Hyperion and Tricycloid are exceptionally strong (especially Hyperion) and combo well with many purple cards (e.g. Geiger’s Maxband, Temporal Distortion).
Almost all Tech III cards are strong if they can stay in play for a turn. That makes them strong cards in general but not relative to other Tech IIIs. The best ones have haste or at least some immediate effect.
Not saying that it’s not good to play an Octopus if the opportunity presents itself, but you won’t pick Future for it’s strong Tech III option.
Yeah, that’s what I was expecting the reason to be. I want to agree with you, but I feel like forcing a beginner to use a tricky build order for their first game would be a bad idea. While I hope that everyone who learns Codex starts with the Core Set for their first game, some people will use the expansions first, and I don’t want to alienate those people by assuming they know more than they do. They can absolutely explore the other specs, but it’s good to give them simpler stuff at first. Besides, Present has some cool and tricky things it can do too!
[quote=“robinz, post:76, topic:1077, full:true”]
As a complete beginner, I must say I’m a bit surprised at how much more used Present is at Tech II than Past or, in particular, Future. Sure, I can see how good Present’s Tech II units are, probably better than the average Tech II cards (and let’s face it, most specs have some pretty OP stuff at Tech II, by design) - but to me Future’s Tech II options look just as strong. Present does look to have really strong spells, and Geiger’s max level ability for further nonsense, but of course you can still use these in a Monopurple deck without having Present as your Tech II choice.[/quote]
That’s because a lot of Present cards are more reliably useful. Hyperion, Trycycloid and Immortal are very obviously strong, and they don’t have any “tricks” needed to use them. You can do tricks with them, but that just makes them better; if the tricks don’t line up, it’s not the end of the world usually. Compare that with a time rune based Future strategy. There’s a real possibility that if you can’t get the time runes off through your other cards fast enough, your opponent will just kill you before they even arrive.
(At this point I saw that Zejety posted. I agree with what he says, but I’m still posting because my answers to both questions are slightly different.)
One thing to consider is that in order to play any Tech III, you have to pay 5 gold to build a Tech III building (meaning you didn’t spend it on killing their stuff or putting down more stuff that turn), and then you have to wait a turn for a chance to play the thing at all (which gives them a chance to either shut down your Tech buildings or just kill you). If at that point your Tech III unit doesn’t do anything the turn it arrives, they get another chance to either get rid of your Tech III or to just kill you.
Compare Octavian to the Green Tech III units. All three of them have something they can do to influence the board state immediately (destroying 2 things, summoning hasty squirrels, or getting to cast free Growth spells) and they also have either Resist 2 or Untargetable to make it harder to get rid of them before they can attack. Meanwhile, as powerful as Octavian’s ability is, it only works if your opponent was unable to either destroy your Tech III building before you summoned it or kill it after it got summoned (or just kill you). It’s not useless, but it’s leaving you vulnerable for two turns when others (even in the faction that’s infamous for not having immediate effects from playing their units) can at least do something earlier.
Thanks for the detailed answer - that makes sense. I will query you on just one point however:
I completely accept that any strategy involving Forecasted units may leave you vulnerable. But only 2 of the 5 Future Tech IIs are forecasted. Hive, Void Star and Xenostalker all look pretty awesome to me, and involve no time runes whatsoever. I guess they could be rendered ineffective by an opponent with lots of fliers themselves (or really heavy on anti-air), but otherwise I don’t see how they’re massively worse than Hyperion and Tricycloid.
I guess I’ve dragged this thread way off topic now though
I brought up the Forecast units because in general you have to go all in with them or they don’t work. The air units in Future are also good, of course! However, if you focus too hard on air superiority you might be vulnerable to your opponent’s units running under yours and killing you first. It’s a balancing act where you either need to set up good enough defenses to not worry about that or you need to get enough power behind your attacks that you can win the race, and that’s also tricky for a beginner (especially since Flying is often misunderstood by new players for a while).
I don’t mind, since this kind of discussion helps me make sure that the guides I make are actually good for teaching new players.
