Nelsormensch

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Cleinhun has the right of it. The only cards that can be advanced are Agendas, unless the card states otherwise.

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Sweet. That totally makes sense. Hopefully our 2nd game will be easier now!

 

One more question: If a corp lays down an ambush card, can he advance it, to make it look like an agenda card? Is there special rules to advancing an ambush card? I was Jinteki and there's a snare (might be wrong about the name) which costs 0 credits to rez. What would happen to those advance tokens?

 

As folks upthread have mentioned, yeah, if it's not an agenda, the Asset specifically needs to say "{This Card} can be advanced."

 

But you may have been thinking of Project Junebug, which does explicitly say it can be advanced and further, "If you pay 1c when the Runner accesses Project Junebug, do 2 net damage for each advancement token on Project Junebug."

 

Technically nothing happens to the asset or the advancement counters on the card after its accessed, but given that Project Junebug and most other traps have a 0c trash cost (barring other weird card effects), assuming they survive, the runner will just trash them right after accessing.

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Oh snap I totally had that card in my hand, and didn't use it, because I didn't understand what it meant! XD

 

Looking at that website real quick, with Cell Portal, if it is the only ice protecting the server, does that mean it's just an indefinite loop? (until the runner jacks out or the corp runs out of credits)

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Oh snap I totally had that card in my hand, and didn't use it, because I didn't understand what it meant! XD

 

Looking at that website real quick, with Cell Portal, if it is the only ice protecting the server, does that mean it's just an indefinite loop? (until the runner jacks out or the corp runs out of credits)

 

Yeah, so just a Cell Portal by itself is probably not worth rezzing. But if it's got something a little pricey in front of it (ideally with an Akitaro Watanabe installed too), then that server is now pretty darn hard to get into.

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Yeah, so just a Cell Portal by itself is probably not worth rezzing. But if it's got something a little pricey in front of it (ideally with an Akitaro Watanabe installed too), then that server is now pretty darn hard to get into.

 

That reminds me of another question: When you rez an upgrade, can you only rez it on a run? And does it get unrezzed when the run ends, or does it just stay there. I got Akitaro Watanabe and it was awesome.

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Excepting Ice,* you can rez cards pretty much whenever you want.** Once a card is rezzed, it stays that way unless something derezzes it.

 

 

*Ice can only be rezzed when it is approached during a run.

** This is not strictly true - there are specific windows for when you can rez cards. But at the level you're at, it essentially works out to "whenever you want."

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...I just realized that even though I know the difference between the two games (despite never actually played either), ever since this thread popped back up two days ago, I've been skimming through it as if I was reading about Nethack.

 

NETHACK AND NETRUNNER ARE NOT THE SAME GAME, PEOPLE. IN CASE YOU DIDN'T KNOW.

 

:getmecoat

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Someone made a Netrunner fangame in Twine. You play as a shaper house-sitting for Mac after Weyland tears your apartment down. It includes draws and runs. I stopped after an hour of playing having scored two agendas.

http://www.nagnazul.com/whyirun/whyirun.html

I don't think that the text-form really benefits the gameplay if you are used to the fast pace of Netrunner itself, but it was pretty cool to see how someone expands the flavor-text and experiments with the slower pace of a descriptive narrative.

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I got the starter set for this recently. I think I was able to work out most of the basics from the manual and video tutorials, but there's still some nuances I'm not entirely clear on.

 

One was what happens to ice if the card it's protecting is removed, but I gather from this thread that it stays where it is and effectively becomes an empty remote server you can put a new thing into.

 

The other thing I recall stumbling over was whether you could mix and match ice-breakers during a run. If I have one that's strong enough to go through a particular piece of ice (or cheaper to buff up) and another that can disable subroutines on that type of ice, can I combine the two, or do I have to buff up the one that's made for this type of ice if I want to use its abilities?

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One was what happens to ice if the card it's protecting is removed, but I gather from this thread that it stays where it is and effectively becomes an empty remote server you can put a new thing into.

That's correct. The ice stays on the server.

The other thing I recall stumbling over was whether you could mix and match ice-breakers during a run. If I have one that's strong enough to go through a particular piece of ice (or cheaper to buff up) and another that can disable subroutines on that type of ice, can I combine the two, or do I have to buff up the one that's made for this type of ice if I want to use its abilities?

You are boosting the strength of the ice-breaker so it can interact with the ice. Boosting the strength of one doesn't get the other ice-breaker to enough of a strength to interact with the ice. There are some ice-breakers that reduce the strength of the ice though. So theoretically you could reduce the strength of the ice with one ice-breaker to the point where another is strong enough to affect it. Both ice-breakers would have to be of the type to interact with the type of ice the runner is encountering in this scenario.

