Navigator leader cards

[Sealer]

After playing an unreasonable amount of games with Navigator Leader and winning a couple of rounds I decided to take a thorough look at his cards. It's far from impossible to win with this character, there are however gross imbalances in cards ranging from useless to grossly overpowered. More importantly, however, some of his synergies/mechanics simply don't work.

+x seconds to redraw mechanics. Almost all of the cards using these mechanics are simply worse versions of other cards. The worst offenders are cards like rum - not only do you get just 45 gold, it also has stock on it and adds 5 seconds to redraw time. It's an incredibly bad card, but if you look at Recreation Facility, it is straight up a worse Apartment. The only card that actually tries to utilize this is Auction. This is simply not enough to turn this from a disadvantage to an advantage.

The Quest mechanic is very awkward as well. Some of the quests are either badly worded, or just broken, like the quest which asks you to raise tax to 15. It actually needs you to raise it 15 above what you have while obtaining this card. The problem with quests is that you are far from guaranteed to get Tavern or a Bard , and getting those cards without quests is pointless.

There are other cards that are combo pieces where neither works alone. One of them is box + merge/cleanup. None of these simply does anything without the others, but at least merge has some cool interactions with created cards and allows you to scale your win conditions.

There is also the treasure mechanic, which while cool in theory simply doesn't have pieces to support it. Treasure hunter has very low range and is squishy which makes it a very problematic unit, and even if you get it it is extremely rare to actually get cards that produce chests.

Aaand there is the ship/create card mechanic which is way too random to work consistantly.

The only two mechanics which work almost consistantly across the board are stock and notoriety. They seem to have the most cards that work off of each other and many of them are quite strong. The easiest strategy I found is to place a lot of mortarrats and use all stock adding abilities on cannonfire. It is very feasable to have over 100 stock on cannonfire which makes it an incredibly potent card, but because it deals damage over time it isn't completely imbalanced. The same can be said about handgunner, but these cost population and you need more of them to achieve the same effect as cannon fire.

In fact, I think it is way faster to list cards which work, then those which don't. The exception to this are units. Most of them are fairly decent, unfortunately most of them are also rare. The main exceptions are bandit and deckhand, and sadly those cards will show up all the time.

I think the main issue here is that Navigator's cards are spread thin across multiple different mechanics which often don't work together very well and/or require specific pieces to function well. Navigator is still playable, mainly because some of his cards are incredibly strong. All of his hoard/draw cards are amazing with the possible exception of paddling, and the scaling on handgunner/cannon fire is strong enough to win, but in the end it makes for many disappointing runs.

[MeteoraTR]

I didnt try him after the update but he is the hardest one for sure.

[KKy_]

Navi's card for example pirate is scaring like crazy, so actually he is ez even hard mode.

[The Laughing Traitor]

So I'd like to speak in favor of the ships, the Barge and Transport Ship in particular can pull a ton of weight later on. Being able to turn some cheese or a spare stockless deckhands etc. into a Guardian/Flame Archer or just dumping it out of your deck as a building without using a remove opportunity is a heck of a swing.

[pneumatic_lance]

There's some cards that's good-enough-cause-I'm-desperate. Rum is a pretty solid early game card that's almost a Cheese with 2 other Cheeses, or Pottery with 6 cards. Box is a nett 30 gold, which is 50% more that double Cheese. They both have high initial Stock that benefit with Restore. Plus they are cheap activator for Cannon Barrage.

Recreational Facility is still an instant +8 ratizen at a discounted price, so am I desperate enough to add 3 second to redraw time cause I don't have Immigration?

I agree on Ships. Treasure Fleet and Observer Ship has potential, but overall the card pool they draw from are too large, plus there's so much text squeeze into a tiny card. I think they can be improved if they offer 3 choices like in treasure chest.

I don't think the cards-needing-other-specific-combo is unique to Navigator. As I unlocked more cards with other leaders, it's harder to find cards that work well with my existing deck. Getting offered bunch of economy cards that need specific synergy as a Scientist; Getting offered no housing and no curse cards as a Shaman. The gameplay experience goes from making-the-best-deck-with-what-I-got to I've-already-lost-cause-they-didn't-sell-me-a-Market.

