Action Economy in Kingdom Death Part 2: The Hunt, Showdown and Gear Grids (Patreon)

We're continuing on last week's article around the concept of action economy with a brief look at the hunt phase, an in depth trawl through the showdown phase and then a discussion on Gear Grid efficiency and concepts. You can access the previous article through this link here.

The Hunt Phase

A brief note on the hunt phase; there are a few tools that can improve the quality of the hunt phase; the most obvious of these are gear that generates extra beneficial hunt events; Reverberating Lantern (Manhunter), Sun Lure & Hook (Sunstalker), Pickaxe and Sickle are examples of this. But also some innovations; such as Pictograph, give you more benefits from the Hunt Phase. I generally do not rush trying to get this innovation, but its passive benefits (which are hidden from you because it is something referenced during other events rather than giving the power up front) are nothing to sneeze at.

The truth of the matter is optimising the Hunt Phase is not a major concern for most hunt parties; this is because despite how the hunt phase is seeking to attack and wear down your survivors; it is rare that it can kill survivors outright. The Monster awaiting in the Showdown on the other hand can and will absolutely kill all of the survivors if you let it, so most gear choices are focused around the Showdown portion and often the Hunt Phase considerations involve avoiding certain keywords (heavy, noisy) or statuses (Insane) so they're easy to achieve.

As such the recommendation for as much hunt phase action efficiency as possible is to get your hands on Pickaxes early, and you want the Sun Lure & Hook as quickly as you can as well. The Pickaxe gives access to iron and crystal skin (a major hunt phase farming target for a settlement; especially in People of the Lantern where it provides major utility against the Gold Smoke Knight) and the Sun Lure leads to a bunch of resources; including building an innovation that generates resources passively every year – passive income is one of the most powerful forms of economy you can get.

When we get the Encounter Monsters; we'll all have to reassess approaches to the Hunt Phase; but until we get our hands on the Gambler's Chest one can't even begin to speculate on what that will be.

The Showdown Phase

Now for the really fun part; the Showdown Phase.

This phase has a push and pull conflict between your survivors and the monster; your survivors as a base standard have 4 movements and 4 activations total; split between the 4 survivors equally. The monster on the other hand has 1 forward moving action that includes a whole variety of things; intimidates, movements, attacks – this single action is very powerful, deliberately so. If the monster only had that AI card it would not be a very engaging or threatening experience. This trap is sidestepped through the highly variable series of reactions that occur during the survivor's turns. These reactions (and the Trap) occur when the monster is attacked, this means the concept to grasp is the number of reactions that the monster can generate is mostly in the hands of the players. If you don't attack with your action then you will generate 0 reactions; if you swing with a high speed weapon you'll generate multiple reactions.

These multiple reactions can be a little hard to pin down due to variance, but you can get a general idea of what will happen with consideration of your weapon and survivor stats:

• Speed gives the maximum number of hits
• Accuracy gives the average number of hits
• Strength gives your hits a chance to convert into wounds and avoid Failure reactions
• Luck gives your wounds a chance to not convert into reactions (and also generate other benefits)

Reflex Reactions and Wound Reactions are not something you should really consider when attacking (unless such a reaction will cause severe issues such loss of life). It's better to score a wound and trigger a Wound Reaction than fail to wound and trigger a Failure Reaction (most of the time, Spidicules can spin that on its head if you're trying to make it a full amputee). That's why most of the time you shouldn't really expend mental power on their weighting during the showdown; wounds are how you progress towards a winning state, aim for wounds and take failures/reflexes as part of the cost of business.

Now; let us get into examples of the various ways you can use Action Economy to leverage things to your advantage. Starting with Action Compression.

There are precious few ways to gain action compression currently in Kingdom Death, however the poster child for this is Blood Paint. If you have your grid set up correctly with it between two one handed weapons then you can get either two separate attacks with different weapons or even more preferably you can attack and activate block/deflect on a second weapon (typically a shield). We've also recently got access to the Novel Sword Proficiency (Willow Beta Content) and that allows a survivor to get a free attack if they have ignored a hit with either Block/Deflect. This actually allows for triple actions from a single Blood Paint and Double activations from a “Sword & Board” survivor in campaigns where Blood Paint isn't available or a survivor is using a Two-Handed Sword and method of gaining Block/Deflect.

