Single-player experience?

[onomastikon]

As a boardgame, root is playable for 2 to 4, but the digital version has an ai to play against bots. Since I'm primarily interested in a single player Eurogame, I'd like to know how I can interpret the criticism I've read about one-sided ai in 2020 and 2021 in the reviews here - have these issues been addressed? Interested in your honest appraisal of single player experience, thanks in advance

[Sakarov]

Originally posted by onomastikon:

As a boardgame, root is playable for 2 to 4

Wrong. 1 to 6 players.

In my humble opinion playing a regular game against AI is good to try out new stuff but overall is not interesting long term.

The solo challenges are fun and there are a decent amount of them.

There is however the Clockwork DLC that implements the (updated) solo (and co-op) version of the board game. As i play mostly in multi i'm not sure if it's worth buying the digital version just for that but it's clearly the main thing you want to look at for playing alone.


TL;DR the AI is still bad but it's irrelevant since Clockwork is a thing.

[onomastikon]

Originally posted by Sakarov:

Originally posted by onomastikon:

As a boardgame, root is playable for 2 to 4

Wrong. 1 to 6 players.

Uh thanks. I have my information from the main root page as well as the original board game.
So a dlc is made for single player? How odd

[Sakarov]

Well to be fair i'm refering to the board game as of right now including all of the expansions. The base US box was 2-4 players. It was released in 2018. The first expansion came later that same year and made the game 1-6 players.

Long story short : the Riverfolk expansion (of the board game) added a solo mode but it kinda sucked. So they made a specific expansion (Clockwork) which contained the revised and improved solo mode that was later added to the digital version as a DLC.

[onomastikon]

Thanks.
I see that expansion has poor reviews, it seems most of the negative ones are related to an inability to access its contents. Has that issue been resolved? I'm hoping this team isn't quite as devicive as asmodee seems to be.

[Sakarov]

Can't speak about others but i've never had any issues accessing the content of any expansion.

I think overall Direwolf digital is better than Asmodee digital. Better prices (we got the winter map for free in Root) and the updates are rolling faster for sure (not that it's hard but eh). There is still a lot of room for improvement (advanced setup when ?) but they're trying.