by Alex319
GENERAL IDEA:I believe that I have come up with a strategy for 6 players that is almost guaranteed to win the game unless you get extreme bad luck on the first few turns. The main strategy is to use the cities as soon as possible until you get up to all 6 Atlanteans per player, and then ignore resources for the first part of the game and focus entirely on accumulating mystic energy and using the knowledge cards. By repeatedly cycling the powerful knowledge cards while holding weak ones in your hand, it should be possible to accumulate an arbitrarily large amount of mystic energy. Once this is done, you can use your huge amount of mystic energy to unflip all the tiles and the rest of the game then becomes easy.
THE THEORY:
We measure resources in this game in units of "ticks". One "tick" is equal to one Atlantean action, mystic energy (ME), or courage token (CT). (These items have equal value because you can use a CT in place of an Atlantean on the Navy, and you can spend an Atlantean action to get 1 ME.)
Consider the "steady state" where all players have 6 Atlanteans and the Athenian Galley is on the +12 space. (This is the state you will generally be in after the first few turns of the game.) The players are getting 39 ticks per turn (36 from Atlantean actions, 1 each from the Champion's and Priest's abilities, and 1 from the CT from the navy). They need to spend 17 ticks per turn to guarantee a defense against the Athenians, leaving a total of 22.
Suppose that you were playing with no special misfortune cards. Then each card would use up 3 ticks (3 ME to defend against it) so would take a total of 18 ticks per turn. That's a net gain for the players of 4 ticks per turn. (For instance, if the players spent all their ticks gaining ME, they would get a net gain of 4 ME per turn. Alternatively the players could spend all but 4 of their ticks each turn on ME so they could keep the floods at bay, and the other 4 getting resources.
Of course that is why the special misfortune cards are in the game. So what happens when we add in the special misfortune cards?
MISFORTUNE CARDS:
Noe we will rate each misfortune card based on how many ticks it costs. Remember that this rating is based on being in the steady state of players having all 6 Atlanteans, and Athenians at +12, and also in the phase when you are ignoring resources and accumulating energy and knowledge cards.
Remember that a basic flood costs 3 ticks and an unpreventable flood costs 5 ticks (because you can spend 5 ME to unflip the tile afterwards)
We have:
36 Basic Flood @ 3 each = 108 ticks
6 Calm Seas @ 0 each = 0 ticks
6 Controlled Flood @ 10 each = 60 ticks
Rioting and Looting, Sabotage, Earthquake, and Athenians Press the Attack = 0 ticks (these cards do not do anything in the above state)
Panic = 2 ticks (if you are just putting Atlanteans on the Navy, Libraries, and central space this doesn't really hurt you much; just might mean you draw a couple fewer knowledge cards)
Lack of Support = 2 ticks (shuts off Champion and Priest abilities for a turn; other abilities aren't particularly useful at this time)
Crisis of Faith = 15 ticks (that's about how many Atlanteans you're putting on the central space each turn)
Hopelessness = 8 ticks (a high estimate of how many CTs the group will have; as we will see below you can get lots of CTs each turn)
Plague = 5 ticks (all but the Astrologer lose an action)
Spur the Cycle = 0 ticks (also, in our calculation of the average, this counts as 2 cards, since it is on average twice as likely to be drawn as the average card. Each cycle through the deck you are guaranteed to draw Spur the Cycle by definition, but each other card is only drawn half the time, depending on whether it is before or after Spur the Cycle)
So we have a total of 200 tick cost on 59 cards (actually 58 except we count Spur the Cycle twice), for a total of 3.39 per card, or 20.34 per turn (6 cards).
This means that by just focusing on mystic energy and keeping the Athenians at bay you can get a net gain of 39 - (20.34 + 17) = 1.66 ticks per turn. (In fact you can do slightly better if you put 16 Atlanteans on the Navy instead of 17; this gives you a 1/6 chance per turn of one unpreventable flood, or 0.83 ticks per turn; total cost of 16.83 ticks instead of 17.)
KNOWLEDGE CARDS:
But of course only getting 1-2 net ticks per turn is not that impressive, and is easily wiped out by bad luck. So we want a bigger margin of safety. The way we achieve that is by using the knowledge cards, many of which are worth several ticks each. Many of the cards are not useful at this time but some are very useful. We have:
Untapped Talent @ 1 tick (copy Priest or Champion ability)
Rune of Reprieve @ 3 ticks (the way you want to use this is unflip something before the Misfortune phase, and let the flood hit it to soak up a flood card without spending ME. If it soaks up a basic flood it is worth 3 ticks. Of course sometimes the flood card won't hit it, but sometimes it can soak up part of a Controlled Flood. So I will use 3 ticks as an average here.)