There are however other ways of gaining action compression; the Skullcap Hammer (And Scoopy Club) inflicts Daze on the monster when you Perfect Hit; Daze places a temporary -1 speed token on the monster (limit once per round) and the Riot Mace (Gorm) forces the monster to perform its Basic Action instead of drawing a card on a critical wound. In fact Clubs have this very much as part of their design, with many clubs affecting AI in some manner when you attack. Whips also do this, but for moods. Daggers also provide some action compression with their Dagger Mastery providing additional options for wounding discarded hit locations.

Then there is Action Growth & Action Denial; the obvious way that players gain access to this is through Innovations that provide additional survival like Surge or Dash. While there is a limited pool of survival actions due to the requirement to spend survival on these extra actions, they allow the survivors to increase their damage potential per turn or even in the case of the trick nicknamed “Dash-Cancelling” (Where you use Dash in the survival opportunity window after the monster has picked a survivor as a target to move that survivor out of range) completely negate the monster's entire turn.

Another way to generate a positive action economy between you and the monster is to hamper its movement; a low movement monster (Many of them can be shoved down to a minimum of 1 which is a death sentence for most monsters) will struggle to achieve anything meaningful if it doesn't have ranged actions (Intimidate for example). Because monsters are a basic automated process, they are very vulnerable to stat reduction bullying.

Fortunately at the moment it is hard to accidentally fall into these bullying behaviours; and even if you know how to do them, you probably shouldn't (unless that is how you get your enjoyment, from beating up a basic AI except for the King's Man, that walking cursed spreadsheet deserves all the bullying in the world).

Another form of action denial is a little monster dependant; and that's persistent injuries; which can be triggered either through critical wounds (Deadly coming through as the best ability in the game once more) or via Axe Mastery. Persistent Injuries can effectively “blank” some AI cards, resulting in the monster skipping its turn. This is something you become more proficient at when you internalise the key hit locations (and the AI they impact) for the monsters you are hunting. Persistent Injuries do have a very minornegative impact though; those hit locations being out of the deck means you are more likely to hit the trap each attack. There isn't too much you can do about that; so it is best to just be aware that Persistent Injuries can make the monster a wee tad more dangerous when on the defensive; but that is worth the trade off if you get to occasionally blank the monster's AI card entirely.

Moving on to action quality; this is an interesting aspect in KDM because it tends to land on monster armor sets such as White Lion, Screaming, Dragon and Phoenix. These sets offer you a powerful attack in exchange for spending your movement in addition to your activation – they also sometimes require other aspects or limitations in order to use them, but they offer extra bonuses in exchange for that. The two most powerful ones at the moment (outside of Green Armor's Charge, because that is the stone cold nuts); are Dragon and Phoenix. Dragon Armor offers a flat +5 strength and a significant +2 accuracy in exchange for demanding that you move exactly 5 squares; while Phoenix Armor offers potentially even more strength; but requires that there are no obstacles in the way of your movement and doesn't provide any extra accuracy.

If you can overcome these positional limitations (often done with reach weapons which give you a large radius you can hit from after moving); then you get a lot of bang for your turn because once you navigate these limits you get to hit very hard and secure wounds safely.

Cumbersome is also another version of this action quality. Often placed on bows (but also one notable club); this ability demands that you sacrifice a full movement in addition to the activation in order to even just use the weapon. Bows really take great advantage of this, because if the rest of the team is able to keep the monster in range, the cumbersome downside doesn't matter. You also get access to arrows; which include some absolutely insane abilities, buffing survivor accuracy, debuffing monster movement being two of the largest ones.

Finally we have action efficiency. This is most relevant on survivors with multiple different options for what their activation will be. It's also the thing that becomes stronger with time and specialisation of roles. The key concepts here is to work out what order it is best to utilise your survivors and what they should each be doing. This is why specialisation of survivor roles is the “meta” that has been accepted as the norm – you simply do better with four specialists than four generalists because each one of them is more efficient.