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But the ice breaker doesn't have to match the type of ice to interact with it at all, right? So if there's a piece of ice that doesn't have the "end the run" subroutine but just makes me take damage or something, can I use any ice breaker strong enough to get through that, or does it have to be one that's made for getting through, say, sentries?

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But the ice breaker doesn't have to match the type of ice to interact with it at all, right? So if there's a piece of ice that doesn't have the "end the run" subroutine but just makes me take damage or something, can I use any ice breaker strong enough to get through that, or does it have to be one that's made for getting through, say, sentries?

The ice breaker needs to match the type to interact with the specific ice, otherwise the only interaction is can do is waste money by increasing it's strength. All strength is lost after every ice encounter unless otherwise specified (all 3 shaper icebreakers retain strength).

 

If an ice is a sentry, only sentry ice breakers and non specific ice breakers are able to break it's subroutines. The sentry ice breakers have Program: Icebreaker - Killer, as well as subroutines that say Break sentry subroutine. A Gordian Blade has Break codegate subroutine so that won't work. 

 

There's AI icebreakers like Crypsis and Wyrm. Those just have Break Ice Subroutine, you can use those on any ice, even ice that isn't a sentry/barrier/codegate.

 

You could use YOG.0 and Wyrm to break subroutines on codegates that high a too high strength but before an icebreaker can interact with an ice it needs to have equal or greater strength. Wyrm is really expensive by itself but slightly less expensive if you have a 2nd breaker, since Wyrm's subroutine breaking requires the ice to have a strength of 0.

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You're talking about using the right ice breaker if I want to disable subroutines, but my question was what happens If I don't want to disable them (and they're of the type that don't end my run, just trigger other annoyances like damage, tracking or the con gaining credit, that I've decided in this hypothetical are acceptable losses). Can I get past it with any icebreaker stronger than that piece of ice, or does the icebreaker still have to match the type of ice, even if I don't want to use the type-specific subroutine-disabling abilities?

 

In other words, when people say an ice breaker has to be the right type to interact with a piece of ice, what does "interact" mean? The ability to shut down subroutines on that piece of ice, or the ability to get past it at all?

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You're talking about using the right ice breaker if I want to disable subroutines, but my question was what happens If I don't want to disable them (and they're of the type that don't end my run, just trigger other annoyances like damage, tracking or the con gaining credit, that I've decided in this hypothetical are acceptable losses). Can I get past it with any icebreaker stronger than that piece of ice, or does the icebreaker still have to match the type of ice, even if I don't want to use the type-specific subroutine-disabling abilities?

 

In other words, when people say an ice breaker has to be the right type to interact with a piece of ice, what does "interact" mean? The ability to shut down subroutines on that piece of ice, or the ability to get past it at all?

 

Sorry, with interacting I meant breaking subroutines via the paid ability.

 

If an ice doesn't have a subroutine that ends the run, it doesn't end the run. You don't need any icebreakers to get past Neural Katana, it'll just deal 3 net damage. 

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Okay, I think I got this then. Strength on ice cards is actually just something you need to overcome to access subroutines, not to get past the ice. I was conceptually confused by this because I wasn't sure people we're making pragmatic generalizations about the topic or referring to a hard and fast rule, i.e. do you "have" to use the right type of ice breaker because a lot of ice cards end your run, or do you literally have to use the right type all the time.

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Yeah, the key thing to remember is that you're only forced to end the run if the ice or some other ability tells you too. Otherwise you can keep sailing through if you want.

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I tried to get into Netrunner by playing a few games with a friend who's familiar with it, and wow was it unpleasant. I had a bunch of UI issues with it (like the constant unexplained symbols on cards or how they renamed all the basic terms like "hand" and "deck" into terms so vague that I kept having to ask "So does that one mean hand or deck again?"), but beyond that the gameplay was just fucking miserable.

In my first game as a runner, I had one kind of icebreaker, the corp had a different kind of ice, and I didn't get to do anything for the entire game because I couldn't draw the right icebreaker to save my life. In my first game as a corp, I couldn't draw any money-generating cards, so I just got wrecked because I was perpetually broke. In my second game as a runner, the corp basically didn't put up a fight and I rolled over it. There was another game where I couldn't draw any money-makers, and it felt like I just lost because the other side did draw a money-maker and so their clicks were worth twice as much. Then there was a game where I walked into an early trap that was indistinguishable from an agenda and it put me so far behind that I felt like I should just concede there (I played it out and as expected, the corp was way ahead on resources and I barely got to interact with them for the rest of the game).

