Aeon Trespass Odyssey

Having painted the Cycle 3 models and looking back into the box I realised there were two functional models left to paint – a titan that is linked to the alternate game mode, and the vantage point for the Cycle 1 big boss.

There’s also the Kickstarter Only model but that never takes part in the game. I’ll paint it up in the coming weeks.

Nothing new with the paints used, apart from the fact I used talassar blue for the trouser stripes on the titan.

I quickly finished off the Primordials and Titans for cycle 3. As before, just a quick paint job with contrast paints. For these the theme was shyish purple, terradon turquoiseb aethermatic blue and apothecary white.

Cycle 1 took me six months to complete, playing roughly one session per week. For cycle 2 I got into it more (mainly because I had no PC game I wanted to play) so I played one session most days. It took just over two months from start to finish.

Let’s see if I can play cycle 3 in under two months and finish the three released cycles in 2023 like I set out to do at the start of the year.

Pros

• I’m really enjoying the complexity of the story. It’s well executed with lots of interlocking parts.
• The way your accomplishments though the campaign in terms of story development feed in to the final battle is great. You feel really well rewarded for doing all the “side quests”.
• Progression in terms of unlocking technologies, abilities and gear also feels rewarding.
• This cycle in particular keeps offering you the choice between obvious gains at a cost of your humanity, versus help people out but your cause suffers. I chose the latter option every time but was then rewarded in the end by having powerful allies to help me out.
• A portion of this cycle has a really cool “flee your pursuers” phase that lasts about 10 game turns. It was different and tense. I really enjoyed it.

Cons

• You get hit with events outside your control which cause you to loose the cycle (loss of crew, damage to your ship, Titans being killed outside battle, amassing too much fate, etc). The game assumes you’ll loose a cycle several times and just restart. I’m not restarting a ~80 hour cycle. I just ended up ignoring these loss conditions.
• This cycle has a humanity mechanic but it never explains it. I just started to be told an event had caused me to loose one point of humanity, so I guessed I started at zero and counted down. Near the end there are some events that check your score and this confirmed I got it right. Oddly at the very end you can unlock an ending if you have positive humanity. That would be out of your control as there are loads of events that reduce it but only the occasional random event (i.e. critical hits on certain locations) that increase it. I ended on -10 and I avoided every loss of humanity where I could.
• I find many battles are quite static and don’t interact with the terrain much. It tends to just end up with my Titans surrounding the Primordial and pummelling them. Sometimes they knock me back and I have to spend a turn running back. Some are dynamic, but less than half. Not sure if it’s me not doing all the rules correctly or by design.

Well this Primordial is certainly an unusual model. My wife actually saw it before I painted it and she asked if I’d 3D printed it because it looks very pretty.

Colours as before, but with volupus pink, talassar blue and ork flesh used for the monsters trapped in the Primordial.

Not much to say about these. Colours are as before except:

The grey-green skin was achieved with a 1:1 mix of militarum green and basilicanum grey.

Added gore-grunta fur for bronze areas.

Using abaddon black to represent ambrosia gloop.

When I finished Cycle 1 I was able to bypass the final battle, having completed a side quest. However, I was curious to see how the final battle would have played out.

Most of my best Titans were dead, so I only had one of the special ones and the other three were the standard variety. They all had pretty good gear though and I had defeated the Temenos Primordial before. On the downside I had a scattering of despair token from the final storyline events.

Having completed all of the side quests in the campaign I found each one gave me a bonus in the scenario. I was able to go first (a rare and significant advantage) and I received various buffs on the Titans. I started closer and the Primordial’s vantage point was exposed from the start.

And after those three short turns, the battle was lost and the campaign would have been to if I had had to fight it.

I’ve found the combat in this game to be fun but often quite random with card draws. Sometimes they’re great for me and sometimes its terrible. Overall I’m ok with it. Just in this, the most critical battle of the campaign, luck did not go my way.

You may have also noticed the terrain never played much effect. I find this is the way in most battles. I’m not sure if its the rules mechanics, or just that I don’t have the bandwidth to use it properly while also managing every other game rule while playing solo.

The first couple of models for cycle 2 are finished.

The skulls were painted apothecary white.

The skin was painted black templar.

The weapons were painted basilicanum grey.

The flames were painted iyanden yellow, with highlights of gryph-hound orange followed by blood angels red.

Leather was painted snakebit leather.

The bases were painted the same as the cycle 1 models.

This morning I finished Cycle 1! I played the tutorial on 7th January, so cycle 1 took be almost seven full calendar months to complete. I settled into a routine where a game sessions was either a combat or the various exploration and story steps in between. Either session type took one and a half to two hours, and I usually got one session in per week. I’d guess I had about 28 sessions to play cycle 1 (i.e. about 50 hours).

Overall I’ve really enjoyed it. The story is intriguing and the combat mechanics are solid.

Some observations:

• Technically I lost several times over, but with the level of time commitment required I just kept playing. I should have lost due to all my crew dyeing, but I missed a technology which meant I didn’t progress properly for about 30 turns. Had that not happened I should have unlocked a technology allowing me to recruit crew.
• The cycle has an 80 turn limit and the map has 80 cards to explore (you explore one per turn at best). However, some areas or the map are dead ends, forcing you to backtrack, and the story has you go back and forth a bit. It is therefore impossible to explore the whole map. You can see above I never fully explored the eastern edge. But I didn’t realise this since I was only revealing one tile a time (I didn’t lay them out all face down at the start). I wasted about 20 to 30 turns leisurely exploring the map, as is my wont in RPG’s and games in general. In the end this meant I needed 83 turns to finish the game. Again I wasn’t going to restart when I hit turn 81 knowing I was so close to completion.
• I had frequent references to special characters. E.g. if you have the Minoan Guide you can do this… Not once did I encounter an option to recruit either of these special characters. I can only assume I missed it right at the start of the campaign.
• The game contains a cypher for the numbers 0-9. Occasionally you are given one, and once you have enough you can decipher some three or four digit codes to reveal some secrets. Even with the amount of time I put in I only unlocked about half the digits (one was given to me twice with conflicting information) and I never once unlocked a code. I don’t know if I was just unlucky or maybe they develop more in future cycles.
• As your Argonauts develop they unlock memories and gain powerful abilities. The last unlock usually looks really powerful but it’s a trick. In every case I encountered (about four times) when you finally reach that point you are given the choice to retire the Argonaut or suffer a permanent penalty to them. You don’t actually unlock the final ability. The first time I assumed it was a quirk of the particular track, but they all ended up more or less the same. It felt like I was cheated a bit.

I’ll take a short break while I paint all the models for cycle 2 then I’ll try to finish the next one a bit quicker.