the stand-alone rules if you just grinded games until you finally win, but I agree the chances of winning a campaign start to finish seems astronomically low.