If most people want present, do that ^^ I am clearly in a minority, and I’m not going to be upset in any way by any form of community work that ends up being done ^^
The Vortoss Conclave reference sheet is up! The only one left to do is Blackhand Scourge, but there aren’t yet build orders for every spec in the Beginner’s Guide to Teching. Notably, I’d like to hold off until the Disease build is written so that it’s clear to everyone what each of the options to vote for are (so you’re voting for a specific build order, rather than an abstract “something that uses Disease Tech II”). If anyone can contribute by creating a build order for any of the missing specs, please do so!
I’ve made a decision to overhaul these sheets a bit, and as part of that I’ve expanded the General Advice and made it a separate sheet! In the near future I’ll be removing that section from the existing sheets and expanding them to include build orders for all three specs in each codex. I’ll be prioritizing getting a Blackhand Scourge sheet up so that there will be links for all of them, since I believe I’ll lose editing privileges on the first post soon. As always, let me know if there’s any improvements that can be made on any of the sheets, but especially on the new sheet.
I’m considering that, but letting everyone edit it sounds like it could be trouble… Then again, I haven’t seen any trolls/spam on these forums so far, so maybe it’s OK?
In case it influences the results, I’m mostly done with the initial version of the black sheet, and the only reason to edit the first post is to add links to new sheets.
That is nice to know, though I question whether that might partly be because there’s so few wikis on these forums that many people don’t know they can edit it. I’m starting to like the idea of making it a wiki more, but I haven’t decided yet.
So, you know how I said in my last post that I was mostly done with the Black sheet? Well, it’s already done! I feel like there’s room for improvement, but it’s the first sheet to have the new style that I plan to update all the sheets to match. If you’re reading this, check it out (the link is in the first post, as always) and tell me what you think! Except if you’re on mobile right now, the formatting looks terrible on the mobile app.
Matchup/plan-dependant: Battle Suits, T. Research, Tinkerer, Time Spiral
Useful to play early: H. Mox, Plasmodium, Forgotten Fighter, Neo Plexus
Useful all game: Nullcraft, Fading Argonaut
Common first workers: Forgotten Fighter, Hardened Mox, Plasmodium,
Tinkerer, Time Spiral
I would change this to
Matchup/Plan-dependant: Time Spiral, Tinkerer
Useful to play early: Plasmodium (only as T1P1) H. Mox, Forgotten Fighter, Neo Plexus, Forgotten Fighter
Useful all game: Nullcraft, Fading Argonaut, Battle Suits, Temporal Research
Common first workers: Plasmodium, Neo Plexus, Hardened Mox, Time Spiral, Tinkerer
Temproal Reserach can be played the same turn, or the turn after you have played Pastasnack, to ensure that you actually draw two, in the case that you aren’t actually running anything with time-runes on. Which, in fairness, the guide doesn’t do. But still, drawing 2 can be very good at any point in the game.
Battle Suits is a great upgrade that hits a lot of your relevant Tech 1 units, which makes them trade with almost any opposing hero, whilst also thinning your deck and synergizes with Hyperion so that it can one shot tech buildings.
I’m not sure if that section of the guide will be kept (look at the newly posted Blackhand Scourge sheet to see what the upcoming style is), but everything there was taken from @Barrelfish’s Beginner’s Guide to Workers, so those suggestions should probably go there. Thanks for the feedback regardless, though!
Edit: A bit of experimentation showed that I was able to fit the starting deck analysis into the new style, so that’s in the Black sheet now. I love polls for some reason, so…
Which sheets should I update to the new style first?[poll type=multiple min=1 max=5]
Blood Anarchs (Red)
Moss Sentinels (Green)
Flagstone Dominion (Blue)
Whitestar Order (Figure It Out)
Vortoss Conclave (Purple)
[/poll]
I’ll update them in order of most voted for to least voted for.
With only one out of eight voters saying otherwise, I’ve made the first post a wiki. I’ve also updated the Moss Sentinels sheet to the new style.
While I’m going to attempt to keep updating the sheets, I’m going to be pretty busy for a couple of weeks. With that in mind, I’ve got a few different questions for the community, only one of which I can put into poll form.
Which of the remaining sheets should I prioritize updating?
Blood Anarchs
Flagstone Dominion
Whitestar Order
Vortoss Conclave
0voters
I’m making a new poll so that the completed Moss Sentinels sheet doesn’t affect the results.