[KKy_]

there are some handy insta win combo.
1 handgunner + general's add ATK cards
:Handgunner has high atack speed, so they get more benefit than other unit.
2 mortarrat + builder's defensive wall card
:mortarrat has good mob clear and bad single target dps. So always Boss wave is your weak point, but Boss usually has bad dps for defensive wall. so If your wall have decent hp, you win how mortarrat is bad at doing boss wave.

[Sealer]

I am aware that mortarrat is a strong unit. That's why I said that for the most part, the units are fine. PIrate, Mortarrat, Handgunner and Black Beard form a strong backbone for this leader. It's the rest of the kit that is quite lackluster. If you don't get offered Mortarrat or handgunner the rest of the units don't really deal damage. In fact, if you don't get offered Mortarrat, handgunner or the two cannon fire cards, I have no idea how you get through waves 10-20.

My gripes are more with the rest of the cards that are very lackluster and non-synergetic. Most economic cards either need a lot of time to scale or are just plain terrible. Compare that to researcher, which has a lot of ways to boost economy and plenty of damage cards to choose from. Shaman has some of the most synergistic kits too - you are guaranteed to get cards that benefit from units dying, and curse is on plenty of cards. On top of that cards like beehive or moth conjurer need nothing to be very strong.

It's not that it's impossible to win, it's that it's not very fun to play when so many cards suck even in the best possible scenario.

[Sealer]

Originally posted by pneumatic_lance:

There's some cards that's good-enough-cause-I'm-desperate. Rum is a pretty solid early game card that's almost a Cheese with 2 other Cheeses, or Pottery with 6 cards. Box is a nett 30 gold, which is 50% more that double Cheese. They both have high initial Stock that benefit with Restore. Plus they are cheap activator for Cannon Barrage.

Recreational Facility is still an instant +8 ratizen at a discounted price, so am I desperate enough to add 3 second to redraw time cause I don't have Immigration?

I agree on Ships. Treasure Fleet and Observer Ship has potential, but overall the card pool they draw from are too large, plus there's so much text squeeze into a tiny card. I think they can be improved if they offer 3 choices like in treasure chest.

I don't think the cards-needing-other-specific-combo is unique to Navigator. As I unlocked more cards with other leaders, it's harder to find cards that work well with my existing deck. Getting offered bunch of economy cards that need specific synergy as a Scientist; Getting offered no housing and no curse cards as a Shaman. The gameplay experience goes from making-the-best-deck-with-what-I-got to I've-already-lost-cause-they-didn't-sell-me-a-Market.

I agree, all of those cards are 'desperation choice'. One of the best reasons to take ships is to change your terrible junks, boxes and rums into something potentially useful, sadly you are far from guaranteed that what you get instead will be useful.

Combo cards is not unique to Navigator at all, but other leaders have much better payoff for their combo pieces - researcher can get infinite money off of experiments + skills + redraws, provided you build your deck well. And experiments is a common and plays into the general theme of using skills as much as possible, Ear is very similar. Shaman has common mushroom farms, which eventually start proccing several times per wave, and the general theme is that your cards benefit from units dying - and that doesn't change. There is also the curse mechanic, which is very robust. General benefits from healing and mass units, on top of having some more or less straightforward buffs.

Navigator has... what? What's the general theme? Pawnshop gives 5 gold when you create a card... but you always lose gold on that. It's really underwhelming. Everything with +sec on redraw is terrible. So how do you get money?

Well, you either get tulip + a lot of population, or you get a bunch of supply depots and levels + junk (this takes half of the game to get a point where it's strong, before you have a couple levels + 1-2 supply depots junk is... well, junk) or you get arrest + pirate units. Okay. But only tulip gives you money without having a ton of other support pieces for it.

On the topic of damage... I'll just say that there is 1 unit which scale with stock, one bad unit that scales with treasure chests 1 spell that scales with stock. Oh, and one overpowered legendary with major splash damage from a screen away, carrying everything else.

[MeteoraTR]

btw, Cargo Ship Lv2 is bugged. It is supposed to be giving Economy cards.