Codex of Continuity @ 9 ticks (cancel a Controlled Flood with this)
Ancestor's Gambit @ 4 ticks (put 16 into Atlantean Navy, use this to reroll a 5; when you use it has a 5/6 chance of preventing a 5-point flood)
Reapplied Knowledge @ 2 ticks (discard a Knowledge Card which took you 1 tick to get; copy Power Core for 3 ME)
Lore of Persuasion @ 2 ticks
Ballad of Bravery @ 5 ticks (give everyone a CT rather than just 1)
Scroll of Sacrifice @ 2 ticks (give up an Atlantean action to get 3 CT)
Law of Balance @ 1.5 ticks (unflip is worth 5, drawing a misfortune costs about 3.5)
Science of Shielding @ 3 ticks (stops a flood without spending 3 ME)
Foresight @ 5 ticks (discard any Controlled Flood, Crisis of Faith, Hopelessness, or Plague; value of this card is estimated by calculating average cost of cards discarded vs. replacement cards)
and 17 other "dead cards" which are not useful at this time (mostly since you are not collecting resources), for a total of 31 cards worth a total of 46.5 ticks, or an average of 1.5 ticks per card. Basically even though you have more than a 50% chance of drawing a dead card, the good cards are so good they more than make up for that, so putting an Atlantean even on one of the "draw 1 keep 1" library spaces is worth about 0.5 ticks more than putting the Atlantean on the central space for an ME. (Of course this assumes that you still have enough ME to cancel all the basic floods; if you don't then you will end up wasting ticks by spending 5 to unflip instead of 3 to cancel).
But the real power of the knowledge cards comes when you've cycled the knowledge deck a couple times. With 6 players you have a total of 24 "hand slots" to put cards in, and only 17 dead cards. So pretty soon all 17 of the dead cards will end up staying in your hands and you will just be drawing the 14 good cards, so your average draw will be worth about 48.5/14 = 3.4 ticks! Pretty good deal for 1 Atlantean action. At this point, if you draw several knowledge cards per turn you will be well in the positives. And especially this feeds on itself; once you've gotten a good buffer of ME, you can afford to put fewer Atlanteans on the central space and more Atlanteans drawing cards. So at this point you should be able to basically repeatedly play all the good cards and end up accumulating lots of ME. Especially since you can play knowledge cards between Atlantean actions, so in some cases you could play a knowledge card, then draw it and play it again that same turn! Then once you are satisfied you have enough you can start getting resources to go for the win (and note that once you start collecting resources, most of the "dead" Knowledge cards in your hands start becoming useful again)
STRATEGY RECAP AND WEAKNESSES:
So, to recap, the strategy is:
- First priority each turn is to play up to (attack bonus + 4) onto the Navy. You want to split this up as evenly as possible between players so that you can get maximum benefit out of Ballad of Bravery. After that...
- Until you have 6 Atlanteans per player, fill up the Cities as much as possible.
- Play on the ME space until you have sufficient ME to cancel floods. I am not sure exactly how much ME is required; on average you will draw about 4 basic floods per turn so you would want 12 ME to cancel all of them. Of course there is also needing some to unflip after controlled floods and to have a buffer to protect against Crisis of Faith. On the other hand you do want to be drawing knowledge cards very soon because their power goes up dramatically the sooner you can get them into your hands and start cycling the deck. This will require some experimentation.
- Play the rest of your stuff on the Libraries to get lots of cards. Play the good cards as soon as possible and hold the "dead" ones.
The only real problems I can see with this strategy are as follows.
First of all, you are vulnerable while you are accumulating your Atlanteans. Of course this problem is not unique to this strategy; all strategies are vulnerable at the beginning if they are spending lots of actions accumulating Atlanteans. Fortunately 4 out of the 6 types of basic floods you don't care about at the beginning with this strategy. And early floods aren't necessarily game-killers - I played a game where I drew 4 of the Flood Cities on the first turn (and could only cancel 1 of them), and I was still able to get all my Athenians by the time the galley reached the end.
Second, there are some events which can really hurt you, like Athenians Press the Attack if you get it near the beginning, a Panic combined with Crisis of Faith, or a Hopelessness if you have lots of CTs in the navy (which you will a lot, because you are getting lots of CTs from some of the knowledge cards, and you are mainly putting the CTs in the navy). But some of these you can play around, especially with the Astrologer's ability; you can use the Astrologer to take up the slack if the Hopelessness comes up. And again, I'm not sure that these events are really a bigger problem for this strategy than they are for traditional strategies.
If I have time I will try to do a computer simulation to see if this strategy is really as good as I think it is. When I get that done I will post up the results.