My group (3 players) plays on hard difficulty most of the time and we usually don't have much of a problem to win each scenario and to gain most or all of the XP's. In my experience the "trick" to success on hard difficulty is to: 1) really optimize the team (synergy between Investigators), 2) upgrade the decks for 1-2 high static skill values to pass most tests of these skills even without having to commit cards, 3) include as much action-compression/bonus actions into your deck as possible, 4) don't be afraid to use the first 2-3 turns to play assets that make your character more efficient/stronger in the long run instead of immediately starting to gather clues or explore locations. 5) And lastly, if you spend an action for a skill test, make sure (whenever possible) to increase your skill value high enough so that the only token that let's you fail the test is the auto-fail token and maybe one other token (usually a -6 token).
Amen. Playing on expert with my group. Agreed with every word. Just wanna add some extra advices: - always try to play around - 4 or worst symbol in your scenario - testless profit your best friend, any testless stuff will be a good help - if your character is bad aginst encounter deck, dont try to rise your unnessesary stats, Just take cards that will minimise the damage/impact of encounter deck
Thank you so much for the job you have done making this videos. We have just started playing recently, and we go over all of your videos analyzing everything the game has to offer. Thank you so much and keep up a great job making new videos!
This one was very nice. Having breakfast with some insight on the game just to go to the Forgotten Age in the afternoon to get crushed by it on Standard
With maybe a couple of exceptions, that can get unfair (Essex Country Express with core set Ancient Evils comes to mind), I think, the game is almost always much easier with more players. That's because not everything scales. Most obvious is movement, but also actions like spending clues to spawn the cultists in Midnight Masks. Of course, this also favours a bit generalists over specialists, because they don't need to be "babysit" and can cover ground on their own. But not quite anymore, with the awesome Safeguard, which let the guardian be stayed put with the seeker without spending extra actions. Another advantage in higher player counts is, that you will pretty much guaranteed see each and every victory point enemy (and have at least somebody, who can kill them easily) and therefore start in the higher levels with more powerful decks.
I've only played on Standard and Easy, so I'll just not my head about Hard and Expert. One additional form of scaling to consider is XP. The choices about whether or not to push your luck to hunt xp on a scenario can depend on how much XP you've already gotten in the campaign. Later scenarios are harder and assume you've leveled up your deck, which may be true to varying degrees.
Wow. This really highlights how crazy powerful Jim Culver is on higher difficulties. On hard being up +2 on any given test is enough to get him to succeed more than half the time with just two committed. A +3 gets him to be successful like 3/4 times. On expert he succeeds 50% of the time with three above the skill test, while all other investigators succeed need to be up four for the same odds. That adds up over time. Alternatively - on hard he succeeds about 1/3rd of the time while being up 0. On expert he succeeds about 1/5th of the time while being up 0, where for other investigators it's 1/18 chance to succeed while up by 0. Those numbers are CRAZY and I think you can build Jim in a way where maybe you can replace your double icon commits for a single icon + effect commit. These numbers say that he needs far fewer icons. Maybe guts isn't an auto-include, ya know?
Would be fun to see the crew try a single scenario on expert over and over until they succeed. They could try a few times a week in a row, and they could include the post-game discussion and the decisions around deck building/ rebalancing the deck between attempts.
Me and my friends play on expert and its hard i tell ya. Cards that guarantee you a succesfull test or positive side effects are much more important, becouse passing tests the normal way is very hard. No dead actions accepted and no risky tests (like you're 1 up), and every sigle action has to count. I like the challange but I wish my friends would let us play standard every now and then. Wishfull thinking thou. One of them is a dark souls die hard fan and that tells a lot about him.
Here’s a challenge my table is running, with proxies for now. All four parallel investigators with the new permanents from Edge of the Earth. Return to Dunwich. All four challenges thrown in. And when we complete it, we will be using the survivors from that campaign to go through Return to Carcosa.
Great video! Have you considered posting these videos on reddit? Just asking because I don't remember seeing announcements for you channel there. There's lots of new players there and I think this series is particularly interesting for new players. Also I'm sure the other players will find interesting as well!
Thanks for the comment. I have a problem where I'm really bad at advertising our content. I really should, because, you're right, it would be great for new players.
Hard is a decent step up from Standard, but I think people get put off a lot by how bad the Hard/Expert reference cards are in the Night of the Zealot campaign. The bad token effects on the reference card are typically proportionally way less bad in later campaigns. I can't think of a bigger step up in token difficulty than those in Night of the Zealot. For example, in Dream-Eaters the Hard/Expert reference card tokens are often exactly the same as the Easy/Standard ones but their modifier is just 1 worse. We pretty much mostly play on Hard now and feel that it still gives a decent amount of wriggle room for creative deck-building. We've played a couple of campaigns on Expert though, and in that instance you definitely need laser-focused decks that can sometimes feel a bit restrictive on choice. As such, whilst still winnable, we typically don't play Expert much just because of how much it can limit your deckbuilding options. Still a fun challenge to return to from time to time though.