 

It felt like the game was extremely draw-dependent and swingy: At any particular point in the game, 15% of my deck is cards that would be incredible and five times better than any other card, and 50% of my deck is (in the current situation) useless garbage. It was also a game that was miserable to lose: every loss (that wasn't due to an inability to draw basic crucial cards) was about getting slowly ground into dust by my opponent's unassailable resource advantage.

I'm not here to shit on the game (although would it have killed the designers to just call it "deck" and "hand"?) because the amount of positivity in this thread has convinced that despite my experience, the game is not actually a finely calibrated misery engine designed by Satan himself. How does one get into Netrunner? The way I tried was apparently wrong, so if I'm going to give the game another chance, how do I go about doing it?

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I'm not here to shit on the game (although would it have killed the designers to just call it "deck" and "hand"?) because the amount of positivity in this thread has convinced that despite my experience, the game is not actually a finely calibrated misery engine designed by Satan himself. How does one get into Netrunner? The way I tried was apparently wrong, so if I'm going to give the game another chance, how do I go about doing it?

 

Heh, well obviously I'd say your experience is not representative, since I'm half of Terminal7, and we obviously love Netrunner a lot.

 

But as for getting into it, find someone at a game store or local Netrunner meeting will to teach. There's also a couple demo decks that do a decent job of introducing the game without some of the complexity.

 

Stick with the same side (either Runner or Corp) for a while, until you get the hang of it. It's useful to know the kind of things the other side has, but focusing is a bit more useful early on.

 

Once you've played a few games, our 8th episode of Terminal7 "Eventually Your Breathing Will Stop" is the most beginner-centric episode we did, so there might be some good info in there once you're a little bit more familiar.

 

If you have any questions, post them here too! I'm sure folks would be happy to answer.

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I think trying to learn the game from someone who already knows it is fairly hard to do. So much of the game is about making decisions based on limited information, but as a new player you don't know the possibility space so you can't make an informed choice. If you want to get into the game I think you'd really want to find someone who was also new to learn with. 

 

As for the "luck of the draw" frustration, I think the fact that you can spend a click to draw a card can mitigate that more so than most card games. It's not the end of the world if you have to spend a turn or 2 digging through your deck. That frustration is also much worse if you are using a deck you didn't build yourself or that you haven't used before, because you won't know ahead of time where your weakness are and therefore can't play around them. It's entirely possible to play a deck that doesn't have very make icebreakers if you play it certain ways, such as being more aggressive than usual and running servers before the corp has the money to get all of their ice up, or by playing cards that let you skip past or destroy ice you can't break.

 

You say you had a game where you hit an early trap that essentially lost you the game. This is something that can happen, but part of getting better at the game is learning what sorts of decks might have what sorts of traps. Or, more generally, if you see something that might be a trap, put yourself in a situation where getting trapped would be an inconvenience rather than a game loss (by drawing extra cards before running it, or by putting important cards in play first so you don't lose them). If you can't do that, you can also leave the trap alone and build up your board or try to score off other servers. If it ends up being an agenda, it still costs the corp resources to score it, which gives you time to do other things.

 

I don't know if any of that is helpful, but there it is.

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I agree with everything Cleinhun said. I'd also like to respond though.

 

I tried to get into Netrunner by playing a few games with a friend who's familiar with it, and wow was it unpleasant. I had a bunch of UI issues with it (like the constant unexplained symbols on cards or how they renamed all the basic terms like "hand" and "deck" into terms so vague that I kept having to ask "So does that one mean hand or deck again?"),

 

To me, this type of terminology serves a similar purpose to how some dungeon-masters require that players speak in character when exchanging information. There is a lot of coherent theming in the game that is amplified if you think of the games parts in cyberpunk terms; if you have no interest in cyberpunk the game loses a lot of its joy. I didn't think that Count Zero was a masterpiece, but that book really helped me appreciate Netrunner. For instance, it's not a deck like a deck of cards, it's a deck like a computer console that you bought from a shady pawn shop that is known to have connections to some console cowboy known to have flatlined because she got too curious about rumors involving questionable bio-medical research done by the global corporation that runs both all the hospitals and who all manufactures all the pharmaceuticals.  Your heap is the pile of equipment that you've fried in attempts to hack into networked computer systems that can fight back; you leave the pile of broken tech and corrupted software in a corner in case you need to scavenge for parts. Corps have Research and Development pipelines that result in proprietary technologies and business opportunities that only high amounts of capital allow. Some of it proves useful, but even when it doesn't they keep in in their Archive in case they need to refer to it latter. Really, I wouldn't recommend playing this game without imagining the theme of making runs on corporate servers to steal secrets they can sell for more equipment to hack into more protected servers.

