Two new categories on the right, since both the EVE Card Game and the Guild Wars Group are becoming regular things. I'm sort of breaking my own rules a bit, talking about the card game, since this is supposed to be an MMO Blog of sorts, but feel free to skip the CCG category posts if you're just here to read me ranting about my inability to hit the side of an Amp Station with a Bolt Driver, or similar!
Last night's game was of a quite different texture to the first outing, with us doing a much better job of reading the rulebook. Seems that turns do in fact work like those of
Magic: The Gathering, with each player taking turns to work through all the steps of that turn, before passing over to the next player. This all makes a lot more sense, and negates a lot of the unfair advantage the 'Last' player gets, that I mentioned before.
I was Minmatar again, with the same borrowed deck as before. My previous Caldari opponent was Caldari again, which makes sense...he did win, after all. Last time's Gallente player brought along an Amaar deck of his own devising instead this time, so that kept things quite fresh. We all shuffled up and got to it, and again, the opening stages of play went much as before, with a kind of strategic build-up, mostly based on getting as many income sources out and secured as possible, and it felt much like playing a traditional RTS on the computer - that opening bit where you're uncovering the map and grabbing at resource nodes, while developing up your technology and infrastructure, in preparation for the Big Push later on.
I think I was pulling ahead in this early stage, and the shuffle seemed to have placed a lot of Location Cards in my opening few Hands. These are enhancements to the various Regions which generate money, minerals and often have useful specific effects, all for whoever controls that Region - by having at least one Ship Card there. As last time, I was generating much more money that I could realistically use - most of the Minmatar ships seem to be very cheap compared to the stuff the Caldari and Amaar were trying to put into play, although have appropriately lower attack and defence scores, making the Minmatar a bit of a 'Weenie' or 'Horde' deck; lots and lots of low cost, low power 'creatures', that you can throw out quickly and in large numbers.
This time though, I remembered the bit where you can choose to forfeit your cash income at the beginning of the turn, and take two cards from the 'Market' - your deck - instead of just the one, and so did my opponents, making for a game with much less waiting about and huge bank balances, and jollying things along greatly. However, as play progressed, I seemed to stall a bit, and made my usual mistake of stretching myself too thin. For a while I held the most regions, and this was going fine until they both realised I was holding them with very weak Scout and Frigate class ships, which could be easily swatted without much effort on their part.
My deck refused to cooperate and give me any of my big-hitting ships, and over about four turns, the Caldari pushed me further and further back, and finally overcame my megaer starbase defences. Game over for me. I went through my remaining deck, and sure enough, the Cyclone, Thrasher and Rupture, my three game-breaking big-ship cards, were all at the very bottom. Damnit! Still, it's exactly this element of chance that makes a good card game so replayable. Next time my shuffling will be better!
I took a few of the Caldari's bigger ships with me though, and sat back to watch the Amaar and Caldari battle it out, which was quite extraordinary. The Amaar deck seemed to be based around making an absolutely immovable object out of his home starbase, with Starbase Structure Cards - add-ons to the base itself - piling up and increasing his original 8 Defence base to a staggering 38 Defence in the end, as well as generating lots of income from the base itself, preventing enemy ships from warping there without paying money per ship, and so on. Very dug in!
On the other hand, the Caldari absolutely owned the rest of the galaxy, with a numerous and potent blob-fleet of Merlins, Kestrels, Herons and Griffins, a Blackbird, a Ferox and a Basilisk, locking down almost all of the other Outer Regions, securing all the special effects each of those grant, and generating so much income that we gave up counting after a while, and just let him play stuff for free. This huge fleet became an irresistable force that neatly swatted little old me, but which couldn't quite get enough firepower together to break the Amaarian starbase with it's staggeringly high defence value.
This continued for quite a while - the Amaarian unable to break out of the base with ships, effectively camped, while the Caldari waited for more ships to turn up, to make the score needed to beat the Amaar base down. However, the clock was ticking, because one of the rules is that if you run out of cards in your Market - your fresh cards deck - you automatically lose. The Caldari was down to three cards left, but held the Sansha's Nation Outer Region. It's special ability allows it's current occupier to take cards randomly from their Scrapheap - the used/dead cards pile - instead of the Market, making that particular card a life-support mechanism for the Caldari at that point.
In a tense nail-biting finish during the wee small hours, the Amaar managed to get an Omen built, and used it in a desperate suicide mission to liberate the Sansha's Nation, then pinning it down with a Guardian Logistics Cruiser. Two turns later, the Caldari ran out of cards, making the Amaar victorious. Neither player seemed that satisfied with the outcome though, the win or loss having hinged on essentially a stalemate of sorts. In most of these types of card game, running someone out of cards generally shows that no decisive plays were made and there are only a few rare strategies that hinge around burning out the opponent's deck rapidly as a way to beat them - neither the Amaar or Caldari seemed to be trying to do it on purpose. The game took about four hours in the end!
The Card of the Match this time was the 'Guardian', an Amaarian Logistics Cruiser, designed to provide support to other ships. Here's the card text:
"Pay 0: The next 1 damage that would be dealt to target friendly ship is dealt to Guardian instead, as long as they are in the same region.
All other damage dealt to Guardian by ships is prevented."
Which basically means the only way you can kill it, is if it's owner decides to soak up enough damage (6 points) to other ships in the same Region, or if you can hit it with enough non-ship based damage - mostly in the form of News 'event' cards. Our Amaarian Emperor was being rather selfish with it's intended role, instead letting the other ships in it's region die a horrible explodey fire-death, leaving the Guardian alone, and untouchable, single-handedly holding an entire Outer Region itself by sheer force of invulnerability. Nerf! He had two of these out in play, and although the Caldari CEO had a huge fleet that had pretty much wrecked every other Amaarian (And Minmatar!) ship, the Amaar still had absolute control over two Outer Regions, via these two ships alone, the Caldari not having any useful News cards that could have eliminated them.
Personally, I couldn't believe that we'd got the rules right - seemed massively overpowered to me, and in the MMO, Logistics Cruisers can't help themselves, only other ships. A quick look on the CCG Forums, here, confirms that this is indeed how it works, and if you're facing an Amaarian deck, remember to bring lots of Ship Damage delivering News cards!
All good stuff, and I think I'm ready to have a go at building a deck of my own, so we'll see how that goes...