So for me the player count elephant in the room is true solo. I know you guys don't play it (much), but maybe you should (more) :-) I would love to hear your wisdom and ideas more on the true solo experience!
Travis and I have both tried true solo (don't know about Bryn) and we don't really enjoy it that much and greatly prefer two-handed solo. Unfortunately, because of this, I don't think we'll get much more detailed true solo content on the channel.
@@PlayingBoardGames Fair enough. Right now I find two handed solo too much to track, and also not as immersive narratively, but maybe I'll come round to it once I get more familiar with the game. In any case I'm really grateful for all the great content you produce, most of which can be applied to true solo one way or another.
Been going through Circle Undone with Diana and the Joe.. on easy., and just keep drawing so many -3 (number or symbol).. even looking to add in some bless tokens., not that the card has come in yet..😅
I think one thing that's worth emphasizing, and I think you did in the negative sense, but the game's difficulty is largely determined by the scenario design, which unlike LotR, has no scaling (Return to... aside). Yes, playing on easy means you will succeed most of the time, but over the course of a campaign, you're going to draw all of the bad tokens, and sometimes at critical moments! I've gone back to playing mostly on easy from standard, but playing through something like Forgotten Age on easy is still quite difficult!
Scaling with player count strongly biases my sense of who's good. I play four player, usually stan-hard, and have never understood the Ursula love - a bonus investigate at base 4 isn’t great and your main cluever in 4p can’t move that much. Compared to say Trish, it’s a no brainer even with similar stat lines who can carry the role for the team. An underrated part of Innsmouth is how the blurse mechanic forces better team optimization since you have to have cross-investigator approaches.
I guess I'm doing something wrong. I'm playing with two investigators on easy and it's almost impossible to win. I am playing Carcosa with William and Sefina and in every scenario I'm getting defeated. I did get to the final scenario by doing a couple of them twice but was slaughtered in Dim Carcosa and I had no motivation to try again as it wasn't even nearly fun. Yet you guys say that easy isn't even worth playing. I don't get it!!!! I guess I must be playing hard on myself based on some rule I'm not understanding, or as a guy with a Master's degree I'm just too stoopid. (SI) I wish I knew the answer but I don't.
My group (3 players) plays on hard difficulty most of the time and we usually don't have much of a problem to win each scenario and to gain most or all of the XP's. In my experience the "trick" to success on hard difficulty is to:
1) really optimize the team (synergy between Investigators),
2) upgrade the decks for 1-2 high static skill values to pass most tests of these skills even without having to commit cards,
3) include as much action-compression/bonus actions into your deck as possible,
4) don't be afraid to use the first 2-3 turns to play assets that make your character more efficient/stronger in the long run instead of immediately starting to gather clues or explore locations.
5) And lastly, if you spend an action for a skill test, make sure (whenever possible) to increase your skill value high enough so that the only token that let's you fail the test is the auto-fail token and maybe one other token (usually a -6 token).
Amen. Playing on expert with my group. Agreed with every word. Just wanna add some extra advices:
- always try to play around - 4 or worst symbol in your scenario
- testless profit your best friend, any testless stuff will be a good help
- if your character is bad aginst encounter deck, dont try to rise your unnessesary stats, Just take cards that will minimise the damage/impact of encounter deck
Thank you so much for the job you have done making this videos. We have just started playing recently, and we go over all of your videos analyzing everything the game has to offer. Thank you so much and keep up a great job making new videos!
This one was very nice. Having breakfast with some insight on the game just to go to the Forgotten Age in the afternoon to get crushed by it on Standard
With maybe a couple of exceptions, that can get unfair (Essex Country Express with core set Ancient Evils comes to mind), I think, the game is almost always much easier with more players. That's because not everything scales. Most obvious is movement, but also actions like spending clues to spawn the cultists in Midnight Masks. Of course, this also favours a bit generalists over specialists, because they don't need to be "babysit" and can cover ground on their own. But not quite anymore, with the awesome Safeguard, which let the guardian be stayed put with the seeker without spending extra actions. Another advantage in higher player counts is, that you will pretty much guaranteed see each and every victory point enemy (and have at least somebody, who can kill them easily) and therefore start in the higher levels with more powerful decks.
I've only played on Standard and Easy, so I'll just not my head about Hard and Expert.
One additional form of scaling to consider is XP. The choices about whether or not to push your luck to hunt xp on a scenario can depend on how much XP you've already gotten in the campaign. Later scenarios are harder and assume you've leveled up your deck, which may be true to varying degrees.
The other thing about XP, is that you’ll get more in multiplayer.
Wow. This really highlights how crazy powerful Jim Culver is on higher difficulties.
On hard being up +2 on any given test is enough to get him to succeed more than half the time with just two committed. A +3 gets him to be successful like 3/4 times.
On expert he succeeds 50% of the time with three above the skill test, while all other investigators succeed need to be up four for the same odds. That adds up over time.
