Dealing with Devouring Eel/Renforcement tokens

[bedjy]

Well, this was my third game of The Other Side last saturday, I play cult and my friend plays Horde. 3time I'm facing a single Eel and I feel like I can't do nothing to deal with it as a Cult player. I don't have ways to remove their reinforcement tokens (nah, portals are not an option) and don't have ways to give them some pinned tokens.
at the end of all 3 games, there was a bunch of eel everywhere, killing and scoring, they were not threatened by much of my things. They have excellent stats, good damages and are almost impossible to kill since they gain up to 3 renforcement tokens on their own (start of the turn, order, killing a unit).

Also even if it's said cult is hiting quite hard, I couldn't kill much in horde team since everything got too many ways to heal. Even our first game where I gain all the flips and did monstrous damages, in the end, it didn't affect the horde much.

Do you have any advice on these one ?
 

[retnab]

Yeah, their "discard a RT to block damage" ability probably should just reduce damage by 1 instead of negating all damage.  Sadly there's not really any real counters against it except just sheer volume of attacks (and I know, their defensive stats make that hard too, but at least we can put a bunch of ST's on it to help there).

[MuMantai]

I don't play Cult, I play Abyssinia. So I do have other ways to deal with eels than you have. General advice for them is either kill them early, or ignore them as much as you can.

Killing them takes a lot of effort. They usually start with an asset, and get a lot of reinforcement tokens, so they have a lot of health. Also, they have a crazy high defense. This can be helped in cult by giving them shaken token, and using ispired token (when applicable, I know cult does not really want them). For that, you will have to commit your forces, may not be something you want, or have to have a lot of ranged attacks.

Ignoring them only works for so long. I assume that the eel is in glory as soon as it activates the first turn, it can get two reinforcement token each round by either attacking or Focussed Effort. you should be able to prevent both, but more tokens are possible through other means. So if you straight ignore it, you have two eels by turn two and a problem by turn three or four. So you have to damage it at least enough to keep it from multiplying. Again, shaken token can help hitting, and ranged attacks are preferred as they keep you safe, but you can also think about pulse attacks or area effects, as they get around the high defense.

Also, Gibbering Hordes usually have really poor card draw, so volume of attacks may help to get some hits through.

My usual tactic is to ignore it at first, take some shots to keep it from spawning more eels, and attack it either if it commits, or directly after it multiplies, for at that points both eels are vulnerable. In your case, I would deploy either Doomseeker or ECB for a bit of ranged threat, and either a breachling or two, or a rhino to get a pulse through. Those are generally good against hordes, due to their low armor.

[bedjy]

11 minutes ago, MuMantai said:

I don't play Cult, I play Abyssinia. So I do have other ways to deal with eels than you have. General advice for them is either kill them early, or ignore them as much as you can.

Killing them takes a lot of effort. They usually start with an asset, and get a lot of reinforcement tokens, so they have a lot of health. Also, they have a crazy high defense. This can be helped in cult by giving them shaken token, and using ispired token (when applicable, I know cult does not really want them). For that, you will have to commit your forces, may not be something you want, or have to have a lot of ranged attacks.

Ignoring them only works for so long. I assume that the eel is in glory as soon as it activates the first turn, it can get two reinforcement token each round by either attacking or Focussed Effort. you should be able to prevent both, but more tokens are possible through other means. So if you straight ignore it, you have two eels by turn two and a problem by turn three or four. So you have to damage it at least enough to keep it from multiplying. Again, shaken token can help hitting, and ranged attacks are preferred as they keep you safe, but you can also think about pulse attacks or area effects, as they get around the high defense.

Also, Gibbering Hordes usually have really poor card draw, so volume of attacks may help to get some hits through.

My usual tactic is to ignore it at first, take some shots to keep it from spawning more eels, and attack it either if it commits, or directly after it multiplies, for at that points both eels are vulnerable. In your case, I would deploy either Doomseeker or ECB for a bit of ranged threat, and either a breachling or two, or a rhino to get a pulse through. Those are generally good against hordes, due to their low armor.

At the end of our last game, my opponent had 5 eel (recruited only 1), and I had lost quite a bunch of action trying to kill some/preventing them from multiplying. Sure I was not that lucky, but the problem is quite hard to resolve. shooting at them would be ok if they didn't have a 18" range of rush !

thanks for the tips anyway !