Preparation Preparation Perspiration: The Dragon King Deep Dive 3 (Patreon)

Part: 3 The Hunt

While running the tests for this deep dive, it became apparent that unlike many of the deep dives, it's actually quite important to discuss preparation and set up. If you are curious about my testing process; I have multiple cloned settlements set up at various lantern years and with different combinations of expansions/gear. The further into the campaign the testing is, the more iterations I have to undertake – this is because early on there's a lot less variation in the make up of a settlement than the later game ones. You can almost consider it as a tree structure, I have a few very solid, powerful settlements for the first few years with little variation, but past the lantern years where the Node 3 monsters turn up things become exceptionally varied. It's part of what makes late game advice quite hard to give in general terms, because your journey on the way to the late and end games is going to be completely unique from anyone else's. This is part of the joy of the game, but it also makes writing for LY 16+ quite frustrating at times (beyond blanket statements like 'X, Y, Z Gear is really good).

So, I'll grab a relevant snapshot of a powerful settlement and then run that a few times vs the L1 version of the monster. Gradually weakening the gear over the iterations to try and find out how 'bad' a group you can take and have a reasonable win rate. It's a pretty lengthy process, but you do get into as rhythm and learn mental shortcuts that speed things up a bit. You also get VERY familiar with how the showdown works.

During this process, I noted that there are a few unique quirks that mean for the smoothest possible  hunt/showdown experience you actually need to set up a few years in advance. We'll walk through the mechanics of the hunt cards to highlight why this is the case.

Thespian Troupe

This is one of these hunt events which I really like from a thematic standpoint because it offers a little snapshot into the life of a monster when it's not in a settlement. In this case the Thespian Troupe is the 2nd Lion Knight, and his three immortal scholars Sam, Ryan and Ash. Unfortunately interacting with this event is worse than just having a basic hunt event – while Unbreakable is an excellent fighting art that means you cannot suffer the first severe injury each lantern year (gaining a Disorder instead). But the risk here is that 30% of the time you get a dismembered arm and 50% of the time you get a delightful outfit that gives you a -1 evasion token. That means a 20% chance of Unbreakable. I mean it's good, but it's not that good.

Still, if you have a survivor who doesn't use two handed weapons and has a playstyle that isn't focused around evasion, you can risk this, especially if you have the +1 from that staple Otherworldly Luck. The downside of risking this is you only have one working arm left, which means that you've lost your safety buffer (which is a weird way of thinking of your arms, but that's the mechanics of it for anyone except two handed weapon users).

Before we move on, I think it's interesting to see that the 2nd Lion Knight pulls the rickshaw himself. It suggests a status that's not higher than the three scholars (despite how the model can make you believe that they are some kind of lesser status than the Knight). We also get complete confirmation that the Lion Knight wears a mask – the miniature of the 1st Lion Knight also confirms this – and that underneath all that finery he looks a lot like a Manhunter.

Cultivated Crypt

Encountering the Crypt is always an interesting decision, you can either gain +1 understanding and a random hunt event or you can Defile the Crypt and gain additional resources. Unlike the White Lion Cub which is a 100% club the cub every time; Defiling the Crypt has a bunch of different choices and each one carries an increasingly more and more severe amount of risks/penalties. The main thing to understand when making your decision is how dangerous Overheat can be. This is because we already know how to handle higher speed (evasion, dash cancels) and more damage (Block/Deflect/Evasion).

The good news is, Overheat is a pretty weak mood that increases the speed at which the first Meltdown is going to happen and effectively gives the Dragon King +1 life by increasing the size of its AI deck. So the answer is, as long as you know how to not get crushed by Meltdown (something we'll look at next week), then you always take at least one Dragon King resource and then work out if you can handle more speed/damage in respect to extras.

I can't answer if you push to the 2 or 3 Dragon King resources however, that's entirely dependant on how powerful your survivors and their gear is.

Lava Flow

The key thing about Lava Flow is it sets one of the HARD rules of hunting Dragon Kings, which is don't take survivors with less than 2 courage because this event can straight up incinerate just not them, but their gear. Even a 10% chance of losing all of that is unacceptable. So your first hard rule is:

Never take survivors with less than 2 courage on a Dragon King hunt.

You might also want to have survivors without too high a level of courage if they are going to be evasion tanking. This is because the 14+ result reduces evasion by one in exchange for +1 strength. That can be a fine trade for an offensively orientated survivor, but it's bad news for a tank.

Lorekeeper

An interesting part of the Lorekeeper's 'worst' result  is that Arithmophilia is not always a disadvantage. If you roll high enough (4+) then you can combo this disorder with movement reducing items like the Steel Shield. You also get to ignore stuff like the King's Man Silent Hymn because you are so obsessed with your chosen number that nothing is going to make you take more or less steps.

We're going to see a trend of the Dragon King fixing/improving survivors stats or making them able to neuter certain negative attribute tokens.

