OzymandiasAV

The Julian Murdoch **HONORARY** iOS Board Game/Strategy Thread

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I picked up Yggdrasil. It falls firmly in the camp of 'rubbish at teaching you how to play'. There is a tutorial but it's really just a vague series of chat boxes and gives you far too much information up front. It's not too tricky to work out but I just expect a decent guided approach with iOS games, Titan and Puerto Rico were perfect for that but some of the others have let me down.

The actual implementation seems reasonably bug free, I think it needs slightly larger graphics and more obvious touch points for the actions you take but it's a reasonable app. I imagine if you already like the game or enjoy coop gaming you will find a lot to like here.

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Developer mentioned somewhere that it's not asynchronous online multiplayer, and no retina graphics (at least not yet). Still, I was tempted to buy the boardgame but didn't want to spend the $40, I'll take the app for $6.

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Pocket Tactics has reported that there are a couple of sales on iOS strategy titles:

The only one of the three that I've played is Cthulhu and it's not too bad. I'm about five hours into it and, thus far, it's been a linear squad-based tactical campaign with a sprinkle of character progression and inventory management.

On the battle field, it plays a bit like Fire Emblem with a trimmed set of Gollop-esque gunplay mechanics; there's no fog of war, but you've got time units, overwatch, and aimed/snap shot distinction. Levels are typically framed around your squad from one objective to the next, dealing with ambushes from cultists and otherworldly horrors alike. The AI isn't the sharpest tool in the shed -- more than once, I've seen a cultist take a suicidal walk into a cloud of nerve gas -- but the encounter design makes up for that with increased numbers of enemies, which forces you to skillfully manage your resources to proceed.

One other point to mention for iPhone players: the UI can be a real mess on the smaller screen. Since the game uses an isometric perspective, it's far too easy to fat-finger a unit/enemy selection and inadvertently send your rifleman running into a field of fire when you meant to line up a kill shot.

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Memorial? Am I dead?

I wish I had friends that cared about the same stuff that I do so I could call them up and tell them that I posted in the same thread as THE Julian Murdoch.

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I picked up Combat Mission Touch now that I finally have my iPad 3. I really wasn't initially grabbed by it. The touch camera controls are very imprecise and it feels like a clunky PC conversion. I am sad to say I've not ever played the original combat mission so I don't know how this compares to that. Anyone else played it and can tell me if I am missing something or is this a case of old game not translating well to new platform?

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Some Slitherine & Matrix wargames coming to the iPad....

• Conquest! Medieval Realms for iOS/Android - May 2nd release at special launch price of $1.99.

• Great Battles Medieval: iPad version - Coming Q2 2012 (Apparently already on Android)

• Panzer Corps on iPad - Q3 2012

• Field of Glory: Tablet versions - Q4 2012 after Unity update

• Battle Academy For Android coming in Q4 2012

• Sovereignty: Crown of Kings coming in Q4 2012-Q1 2013

• And even the classic Close Combat series may be possible in 2014.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/10041/ios-news-slitherine-announcements-agricola-tricky

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Fairly promising new blog I've been checking out the last couple days:

http://pockettactics.com/

The author posts over on Broken Forum, but I figured he deserved a little extra promotion for his efforts.

The Outwitters interview in particular looks neat. Tilt To Live (NOT a strategy title!) was a clever casual game with great presentation, so I'm looking forward to seeing what those guys do with some hexes.

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Gosh...thought Julian had bought the farm, so to speak, judging by the title of your thread! :eek:

False alarm, I trust.

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Modern Art: The Card Game is a somewhat poorer variant of the original (and awesome!) Modern Art game, but still ok from what little I've played.

It's also on the iOS, but has a somewhat crappy interface. Still, might be worth a look if you like the card game.

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Gosh...thought Julian had bought the farm, so to speak, judging by the title of your thread! :eek:

False alarm, I trust.

It was a joke (and one that went over like a lead balloon, apparently), so I renamed the thread title to avoid any further confusion.

EDIT: Errr...at least I attempted to edit the thread title, anyway. Following up with forum admins now.

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Wow, Ascension for the iOS received a number of great improvements and became 99,999% awesome!

:tmeh: The new expansion Storm of Souls. (:tdown: I don't care for the look of those cards though). For a while I couldn't figure out where the event cards where, I guess maybe there wasn't any or there's a bug.

:tup: Better animations, now you can actually follow what the other guy is doing without slowing the game down too much :tup::tup::tup:

:tup: Selectable victory point pool size (up to double the normal and only for offline). I wanted this so bad since I often feel that just as I get my awesome deck going, it's game over. The AI seems really weak for larger pools, though, although it beat me a couple of times. :tmeh:

:tup: Selectable themes

:tup: You can now select if you want to draw a card when it says "You may draw a card". This is important on a few occasions. :tup:

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I'm really enjoying this game too. My biggest gripe is the random (isn't it always) selection of cards in the middle. I hate loosing a game because suddenly monsters stop appearing. I usually go for heavy draw more card builds if I can.

