stopping sabotage

[Zombie_Pimp]

one of my friends plays ramos and in just about every game he picks sabotage as his scheme at least once and every game which I'm haveing a very difficult time trying to stop all he needs to do is get a model up to a structure (which i can't predict because he dosn't have to declare it) spend an action and wow he has 2vps just wondering if anyone has some advice for preventing sabotage from going off or should i just not focus on that an focus on winning my own vps

[Rathnard]

The thing with schemes is that some of them are very easy to pull off for certain crews. Sabotage is most definitely one of them. Possibly the easiest in fact.

Personally, I don't think spamming sabotage all the time it's a very sporting move. Winning purely on the grounds of a (1) interact with a building or two hardly qualifies as a particularly well earned victory.

In a few weeks I'll be playing in a league where over 5 games, you can only select each scheme once at most. I think it's a great way of playing, since it challenges you to get the most out of whatever schemes you have available, rather than just picking the easiest ones all the time. If you can convince your opponent to try something similar, you might both have more enjoyable games and come out as better players because of it.

Aside from that, all you can do, I suppose, is pick the easiest possible schemes yourself and do your best to achieve those. Either that, or play with as little sabotageable terrain as possible.

[kbdrand]

I do think it should be adjusted. Maybe only 1 VP if you don't declare but 3 VPs (or 4) if you do? Right now when I play Archanists I always pick it since it's so easy to do.

[Zombie_Pimp]

just curious if anyone has tried to make arcanists insignificant using seamus and/or bette noir when they suspect sabotage to be coming up

it seems like a strategy that would work but I havn't tried it out...yet

[Ropetus]

We found Sabotage a bit overpowered when we first played it. My Marcus crew with the lighning fast beasts just zoomed over the battlefield and sabotaged those two terrain pieces while out of sight and there was nothing my opponent could do about it (well, part of it could be because my Seamus opponent bunkered all his models in the middle to defend his Reconnoitre objective). The game ended in a 8 VP - 8 VP draw since both players were in a really bad position to stop the other's Strategies and Schemes (Marcus snatched his treasure counter on first turn and ran away with 2 Sabotages while Seamus had Bodyguard and Army of the Dead and claimed his Reconnoitre by having his horde of undead dancing around the centre of the table where he had a Graveyard special terrain).

After that game we thought some of the Strategies and Schemes need some minor adjustments. We have planned something along these lines:

Slaughter - Removed. Turns the game into hack-and-slash and it's often ridiculously easy to stop. Just take some fast models and run away with them. Your opponent can't catch all of them before the game ends which results in 0 VP.

Bodyguard - Removed. It's a bit boring that this Scheme is so easy that everyone auto-takes it every time. The Scheme also overlaps with an existing Strategy (Assassinate) so it seems a little rebundant. If it's removed, you see more use of those actually interesting Schemes like Stake a Claim or Breakthrough.

Reconnoiter - Adjust it a little by forcing the models to actually be on every quarter of the table by a minimum distance the models have to be from the center. It makes no sense that you can claim this Strategy by having 4 models in the centre touching each other and every one of them on a different quarter of the table. Allowing that makes the Strategy just a copy of Claim Jump which is only harder to stop.

Stake a Claim, Sabotage - Agree beforehand which terrain pieces are eligible targets for these Schemes. 2 or 3 terrain pieces should be enough. This makes Sabotage a bit easier to deal with since you know which pieces of terrain are possible targets to defend while still allowing some freedom in picking the Scheme. Also, it does not make sense that you go and Sabotage some random bush which just happened to be on your opponents half of the table.

Treasure Hunt - I'm not sure what should be done about this one. The idea is interesting and very good but in practice it doesn't work really well. The Strategy is very biased towards speedy crews (Perdita, Marcus, all Neverborn, Gremlins) and almost impossible to manage or stop if you're playing a slower crew (like playing Resurrectionists or only owning Rasputina crew for example) against one of those speed freaks. I think the main problem is that its way too easy for them to reach the treasure on first turn and run away with it before your opponent can react. This Strategy often forces each faction to use a certain Master if they want to stand a chance at all which I don't like. You should be able to use any Master with any Strategy and at least have a chance. However, it's hard to come up with an idea to improve this without changing the point of the Strategy, maybe having multiple treasures would help, meaning that it's not autowin if the speed crew snatches one early. They still have to fight over the rest.

In our gaming group we have thought about moving to scripted scenarios instead of Strategies/Schemes for this reason. It's a fun idea but it often leads to very unbalanced games.

-Ropetus