Hail and Well Met!
Sauron Gains New Abilities
Let's continue our sneak peek at Encounter 3 this week.
Up until now, Sauron's ability to deal with the player has been pretty fixed (outside of new enemies and hazards) while the players have enjoyed many new cards and tactics to use against him. Starting with Encounter 3, that's no longer the case and we will be adding even more cards for Sauron as we move forward. We've been working on new Shadow, Treachery and Event cards for Sauron to use against your fellowships.
Keep in mind that these are all works in progress, and we reserve the right to change these cards up until release.
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Let's take a look at two of Sauron's new Shadow (attachment) cards...
Dark Defense
This Shadow card costs Sauron just a single resource to give an existing card Guard. While Sauron can't turn on Defense like players, this card gives him a similar ability for the cost of a resource.
Going For Help
This Shadow card card costs Sauron nothing, but makes one of Sauron's cards fleeting. If that enemy is not defeated before the end of the round, they will disappear, but be replaced by three random enemy minions in its place.
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Now let's look at a pair of new Event cards...
Dark Recovery
This 2 resource cost event will heal a random enemy 2 Health and then ready that enemy card. This give Sauron the ability to ready any enemy to act again if he's willing to trade resource points to do so.
Sap Strength
This devious single resource cost card will reduce a random Hero or Ally with at least a 2 Attack value by 2.
Other Updates
Just as a reminder, we have some other updates coming along with Encounter 3...
Deck Builder Tutorial (Quest 4) Restructure
While we are very pleased with most of the new tutorial structure and how it better prepares you for the complexities and subtleties of our game, we felt that the Deck Builder Tutorial (Quest 4) just didn't hit the mark. We have a new version of this almost ready to test internally that we feel does a better job of walking you through the options of building a deck as well as reinforcing concepts like Sphere Levels and better explaining the ins and outs of deckbuilding in a more sandbox type of environment.
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Save Game Changes
We're making some under the hood changes to the save game system that we feel will improve that system. Currently, when you have a save game, whatever deck you were using locks out the deck from editing. You cannot change the associated deck until you either finish the saved game or opt to delete it.
We've decided to remove that restriction. When you make a save game, it will save a version of that deck with the save so that when you run a saved game, it will contain the remainder of that deck in the save. This will allow you to manipulate the associated deck separately from that saved game. However, when you run that saved session, you will still have the deck you used from the original game.
Why don't we allow you to bring the altered deck to the saved session? Since a deck lasts across an entire quest, there's no way for us to know what cards would have been used in an altered deck up to the point of the save. You are saving the state of the session as it existed at the time, so we save the deck as it existed at that time.
This will clear up some issues with both single and multiplayer save games and make it less confusing when you go to make changes to your decks.
Reminder: Obtaining Technical Assistance
If you need technical assistance for the game, please remember that if you don't see the answer within the forums or on discord, you can always file a Helpshift here:
https://asmodee.helpshift.com/a/lord-of-the-rings-acg/
Discord
There's a fan set up and run discord channel where you can reach out and talk to fellow players and look for multiplayer friends to play with.
You can check it out here.
Twitch Stream
Don't forget that you can check out our Twitch channel at https://www.twitch.tv/ffigames every two weeks at 1pm Central US time / 6:00pm UTC.
Our next stream will be tomorrow, Wednesday, July 17th.
Next Update
That's all we have this week. Until we meet again, may the stars shine ever on your adventures!