The One Game Week 9: Ripped Apart

I’m dedicating time to one game in order to try and master it. I’ve chosen The Banner Saga to be that “One Game”. Each week I’ll be reporting on my progress within the game, as well as things I’ve learned outside of it. You can follow my progress via this tag.

Week 9.
Total time played (according to Steam): 10 hours.
Matches Played / Won: 7 / 1
Achievements unlocked: 2.
Rank: 56969.
Rating: 984.
Team Power: 1.
Renown: 50.

Achievements are now working! Sadly the Steam overlay still isn’t. Change of format this week, with no preamble, just straight to battle!

Ninja Foodstuf vs. Ripper

Ripper runs the MacGameCast (site under development). His team power is 6 to my 1, and he’s clocked up quite a lot more hours on the game than I have.

I decide to adopt the same strategy as last time. Early on my Thrasher succumbs to 5 points of armour damage, and is then killed before he gets to take his second turn. It’s early in the game and I am doing badly. I finally get an opportunity to lash out with my archer, but struggle with the interface and the time runs out.

Things are going from bad to worse. I take a lot of slag damage, and now half my team is down to a fraction of health, the other half dead. Even my archers are taking their share of pain from Ripper’s Backbiter who has broken through to the end zone. Yeah I’m going to lose, perhaps my worst loss to date. Down goes my remaining Varl, leaving me two archers and a weakened Raider, to Ripper’s full team.

Astonishingly I fluff yet another chance to do some damage and miss another turn. Then it’s pillage, and game over. Except it isn’t! Some weird bug causes the game not to end and we both sit and look at the screen with nothing to do and ironically dramatic music playing.

But at least we have a nice chat.

Post-battle

Ripper and I discuss tactics. He gives me a ton of useful advice for future battles:

It can be good to change up your starting layout, but don’t put your raiders behind your Varls, and the archers are too far back as well– you have to waste turns moving into range. A promoted archer has a special which can be useful, but basic archers do nothing back there.

Some raiders (or a warrior Varl) will have a lot of willpower and exertion which means on turn 1 they run up to you and attack (if its a tempest with spin attack, hits your entire team in one hit), this happened to me once so I spread out a bit more now usually.

As you’ve seen, I kept  my archers behind my Shieldmaster. I could have picked off your raider sooner, but figured he wouldn’t do much so I ignored him until later, even though he got some armour break in, nothing else was a threat to the archer so i didn’t care. A thrasher I wouldn’t have let live, as he could have used the special on me every turn.

Don’t forget you can check on my units to see their maximum range, so use that to move yours just out of reach (that’s why your thrasher ate it, he was out a square too far, and not giving any shieldwall to your shield master).

The starting setup is a gamble but if you go with something solid it will ususally work all around, though i’ve lost a game or too with misplaced archers.

So some great advice from an expert, let’s hope I can put it into practice next time.

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