Unpopular Specs?

Also is bashing just THE WORST SPEC EVER in the regular 3 hero format?
I feel like Troq is just complete rubbish compared to any other hero, like Grave and Rook are just strictly better than him. His spells are okay I guess, but Centaurs and Argonauts are just better than Iron Men, and I can’t imagine myself locking into Bashing for tech two over any other spec.

Anyone have anything to counter this sentiment? I’m still incredibly new to this game so I would love to know if I’m missing anything

I could see him being useful if you want to use the neutral starter but your other two chosen specs don’t have good Tech I combat options.

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Bashing tech 2 is pretty nice to complement a primarily hero based strategy. Especially if you have something like Garth to get easier access to the variety of options Bashing provides.

I would never take it in a squad that would pay the multicolor penalty, but getting access to Hired Stomper or Regular Rhino without paying the multi-color tax can be worth it.

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What in the world is “speed” and “tempo”? To me, these don’t sound like words that apply to a turn-based card game that takes two hours to play.

(I’m not “Bashing” Codex for being slow, by the way. I like a good long strategy game.)

Common game terminology taken from past games. I don’t mean Sirlin games, I mean really old games like Chess that are many thousands of years old.

Speed most commonly will refer to how quickly you can implement some kind of win condition.

If you intend to kill the opponent by attacking with a tech 3 unit over and over, that would be a slow game plan. It just takes a lot of turns in order to be able to get out a tech 3 and then a lot more turns from there to win once you do.

If you had the intent to attack with a Void Star until the opponent died, you would be able to “start winning” (attack with the thing you intend to kill with) much more quickly. This would be “faster” than the above method.

In Chess terminology, speed in this context might be one master trying to get a quick win in the first 10 moves of the game vs another master trying to implement a plan where they win by building up small advantages over 30 turns.

Tempo most commonly will refer to how you feel when playing the game. Tempo is a measure of time. Not RL time, it’s measured in something like “game turns” or similar.

Do you feel like you are winning or losing? If you feel like you are winning, you are probably ahead on tempo. If you feel like you are losing, you are probably behind on tempo. If you are spending your time just trying to stop your opponent from winning, you are behind in time. If you are spending your time trying to figure out how to most devastate your opponent with the things you have out, you are probably ahead on tempo. If it feels even but it’s your turn, you are slightly ahead. The opposite if it feels even but it’s their turn, then they are slightly ahead.

In chess terminology, Tempo at the beginning of the game would be slightly to white because it’s an even board and it’s white’s turn. Black will typically have to do some sort of strong move that is both defensive and has multiple offensive threats in order to turn this around and make it so black is the attacker and white is the defender.

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I think you hit it, but I think more simply tempo is do you get to decide what happens next VS is what your opponent did so threatening you have no choice but to react to what they just did. This is VERY relevant to turn games, like Chess or Go, and equally important in Codex.

P1, especially when they have a strong aggressive hero like Cala, Rook, Vandy, etc, can put incredible pressure and hold tempo for a long time.

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I suspect Future looks better to beginners because beginner games lag 1-2 turns behind optimal play, which makes low-tempo upgrades significantly better: MoLaC doesn’t have board presence, so misplaying it in a top-level game will probably get you killed. But in a newbie game, it just seems thoroughly unstoppable.

Just the same, Jail is a major annoyance for beginners, as it seems to wreck tempo. In serious games, it’s not an important tool of any winning strategy, and mostly seems a way for Blue to get further behind on board.

Future hard counters stuff that doesn’t really necessitate a specific counter.

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