Easier scenarios vs completely impossible scenarios?

[ottergal]

So, played with a group of friends tonight and we got our butts completely stomped. We started at Scenario 1 thinking it was likely the right place to begin... if it was and they only get harder I will probably never get my friends to play again!

Does anyone have (I looked and didn't see a listing anywhere) of the less difficult to more difficult scenarios?

(still had fun even though I died first.

 

[amwranes]

I've only played 3 scenarios so far.... The tutorial, the first, and the second. I've found them all to be pretty easy. Perhaps a review in tactics? Why did you find 1 difficult, what happened? How many survivors did you have? Which ones?

 

[Niranth]

A good bit of what makes it easy or hard is the order of cards drawn. Our first attempt had the sewer cards and extra zombie movement come while everyone was still blue. In the games I have played, we had six survivors. We keep the survivors close in XP. Amwranes is right, details of your game would help.

 

[Scorpion0x17]

I've only played 3 scenarios so far.... The tutorial, the first, and the second. I've found them all to be pretty easy. Perhaps a review in tactics? Why did you find 1 difficult, what happened? How many survivors did you have? Which ones?

If you found 01 easy, then you're not playing according to the rules! (which from your other posts, I suspect you're not)

01 is brutal.

02 on the other hand, if you think about it, before just wading in opening doors, is ridiculously easy (particularly if you use Wanda).

Not sure about any of the others.

 

[amwranes]

If you found 01 easy, then you're not playing according to the rules! (which from your other posts, I suspect you're not)

One was harder than two, but it was still easily winnable. Please do indicate where you think I've missed rules based on my other posts. As far as I'm aware, we've followed the game rules in all of our games, but perhaps I'm missing something.

 

[Shoogoo]

One was harder than two, but it was still easily winnable. Please do indicate where you think I've missed rules based on my other posts. As far as I'm aware, we've followed the game rules in all of our games, but perhaps I'm missing something.

If you found 01 easily winnable, then you're definitely doing something wrong.

Anyway, I'm making a list over at BGG, ranking the difficulty for the scenarios ; http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/844494/scenarios-difficulty-ranking/page/1

Feel free to add any data.

 

[amwranes]

Perhaps it's in my definition. It was a long game (took about two hours), we had six survivors and 2 got 1 wound each. Four of the six reached the finish line with the supplies and I think, barring something odd, the other two would have made. We simply stopped because we'd won and there was no reason to go on. We stayed fairly grouped up (within a couple zones of eachother for the most part). We took Amy, Wanda, Ned, Dave, El Cholo and Doug. Got Doug dual SMGs early on (turn 3ish) and Dave had a sniper rifle. Ned got a shotgun, and Amy a Katana. Cholo stuck with his machettes. I don't really remember what the others had, all the ranged other than Doug had plenty of ammo, so we got a lot of rerolls. Unfortunately, we never got out the gas/bottles for Dave, so no Molotovs. Most of the Zombies we took out with range, the fatties had their walkers smoked by range and then one of the melee's with a 2 damage went in to finish them off. Perhaps it was luck, I've only played the scenario once, but it was far from difficult.

 

[Scorpion0x17]

Please do indicate where you think I've missed rules based on my other posts. As far as I'm aware, we've followed the game rules in all of our games, but perhaps I'm missing something.

I might be wrong (and sorry if I am (probably someone else with the same avatar, if so)), but haven't you been house-ruling it left, right, and centre?

 

[amwranes]

I might be wrong (and sorry if I am (probably someone else with the same avatar, if so)), but haven't you been house-ruling it left, right, and centre?

Nope. Probably someone else with the same avatar, then. No worries, it happens, was just curious if I actually was missing something. The only "house-rule" I have right now is that we aren't using cars, but those'll come once we've solidly got the base rules going.

 

[Scorpion0x17]

Nope. Probably someone else with the same avatar, then. No worries, it happens, was just curious if I actually was missing something. The only "house-rule" I have right now is that we aren't using cars, but those'll come once we've solidly got the base rules going.

