So, how does one PLAY this unusual new faction? Most obviously, you need to worry about your Cathedrals. Because you don’t have a Great Old One, you get major power savings, but this is ultimately negated by your need to spend 4-10 Power on Cathedrals. This is spread over time, however, so you never lose a whole turn to Awaken (unlike other factions). And your Cathedrals can earn extra Power, eventually reimbursing part or all of their cost.
You must balance your Cathedral construction with your Gate construction and your army. You need enough combat effectiveness to place your Cathedrals without undue interference. It may seem obvious to build a Cathedral in your starting Area on turn one, but that choice is still available later in the game. You are often better off building a second Gate in a neighboring area with a different glyph. You need a monster to protect your Gate too, so Brainless or Festival are good to aim at early on.
Your greatest advantages are first, how cost-effective your monsters are and second, your ability to engage in “social engineering” with the other players.
Your greatest weaknesses are first, your lack of a Great Old One, which renders your cultists vulnerable and second, your need to travel around the map. You must build strategies around this.
The real menace of the enemy Great Old Ones is not that they might fight you, but that they may Capture your cultists, against which you may seem defenseless. To avert this, you need to threaten battle (they’ll fear Cathedrals once you get Unholy Ground) or at least offer to withhold your favors of Cathedral placement and Festival.
You don’t need to fear combat. Your Un-Men is practically advantageous. Not only does it let you walk in place for a turn without spending Power, but you can strategically boost another player, presumably against a mutual enemy. Your Reanimated are often worth killing off instead of a Cultist, since a Reanimated pained off by itself is nigh-worthless. They’re cheap, too.
With Yothans, you have more battle dice than any Great Old One. Don’t unnaturally worry about losing them in battle – consider them an investment that needs to be cashed in at some point. You may need to pace out their loss however. In an ideal world, you’d lose your last Yothan on the last action of the last turn.
You don’t have any reliable way of getting bonus Elder Signs until later in the game, so you need to keep ahead with Gates.
SAMPLE ANCIENTS STRATEGY
Here is a sample plan for the Ancients. They have many possible choices. This is just one.
SETUP: Start in a spot that gives you at least three glyph options (hopefully more). For example, if you start in Earth’s North Atlantic, you’re adjacent to all four possibilities. Of course, this may leave you a little vulnerable, but remember Cthulhu Wars is about aggression, not passivity.
PHASE ONE: Move to an adjacent area, and build a Cathedral for 1 Power. Take Festival. Build a Gate at the Cathedral, then summon an Un-Man to guard it. (Choose someone far away from you to get the Festival power.) Move from your home area to an area NOT adjacent to the Cathedral, and build a Cathedral there. Do NOT defend this area – your plan is for another player to occupy it. Take another spellbook (I’d suggest Mindless or Worship Services.) Stall by summoning another Un-Man in your home area, or get a Reanimated.
In the Doom phase, use Dematerialize to move your home area Monster, plus a cultist or two to an area with a new glyph, not adjacent to your current areas. You’ll probably be vulnerable to another faction, so point out they’ll WANT your Cathedral to stay after you leave. (If you don’t have Worship Services yet, point out you may have it before next Doom phase.) You’ll end the turn with 10 Power and 2 Doom.
PHASE TWO: Build your third Cathedral, and take a useful spellbook. If you see other players plopping down Great Old Ones, you’ll want Extinction or Unholy Ground to defend yourself. In any case, you may want to take the spellbook that gives your foes their cheapest monsters this turn. Do this late in the turn, so they are short on Power to use their new toys. With luck your enemies will use their new freebies to fight one another instead of you. Take Consecration if you are not yet direly threatened. You have 9 Power left, so get a Yothan (if you have Extinction), plus build another Gate and guard it. If you don’t need a Yothan, you might be able to build a fourth Gate or your last Cathedral. Let’s assume you build that fourth Gate, instead of a Yothan. In any case you’ll need to spend Power to get your cultists in non-Gate areas to safety.
