Hello Boys and Girls, today I'd like to give some remarks about actual gameplay of Defiance. Of course everything here is subjective and only reflects the games in my group. Maybe we are doing anything/many things wrong. First of all I'd like to ask around ... is anyone actually playing the game or did everyone of you only buy it to get the very beautiful miniatures? For many surely the main point, but I actually hoped for a nice coop-game as well. I am asking because after having played 5 Missions, we have encountered massive balancing and game mechanics problems. The game plays like noone ever tested it. And I am not talking about the CB-typical nebuoulus and obscure rules. Like the ones of the Seed Soldiers. I am talking about the actual game mechanics. Let me try to explain and I will split this post in 4 parts: Balancing between characters and enemies. The (generic) enemies are one-on-one better than the characters. A Jayth or Caliban (even three Taigha) is better in close combat than Cadin. Especially the Jayth is negating the CC specials of Cadin with his Born Warrior, making him far superior to Cadin. Nearly everyone is better at shooting than Uma. The "HI" (Gwailos or Charontids) are better than Qiang Gao. The only character who is actually better than her counterparts in a one-on-one is Jazz. While this may reflect the ranking in Infinity this doesn't work for a Spec-Ops game with fixed heros who are not expendable like attack pieces in Infinity. And this is comparing the matching pairs. If one Taigha slips through your line it will just kill or at least badly wound Jazz or Billie and even Uma. The Crew of the Defiance is sent to attack the EI on their home turf. They deceided so sent a small squad, not a whole army. Shouldn't the squad be able to stand their ground one-on-one? I mean, they are always outnumbered. Four against ... whole facilities. Shouldn't they be the best of the best of the best, sir? But ... they don't even got decent weaponry or armour. Uma is going to a fight with pistols (Range 1-4) against Gwailos and Charontids with HMGs and the like (Range 10). The best of the best of the best are not even worth a single SMG? Even if you buy the same weapons the EI have, for example the Nox with Combi Rifle, the "human" Combi Rifle has Range 6, the Combi Rifle of the Nox has Range 8. If you do not buy something like the Missle Launcher after Mission 2 the whole team has a max range of 5. The characters do not even have the element of surprise on their side. In most of the missions you start with Alert Level way above 0. And we are still in our own dimension. After going through the worm hole I'd assume you gain an additional ... 5 Consequences, so you are starting with like 3 or 4 hitpoints left when fighting in the dimension of the EI. Sounds like a great idea. So ... the enemies are better than you, they are better equipped, outnumber you and are expecting you. How is this going to add up? And to make it worse, they constantly respawn. This brings me to the next point:
Respawning and Reinforcement Tokens In the missions, Alert Levels are rising automatically and/or if you are doing something you have to do. At Alert Level 4 you gain 2 Reinforcement Tokens every Round. And you gain one after having killed a unit. Lets add this up: Mission 3: You have a Pit, means you always get 3 Taigha for free. If you kill them, to prevent them from shredding your whole team, you get a Reinforcement Token. But since they come every turn, this doesn't do much for you. So you have to kill another unit, a Jayth for instance. Since Jayth are deadly in CC as well as in ranged combat, you don't have much choice. Another Reinforcement Token (RT). Let's say, this is it, so ... you got 2 RT plus 2 at the end of the Round, adding up to 4. Not counting any RT you might get if your Aggro is filled and spilling over to RT. Attacking Taigha doesn't add Aggro, but attacking Jayth does. So, 4 RT. So ... what is Respawning? The Taigha come for free and the Jayth costs ... 