Ok, apologies then. :embarrassed:

However, I still suspect you're doing something wrong if you found 01 so easy. Are you:

Spawning zombies in all rooms in the building when you crack open a door to that building for the first time?
Assigning all ranged hits to survivors first (then to walkers if no survivors present (then fatties or abominations if no walkers and no survivors present (and only to runners when there's no abominations, no fatties, no walkers, and no survivors)))?
Search once per turn, per survivor, only in buildings, and when there are no zombies present?
Losing equipment and taking a wound when a survivor is attacked by zombie?
Splitting zombies when there's two paths they could take?
Having Zombies attack before moving (and not moving if they've attacked)?
Burning extra actions to move out of zones with zombies in?
Keeping track of noise tokens?
Keeping track of danger level when spawning zombies?
Spawning zombies at all spawn points every turn?
Spawning zombies at all manhole covers on all tiles that have part of a zone that has one or more survivors in them, when drawing a sewer spawn card?
Re-activating zombies when you run out of minis?
Choosing just one survivor skill from the orange and red level choices when they reach orange and red, not using all of them?
Obeying sewer spawn and re-activation cards that are drawn when populating a building after opening the first door in that building?
Dropping item when you search when having a full inventory to make room for an item that you found and want to keep, rather than just passing items around to make room?
Spending an action to re-arrange your inventory when you haven't passed/been passed an item?

Just to list the possible areas I can think of off the top of my head where you might be going wrong (and there's bound to be more)...

 

[amwranes]

Yep on all of those. We've even kept track of noise tokens when it seemed pointless, as of yet they haven't made a difference as to where the Zombies have gone, except maybe once. They've always moved towards the group of survivors because the tokens are either in their direction or are fewer than the survivors. I think once we got a bit spread out across 3 zones and the noise tokens actually came into play. We've always been careful with our range attacks, too, to ensure that survivors wouldn't be targets.

Kicking down that first door in Scenario 2 was a lot of flipping to spawn off zombies, too. Though since we did it first thing, it was all in the blue and therefore really easy. We carefully manage our danger levels. In Scenario 1, we were 3/4 done when we hit orange. We've yet to run out of Zombies, but I went in full Abomination level. We came close on walkers once, but never got there. We've always have had a lot of runners/abominations left.

Your comment on searching actually reminded me that the only house rule I kind of like the idea of (But haven't used) was being able to search the dumpsters. (roll a die, 1 = zombie, 6 = item card, any other number = nothing and you generate a noise token for doing the search, and the search may only be done once, period.).

 

[killaminis]

Just reading the posts on this thread and I have to point out something I didn't consider when I first started playing. Are you all playing with the extra Zombies and Cards??? ( Walk of the Dead). I noticed I was and didn't realize the implications. A quick look over the cards and the basic core set of Zombie Cards average around 2.5 zombies per card ( Orange Threat Level) but the extra cards that come with the Walk of the Dead Average around 5 or 6 Zombies per Card!!! This makes a huge difference as things usually heat up in the Orange threat levels. So, after a record of 9 losses and 1 win on Mission 01, I went with a solo game of 4 survivors and only the base models and cards that come with the game... no extras. I immediately noticed a difference. The Zombie Spawns were much more tame. In addition, as long as I always maintained a 1 zone buffer between my survivors and any threat, I was able to handle and survive multiple extra turns. I still lost though but I've deduced it was due to the fact of using only 4 survivors versus 6 survivors that most people would use playing in a group. That theory caused me to play solo with 6 survivors and I won mission 1 the first attempt through. It was not as much of a challenge but from a replayability factor I love that mission and will go at it again with 5 survivors to see if I can find a happy medium as 4 in solo mode, even with only using the base set can be intermediate to hard mode.

 

[ottergal]

Wow.. sounds like people are semi-"all over the board" when it comes to this one. For our particular game we had 4 survivors - Amy, Josh, Ned and Wanda. We randomly chose survivors for the tutorial and just kept them moving into the next game.

It took us a while to get better powered and Amy never really got there. Eventually, Ned had a couple of pistols with plenty of ammo, Josh had a chainsaw, Wanda had duel machettes and Amy never really found anything better than a baseball bat and a crowbar. We had 2 folks who could open doors and 1 with a ranged weapon.

