by njshaw2
Deano2099 wrote:
I think it's significant that Bravo complete *all* the searches for you. We're only talking about it in terms of that last search, as generally you have the others done by November.
But if you flip that around, you basically get zero credit for completing any of the searches if you fail to complete them all. Which doesn't make any sense. Even thematically it means Bravo doing one search or doing four of them.
It should be a penalty for every uncompleted search. If that penalty is -200 (so -800 if you fail all four) then fair enough. But it really feels to me as if it was meant to be -50 per search then they decided that was slightly to awkward to track or something.
But if you flip that around, you basically get zero credit for completing any of the searches if you fail to complete them all. Which doesn't make any sense. Even thematically it means Bravo doing one search or doing four of them.
It should be a penalty for every uncompleted search. If that penalty is -200 (so -800 if you fail all four) then fair enough. But it really feels to me as if it was meant to be -50 per search then they decided that was slightly to awkward to track or something.
Even better would be giving bonus points for each search completed, so say +50 per search complete. I hate scoring that gives you negative points, even more so when it's a massive negative value for something you were completely unprepared for.
To put this into context, this is what happened in our campaign: We intentionally went for losing our 1st and 2nd October games to try to complete the search, but after 4 epidemics in the 1st game, and after 6 outbreaks in the 2nd game, it was clear the search wasn't going to get done that month, so we abandoned it in favour of being able to complete other objectives (we failed to do that in our 1st October game, but managed to win the 2nd October game). We were trying to avoid any more spread of Coda, which thematically seemed an appropriate thing to do when the search went cold [or was so close to going cold it was pointless continuing to try]. We were thematically going with where we thought the story would go under such circumstances.
We had therefore planned to throw the November game in an all-out bid to find Patient Zero. And in our haste to do so, we completely forgot to read the November briefing! And we FOUND patient zero (and were on the verge of losing to outbreaks at that point, so would have lost November's 1st attempt). And just as we were scratching off the Patient Zero panel, I noticed we'd forgotten to read the mission briefing. GAH! And so we read that. And Team Bravo said, effectively, "nope, you're idiots, we're taking all the credit - and 200 points - for that search you just completed". That really annoyed us. We had to reset that November game completely [removing stickers from any cities that had increased in Panic, and restoring some burnt-down Military bases]. So we technically found Patient Zero ourselves without Team Bravo's help, which we clearly hadn't needed. But had to then reset. Would we have been able to vaccinate all Coda cities by the end of December if we'd lost November to find Patient Zero? Probably not. But it still felt like a punch in the gut.
So it was our fault for missing the November briefing at the start of November that made us so cross, but also it wasn't for lack of trying that we failed to find Patient Zero, as we were intentionally allowing ourselves to lose the October game(s) to focus on the search; the cards just didn't come up the way we needed to get the search done [our city zero player card came up really late in both games, too late to be of enough help to progress the search along]. We were penalised a whole load of points for having two back-to-back games of unlucky card draws.
But of course, you're basically unprepared for ALL the scoring, and it's really only meant as a rough guideline. But then, why bother with a rough guideline at all? We would have much preferred a longer "epilogue" for the story, maybe having multiple possible endings where the one you scratch off is linked to certain conditions at the end of the entire campaign. Did you vaccinate everywhere and destroy the stockpile? Scratch of panel X. Did you fail to destroy the stockpile? Scratch off panel Y. Did you fail to vaccinate everywhere? Scratch off panel Z. Etc. That would have felt like a much more satisfying conclusion. The scoring just felt... tacked on.