By the time of the Doom phase, assuming at least two other players have Gates at your Cathedrals, you start with 6 Doom, 16 Power, 4 Gates, and a fair number of monsters. Ritual, using Consecration to take an Elder Sign. You may be the first player to Ritual. If so, you’ll end up with 10 Doom, 11 Power, and an Elder Sign.
PHASE THREE: You may feel impressed by that 11 Power total plus a Ritual, but don’t forget, it means two other players got Power too. Plus if you’ve been steadily summoning Un-Men, your enemies are getting Power from that. Basically, when the Ancients are in play, ALL the other factions are a little stronger. So don’t get too cocky.
This turn you must aim at getting your last Cathedral placed. Don’t worry about trying to save Power by moving a long distance. Now that you have three Cathedrals already in play, it would be awkward anyway, so just suck up the 3 Power cost and get that sucker placed. Then start pulling out Yothans to hammer your enemies, steal their gates, and make them pay. You can get one big attack off each full turn with ease, using Dematerialization and proper preparation in the previous turn. I’ll assume you manage to hold onto your four gates (or capture one, but lose one), and build that last Cathedral during the course of play.
In the Doom phase, assuming three of your Cathedrals benefit from Worship Services, you should have 14 Doom and 17 Power. Do a Ritual of Annihilation (let’s assume it costs you 7). With four Cathedrals, you’ll get two more Elder Signs. At the ritual’s end, you have 18 Doom, 10 Power, and 3 Elder Signs. Plus if you planned carefully, you can Dematerialize and be in place to capture an enemy Gate with your Yothans & their little buddies.
PHASE FOUR: Use your 10 remaining Power to attack key positions and take Gates. If you are not afraid of losing a Yothan or two it shouldn’t be hard to get up to 5 Gates. You may need to sacrifice a Cathedral to take out an enemy Great Old One – if you do, rebuild it as soon as possible. Late in the turn, you should take your last spellbook – giving each enemy his “most expensive monster”. With luck, at least some enemies will already have those monsters on the tabletop, so they will be forced to take a cheaper monster from their pool.
In the Doom phase of this turn, you have 23 Doom, 17-18 Power, and 5 Gates. Naturally you should Ritual – this will bring up your Doom to 28, and now you have 5 Elder Signs, enough to end the game.
Note that this game only lasted four turns! Of course, I have assumed that your enemies didn’t mess with you too aggressively, or that if they did, they were not victorious. Naturally many games won’t go quite as smoothly for you. Beware Cthulhu using Submerge to annihilate your homeland, or Sleeper going on a rampage capturing your monsters when you are out of Power and defenseless. Or … any number of other possibilities. You have defenses, but it takes cunning and preparation to use them.
For some weeks we have been listening to you, and analyzing the experience people have with the Tcho-Tchos. The conclusions we have reached are threefold.
IT’S A NEW FACTION
First, as a new faction, many people are unprepared to deal with them, and suffer initial defeats. Then there is a natural tendency to fear the Tcho-Tcho advantages, or at least to fail to capitalize fully on their weaknesses. This is exacerbated by the fact that the Tcho-Tchos are actually pretty easy to master, so their players are up to snuff sooner than their opponents can figure out how to stop them. This aspect of the Tcho-Tchos I am not going to change. Indeed, I am proud of it.
TCHO TCHO TURTLING
Second, the Tcho-Tchos are too capable of “turtling” – holing up in the late game with 1-2 gates, recruiting HPs, and simply Ritualing for 4 Elder Signs at a time. Other factions can overwhelm or match this Doom potential by brute force.
For example, Cthulhu can often end the game with 5 Gates (and it’s easier in a game with Tcho-Tchos because they don’t often launch spoiling attacks). This means the last Doom phase for Cthulhu nets him 10 Doom plus an Elder Sign – two, if he reawakened Cthulhu in the turn. This gives him 11-16 Doom for his last turn. A Tcho-Tcho with 2 Gates, taking 4 elder signs, will earn 8-16 Doom in that same last turn.