2 RT. So the Jayth is automatically respawning and you are piling up another 2 RT for the next unit (yes, the respawn sequence is the other way around, but to compare the numbers this works). For instance the Cadmus. A unit you have to destroy in one turn, because otherwise it is "restocking" 1 Cadmus for 1 RT. This doesn't work. In Mission 3 we never made it out of the first room, because we had to constantly fight of hordes of enemies and had no time to move. And Qiang Gao already had the Missile Launcher to kill the Taigha-Blob with one blow. Moving forward would even have made it worse, because the Taigha would be able to actually attack, not just move. In this mission it wasn't necessary to move, so it worked, but ... what a strange situation. Mission 5 is exactly the same, it leads to situations where you have every enemy unit on the board, if you kill something it instantly respawns (in the midst of you) and you don't have a chance to actually do something. We already noticed this in Mission 3 and came up with a houserule that respawning costs an additional RT per unit. In Mission 4 this worked, because it was no real fighting mission, but Mission 5 showed that this surely wasn't enough. The combination of respawning and the free respawns of the Pit is just too much. No idea, either we will further adjust by raising the cost of a respawn by 2 RT or we skip the Pit alltogether. (side note: Destroying the Pit might sound like it's the way to go, but they are located that far away you would have to run towards it while being attacked, so I doubt it is easily feasible, even with the AoE effect of the Missile Launcher)
Next point is: you can not play it tactically IMO you just have at least one dimension of uncertainty to much: You don't know when a unit actived (order of activation) you don't know what the unit is doing (AI cards) and you don't know how much damage you can do (very inconsistent dice results). While I argue the dice are ... okay because it's like in Infinity. Sometimes it works as intended, but sometimes it just does nothing and sometimes it goes horribly wrong. But the other 2 dimensions? If you don't know when a unit actives you don't know which unit you have to deal first with. If you don't know what he unit does, you don't know if the unit is more dangerous than another unit. While this may sound realistic (in reality you don't know what someone will be doing) it leads to absolutely stupid situations: We had situations where an enemy is running past several characters to attack for example Billie, because she had the least Aggro an enemy is running forward, couldn't see anything and is running back (although there was obviously a fight going on) And you can't effectively tank or protect your team with Qiang, because if the using his special and is hoarding Aggro ... then an AI card comes, telling the enemy to attack the one with the least Aggro. So the enemy is running past Quiang, showing him the middle finger and killing Billie, Jazz, Uma ... If you look at other games, you see there is at least one dimension of uncertainty too much. If activation order and AI cards are random, then the damage you do should be more consistent or fixed. If the damage output is random, then either Order of Activation or AI cards should be known. Metagaming It is nearly impossible to play the mission without meta gaming. While it is no RPG, so this is not that bad, it still is an extreme weakness if you ask me. Leaving Mission 1 alone with poor Agnes who died in demo games every game ... lets take Mission 3. If you don't open the door in Round 2 (?), Rahman is just killed by 3 Taigha, without standing a chance. When we played it, by pure luck Jazz opened the door just in time, because she had nothing else to hack. Otherwise Rahman is just dead and lost for the whole campaign. Or in Mission 5, where you gain one Intel for not raising the Alarm Level during Phase 1. Even with metagaming this is hardly possible. In hindsight I think it is a trap because when doing it this way you "lose" the "reduce the Alarm Level by 1" effect and end up with Alarm Level 5. Otherwise you would end with Alarm Level 4, making it maybe possible without the whole party dying. Coming to the next point; IMO the game looks like it is unplayable without a Hacker Without Jazz (or maybe Valerya) I doubt the game is playable. I have no idea how you would be able to complete the switches on the consoles in time. Jazz is already a monster of a hacker and she needed two actions to complete the Console 2 in Mission 5. Without Jazz you would have to run inside the room, deal with the Jayth while trying to interact with the console ... good luck. Yes, someone could buy a Hacking Device and use it like Jazz, but then this character can not buy a better weapon and everyone is already plagued with the worst weapons in the universe. And without a hacker ... you can not blind the Charontids or Gwailos. The Charontids just goes through your army like a hot knife through butter if not blinded.
