u/holymadness

I dusted off my copy which I hadn't played for about 6 months, got reacquainted with the rules and pitted the Minoans against the Maurians -- two relatively simple civilizations. I got destroyed, 78 to 99, on Overlord difficulty. The Maurians, as I discovered to my chagrin, are land-hungry expansionists who completely emptied the draw deck of regions in just a few turns. A single prosperity card at the end of the barbarian era netted them something like 18 points. On top of that, their nonstop attacks forced me to abandon my regions almost as quickly as I managed to play them, leaving me in a difficult position to achieve glory or prosperity.

My strategy of aggressively thinning my deck while acquiring almost no new cards, rushing towards developing my civilization, and achieving fame didn't work out. My engine was running well, but it was too slow compared to my rival: I should have better taken advantage of my fast transition to empire to acquire high-value civilised cards and tried to interfere more with the bot.

A game of Imperium takes a couple hours, but I never feel the time pass. I enter a flow state that I used to experience when playing Civilization II on my family PC way back in the day, trying to resist the lure of playing "just one more turn..." before realizing it's midnight. Funnily enough, though the game is quite open and you can choose between many actions in a turn, I rarely experience any analysis paralysis. Each individual action is relatively low-impact: on a historical timescale, you're slowly nudging your civilization in a direction over hundreds of years and you only feel the combined weight of your choices after many, many turns of pursuing a strategy. It goes without saying that theme is sublimely married to mechanics. Imperium also has an excellent ratio of "crunch per minute": setup is fast and bot turns take <30 seconds, so I'm spending the vast majority of my time on my turns. Pure bliss.

I've now failed this scenario 6 times in a row before even getting to the 2A quest card. Either you let the staging area threat rise unmanageably high in no time, or else raise your own threat by 2-4 per round, which kills you before you have a chance to clear the 6(!) locations needed to progress. Look at this, there's 24 threat on the board before even revealing cards in the questing phase.

I have tried to add as much threat management into my decks as as I can think of: Gandalf, the Galahadrim's Greeting, Pillars of the Kings, Northern Tracker, Double Back. It's not enough.

Do I need to completely remake my decks for this scenario? I've been trying to tinker with them on the margins, as they're fairly solid (slightly tweaked Gondor and Rohan starter decks), but I keep falling short.