Team Planning – Soldiers of Fortune

Today I take a brief break from picking a (apparently) sub-par Aristo and basing a team around them for some reason, and instead I have decided to look at how well some of the expansion boxes work as a team.

The reason for this is that I have only been playing Aristeia for a handful of months, and around me in the middle of the UK Aristeia is starting to pick up. Many players after their first demo game or two tend to buy a box and play it as a team. It has been very apparent from some of these games that some teams have obvious synergies, and some less so.

So, today I’m going to start with the soldiers of fortune boxed set. I will briefly look at the characters in the box and talk about how the team might play together.

In the box we have:

Senor Massacre

Valkyrie

Laxmee

Hannibal

So, let’s begin.

Senor Massacre

Senor Massacre is a mobile damage dealer with some control potential. His defence is relatively low for a damage character, so you must be mindful of who can threaten him.

He is capable of surprising busts of speed with Tangana! and his ability to Taunt can help him to defend the rest of the team for a short while.

He will want to taunt often due to the mobility and damage options this opens up, and likely will want to go early in the turn where he can pro-actively take out any threats before they get him, or before they attack his team.

Valkyrie

Valkyrie is another mobile damage dealer. Whilst Senor Massacre does this by using taunt to bounce around targets, Valkyrie pretty much HAS to move to get her attack damage to decent levels. That said it is helped by her good agility and her switch.

She also has control potential by easy access to immobilise, and her immunity to enemy displace effects can be very helpful against any control affects that move her out of scoring zones.

Laxmee

Laxmee can’t be any more different than the first two team members. She has no offensive or damage output at all. And now for a disclaimer; Laxmee is probably my favorite support character in the game so I might be a little biased.

D/BUff3r really supports the team. It’s long range and no LOS requirement means she finds it easy to use, and her main switch is easily obtainable giving her bursts of speed. Focus tokens last for two activations without wearing off, so first turn she can probably buff her entire team before they engage. With Fairy Dust her team is able to shrug off states. Alternatively they can use a yellow dice from the focus token to help with (mainly) activating switches like Tey voy a cascar!.

And now for stun. At first glance losing a hit on an face to face or simple roll might sound trivial. It’s not – imagine it as giving every model a free shield result when being hit by a stunned Aristo. It also can significantly reduce the effectiveness of characters who use abilities rather than attacks. Oh, and it can make agile (or not so agile) Aristos find it much harder to disengage.

Laxmee can help the team absorb more damage and generally do their job better. Whilst she has no offensive outpur at all, she really increases the potency of her team.

Hannibal

Hannibal’s has low damage output on his own, and average defenses and health. In this team Pointman makes Senor Massacre and Valkyrie able to roll their maximum number of 3 orange dice much more easily. This is most notable for Valkyrie who won’t need to move as many spaces before an attack.

Programmed strategy is likely to be used a few ways. It can activate any of Senor Masscare’s powers, making him able to attack, taunt or place himself out of activation. Combined with some cards, which will be discussed below, it can allow Senor to move across the board at a frightening speed. With Valkyrie it will allow her to immobilize any targets she is adjacent to, locking an area down and potentially giving her more attack dice.

Due to Laxmee being very fragile, Hannibal will probably not be able to stay at the back and just give out orders, care must be taken to keep him out of the way of targets that can take him out of action too easily whilst also threatening scoring zones.

Cards

I have selected what I think is a good hand of cards to start with. However, I do think all cards have merit, and will talk about other ones as well.

This team lacks any dedicated scorer, has a bit too little control for my tastes, and doesn’t have a tank. The purpose of these cards is to fill those holes.

Kiss my sexy ass and Frostburn are both pretty potent control abilities. Preventing attacks or movement can cripple some characters and allow you to move into a scoring area potentially unopposed.

Epic regeneration and Atom can help with tanking significantly. Atom in particular is crippling if your opponent uses a card such as Focus, and you then reduce their large dice pool to a single yellow. With taunting and all his sword-play Senor Massacre will attract a lot of attention, so giving him a second life can really keep him standing. Team reset is for when focus tokens are lacking, or when you want to remove action point penalties from your team. Or when you play those horrible poison / fire heavy teams.

As for the two Code cards….well they are just…..good. Dive allows you to do more actions in a turn, or lets Hannibal do a double move without sacrificing hisother powers. Timeout lets you use all these cards all over again.

Other cards they have that I didn’t take that I think have merit include Say it to my face! which can move an enemy Aristo a huge distance, either out of a scoring zone or out of engagement. This in particular is a big deal, as the team only has one character who is decent at disengaging. Other than Valkyrie, if you want to disengage from a target it’s going to be a struggle. I also quite like Ice Wall, it can add a damage to Valkyrie due to the way it works with her switch and also help the team tank more.

And that’s it! Let me know what you think, either here, on Facebook or on Twitter @Ihexadome!

Thanks!

Bye!