And then IMO just plain bad design: One additional point: Who came up with the idea of dealing 4 (!) damage to the hacker via a console switch? And this two times? Or in Mission 5 once 4 and a second time 2 damage? Jazz has 8 hitpoints, so with 4 damage 2 times, she is just ... dead. Or with once 4 and once 2 almost dead. A single shootout with monsters like the Jayth or Caliban and she is done. And there is no way to really heal during a mission. Yes, you can take Medpacks or the Automedkit, but with using this kind of First Aid you have to draw Consequences. WTF? With metagaming you can again try to avoid the damage, either by not rerolling a blank if you missed this one switch or by using switches to take away the symbols you would "need" for the Damage Switch, but this doesn't always work. Character Development Except for Jazz, Character Development feels like being almost non existent. It takes forever till you can get better weapons (except for the Missle Launcher for 5 Intel, which can be seen as auto-take) and even if you get new weapons it's not like its a quantum leap and you think "Wow, now I am really better" because the enemies are getting better faster than you. So while you are getting better in absolut terms, relatively to your enemies you are getting worse. Jazz is an exeption, because of the Software Samples she has an additional dimension of improvement, so IMO for her the Character Development works. Oh, and the Loot Cards are just a joke. They are one-shots and for one-shots the effects are mostly minimal. Not worth investing the actions to get them. To sum it up: Far too fast respawns Too random actions of the enemies Too random outcome of interactions Enemies are way too good compared to characters Enemies are better equipped than the characters Almost non-existent character development You are constantly facing an uphill struggle, although you are the attacker. You are like the hit team, but instead of taking the enemy by surprise, you are running into one trap after another looking into enormous guns while holding your own measily pistol. Right now we have finished Mission 5, where every character went unconscious at least once, Cadin and Billie twice. But maybe we play it wrong. Maybe it would be better to only kill the "black card enemies" because they don't respawn, do the consoles and otherwise only run. Run to your objective under fire, do your objective under fire, and run back to the Stalker under fire. Upgrades would only go into defensive abilities that allow to run faster or take more damage. Doesn't sound like fun or like something a Spec-Ops team would do, but I think it would be far better than trying to fight. Which brings me back to my first question: Is anyone actually playing the game? Is anyone having the same issues with the game? Or other issues? Or is for someone the game just right and everything works well? (Sorry for the very long post)
I personally hate the way CB marketed this game during KS as a pile of minis (especially those that don't have a sculpt/resculpt yet in years) on a discount + some dungeon crawler as a bonus. Most of the people I know backed it for the minis. Balancing and game mechanic issues? Hah, you are asking too much from a one-time KS-exclusive thing. They have no intention of developing it any further. They won't spend any sizable resourses on fleshing out the rules (look at FAQ thread). It feels like the core game was put up together by some CB employees in their free time as 'Infinity, but with Aristeia rules'. And then someone higher-up decided they can cash-in on that idea. Regarding Characters and Enemies balancing - I think it's fine. They are aliens after all! By the end of campain you'll be able to squeeze out 10* with some attacks. And besides, if you read the fluff - they had to begin operation early because of Shasvastii surprise attack, they might be unprepared. And you won't be sending pro's on a suicide mission. Mission 3 - not sure that we had any extraordinary issues with RT. Managing Aggro and RT is an important aspect of the game. At some point you'll learn not to kill enemy units completely. Destroying pit is better with D-Charge. And imposing states like Immobilized, Blind and Stunned can be a lifesaver. Play it tactically - Skills (store symbols, rerolls, switches) really help with bad dice rolls. When enemy unit activates - some expansion characters can see that. Regarding enemies movement and attack - you'd better double check the rules and FAQ, enemies don't *have* to run across half the map to attack someone, they'll just pick one who suits conditions better. And there's always a 5 player mode when someone takes over AI. Metagaming - what exactly do you mean by that? Mission 3 - Rahman is not considered an Ally (and thus not a target of instructions) untill you open a door, so Taighas will be left scratching the door. Mission 5 - we had a funny situation when the party was running from one bush to another and leaving killing to Cadin to avoid triggering alarm. Lucky for us we also had smoke to hide from Jayth near console. unplayable without a Hacker - yep, totally agree. A guy playing hacker dropped during campain so I had to play 2 characters. It's just annoying that most of the missions require hacker to push buttons. bad design - well, hackers can switch symbols to avoid damage, duh. Character Development - you missed the best gun in game for Uma - heavy pistol. Loot cards indeed are a joke. To sum it up - can't agree with random, most of the stuff can be rather predictable if you exploit focus states, aggro management skills, etc. correctly. I've only played 1st campain and still waiting for them to send the bloody wave 2. Same issues over here for the most part. Just my 2 cents - consider yourself a DM and don't mind making homerules on the go. At least for the first missions. The game will go much smoother this way.
@Spitfire_TheCat Sounds like you’re making the mistake of actually killing things. Kill the individuals in groups down to a single creature, to the point where they never reinforce and then soak what ever is left. Missions become remarkably trivial when you use this method. Also this Totally true. I do not see how this game is remotely playable without Jazz.