The other two results you can roll on this table are both excellent, either you get +2 understanding at the cost of brain event damage or on a 10+ you get a free innovation. I don't think I need to explain to you guys how good free innovations are. So always be rolling on here.

Majestic Shadow

This is one of those classic 'choose your poison' hunt cards that I think represent the stronger end of hunt card design because it gives players agency and choice. And there is actually nuance to the decision here, the 'Gaze Upward' option has a 40% chance of being ambushed vs. 60% chance of +10 Insanity. While the 'Flee in Terror' option is 50% chance of 2 event damage to the legs vs. a 50% chance of a random hunt event.

Of all of these I think that the 2 event damage to the legs is probably the most dangerous result if the event revealer is your lead tank, but the higher your total armor points get, the less of an issue this can be. Being Ambushed by the Dragon King also isn't a huge deal a lot of the time. You just need to be cognizant of the fact that the Dragon King has 10 movement and it starts 6 spaces away from all survivors – so it will be able to reach and attack on that ambush turn.

So with all of that written I'm sure you may be wondering 'what makes the Dragon King something that requires so much preparation?' And yeah, so far this is exceptionally standard fair. However, we've got two big old wrinkles to dig into.

Say hello to Dopple Den, aka the most thematically amazing Hunt Event in the game.

What Dopple Den does is has a 70% chance of your survivor being “killed” and replaced with an Evil doppelgängers version of their survivor. If the intimacy survivors Amanda and Steve ran into the Dopple Den then we'd end up with Evil Amanda and Evil Steve.

The important thing about “Evil” survivors is they get Marrow Hunger as an ability, and that means the following:

It also mechanically means the following:

Dopples are very closely tied to Murder and Skull Eater Settlement Events, always being involved in them. First of all this means that if you end up with multiple dopplers, then 'There can only be one' – and when Murder happens one will kill the other.

This creates some really delicate situations for your settlement and you need to think about how you are going to approach these doppelgängers. You can either use them as what we call 'Murder Bait' (more on that later), or we want to try and keep them because they're good survivors. This is going to require two different approaches.

If they are going to be murdering other survivors because you want to keep them around due to their strength/weapon proficiency then you are going to have to hunt the Dragon King a fair amount in order to ensure there's plenty of fodder for them to keep churning through. Otherwise they're either going to start murdering your highest XP normal survivors or get murdered themselves.

In this situation during People of the Lantern you can employ saviors as murder bait if you want to protect your big evil doppelgängers. What you do here is you use their savior specific abilities because of how much XP they can gain – and you specifically aim to get them to one step short of retirement by the end of a showdown as quickly as possible. With that done you leave the savior in the settlement cooling their heels waiting for your chosen Doppler to go eat their skull.

If you choose this route the Blue savior is the best choice because they'll deal a load of damage and generate a lot of resources during the showdown where you super age them.

The alternative option is to consider doppelgängers as fodder, you take generic, weak survivors out and don't worry if they become evil copies. Here they become the murder bait themselves and this can give you some lovely protection from Murder for your important survivors and that feels good.

That's the first piece of why the Dragon King's hunts require a bit more planning than normal. If you go into hunts without a plan for how to handle the evil doppelgängers then you're going to get yourself into a mess in the situation where Murder/Skull Eater turns up. But before we finish there is a second card that you have to consider when hunting the Dragon King  and it's not a hunt card, it's a resource and here it is:

This strange resource is gained via either the deathblow or killing an L2 Dragon King with Sculpture innovated and as you can see it has a 70% chance of killing the survivor who scores the Deathblow. If it does kill them the Heart sits to one side and is gained in general by the settlement on a victorious showdown (so pretty much immediately). This odd quirk in how resources is gained means that at most we're only going to lose one survivor to the Radiant Heart and only via the Death Blow. You should be able to control the situation enough to ensure that the Dragon King is only killed via the Death Blow when you want it. Plan accordingly, bring a 'Red Shirt' survivor against the L1 Dragon King if you want an early Nuclear Scythe (and lets be totally transparent, why on earth are you hunting the Dragon King if you're not going to play with Scythe Mastery?) that Red Shirt will grab the Radiant Heart via the deathblow and probably die – but it's a worthy trade if you get to start working on Scythe Mastery early.

It is also worth briefly noting that during the showdown the Dragon King may create obsidian towers (which this monster will generate during the fight). That's something you want to activate while holding either a club or a heavy weapon. Not only do they create resources on a 4+ but on a 9+ you get iron and on a 16+ you also gain +1 permanent strength. Great stuff.

All of that written we can see there are a few guidelines which should be held in mind when you're hunting the Dragon King and some of these require set up or at least an organised plan for how to handle this mighty kaiju. It is a lot of additional work and planning if you want succeed, something that not all monsters require – this preparation however pays off massively because the Dragon King is capable of not just providing resources as benefits, as you'll see when we wind through the showdown's cards next week, it also helps make your survivors statistically stronger and can even give them immunities of immense power!