Alternatively - on hard he succeeds about 1/3rd of the time while being up 0. On expert he succeeds about 1/5th of the time while being up 0, where for other investigators it's 1/18 chance to succeed while up by 0.
Those numbers are CRAZY and I think you can build Jim in a way where maybe you can replace your double icon commits for a single icon + effect commit. These numbers say that he needs far fewer icons. Maybe guts isn't an auto-include, ya know?
Would be fun to see the crew try a single scenario on expert over and over until they succeed. They could try a few times a week in a row, and they could include the post-game discussion and the decisions around deck building/ rebalancing the deck between attempts.
Me and my friends play on expert and its hard i tell ya. Cards that guarantee you a succesfull test or positive side effects are much more important, becouse passing tests the normal way is very hard. No dead actions accepted and no risky tests (like you're 1 up), and every sigle action has to count. I like the challange but I wish my friends would let us play standard every now and then. Wishfull thinking thou. One of them is a dark souls die hard fan and that tells a lot about him.
Here’s a challenge my table is running, with proxies for now. All four parallel investigators with the new permanents from Edge of the Earth. Return to Dunwich. All four challenges thrown in. And when we complete it, we will be using the survivors from that campaign to go through Return to Carcosa.
Great video! Have you considered posting these videos on reddit? Just asking because I don't remember seeing announcements for you channel there. There's lots of new players there and I think this series is particularly interesting for new players. Also I'm sure the other players will find interesting as well!
Thanks for the comment. I have a problem where I'm really bad at advertising our content. I really should, because, you're right, it would be great for new players.
I´d love to see a run by you guys on hard.
Topic idea: how to win against the big bad during the final scenario of each cycle.
Hard is a decent step up from Standard, but I think people get put off a lot by how bad the Hard/Expert reference cards are in the Night of the Zealot campaign. The bad token effects on the reference card are typically proportionally way less bad in later campaigns. I can't think of a bigger step up in token difficulty than those in Night of the Zealot. For example, in Dream-Eaters the Hard/Expert reference card tokens are often exactly the same as the Easy/Standard ones but their modifier is just 1 worse.
We pretty much mostly play on Hard now and feel that it still gives a decent amount of wriggle room for creative deck-building. We've played a couple of campaigns on Expert though, and in that instance you definitely need laser-focused decks that can sometimes feel a bit restrictive on choice. As such, whilst still winnable, we typically don't play Expert much just because of how much it can limit your deckbuilding options. Still a fun challenge to return to from time to time though.
I feel like 3 players is the sweet spot for my games.
So for me the player count elephant in the room is true solo. I know you guys don't play it (much), but maybe you should (more) :-) I would love to hear your wisdom and ideas more on the true solo experience!
Travis and I have both tried true solo (don't know about Bryn) and we don't really enjoy it that much and greatly prefer two-handed solo. Unfortunately, because of this, I don't think we'll get much more detailed true solo content on the channel.
@@PlayingBoardGames Fair enough. Right now I find two handed solo too much to track, and also not as immersive narratively, but maybe I'll come round to it once I get more familiar with the game. In any case I'm really grateful for all the great content you produce, most of which can be applied to true solo one way or another.
@James Harland: Manfromleng at the Whispererer in Darkness channel, plays true solo exclusively so there’s lots of great true solo content over there.
@@joshuawestlund Thanks for the tip! I've now subscribed to the channel you mentioned.
Been going through Circle Undone with Diana and the Joe.. on easy., and just keep drawing so many -3 (number or symbol).. even looking to add in some bless tokens., not that the card has come in yet..😅
I think one thing that's worth emphasizing, and I think you did in the negative sense, but the game's difficulty is largely determined by the scenario design, which unlike LotR, has no scaling (Return to... aside). Yes, playing on easy means you will succeed most of the time, but over the course of a campaign, you're going to draw all of the bad tokens, and sometimes at critical moments! I've gone back to playing mostly on easy from standard, but playing through something like Forgotten Age on easy is still quite difficult!
Scaling with player count strongly biases my sense of who's good. I play four player, usually stan-hard, and have never understood the Ursula love - a bonus investigate at base 4 isn’t great and your main cluever in 4p can’t move that much. Compared to say Trish, it’s a no brainer even with similar stat lines who can carry the role for the team.
An underrated part of Innsmouth is how the blurse mechanic forces better team optimization since you have to have cross-investigator approaches.
BBBB: BRING BACK BEARDED BRYN
I guess I'm doing something wrong. I'm playing with two investigators on easy and it's almost impossible to win. I am playing Carcosa with William and Sefina and in every scenario I'm getting defeated. I did get to the final scenario by doing a couple of them twice but was slaughtered in Dim Carcosa and I had no motivation to try again as it wasn't even nearly fun. Yet you guys say that easy isn't even worth playing. I don't get it!!!! I guess I must be playing hard on myself based on some rule I'm not understanding, or as a guy with a Master's degree I'm just too stoopid. (SI) I wish I knew the answer but I don't.