That you have to read the mission before playing it and using the information to solve the mission. So having the information beforehand. Definition of metagaming seems to be: mixing IC and OOC Information. Yes, we did this as well. And additionally we had Uma with Silenced Pistol. The Smoke Grenade as well, but still ... hardly doable and at the end of each Round you would get another RT because no enemy activated. Yes, I tried this, but I just had the wrong amount of !. One to much. Switch was with !!. But doesn't matter. Knowing the result of the consoles beforehand is metagaming as well Our Uma went for the Silenced Pistol first. She doesn't have enough Intel for the Heavy Pistol yet.
We just started our campaign and this post makes me a bit worried since this was what i feared while reading the rules :/
Oh, yeah. I was also putting all the tiles and kept in mind all the triggers so I checked missions way ahead. Did you keep all the conditions in secret? Even console input commands? Damn, that's brutal. To be honest, I have no idea how you can play any other way - there's no random events deck or something like that to keep that simple, you might end up missing Intel packs or suddenly trigger a wave of seed embryos (or Sheskin). And some missions force you to constantly check for beginning/end of the round conditions. (Though I'd love to play as Evil AI some day and try to slaughter all the players)
we're definitely playing differently, though i know i've also made mistakes that have also made it harder and easier on myself. playing a couple concurrent campaigns, but i'm through mission 7 soloing at this point. i think so far i'd agree that the game has some flaws, but i actually like it a lot and don't find the mechanics all that terrible. first off, i think the game is just hard. like real hard. by design. and that's... ok when the difficulty feels rewarding and bad when it feels arbitrary. late mission respawns are meant to be punishing and overwhelming, it's better to run sometimes rather than gun down all the enemies and try to have your way with the board. and that choices to hack a console on the other side of the map for a single intel pack are a trade off that makes the mission harder. i think the evil AI rule is the best innovation of the game because it simplifies the complexity and non-clarity of the rules by just making the enemy do that absolute worst thing for you. also means that jazz is going to start the mission on consequences because even with the doc and reroll you can't fix everything. the game wants you to suffer. contrasted to playthroughs i've watched of cursed city, it's tough but not boring. the things i agree with (as have others): loot is underwhelming, can't play this game without a hacker (even bostria said that's extra hard mode), and some of the equipment upgrades (i.e. weapons and armor) don't merit the price. my own additions--missed opportunity to reprint the instruction books fixing mistakes highlighted in the FAQ. assault team mode is too punishing without giving intel packs to characters who don't play the missions. tons of component sprawl make it hard to layout this game and absorb/recall information during a playthrough. on the other hand, i've gotten qiang and uma to the point where they're pretty good damage dealers. qiang has contender armor and hmg, which can one hit enemies if they don't get close while uma is still ok with her starter pistols, her starter helmet which gives them range 5, and a winterfor cloak helps her duck damage i'd like to avoid. i dropped cadin for trisha because the lhost upgrades plus d-charges make her a great utility solution for things like taigha pits. don't know that i have any insights on mitigating frustrating play besides what others have added--certainly learned early on not to kill all the enemies in a group without a respawn value and storing symbols on cards to tip rolls in my favor. with an HD+ and later hacker skills, jazz can pretty well avoid all damage from consoles. forgoing cheaper equipment upgrades for better ones a mission or two later might also make a difference in our experiences. i do wish that we can put to bed this meme of CB not playing/play testing their own games, though. the fact that i have two different combi rifle cards from kaldstrom to printed game attests to the fact that they kept tinkering with this game, probably up till the point where they released it for print. it's hard to make a good boardgame. this one is not perfect. but i think it came out pretty good, with an engine that we can keep building on after the campaigns. it will need fan support to smooth out the remaining rough edges and hopefully keep it living beyond the initial release.