Yellow Sign, using Third Eye, can easily gain 3-4 Elder Signs in the last turn, then Ritual with 2 gates (same as the Tcho Tchos) and get 2 more elder signs from his GOOs. That equals or exceeds the Tcho Tchos.
But, in the above examples, Cthulhu & Yellow Sign had to go out and DO things to attain that Doom. It’s not as fun for anyone when a good strategy is to sit in a hole & guard your precious.
So I am addressing this. I am not completely removing the Tcho Tcho ability to turtle – just tempering it. read on to see what I did.
OH BABY THAT STARTING HIGH PRIEST!
In a game using the High Priest Expansion, every faction except the Tcho Tchos gets a slight boost. My solution to this was to give the Tcho Tchos a bump up in this case – namely a starting high priest, at the expense of one of their cultists.
My logic was this would give the Tcho Tchos more starting choices. Boy, was I right! Reports are that folks have learned how to use this to a huge advantage, far more than we detected in our own tests. Kudos
HOW DID SANDY ADDRESS THESE BALANCE IDEAS?
I have changed two of the Tcho Tcho spellbooks.
The Tablets of the God spellbook now states that you earn 1 Elder Sign per Gated Area in which you have any high priests. You then lose all your high priests. This means you have to maintain and protect three gates to gain your 3 Elder Signs – no trivial matter for the combat-poor Tcho Tchos. Plus if you are forced into Martyrdom to protect a gate, you’ll need to re-recruit him before the Doom phase.
This still lets the Tcho Tchos turtle, a little. But not as much. There is a huge difference between 2 gates & 3 gates, plus the high priests have to be split up, too. It makes the Tcho Tchos far more interactive and forces them into confrontation, which is good.
Enemies who want to meddle with the Tcho Tchos will find it much easier. A gate defended by a cultist, a high priest, and 2 proto-shoggoths is not a tough nut to crack. Remember you don’t even have to kill the Tcho Tcho high priest – just get it away from the gate! Every faction has its own approach to this, which I will leave as an exercise for you players!
I have also changed the Hierophants spellbook. Now it states that when this spellbook is first received, EVERY faction with a high priest in the unit pool gets a free high priest. Thereafter, the Tcho Tchos (only) continue to get a free high priest with each subsequent spellbook.
This means that while the Tcho Tchos still start with a slight advantage in a high priest game, this is quickly trumped when the other factions get their free high priest! Also it means that, sometimes, the Tcho Tchos may wish to NOT get Hierophants as their first spellbook, to keep their enemies at bay. After all, the normal Tcho Tcho start is to get a spellbook in the first Doom phase, then take Hierophants. Now if they do this, all the other factions get a high priest too! It’s like giving them all 3 Power. Kind of scary.
Both of these changes give the Tcho Tchos more choices, and this makes them more interesting to play and to play against.
Some players have trouble getting their head around the Tcho-Tchos. Others have trouble seeing how the Tcho-Tchos can be stopped. This strategy guide should help everyone understand this weirdo faction better.
THE FIRST TURN CHALLENGE
In your first turn, you pretty much need a high priest. This is going to cost you 3 Power. Since you also want a gate (everyone does!), you have a problem. It’s 4 Power to build that gate, and 3 Power for the priest, which leaves you only 1 Power, which means you can’t guard your second Gate with a monster, since your only monster costs 2. In other words, you’ll have to guard that Gate by moving a cultist, or by recruiting your high priest there. And THEN you have to hope that only one enemy targets you for capture.
The difficulty is that when you build your new Gate, it is possible for at least two enemies to already have gates next to it. This assumes Crawling Chaos isn’t in the game, which will add a third threat. If both enemies produce 1 pt monsters to “guard their gate”, but then spend 2 Power to move to YOUR gate, and capture you, you have taken a pretty big hit.
There’s not much you can do about this except try to place that Gate where it is only adjacent to one enemy, or try to verbally convince your enemies not to gang up on you.
