Silk Armor & Spidicules - When Design has the Wrong Focus (Patreon)

I wrote a review of the Spidicules expansion a while ago over on board game geek (here) and before we start I'd like to surmise and update my position on the expansion.

Spidicules is an expansion where the design of the monster stands counter to the intent of it. This is an experience intended to replace the Screaming Antelope, however - the expansion itself compliments the Screaming Antelope while competing with the White Lion because the weapons if offers have so many competing similarities - the Amber Poleaxe is just a more expensive and King's Spear with a couple of improvements (one of which is super abusable, anyone want to learn about "punji stick" tactics in the future?) The Hooded Scrap Katars trade deadly off the Lion Beast ones and gain +1 Str, a decent paired ability and an affinity in trade and so on.  Effectively, except for the loss of the Whisker Harp and Cat's Eye Circlet, you can play entirely with Spidicules instead of the White Lion and not miss the White Lion at all.

However, the punishment level of Spidicules is too high for such an early level expansion and as such it doesn't appeal to the typical gamer, it appeals to those players who are more nihilistic and/or cruel in their play style personalities.  The average player however, especially ones who get attached to survivors, can become very upset.  

There are also odd things that happen because of the Taken mechanic, what happens when only one survivor makes it out of the showdown alive but has successfully cut off all 8 legs from the Spidicules is still a bit mindboggling to logically parse.

Finally, as much as I love them, the three rings are problematic at times, the red ring in particular is either useless or utterly broken - there's no middle ground. And while the Blue and Green ones have more common uses, they too are very, very powerful and can be broken with certain other synergies (Gloom Hammer in particular)

So this is an expansion that falls down, which is a shame, because it has so, so many good elements to it.  With that in mind; before I move onto the main issue (Silk Armor) here are my personal house rules for playing with Spidicules:

• Play Gorm + Spidicules + Antelope for the early game. Do not hunt the White Lion.
• Young Rivals can target male survivors with 0 hunt xp.
• Taken abducts a random survivor from the settlement.
• Silk Turban cost reduced by removing the requirement for the Silken Nervous System
• Silk Body Suit cost increased by adding the requirement for the Silken Nervous System
• Silk Bomb is not archived after use.

We're playing with a modified set of these house rules in the Let's Play. But I modified it further and removed most of the 'take that' punish from Spidicules so we can experience and enjoy the expansion as it stands.  

However, the biggest problem once you house rule things is the Silk Armor set.  The design on this armor is all over the place and as such I've had no real successes with using this armor set ever, so I apologise in advance for the rambling nature of this particular post, but I do hope at least it gives you some additional tools in understanding how to focus particular builds and create gear grid designs.

To start with, we'll look at the two basic layouts that I typically build from:

1. The Standard

2. Activate the Boots

Both of these are super awkward layouts and you'll notice that you cannot get the body, head, legs and waist ability all active at once.  This is because of the sheer number of puzzle piece connectors that do not match up well.

It gets worse when you drill into it, the following images show the positions that the various armor pieces have to be in if you want to activate them.  

This also should let you see my process for figuring out how to construct builds, it's very visual.

(The Wraps can go anywhere as they have no activator)

When you combine all of these grids together you get the following:

That's pretty darn limiting and it makes it pretty clear that you are not supposed to activate everything on the Silk Armor at the same time.  In fact the closest you can get to activating everything is the following layout:

But, there is absolutely NO down red, right blue gear card that you can fit into that top spot and you're very limited to what weapons you can use in the bottom slot because they need that up red if you want it all active.

Instead it seems more likely that you have to give up on activating the body piece and concentrate on getting the head, boots and waist pieces active.  The Body is just too restrictive and should be given up on in most builds.

As such this is my actual recommended build positioning for Silk Armor:

You can swap out the Bandages for a different down green item, but on the whole the bandages are probably the best choice because they provide some support/utility and the Shield can be a Pickaxe or Sickle if you are in harvesting mode.

But, once you get sorted on what layout you're going to try and use; there's another issue on top of this, the set bonus:

This bonus is solid and interesting, but it has no synergy with the armor set itself.  Because the armor set gives out a blanket +1 armor to all locations it runs counter to the design of the full set that allows you to protect badly damaged areas by having a hit land elsewhere.  

There are good things in the Silk Armor, it looks fantastic, the head piece and boots are very powerful and unique abilities, but the overall thing is a shambles - it's probably the least cohesive and most difficult to use armor set in the game.  It has no specific focus, it's not as good at support actions as the Rawhide set, it's not tanky enough to make good use of the armor set ability and it doesn't have anything that would support a DPS style character.

So where does this leave us? Well I'm not any closer to having any good Silk Armor builds and I am not sure if there are actually any out there with one exception...

Warriors of the Sun.

Yes, Warriors of the Sun from People of the Sun have the Prismatic ability, which means that their affinities are all colours and this means you can combine the puzzle piece abilities of Silk Armor in a host of configurations with other gear pieces and have access to every single ability on the armor without any issues.  In addition Warriors of the Sun are crazy good at activating the 3 Rings and you will get a huge amount of mileage out of the Blue and Green Rings in that campaign.

So my recommendation for how to use Silk Armor? Add Spidicules to all your People of the Sun games.  For everything else? You're going to have to pick and choose the abilities you want active and live with the rest not working.