Bots focus Sympathy too much?

[Tomfoolery]

I know keeping sympathy down is the key to keeping Woodland Alliance from snowballing but good Lord in heaven, I am way too often 10 turns into a game but feel like I'm taking my third turn, because I keep doing the EXACT same thing every turn.

1. Place Sympathy
2. End turn
3. Watch bots kill Sympathy with a passion
4. Repeat

[KingCoward]

Seems reasonable, i wish all players did that.. once the woodland alliance gets a foothold they can pretty much click randomly on the screen and still be a threat to come out on top.

[The Invisible Hand]

Try to spread your sympathy on only one player's "turf," which makes it less likely that they'll have enough actions to destroy it all. Also, stay away from Vagabond if possible.

Spreading to clearings that don't have enemy buildings (so you're less of a threat) may help, too.

[TheDarktrooper]

I find if i'm in a game with someone (or some bot) that is very much targeting sympathy it ends up being worth it to just skip a go and collect more supporters so that I can really spam the board to a much greater degree. If anyone has any better suggestions though i am happy to hear them!

[Tomfoolery]

Originally posted by TheDarktrooper:

I find if i'm in a game with someone (or some bot) that is very much targeting sympathy it ends up being worth it to just skip a go and collect more supporters so that I can really spam the board to a much greater degree. If anyone has any better suggestions though i am happy to hear them!

That only really works if you have a base. Otherwise, (A) you can only hold 5 supporters, which you'll have all of anyways if all your sympathy is removed, and (B) you're only drawing one card per turn.

[Barraka Frite]

I'm trying the Alliance domination challenge and I was feeling the same thing. I mean it is fine and adviced to target sympathy as it removes revolt threat and deliver some victory points, but the AI seems to keep focus on removing sympathy tokens even when the Alliance is far from victory and other players are about to win.

[Bread-kun]

Based on playing the board game a lot, it really is the correct course of action vs woodland. If you give them any breathing room to set up sympathy they can spiral out of control fast. The entire table basically has to keep punishing their sympathy tokens or they can just out VP everyone very quickly.

Even then you still are getting a garunteed 1 or 2 VP a turn more or less at minimum.

[[FAUCᴇT] Psychopath]

Originally posted by Bread-kun:

Based on playing the board game a lot, it really is the correct course of action vs woodland. If you give them any breathing room to set up sympathy they can spiral out of control fast. The entire table basically has to keep punishing their sympathy tokens or they can just out VP everyone very quickly.

Even then you still are getting a garunteed 1 or 2 VP a turn more or less at minimum.

Not every sympathy token is worth smashing.
If they have a base of the same suit, they can't revolt there even if you smash the base this turn (since they'd lose all supporters of that suit + birds). You also won't want to remove their last token so they're forced into a particular area of the map instead of having free placement (particularly worth considering as both cats and birds). In some cases you have less to lose than an opponent in the same clearing, you can force them to deal with the problem instead (ie a lone cat in a clearing with 4 birds and a roost). If youre in a position where you dont fear revolt, you can march a bunch of army into their base to trap their warriors in that clearing so they won't be able to organize without fighting until they regain rule of that clearing.
They are nuanced decisions that players keep in mind. If anything I feel that the cats focus so much on crushing a revolt on the Eyrie side of the map that they never care enough about building recruiters and putting cats on the board to bolster up.

[Tomfoolery]

Originally posted by CPC Barraka Frite:

I'm trying the Alliance domination challenge and I was feeling the same thing. I mean it is fine and adviced to target sympathy as it removes revolt threat and deliver some victory points, but the AI seems to keep focus on removing sympathy tokens even when the Alliance is far from victory and other players are about to win.

This is what I'm getting from them too. AI Marquise often focuses them so much that their lack of action against Eyrie and my subsequent inability to do anything about them myself, often leads to an Eyrie victory. I have no idea how the bots are designed, but I think they should take player's current scores into more account when deciding courses of action.