Aeon Trespass Odyssey

I haven’t posted an update in a while because I found that although the monster fights continued to be a challenge and the story elements were interesting, the write-ups were very samey. So I kept playing but didn’t bother to do a write-up after every session.

To summarise, I’ve circled Crete once and have now developed the technology to explore the internal rivers of the island. I’m trying to find King Minos in here somewhere.

And then…

I got to turn 42 and the game ended.

Bummer.

The loss mechanic for the game is the accumulation of doom tokens. Every five or six tokens progresses the “negative” side of the story, and once you finished the sixth “negative” phase the game ends. Conversely there are six “positive” sides to the story, and to finish those you either collect progress tokens or achieve some other objective. I was on the fourth “positive” phase when the game ended.

I am a little miffed. I amassed 11 doom tokens simply from exploring the map, and I therefore had no way to avoid them. The other 20 or so came from in-story decisions I made, but again I could not avoid these unless I read ahead and cheated to avoid them. I tried to determine which choices I am “supposed” to be making but was never able to do so. In one story I’d be aggressive and be rewarded, in another I’d behave the same and be penalised. I never gained doom tokens for loosing a monster fight (i.e. when player skill comes into play).

Given the above, and the fact I’ve spent about 40 hours spread over four months playing so far, I’m just going to keep playing. I’ll find some other way for doom token’s to penalise me, so I’m not just ignoring the negative consequences of them.

While I’m reflecting on the game there are a few other things I’ve noticed.

• The technology tree seems “bugged”. Techs come in two flavours – combat and non-combat. The non-combat side has been stuck for 20 turns. I researched everything I could and then the only tech left to me requires that I have explored at least 45 map tiles (which is impossible before turn 45 at least). So I’ve missed out on the last 5 non-combat tech upgrades.
• The cards for two of the Titan upgrades are missing. I’ve searched the entire box twice and they just seem to have not been produced, or they are in a secret envelope I have not been instructed to open yet.

Overall I’s still enjoying the tactical combat and the interesting stories, so I’m happy to keep playing. I’m just going to ignore the seemingly arbitrary “game over” message.

I just noticed that I labelled my last few entries as being from cycle 2. Not sure how I started making that mistake as I’m still playing cycle 1.

In terms of game turns I’ve completed circumnavigating Crete and I’ve started my second lap, this time further out from the coast.

During this session I also had my third battle against the Labyrithauros. This time it was the first battle where it was truly allowed to use trample, which was very infuriating. This means that after it attacks it often runs off trampling over my Titans. I found that if I tried to anticipate it trampling to a location, it didn’t do it. If I anticipated it would stay still, instead it trampled off. When I could actually pin it down and get some hits in I did damage at a decent rate.

On the face of it sounds like ranged attacks would be the answer. I only have one Titan with ranged attacks right now. The problem is you can only carry a weapon in each hand, and that includes shields. It’s not like you can effectively give every Titan a ranged attack unless you deliberately choose to sacrifice the use of shields or two-handed weapons.

One Titan was knocked over then gnawed to death. Poor guy…

Eventually I was able to hamper the Labyrinthaurus’ movement with a critical hit on its Maze Fragment location. It didn’t last much longer after that.

This turn it was time for my first level 2 monster fight. Now any Titans pushed off the board edge count as being thrown of a cliff and die. Also every third wound inflicted on the monster gives it a free signature attack.

I started the session with my first fight against the Hermesian Pursuer. This is a monster that chases you across the map throughout the game.

Round one it knocked everyone down and scattered my Titans around the board. I only managed to do one wound, though that’s not bad going for round one.

Aeon Trespass Odyssey has a battle mechanic called escalation. At the start of a battle a monster has a deck of level 1 AI cards and a deck of level 1 body location cards. When you successfully wound a location, you replace the location card with one from the deck one level higher. This represents you ripping off armour or exposing vulnerable locations, so as the battle goes on you wear the monster down. But what also happens is you remove and AI card of the level of the hit location and replace it with one of the next level up. This means as the monster gets more injured it behaves more aggressively.

Round two one of my Titan’s stood up.

