Recruiting Professor Ivo was a mistake. His poor personality and obsession with his project caused more problems than he was worth. A lot of effort went into keeping him alive (like guarding his hospital after a stroke) and cleaning up his messes (handling interviews with Lois, detecting and removing radiation after he blew himself up). While he made significant discoveries, he was outshined by some of the other options. In hindsight, I would have recruited Toyman, Achilles Milo , Ray Palmer, or Ted Kord.any of whom would have been better choices.
I feel like that may be a tad harsh, while Ivo came with his fair share of problems and there may have been better choices I feel like most of our issues came from us not properly handling the situation than from Ivo himself.
Recruiting Noi Komarov, who turned out to be a Russian spy. It was literally brought up as a strong possibility in the discussion but people still ended up voting for him
To be completely fair he was arguably the best of a bad crop, the only option there I would probably have taken in his place is Bette Sans Souci but the others were either extremely unimpressive or even more suspicious. Iirc a big part of the reason we went with Komarov is because we
knew he was a Russian spy as opposed to the other top contenders and could theoretically try to use him to our advantage.
That being said I do somewhat regret that we fumbled that opportunity, though I do find it morbidly amusing that there's now a Russian spy and prospective member of the Rocket Red Brigade out there somewhere who is completely terrified of us.
Really? I mean sure he's not
amazing but he's still one of our best Stewardship hero units.
Though looking back that was a
stacked recruitment pool and at least Paul Westfield or Curtis Metcalf may have been better choices in retrospect.
not turning Cailtin into metahuman and tanking most of her coops.
Eh, iirc Caitlin's coop scores were never that great to begin with and IMO the downsides were well worth the benefits.
Even ignoring the advantages of having a very powerful metahuman working for us should we ever need it her becoming a metahuman also improved some of her coop scores, gave her the trait that makes her an incredibly useful Learning hero unit on her own, gave us an opportunity to secure her loyalty and most importantly drove the initial wedge between her and Louise that we used to tie Caitlin more closely to us and max out her coop score with Pamela.
Could have found Barbara's identity as Batgirl and just offered to secretly sponsor her heroics
To be fair we could still do that, we have the action and a team that could easily accomplish it.
Would have pushed to assassinate Garrison Slate earlier (I am sure he's doing some shady stuff involving Intergang)
I agree with the first part but I highly doubt that Slate is involved with Intergang.
Slate has pretty much always been depicted as a fundamentally good person whose main goal with S.T.A.R Labs has been to have a pen advanced scientific institute free of political agendas or corporate mandates. Selling his soul to the well known terrorists Intergang wouldn't be his style.
So this is a light little status update. Things are looking kind of rough this week. If the update comes out it'll be over the weekend but that's not looking like the most likely thing in the world.
I also wanted to give some of my thoughts on the balance changes to expect for next turn. I've already stated that I don't like how things are balanced currently and that I want to tweak things to be a little less safe and to encourage more "risk taking" action choices. Broadly speaking what I'm thinking of doing is the following.
I'm thinking of implementing a counter where if you take over 25% of your actions as DC 0 actions it'll contribute to your nemesis gauge, I'll be raising the DC and readjusting the rewards of a few key actions (most notably specialized labs), and I'll be capping failure on a number of high DC actions in order to tilt them to be both a bit safer (though not perfectly safe) and to incentivize people to engage a little more in allowing some element of risk into strategies.
This isn't set in stone and it could all change as I continue to review stuff, but this feels to me like a fair and solid way to tweak things back to where I want them to be. I won't be doing sweeping DC changes as I initially considered, as I think this is a healthier way to rebalance things. That being said if someone has issues with these proposed changes, feel free to air them out. I can't promise that I'll incorporate all the feedback I get, but I will at least listen and consider it.
As always I'm hesitant whenever these sort of changes are made, especially messing around with the labs, but I trust you to have put some serious thought into it so we'll see how it goes.
Agreed. It's not that she isn't a good character or an interesting one, I can even say she's a character I can sympathize with, but maliciousness towards certain employees is worrying and I don't want to imagine the dc on a successful therapy session.
That's fair, my hope is that if we can have Raven help against Incubus it may soother things between her and Eve some though it probably won't be easy.
I'm kinda hoping that we can put Raven, Rebecca and maybe Mina on "learn about demons" next turn to allow us to grab as much information as we can on Trigon and Incubus and hopefully her helping out with that will a,ke Eve like her a bit more?
I'm still happy with where we are in the quest, my current priority is pushing to have the infrastructure to recruit some more hero units once the Big Bang happens in Dakota City.
With bastion we can incorporate BBs into a team without needing them working directly in Lexcorp, which is an excellent compromise.
There are quite a few Bang Babies that I'd like to have at least some connection to without outright recruiting, for example Permafrost makes a very good sympathetic charity case and Caitlin would appreciate us helping her out and Rubberband Man would be interesting at least to have as a musician, but only a few I'd really like to have as hero units.
Those ones would be:
Ragtag - His personality leaves some to be desired but the ability to give people temporary superpowers makes him a significant force multiplier.
Nina Crocker - I'm never gonna say no to time travel.
Dwayne McCall - Basically the same powers as Funnyface but more easily manipulated into being a pawn for Cassandra.
Richie Foley - Another super genius is never a bad thing, he and Lex can form a "Held hostage/possessed by Brainiac" club.
There's also Madelyn Spaulding who I'd take if we haven't recruited a psychic already by then.
I think that you're forgetting how awful he was to deal with. He only kept making those robotics discoveries when succeeding his AMAZO actions which got to the point of being unfeasible.
Again I hold that more a failing of us not making use of the available systems than of Ivo himself.
If we'd made use of the labs and double downs Ivo's desire to keep working on Amazo wouldn't have been that much more of a pain than the sisters wanting to work on pharmaceuticals or Karl wanting to work in the bone formula.
Looker didn't want to become a superhero though. If she did, she'd be vastly overpowered from what a google search tells me but I guess that was king crimson's way of doing things.
True but we probably could have worked around that.
