Aeon Trespass Odyssey

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.

Spoiler warning: this post covers some secret content from the end of cycle 1.

I’d been holding off playing the Pursuit’s End battle (the final boss fight against the Hermesian Pursuer) until I’d painted the model. In my last session I successfully “killed” the monster (not just defeated it) which allowed me to unlock this final showdown battle.

One of the special rules for the battle is that the Hermesian Pursuer isn’t toying with us anymore so it can destroy equipment and does more damage. The thing is I’d been playing it like that since after its first fight as I’d either misread or forgotten the rule from one game session to another.

The battle started off very badly. One of my titans was disembowelled turn one. Turn two a titan got so badly beaten up its danger went to about 25 (10 is enough to have a 50:50 chance of killing you). This actually triggered a special rule where there was a chance my death was legendary. It turns out it was, and it triggered a secret event where my titan was possessed by the power of Hades. I have to admit this was awesome. My titan proceeded to half kill the Hermesian Pursuer with her free bonus attack, which triggered a critical that gave yet another bonus attack. She only had two turns before the possession ended and her death was guaranteed, but it was epic.

Then my third titan was disembowelled. I couldn’t believe I was being this unlucky so after the game I counted the deck and there are three disembowelled cards out of 16. I had thought there was just one.

By this point I just had to do one more wound. In truly cinematic fashion my one remaining titan hit the Pursuer’s most vulnerable spot, criticalled it, and then rolled enough damage to confirm the blow.

I finally got around to painting the cycle 1 models that I missed when I did the first round of painting. The paint schemes match those from the first batch.

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.