For example; a survivor with a shield will be intending to move and activate Block – with the intent of tanking the monster's attack. This is a set of actions that have no chance of failing; so you will probably want to use them later in the showdown phase, after you have seen what the other survivors with their more random actions have achieved. There are exceptions to this rule however; the White Lion's tendency to Grab being one of these. Because Grab can be activated on a Hit Location card and the monster usually moves forward; grabbing, harming and knocking down its targets. You don't want that happening to your tank; because then they can't save more vulnerable members of the party from disaster. So often you'll see the Tank move and reposition early in showdowns where the monster is prone to swingy, harmful movement during its reactions.

When it comes to Damage Per Swing (DPS) survivors the goal here is mostly set during construction of your gear grid tableau, what style they lean into greatly depends on their weapons and armor set. In general terms a DPS survivor wants as much Luck and/or Strength as possible and sufficient protection to ensure that they can withstand the odd stray attack or reaction. It's worth noting that you can run DPS survivors who are naked apart from several shields; however armor sets like Cycloid Scale and the above mentioned Dragon/Phoenix armor offer too much power in exchange for their 5 slots – so a “turtle” DPS survivor tends to be a temporary stepping stone in a settlement that has struggled to get enough hide.

Support Survivors tend to be used earliest in the Survivor's Turn flow; they will use their normal activation for some form of monster control if they are a passive support survivor. Or they may hit into the trap with a spear if they are a more active form of support. There's a host of different ways that support survivors work, but they are very much the glue that holds the entire strategy together; a big reason for this is because many support items have no failure state. They always get to do their thing.

You can also spread out your support items across multiple different survivors. This is why the Rawhide, Bone Club, Evasion Tank works in the early game. If the monster is in range, you get to smash it with the Bone Club and have a high chance of converting that attack into wound(s); if it is not in range then you are going to use the Rawhide Headband to work out where the monster is going to focus its attention and ensure that you'll be able to dodge its attacks before smacking it with your big bone next turn.

So action efficiency is a very fine art; and the truth is it is not something that can be taught directly to players because of how mutable and situational it is. You'll have more success learning how to succeed at this through play; as both successes and failures can help educate you (as long as you keep an objective look at what the best action was, and avoid outcome bias). This is the same skill that surrounds things such as knowing when to move to harder monsters, what to do when your settlement is stable and moderately developed (the answer to that one basically boils down to whatever is fun as long as you keep maintaining/growing population) and

I'd recommend slowing your play down, both before taking the survivor's turns and afterwards. The goal here is to be more considered with your actions before you taken them and then also being reflective on what you achieved after the turn is over. Just try and avoid being influenced by outcome bias. What matters is what the average success rates are for the actions you took, not any outliers. Just because your 10% chance of wounding worked out doesn't mean it was the right choice (unless it was a desperation action). This is always an important skill in any game, learning to identify what the average outcome was for a successful or failed action can identify if it was the right one in the first place. That's why I consider D10s to be a value of 5.5; sure you absolutely cannot roll a .5 with a D10, but it allows me to look at an attack and go:

“Okay, I have 4 strength total against toughness 10. My average here is 5.5 + 4; so the typical wounding (rolling 1 to 5) is going to fail. Is that the best I can do here or is it time to just hope? How often does this monster do failure or reflex reactions? What's in the discard pile?”

All of these things and more can go into assessing as complex a flow as the typical survivor's turn is. Sure you can boil it down to “I move next to the monster and attack.” If you want to be reductive to the point of making your decisions pointless sure you can do that. However; when you start to consider optimal positioning (hint, it's not always behind the monster, but that's not a bad place to start your planning at); reflex/reaction/wound percentages. Trap considerations and similar then you can come to realise that there's a lot going on, because the option 'do nothing' is at times the right decision because doing something and giving the monster a (re)action can just be making everything harder for the other survivors. This is why you generally should try to add some utility activation that cannot fail to your survivor grids, a tall ask because gear grids are already packed to the rafters.

Speaking of which. The supplemental article on Slot Compression Affinity which I promised is here. I wanted to separate it out because in truth it is a seperate topic, but I did confirm I'd be putting it out this week.