If anyone is up for a game I'm dibkins on game centre.

Edit: also, every so often the ai will just slow to a crawl.

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My biggest gripe is the random (isn't it always) selection of cards in the middle.

Yeah, I'm with you there. I didn't actually like Ascension (the physical game) that much, until I got the iOS version, which is nice to play just to kill 5-10 minutes.

I don't even know if it qualifies as a strategy game. Sure, you make a choice of what kind of deck to build, but the game really depends on what cards are available in the centre. Usually there's enough to support your "strategy", but sometimes there's not. So you might have to adapt. Maybe it's more of a tactics game, but you also can't always respond very well to what's on the table -- depending on the number of players and your deck size.

The game is a bit random for me and I think Dominion is a much better game, if we'd compare the physical versions.

Edit: also, every so often the ai will just slow to a crawl.

Oh yeah, I think this is when the AI has to think about banishing something, or if it has a lot of constructs. And it seems to do it before every move -- sometimes the slowdown even happens between playing two Mystics or something.

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The only strategy i've been able to eek out is to get as many "draw cards" heros and constructs as i can and cycle my deck to get the best cards out of it quicker. After that its a gamble if your early stategy is going to work or not.

Still fun for a quick game though. I wish they would put in the 3rd difficulty setting:/

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The only strategy i've been able to eek out is to get as many "draw cards" heros and constructs as i can and cycle my deck to get the best cards out of it quicker.

Focusing on drawing cards will put your economy in a good place, but a good economy alone doesn't mean you will win (vs human players that is). The real strategy is in the discarding. Discarding a card is like running a whetstone along a blade. You get rid of the imperfections in your deck, which improves every successive draw. Though, you can also ruin a blade by over sharpening it. That's where the real decision making comes into play.

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I love it too. Storm of Souls is interesting to me in its mechanics and balance, but I do tend to notice that you need a lot more heavy militias and the like because of all the trophy monsters. Combine that with a bunch of those destroy/return to hand Mechana constructs and the biggest problem, when you are playing to that strategy, is just managing the little tiny construct holder in the bottom of the corner.

I agree that the game can be overly random at times but that just means that a more balanced general strategy is necessary rather than something very focused (if you are focusing on buying mechana constructs and get nothing to battle monsters with then you're kinda fucked if the center deck draws all monsters!)

Being able to play with an enlarged honour pool is awesome too in that it lets you experiment more. In one game I basically had all the mechana constructs (this is just the base game) and had banished everything except for a few high mana + draw cards + gain honour cards. I would play the entirety of my deck every turn. That shit's impossible to set up with the default honour pool but it was fun beating the computer like 235 to 80.

(Also, that play five turns in a row achievement is insane.)

Anyway, who wants a game? I'm n0wak (that's a zero) on game center. I need more human opponents.

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I will challenge you guys to some games when I've got less on my mind (=next week maybe). I'm T4ffer, I think.

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Sorry for declining any requests, I really don't have much time for synchronous games right now. If you want a longer game (couple of days+), I'll bite. BTW. Isn't it completely stupid that you can't message Game Center friends (or in Ascension). Or maybe I'm completely stupid and you can do that?

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Ya, I really wanted to trash talk you after that trashing. Oh well, yo mystic so stupid yadda yadda.

Also I nearly burnt my risotto while playing:p

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It's been announced on Twitter and elsewhere that the asynchronous multiplayer update for Neuroshima Hex has been submitted for Apple approval. If the turnaround for Storm of Souls was any indication, that means we should be getting it in the App Store later on this week.

I will challenge you guys to some games when I've got less on my mind (=next week maybe). I'm T4ffer, I think.

You can add me on for Ascension as well - Game Center ID is OzymandiasAV.

I'm not really connecting with Storm of Souls yet, though I've only played ~30 games of it. I'm really enjoying the Trophy mechanic but, when you add those Trophy monster effects with the new event cards and the lackluster constructs, the new set seems to discourage long-view strategy even more than usual.

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I'm really enjoying this game too. My biggest gripe is the random (isn't it always) selection of cards in the middle. I hate loosing a game because suddenly monsters stop appearing. I usually go for heavy draw more card builds if I can.

If anyone is up for a game I'm dibkins on game centre.

Edit: also, every so often the ai will just slow to a crawl.

Controlling the center is an important strategy. Your opponent should/might be taking/banishing monsters so that only hero's and constructs are left.

http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/687646/basic-strategy-managing-the-centre-row

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I honestly never even considered that. Mystics it is!

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So I did this last night https://twitter.com/#!/n0wak/status/202813767585775616/photo/1

I think the adjustable honour pool kind of highlights some serious balance issues in the original deck and expansion that weren't too visible with the default (two player) 60 honour pool. The game ended because I basically got bored of being in an infinite turn after turn loop rather than because I ran out of any ability to play. So yeah, "Tablet of Time's Dawn" became a broken card when the expansion was added. They should errata that shit because if this was Magic that kind of play would be banned already.

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