Second, which multicolors would you be interested in having sheets for? I know there’s some, like Past/Peace/Anarchy and Necromancy/Blood/Truth, that are both strong enough and popular enough that they need to be covered. However, I’m interested in having more than just the most known builds represented here. Let me know what you’d like to see, and we could end up making it a weekly event for the community to build a new multicolor sheet!
Finally (for now), I’d like to have more sheets that cover general advice. The one I have up gives advice that’s useful for beginners, but I’d like to have one that helps those considering using the Neutral specs in the full game, with an emphasis on how they can be used to make different flavors of “mono-color,” and another that gives pointers on building a multicolor codex. I don’t think anything like what I’m suggesting currently exists on the forums, and I’m definitely not qualified to talk about either topic (I still only have the Core Set IRL, though that might change this Christmas), so I have no choice but to turn to all of you for help.
So there you have it, one wall of text later.
If any of you can help with this project in any way, even with something as small as voting in the poll at the start of this post, I’d be extremely grateful. Thank you!
I’ll definitely consider that, but I wouldn’t post the same links. I’d need to do it the way @zhavier did the Spreadsheet, where you make a copy of it instead of having access to the original.
The poll is going about how I expected, but I’d rather not start working on them until the tie for second between White and Purple has been broken (otherwise I’d have to make another poll). If you haven’t voted, please keep in mind that you can pick multiple options – you can vote for one of those (to break the tie) and something else if you want. I’ll get started once I see the tie has been broken!
So, it’s been a while since I did anything with this, hasn’t it…?
I’ve finally resumed updating these reference sheets to the new style, and should be able to get all of them done soon. The order in which they’ll be updated, as decided by your votes, will be:
Blood AnarchsDone!
Vortoss ConclaveDone!
Whitestar OrderDone!
Flagstone DominionDone!
What about Bashing and Finesse?
I’m not sure how to handle these, honestly. There’s not enough cards in each spec to justify having multiple build orders, so the style I’m using for the other sheets is out. It seems bad to have some of the info from the General Advice sheet repeated on them, but it’s also weird to have only these two be blank on the back… They could be double-sided with Bashing on one side and Finesse on the other, but then you have to either have players pass it back and forth or print two copies and have redundant info on one side for each player. Any thoughts?
After those are updated to the new style, I’m hoping for feedback on both the information on the sheets and the layout/formatting of the sheets themselves. I’d like to post these to Board Game Geek, but I wouldn’t want to have them in a format where anyone on that site can suggest changes – there’s far too many BGG users for it to be safe from trolling. Thus, before posting them there we need to make sure the quality is as high as possible so I can post a “final” version of each sheet.
All the sheets (except for Bashing and Finesse) have been updated to the new style! There’s still room for improvement, but the bulk of the formatting work is finished. The only thing that’s missing is a list of suggested workers for Tech II Truth, but that’s not going to be an issue.
I’ve been pulling the build orders and related information from @Barrelfish’s Beginner’s Guide to Teching (link in the first post of this topic), and noticed that there was some missing info for White. I asked about it in that topic, and as part of the response I got…
[quote=“mysticjuicer, post:87, topic:1421”]
Discipline
Suggested workers: anything other than Aged Sensei (until the mid-game), Grappling Hook, Snapback, Sensei’s Advice[/quote]
…I realized that there was a legitimate reason to flip around the thinking behind the Suggested Worker sections. Rather than have new players think about it as a negative process – “Which of these cards is most useless” – I’d rather have them think of it in a more positive way – “Which of my starting cards are worth keeping until the end of the game.”
With that in mind, I’m going to be replacing the Suggested Worker section with a new Cards to Keep section, where I’ll be highlighting four cards (give or take) from each faction’s starting deck that are most likely to help when attempting to use one of the suggested builds. If you want to see what that looks like, check the Whitestar Order sheet in the first post of this topic.
That said, I only have first-hand experience with Red, Green and White. I’ll need help flipping things around to work with this new way of thinking, so I’d appreciate input from anyone reading this who has experience with any of the mono-colors (especially Blue, Black and Purple).