One other option is to NOT build that second gate, but instead sacrifice your own Gate at your start for a spellbook, (taking Hierophants) and then rebuild it. You won’t have to recruit a High Priest (since Hierophants gives you one), but you still can’t afford to build a second gate AND take a proto-shoggoth. So you’ll start your second turn with 2 less Power and 1 less Doom.
It’s a thorny situation, and shows you how the Tcho-Tchos are faced with critical decisions right from the start.
THE SECOND TURN BREAK
In the first Doom phase, assuming you “only” lost 1 cultist to capture, and did keep that second gate, you’ll start with Ubbo-Sathla (presumably guarding the outlier gate). There are several choices for your second spellbook, but Soulless is pretty popular, as it discourages (though doesn’t prevent) enemies from going after you.
This doom phase you’ll wind up with 10 Power, 1 High Priest, and 2 Doom. (Sack your existing High Priest in the Doom phase to awaken Ubbo, then take Hierophants to get him back.)
Ubbo’s combat is 0, so while you can use him to capture enemies, he can’t do much damage. This is probably a good turn to destroy and rebuild your start area gate, which also gives you a second high priest. With your 7 remaining Power, you should be able to either build a third gate and guard it with protoshoggoths, or attack with Ubbo-Sathla in an attempt to get him killed (might be hard unless an enemy awakened a nearby GOO), or you can reach for the stars and try both. If you succeed, you’ll have all three high priests! You may want to get Tablets of the Gods for your reward upon killing off Ubbo. See why below.
THIRD TURN CHALLENGE
If you get that third gate, don’t lose any cultists (and recruit back your captured one) AND kill off Ubbo-Sathla, then in the Gather phase you’ll have 15 Power. In the Doom phase, you’ll sack a high priest to re-awaken Ubbo, then with this much Power you’ll want to Ritual. All three high priests will be sacrificed, to give you no fewer than FOUR Elder Signs, which will also mean you get 2 new high priests, since you got both your 1 Elder Sign & 3 Elder Sign spellbooks! If you didn’t get Tablets of the Gods, you’ll only get 1 spellbook , but you’ll have an extra High Priest. If you’re the first one to Ritual (plausible, if not certain) you’ll end up with 10 Power, 8 Doom, and 4 Elder Signs. You have five spellbooks too, plus presumably a few protoshoggoths.
You could try to build a fourth gate and protect it. Your basic problem here is that with four gates, and only 6 protoshoggoths (not all of which are yet in play), and 1 GOO, you can’t guard those gates very well. At least one gate is going to have either just a single proto, or else Ubbo won’t have a proto alongside him. Plus with four elder signs AND four gates, you’ve painted a big target on your forehead.
So maybe it’s time to strike. Use Idolatry to move Ubbo (if his die roll for combat was decent) and a proto or two to a strong enemy’s homeland, and see if you capture their gate. If not, at least you set them back. Then use your excess power to go after another gate. Send a high priest to protect your force (Martyrdom).
This brings up another issue with the Tcho-Tchos. It’s not too hard to have 3 priests. Since another is “on the way” next time you get a spellbook, you need to get rid of one of them to open the way for the new recruit. While you can just sack him for 2 Power, Martyrdom is usually a better choice, because a well-chosen battle can take a gate (or save one!).
You could try to get a 5th gate, but that really is almost impossible for you to defend. Every other faction but one is skilled at defeating a Tcho-Tcho gate only defended with a cultist & a proto. Crawling Chaos can turn your proto invisible with a polyp. Shub-Niggurath can Avatar you away. Opener literally loves to attack you when your shoggoths are decreasing his combat potential, because it means yours is low too, and his guys can promote via Million Favored Ones. Sleeper captures proto (who doesn’t benefit from Soulless). Windwalker Howls you away, Cthulhu Devours (and has enough combat to bull through your Terror), and Yellow Sign Zingayas. Really only the Ancients don’t have a simple response to the Tcho-Tcho gate “problem”, and they can try to finagle other factions into being catspaws with Festival, or in the worst case, attack with a couple of Reanimated, whose attack is good enough to handle it, if not as trivially as with the others.
