by Kalarian
My friends and I got this game and we were in love with it. We played 2 full campaigns (idk why people say they take 20 hours) and a bunch of test quests. But the more we played it, the more we disliked it. Here were our main concerns:1) With 4 heroes, the game seems to cripplingly favor the Overlord as his objective is never to kill us, but much weaker NPCs. With 2 it seems to favor the heroes a lot. We didn't do a campaign with 3, but they seemed ok for the Quest we tried.
2) The overlord usually doesn't have reason to attack heroes. The quests are always for the overlord to kill NPC or steal something. Then he usually has goblin archers who have 5 movement. In part 2 of A Fat Goblin, with 4 players the OL got literally all 4 prisoners back to the torture chamber in 1 turn. Granted, he still has to escape through us but its so much movement. Also Belthir in Death on the Wing part 2 has 8 movement to just fly around while the guards die. With 4 heroes, the OL kills all the guards on turn 2 unless he's really unlucky.
3) Hero NPCs don't scale. In Castle Daerion, the guy has 25 health whether we have 2 or 4 heroes and he has to survive at least 5 (usually 6) turns. Same in Death on the Wing, the 4 guards have the same stats. Even when we gave free act 1 weapons to everyone for Castle Daerion and all 4 Militia, we could not win part 2 except when the OL rolled 4 misses...
4) For most first encounters, the Overlord can only profit. Heroes have to win or they suffer a penalty (more monster health, losing a turn, etc..) Because the overlord has literally nothing to lose, he has no incentive to use his OL cards. So he just sits there and stockpiles them for part 2 making it ridiculous. We even made a house rule to make him reshuffle for part 2 and the cards were still very annoying.
Act 2 became even harder because heroes have no money or XP to buy from act 2 shop and the monsters get a fair amount stronger. In 2 campaigns, the OL won 15/18 quests. And maybe 2-3 were even close. Heroes won almost every encounter 1 but lost nearly every encounter 2. They were just stomps one way or the other.
This all being said, we LOVED the game when we started and we're gonna give it a few more weeks before we make a decision. Is there something that we are missing? We double checked and watched a lot of videos and we are obeying all the rules perfectly. Is there anywhere that lists what quests favor which side based on hero numbers? Is 3 the best way to go?