Round three the monster drew the one level 2 AI card in its deck (thanks to the one wound I did in the previous round). This attack killed a Titan just by staring at it and then it was battle over. Special defeat conditions for this particular monster’s first battle.

Oh well… on to map exploration.

Exploration went well. I’ve now unlocked God Form mechanics, where under certain conditions my Titan’s can take on the form and powers of a God briefly. To begin with I’ll have access to Zeus.

The amount of technologies I have access to know is so big that I need an A1 board to lay them all out on. The map has also grown so much that it needs its own A1 board.

I thought I’d finished painting all the models needed in cycle 1. Then I found I need to battle another monster next turn. That’s the problem with a game like this which is full of secrets. There’s no easy way to look ahead to know what will happen to know what to paint.

Anyway…

I just went for a simple contrast paint paint scheme. They look good enough on the table for a board game.

Gold/blonde hair: iyanden yellow

Trees: ork flesh

Roofs/tabards: blood angels red

Sea: terradon turqoise

Stone: skeleton horde

Grass: militarum green

Dark flesh: darkoath flesh

Brass: gore-grunta fur

Steel: basilicanum grey

Wood: wyldwood

Titan studs: black templar

Pale flesh: guilliman flesh

Slug flesh: volupus pink

Sail clothes: apothecary white

Wings: syish purple and apothecary white

Pink skin: 4:1 apothecary white:volupus pink

Sea marker rims: mordian blue

Land marker rims: rhinox hide

Turn 13 say my first “normal” battle against the Labyrinthauros. Having fought it once in the ambush battle I knew to correctly ignore its trample ability while it is still only level 1.

I was unlucky fairly early on and drew a “Heroic Death” card for one of my Titans in round 2. This meant they died much earlier in the battle than you would normally expect.

I quickly made up for that by being able to score a critical hit and open up a vulnerable spot. This allowed one of my Titan’s to mount the monster. From here their hits can gain a bonus to wound and the Titan can ignore any monster responses to their blows. The Titan was able to remain on the monster’s back until the end of the battle and do a lot of damage while they were up their. They were even able to use another critical hit to tear off one of the monsters tabards which has given them a “secret” special gear card.

Overall I was able to handle group tactics a bit better now that I’m more or less on top of the core combat mechanics rules.

I was all set to spend another hour or so exploring the map before the next scheduled monster fight, but on turn 15 the adversary made a two tile advance and caught up with me. I stopped playing and will have to battle the monster at the start of my next session.

I got to do lots of exploration in this session. As it turned out my pursuer didn’t move much so I didn’t have to do that encounter. I made enough progress exploring my ship to unlock the ability to summon nymphs, which is great as the only reason I got interested in this game is the fact I’d already bought and painted most of their nymph models.

I also progressed the “doomed” side of the story to trigger a major negative effect, which in this case was a battle with the Alpha Temenos again. This time I was definitely supposed to do it and I was a little bit more prepared. Not only had I been able to equip all my titans with armour and a weapon, but I’d painted them up too.

I managed to inflict three wounds, enough to declare a victory in this tough fight. I also managed to do so without loosing any titans, though two came very close and were only saved by their new armour.

Overall a good session with both multiple exploration turns and a battle, played in two hours 40 minutes. A full monster fight would have taken longer but still doable in a reasonable evening session.

In turn 8 I drew the ambush card, which meant I had to fight a battle with the labyrinthauros for the first time. The couple of fights I’d had against the hekaton had been frustrating because it knows my titans over a lot. They seem to spend more time on the floor than fighting.

It turns out the labyrinthauros’ signature ability is trampling, which knocks you over, or if you’re already knocked over has a 50:50 chance of killing you.

The other problem with the trample ability is that it often triggers after an attack and give the labyritnthauros an extra move. For the first half of the game I was spending most of my time chasing the monster around the board with three of my titans, while the fourth was being repeatedly knocked over and trampled.

Then I happened to look at the level two abilities for the monster, where it states that a level one (which I was fighting) does not have the trample ability. I have no idea why the game designers felt that information needed to be in the level two area and not the level one area. At that point I started ignoring the trample ability whenever a card said it should trigger and the battle became a lot more manageable.