by rmsgrey
andylatto wrote:
mfaulk80 wrote:
In the end, that strategy will come back to hurt you. I can't say much more without giving away an end game spoiler. Regardless, just as it would be in real life, it's best to attempt to contain the diseases every month as they continue to outbreak. Indeed, the "campaign goal" is more vague and thematic initially. Around 8-9 months in, the "campaign goal" becomes more clear.
And this is the reason that Pandemic Legacy has very little appeal for me. For me, a big part of the appeal of playing a game is trying to figure out which choices are most likely to result in my achieving my goals. Playing a game 7-15 times, and then finding out what my goals were supposed to be, seems pointless. How can decisions feel meaningful and interesting when you have no idea what your objective is? And you can't play it again once you know your objective, because it's designed to be played only once.
Each game, you have clear objectives to meet for victory in that month. You also have clear long-term consequences for various things happening on the board each month. What's unknown is how those consequences will interact with future changes to the game, but you can still make educated guesses about what's going to be important. You know that increased panic levels are going to hamper your movement for the rest of the campaign, so avoiding outbreaks seems like a good idea, even if you don't know what you'll be using your movement to achieve.
A lot of videogames with RPG elements have the same thing where you're not told in advance what the optimal character build will be (nor what the constraints on achievable builds are - I'm still annoyed with Wings of Liberty on that one) - it's just unusual having it in a boardgame.
You know your short-term goals, you know your long-term objective, and you know most of the long-term consequences of events in the immediate future - you can't min-max perfectly, but you can come up with decent ideas - for example, putting Local Connections on the Medic seems like an obvious move, or setting up some permanent Research Stations - making generic improvements to the board, or enhancing a character's strengths...