Nah, we used the OOC information as well. The game is not designed to be played like a role-playing-game. But that's doesn't mean, that I like it
I think it's pretty cool that you like the game and a positive review is always nice. But i think some of the flaws you mentioned are just that ... flaws. Sure, you seem to play alone, so, if something goes horribly wrong, you can just start over and try it again. It's like all the dudes playing the Arkham Horror LCG on hard or extreme modes and just doing it over and over again until one time it works. By pure luck, of course. If you play Defiance with 3 other dudes/dudettes, where you have to fix a date first, play maybe once a month or less that's not really a solution. And I think for a Dungeon Cralwer there should be some exploring. You don't have any. You just run around, surrounded by enemies, you are constatly on defense although you are ment to be the attacker ... I don't know. But you mentioned that you are through Mission 7. The jump is later. There you get surely some (more) consequences and IMO if difficulty is rising (it should in later missions) I'm not sure if it is possible. Like I already mentioned, I have the feeling the characters are getting worse relatively to the enemies. It just doesn't feel like a dungeon crawler, it feels like playing Infinity but being limited to fighting (while not being equipped for fighting that is). Just yesterday we played a match of Infinity. Typical Objective Grabbing Mission, with antennas, objectives and dragging a beacon around. Playing Nomads I didn't fire a single shot in active turn. And it worked. Sure, I lost some units, but in Infinity that's okay. My Moran died? Next game I have a new one without any consequences. Same with my KHD Bandida (IMO still the perfect character for Defiance). But in Defiance that would be no viable playstyle, because you rack up consequences. If some healing would be possible without suffering consequences maybe a non-fighting playstyle would be possible, but right now I don't see it. And yes, does CB some playtesting. I have a "better" Combi Rifle as well (came in the pack with Valkyrie AFAIR) and in the demo games there were additional bio samples or somethign like that? But it always looks like only the designers played their game to some extent, dudes who know how something is supposed to work. Alone the fact that you have to constantly check 3 or more different places in the Mission description is IMO not the best design. Oh well, we'll see.
I think you can blame the people who call games like Zombicide "Dungeon Crawlers" for your frustration. Especially when you complained so much about randomness in the activation sequence, and about the only way to add more unknown to the game would be randomly selecting enemies (like Zombicide does) and you've already complained about the lack of ability to plan in advance caused by the AI deck. But is it any worse than how the same authors have dealt with the Infinity rules or ITS rules?
I don't know, never played Zombicide. No, that's why I didn't go into the rules diskussion or how "easy" they are to understand or how fluent they play, just my subjective perception of balance. I would have been massively surprised if the rulebook from CB would have looked anything else than it does The player in our group who reads through the mission while we play it, so we don't miss anything, constantly complains about it, but I just keep telling him "That's CB!" ... he is not playing Infinity.
Taigha does not increase reinforcement that's in their card rules. But as almost every rules from CB, a rule is written once and not repeated at places it is useful. By example, if you skip move through other unit possibility you can't reach mission objective in time. Other common issue with the campaign book. It's difficult to read and you can make mistake like in mission 3, their I not installed until turn 2 or 3 and does not activate until you open the lab door. It's not your fault everyone does the mistake. We should get 3 separate map: - initial setup - dedicated room setup when turn/event sets. - global setup like the one provided. And MOOOOORE tarot size cards for events, lore, rules summary
@Spitfire_TheCat when your comparing enemy and character, how are you playing death of character? Because getting as much damage as health is not a death penalty just a setback. When an enemy die he will eventually come back (but not as quickly as you play it). When your character die he comes back next turn with a condition penalty. I often end mission with 2 or 3 conditions on characters it hurts but we keep going and medikit/medbay help so getting 8 damage is a huge penalty for hacker but not end of the world. Regarding those console damage they are their to downplay hacking power. If you don't have hacker, you don't care for 1;3 of console rewards (software token) you learn to move more quickly for some interract with console and you make use of explosive to blow up doors. It damn harder but what you loose from hacking you gain in resiliance/damage
If I remember it right Taigha do not increase Aggro, but do give a reinforcement token when the unit is completely whiped out. In mid/late game it doesn't matter if Aggro or Reinforcement Token, but this is how I remember it. You sure? You have only one automedkit. Without the Automedkit you don't come back because you don't gain health. Otherwise I would not know what the medkit is used for. So you have one "Extra-Life" but even for using this automedkit you gain a Consequence. Racking up consequences like you said won't bring you far in the campaign. If you rack up 3 consequences a mission and maybe heal one between missions you are dead before you even come close to the worm hole. As I see it the Automedkit is only the emergency solution if everything went badly wrong so you have a chance to fulfill your mission and get back to the Stalker/Defiance But during the last mission (5 I think) we noticed that going unconscious and using the medkit might be a way to play it, because you loose all Aggro. So you gain a lot of time. Maybe "dying" and using it in mid game just when the Aggro meter is full might make the mission easier. Again a strange way to play it, but this came to our minds.