Another problem you have with the Ancients is two of their spellbooks give every other faction their “cheapest” and then their “most expensive” monsters. This is much less exciting for you, as a Tcho-Tcho, with only one monster! But perhaps it makes sense that the two human-centered factions are natural foes.
FOURTH TURN
Anyhoo, if you hang onto that fourth gate, this Gather phase you’ll have 16 Power (two high priests). In the Doom phase, at least one player should Ritual, which gives you your last spellbook. You need to Ritual (which sends you to 16 Doom, and drops your Power to 9-10). But first you have the tough choice of whether to sacrifice your high priests before or in the Ritual. Doing it before means you’ll start the turn with four-six more Power (depending on whether you get your spellbook before or after your own ritual). Using them DURING the Ritual means you get three extra Elder Signs, but then no more High Priests unless you recruit them yourself. Probably the Elder Signs are worth it though, since this sails you up to 8 Elder Signs.
If you sack the priests, the turn starts with you at 9-10 Power, no High Priests, a 2d6 combat Ubbo, but easily able to get all your proto-shoggoths out. Unfortunately, the other players all have great old ones by now, and most or all of their own spellbooks, which means you are in for trouble. Hold on tight. Unless your opponents blunder, you will not be able to get another Gate, and probably won’t even be able to retain the four you start with.
The difficulty is that you are an easy target to hit. Your Gates are comparatively ill-defended – even two proto-shoggoths can’t really hold out against a determined attack, and all your high priests are gone, so you don’t have Martyrdom anymore. If you choose to recruit a High Priest, his best use is to keep intact until the next Doom phase so you can sack him for more Elder Signs, which means you will have even less Power to fight off your enemies.
You may well be driven back to 2 gates this turn. Ubbo might die. The exact mode of attack will vary with the enemy, but Crawling Chaos will be excited to hit Ubbo to get Elder Signs and/or Power, Cthulhu may just hammer you for the gates, and so forth. You will be scrambling this turn, but this is how the Tcho-Tchos roll.
In your favor, you have 8 elder signs racked up, and at least one more on the way. You also have 16 Doom, and a good chance at getting 4-6 more next Doom phase, plus if you recruit a High Priest with your sparse remaining Power, you can get up to 2 more Elder signs. You have a decent shot at victory.
The Ancients are able to use their science revivify dead tissue, letting it move and perform tasks. They use these living corpses as workers or warriors, and can even reanimate a portion of a corpse.
They generally use the corpses of criminals or heretics for this. Or now, in the Cthulhu Wars, captured prisoners.
In the original tale, they use simple mutilated bodies to frighten intruders. But we know they can attach appliances & weapons to their forms in times of need (or war), so our example is heavily-armed.
In other words, Lovecraft invented the idea of atomic-powered zombies. And now they are in Cthulhu Wars!
How Do I Use Reanimated?
As with the other Ancients units, you get three. The Reanimated have a combat of 2. With their Mindless spellbook, they only cost 1 Power – a bargain! In fact, the best cost-to-combat ratio of any faction monster!
Their disadvantage is that they are not self-willed. If no non-Reanimated Ancients units are in their area, they can’t initiate battle, move, or capture, but just sit idly, awaiting instructions.
They pack a good punch, and are great gate guards. Because you always have to accompany them with another unit (typically a cultist or un-man), they can be expensive to move.
Unlike most 2 Combat units, they are so cheap you don’t mind taking them as losses, which is nice when preserving a Yothan or a garrisoned gate.
Lovecraft reports the Ancients have the ability to transform a person into plasma-like, almost gaseous state. In this form, the victim becomes able to twist and distort his body in exaggerated ways.
I have chosen to call these entities, former humans, the “Un-Men.”
