Reply: Terra Mystica:: General:: Re: Auren too weak ;)

by QBert80

sfox wrote:

Not trying to be offensive here, but you are way wrong if you think Engineers and Cultists are weak, they are both very strong. The Engineers take a bit of skill and the right conditions to do well, but the Cultists are dead simple.

The Engineers are dependent on having the bonus tiles available which give you extra workers though (the +2 workers bonus which gives you 4 points for stronghold/sanctuary is amazingly good for Engineers). In the best case for Engineers you want to have the +2 workers bonus tile, the free terraform tile, and the other tile which gives +1 worker and +3 power. The Engineers can have a tough time getting going early game but once they are going they are amazing because everything is so cheap for them. It is easy to get 3 bridges out by the 3rd or 4th round, that should be worth at least +30 points for them. I've personally scored 130 points with the Engineers, but that sort of comparison is meaningless. The power the Engineers have is that they don't need many workers and if they can get extra workers via bonus scrolls and the 4 power -> 2 workers action they are extremely good.

The Cultists are dependent on other players taking power when they build/upgrade. If other players take the power, the Cultists can easily get 3 or 4 cult track moves every turn. This is of course a meta game issue. If all other players decide to screw the Cultists then yes they suck. On the other hand, if all players always take power when the Cultists build they will dominate the cult tracks. The bonus 7 points the Cultists get means you don't bother building the stronghold until late game as building it early is meaningless. This can be a nice advantage as you can time when you build it to match a round when building your stronghold gives you +5 points whereas races which have really powerful strongholds want to build their stronghold on the first round to get good use out of it.

Awesome, I'm glad to hear you've been having success with these factions, as there have been a lot of complaints about them here on the message boards. The flexibility of being able to build your stronghold late is really nice for the Cultists, I admit, but I'm a little less convinced about their primary ability. Being the player in my group who wins this game the most (for now), if I were stuck with the Cultists I would indeed expect the other players to conspire against me and avoid taking power from my builds. I'm not sure at this point how much they would be hurting themselves by doing so and whether or not it would be worth it for them.

I think the Engineers look really cool and different from the other factions, so I'm looking for a setup that favours them so I can give them a shot. Like you say, it sounds like which bonus tiles are in play is really important for them.