There are things we totally could have done differently - we should have each searched once more before moving on and we shouldn't have split up for the first few turns of the mission. We quickly moved back together!! We should have opened the biggest areas with the most rooms first when we were in the blue. We should have rolled the dice better. I (Josh) died for a completely stupid reason - we decided to send Josh through the hoard to loot some rooms and get objectives since he is slippery. I had done a chainsaw trade (to another player so they could save me) and didn't take it back (figured i wasn't going to need it and they would since they would draw the masses). I did a search, found a zombie and only had one action with a katana to try to kill it. Didn't... so died the next round. Dumb.

But, we just got completely overpowered. I have the extra zombies and cards from the abomination pack and we had all walkers out on the board at the end. We didn't search as much as we should have/needed to, but it always felt like we really didn't have the opportunity again if we didn't want to die. We missed the opportunity at the start - we probably could have had one more search round each? but then just never caught up.

Shoogoo - thanks for the link to the other forum.. I will look at that the next time we play and see if we can't try one where, if we can't win, we feel like we have a chance at least.

 

[Scorpion0x17]

Using the abomination pack extra zombies, and not the Walk Of The Dead cards would make the game easier too, if that's what you were doing, amwranes.

But, it could be that everybody is saying that 01 is so brutal because of the point KillaMinis made above (and because the only two games I've played have been via Google+ with KillaMinis, then it seems I've only experienced it in brutal mode (or was the 2nd half of game two in not-so-brutal mode, KM?)).

However, you saying that "the tokens are either in their direction or are fewer than the survivors" makes me wonder if you've not been forgetting to put them down occasionally.

But, it sounds like you and your group just hit on really good tactics pretty much straight off the bat.

 

[amwranes]

We used the full set of cards (47+ I think their numbers are?). The sound tokens were frequently near the survivors or with them because we'd do movement and then fire. Next game will probably be #1 again, maybe we just got really lucky.

 

[Entiago]

Senario #1 can go alot of different ways, mostly due to the luck of the draw in cards (both zombies and equipment). I have done this scenario 4 times so far. 2 with the family and 2 other times with 2 different groups. Not using the Walk of the Dead cards, or the extra zombies, or the KS Promo survivors - Basic games with what you get in the box. We had different outcomes all 4 times.

Family game 1.
Only 3 of us, so we have our 2 survivors each. The cards were not nice to us. We got about halfway into the game and quickly got overrun. Mostly due to one of the heroes going into yellow and the rest in blue. Equipment not coming up much usefulness (but we did manage to find the water, rice, and canned goods early). All 6 survivors died.

Family game 2.
Again 3 of us. Cards shuffled much better and strategy was used. We stuck together and got lucky with low to none zombie spawns early on. We did much better and sacrificed Josh to make it to the end.

Friend game 1.
6 people. Hordes of Zombies. Everyone wanted to fan out and search. I warned this would get rough. Everything was going well until the board got over populated and the water, and canned goods were still missing. Then came the runners extra action card. 2 survivors down at once. The Abomination was easily taken care of, but they should have used the Molotov on the 6 walkers gathered 2 squares away. Needless to say the survivors died. Only 2 survivors were in the orange, 1 was still in blue level. The other 3 were in yellow danger level. The 2 that died first was a blue and orange survivor. This was the most brutal I seen the scenario, but it was fun!

Friend game 2.
Different group of people. 6 survivors. This group had leadership issues, and tactics went awry. Hard at first with the zombie cards, but halfway thru they decided to re-group. Only the canned goods were found and 3 of the objective markers taken before the group slowly died. This was mostly due to split group.

Scenario 1 is brutal.

 

[Kenton]

I have played twice and only scenario 1 so far. First time we made it to the last objective and were overrun.

Second game with different folks we got out with 4 survivors. The main change was that we opened most of the doors whilst we were on blue and only one on orange level, by which point we were almost out. This makes a huge difference to how hard it is. Huge.

Not sure this works for all the scenarios but it certainly does for number 1.