At least at first, the victims can still mentally discipline themselves into a semblance of humanity, and even be restored to normal by dint of technology. But over time their minds, and thus their forms become more monstrous and inhuman until they have almost no connection to their former life.
Naturally, the ill-effects of this process means the Ancients only select suitable specimens- typically the insane or criminal. Of course some people actually volunteer for it – no doubt believing in advantages of this new life. (For example: near-immortality)
Since only debased specimens are generally subjected to the plasmatifying process, this accelerates the distortions & madness even more. There is a feedback loop of horror.
But, even at their most corrupt, the Ancients wield power over the Un-Men: what they can do, they can undo. Fear of dissolution keeps the Un-Men in line.
How Are They Used?
You have three if them available. They have 0 Combat. (After all, they have no physical form.) Once you gain the Un-Man spellbook of Festival, their price drops to zero, making them a fabulous cheap monster or delaying tactic. (Just summon one to effectively “pass” for a turn. It costs nothing!)
As with all Ancients units, they come with a disability. In the case of the Un-Men, when you summon one, you must choose another player to gain 1 Power.
Naturally you should use this bonus to your advantage. Give the Power to a faction you think is unlikely to go after you. Engage in negotiations.
I’ve seen an Ancient promise that if Yellow Sign gave him the 3 Doom bonus from his spellbook requirement, he’d in turn give Yellow Sign the Power from his next three Un-Men summons. (He only did it twice, though, the rascal.)
Highly useful but perhaps a little scary to use in the first turn, when giving an enemy 1 Power can really overclock them.
Deep below the blue-lit cavern of K’n-Yan is the red-lit cavern of Yoth, inhabited by a race of intelligent reptiles. Long thought extinct, the few remaining Yothans now work with the Ancients.
Every faction has acolytes. Every faction has monsters. Yothans give their Ancients allies something unique – Terror. What’s more, they are the ONLY Terror that appears in groups (all the rest are loners).
The Yothans are one of the most powerful units. Not only are they resistant to many spellbooks since they are Terrors, but they have a Combat of 7! That’s more than Cthulhu! And the Ancients have three of them!
The Extinction spellbook means they only cost 3 Power, but gives them the serious drawback that when they are killed, they go back into the box, and can never be re-summoned again.
Naturally enough, some players freak out over these weaknesses and try to work around them. But the far cheaper price of getting the spellbooks far outweighs their disadvantages. Even the Yothan’s dire Extinction is not so terrible – usually you won’t need to use them in combat until the last turn or two, and if you are able to pace out your losses over time, all is well.
To be frank, if you lose your last Yothan near the end of the final turn, who cares? You won’t need him again, and really, if he died in battle, his 7 dice may well have done the job you summoned him for.
But, watch out. Crawling Chaos can use Flying Polyps to Invisibilitize cheap Ancient units so he can focus on killing Yothans, and Vengeance means Hastur is absolute poison to Yothans.
Naturally, the ill-effects of this process means the Ancients only select suitable specimens- typically the insane or criminal. Of course some people actually volunteer for it – no doubt believing in advantages of this new life. (For example: near-immortality)
Since only debased specimens are generally subjected to the plasmatifying process, this accelerates the distortions & madness even more. There is a feedback loop of horror.
Naturally you should use this bonus to your advantage. Give the Power to a faction you think is unlikely to go after you. Engage in negotiations.
Every faction has acolytes. Every faction has monsters. Yothans give their Ancients allies something unique – Terror. What’s more, they are the ONLY Terror that appears in groups (all the rest are loners).
The Yothans are one of the most powerful units. Not only are they resistant to many spellbooks since they are Terrors, but they have a Combat of 7! That’s more than Cthulhu! And the Ancients have three of them!
Naturally enough, some players freak out over these weaknesses and try to work around them. But the far cheaper price of getting the spellbooks far outweighs their disadvantages. Even the Yothan’s dire Extinction is not so terrible – usually you won’t need to use them in combat until the last turn or two, and if you are able to pace out your losses over time, all is well.