 

 In my first game as a runner, I had one kind of icebreaker, the corp had a different kind of ice, and I didn't get to do anything for the entire game because I couldn't draw the right icebreaker to save my life.

 

You really have to adjust your running strategy based on where the corporation has invested their security. If Headquarters, R&D, and remote servers always feel too well protected, then you might need to try using an anarchist deck or play a Sneakdoor Beta so that they have to protect their Archives too. But one thing that took me a while to get used to is that this game is tuned to have runners win by risking everything on one-last-shot. Time is on the side of the Corp and each run is supposed to be painful. make sure you aren't thinking of it as trying to permanently open a server so much as finding exploits that are going to be patched as soon as the opponent knows what you are planning. Between putting in cards like Special Order (lets you look in your deck for an icebreaker), Inside Job (bypass first piece of ICE), Tinkering (ICE gains sentry, barrier, or code gate til end of turn) you should be able to access at least one vulnerability every turn or two early and mid game.

 

In my first game as a corp, I couldn't draw any money-generating cards, so I just got wrecked because I was perpetually broke.

 

When I play Corp and I'm not drawing money resources, I use my clicks for credits while keeping Headquarters full of possibilities, putting out bluffs to waste the runner's clicks, and praying that no high-point agendas show up in Research and Development before I can afford some ICE. These games can actually be really rewarding. When the runner has drawn the same card from Headquarters for the past three runs, it flavors the entire game and they think you are some sort of lucky mastermind (which you may be).

 

In my second game as a runner, the corp basically didn't put up a fight and I rolled over it.

 

The Corp was probably making some gambits that could have gone either way and you chose wisely.

 

There was another game where I couldn't draw any money-makers, and it felt like I just lost because the other side did draw a money-maker and so their clicks were worth twice as much.

 

If the runner is getting a lot of cash, make decisions based off the likelihood that they will be playing aggressively. If the Corp has got a money maker, target it.

 

Then there was a game where I walked into an early trap that was indistinguishable from an agenda and it put me so far behind that I felt like I should just concede there (I played it out and as expected, the corp was way ahead on resources and I barely got to interact with them for the rest of the game).

 

Along with what Cleinhun said about this, managing risk does involve knowing what cards are available to the Corp. This goes back to another suggestion of something Cleinhun said. If you are learning the game with someone and the two of you start with just the core-set, you can account for all the card-possibilities much more easily than if you are being taught by a veteran who has every expansion.

 

>

It felt like the game was extremely draw-dependent and swingy: At any particular point in the game, 15% of my deck is cards that would be incredible and five times better than any other card, and 50% of my deck is (in the current situation) useless garbage. It was also a game that was miserable to lose: every loss (that wasn't due to an inability to draw basic crucial cards) was about getting slowly ground into dust by my opponent's unassailable resource advantage.

 

There are some very bad draws, but they happen to me rarely. Usually, a drawing poorly can be hedged by suggesting that you are doing things that you aren't. It takes some familiarity of the game from both you and your opponent though. It's even better if the two of you have played a lot together and you can feign strategies that are infamous in your shared memory of the game. There are a ton of ways to bluff in Netrunner, but the opponent needs to be able to recognize what you might be doing in order for it to be effective.

As far as being ground to dust due to a resource advantage. Time is on the Corp's side. This is part of the game-balance. The runner needs to feel a sense of urgency during the game. Each mistake has an opportunity cost.

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Clyde and Cleihun make some good points, but I'll just chime in on the terminology point. I'm pretty sure they renamed "deck" and "hand" and "discard pile" because the Runner and Corp each of one of each of those, and both sides have cards that affect all three. If they didn't have unique names, every card that referred to "Archives" would instead have to refer to "the Corp's discard pile". Likewise for all the other locations. It's a bit frustrating when you're first learning them, but once you have those names memorized, it's actually far more useful than the more straightforward names.

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Double-post to say that anybody in the Toronto area looking to get into the game should attend Snakes & Lattes' Core Set tournament. You're only allowed to build decks out of a single Core set, so it will be really welcoming to new players. I also know the guy running it and can guarantee that it will be a good time.

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