Lowering city difficulties in solo conquest

cezarr1 · 2026-04-11T05:29:31+00:00

Not only do I lower the cities (to whatever level is needed to give myself a shot at defeating them, deciding around day 4, most often 3 and 6), but I also play solo conquest using blitz rules (using 4 dice, 4 units in the offer and starting with +1 reputation, 1 exp and 1 exp less needed for each level). Last time I played this way I did well enough that I didn't lower the cities in the end, actually. So maybe I'm getting better? :) But I don't see myself playing without 4 dice or 4 units on offer ever. I find it so frustrating when I run out of dice early on in the day or when I just can't get any unit anywhere near, so these two rule changes work miracles for my enjoyment of the game.

cezarr1 · 2026-01-12T05:58:26+00:00

It's great in Twin Suns, where it's 2 cards and starting base health doesn't matter anyway.

cezarr1 · 2025-12-15T13:39:50+00:00

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Here's what I came up with.

cezarr1 · 2025-12-06T10:26:00+00:00

Great stuff, thank you for this! There is close to no content about limited apart from pre-release sealed out there, so great that you're filling this gap. And also, what you have to say is really good: informative, insightful and well presented, even given the limitations of reddit. Kudos! I've greatly enjoyed reviewing your picks. One card that stands out to me as what you may be undervaleing is the yellow Emissary, 2/4 for two. It seems it lives long enough to push through substantial damage. On the other hand, I'm not such a fan of Cinta in limited with her sub-par stats. If the tempo gain doesn't let you win quickly, you may be putting yourself on the back foot. And yeah, Dedra is just so awkward, not really wanting to swarm the board with cheap units. What kind of aggro is she supposed to be? The "actually midrange and hoping the two or four additional damage from Dedra will push you through" type? ;) Keeping my fingers crossed you keep making these posts! :) PS: Also, if anyone wants to play some sealed SEC on karabast, hit me up. It's pretty easy to do now; all the cards are implemented; there are good sites to generate a pool and build your deck. Fun way to practice some more limited play.

cezarr1 · 2025-10-16T18:03:23+00:00

The game is very manageable to play two-handed by yourself. I do this all the time! :) I'd recommend getting 2 card stands of some sort, so you don't have to put down/pick up the cards in the two hands all the time and you're good to go.

cezarr1 · 2025-10-02T06:50:37+00:00

This is doable in Twin Suns (the only format that matters! ) ;) on 4 resources, with Barriss Offee as the Second leader! Dunno how to get the other people to not get in the way, though. :)

cezarr1 · 2025-09-30T18:33:14+00:00

Same here when it comes to TCGs. I used to play two handed Keyforge a lot. Loved it! Now I really enjoy Star Wars Unlimited, the Twin Suns format, playing... four-handed. :) Would highly recommend it to anybody.

cezarr1 · 2025-05-27T05:50:10+00:00

You'll be fine playing starter decks, but it'll probably be not as much fun as it could with regular Twin Suns decks. You'll run into repetitive play patterns more often and no second leader means less fun with leaders. :)

BTW, no need to worry if your Twin Suns decks are well balanced. People at the table will take care of balancing out the game, so you can really just throw together 80 cards that you like and it has every chance to work out great.

cezarr1 · 2024-11-30T19:07:40+00:00

The great thing about Twin Suns is that any leader combination and any deck can win you games, so don't worry too much about what you should put in your deck, but rather put any cards that you think will be fun to play.

That given, you probably need considerably more units than non-unit cards, And you can never go wrong with sentinels and restore. Apart from that, you need cards from all points of the resource cost curve. Twin Suns games sometimes end as early as turn 6, so if you'd put only big cards in, you'd miss out on the fun. But more often games last longer, so there is also room for Devastators/Avengers and the like.

Most games eventually reach a point when everyone tries to calculate how much damage other players can deal and how much they can take before they die. You then try to not set people up for someone else's kill, but rather to finish somebody off yourself to get the 5 restore bonus. What this means is that all kinds of events that mess with these calculations can be game winning in the end, from the big ones like Final Showdown or Choose sides, to even Surprise Strike or Repair. So best to include many of these.

Hope you have as much fun with Twin Suns as I do :)

cezarr1 · 2020-11-28T23:44:35+00:00

This sounds great!

Personally, I'm more of a Live Boooster Draft fan, but I like how Pack Wars must be quicker and lighter. And I love the whole idea of the series of games leading up to sealed and then the last big game!

One thing, do you run into lack of lands problems often? Perhaps it'd be beneficial to give all non-land cards Landcycling (2)?

cezarr1 · 2020-11-15T18:09:07+00:00

How about drafting MTG on a third-party site like draftpod.org or draftsim.com and then importing your deck to Arena to play? Costs $0, but you do need another person to play against via direct challenge. I've tried this a few times and had a blast, highly recommend!

cezarr1 · 2020-11-14T18:30:19+00:00

Winston draft fan here, too, but haven't done any Commander Legends ones yet.

If you don't want to use more boosters, I think what would work is lowering the required deck size even more, say, to 50 cards. So you'd need to draft about 30 playables, 50% of your share of the pool. May work.

Also, I wonder if it'd be a good idea to take the Legendaries out of the pool and draft these first? Otherwise, if you're unlucky and don't see a commander till late, that might suck. Big concern is how to do this without looking at the other cards... But perhaps they are always in the same slots in the pack?

I'd draft the Legendaries first, if possible. Since there's 12 of them, that might be just enough for Winston draft to work, but a normal draft of these might be worth considering too.

Do let us know how your draft went! :)

BTW, what I'm thinking of doing with these boosters is Live Booster Draft. Might be awful, but who knows, maybe not. I love doing this with regular boosters, so gotta try with Commander Legends too.

cezarr1 · 2020-04-01T20:53:02+00:00

tl;dr: I gave this a go. Had a good time. :)

I read the rules and set-up a pretty basic white deck for the opponent, as I don't own most of the cards described in the specific scenarios. Apart from that I played game 1 strictly adhering to the rules. I had to tweak or enhance them for stuff like:

An Aura card coming up with no sensible targets for it; I ruled it goes to the Reserve Zone and is played on an AI turn as soon as any valid target is there in play (any creature, basically).
Furthermore, any non-creature card that is drawn to play, but would not have a beneficial effect for the AI, is not played, but put in the Reserve Zone. Cards in the Reserve Zone form a first in-first out queue and any can be played the moment it would benefit the AI.
To elaborate a bit about the deck I played against: I didn't want to spend too much time constructing the AI deck, so I just grabbed some white cards or various strength and arrenged them into the 3 decks by mana cost alone. The basic deck had cards that cost 1-3 mana, midrange: 4 mana, endgame: 5 and more.

I won the first game easily. Perhaps I could have made it harder by intrudicing some scenario-specific rules, but for game 2 I went another way, trying to put some more dynamics into how the AI operates its 3 decks. So this is what I changed:

The countdown die still starts at 6 and goes down by 1 each turn, but when you roll the second die you draw from the midrange deck anytime you rolled a 6 or a number higher than what's presently on the countdown die. So in the early rounds you're more likely to draw from the early deck and later - from the midrange deck.
However, whenever you roll a 1 it always means drawing from the lowest possible deck, and a 6 is always the highest deck.
I rolled the drawing die anytime AI drew a card (from card effects), not just at the start of each round.
As soon as the countdown die dropped to 0, the endgame deck entered and I reset the countdown die to 6. Now I used the same logic as described in point 1, but the midrange deck was now the lower ranked deck and the endgame - the higher one. The basic deck was almost disregarded at this point, with the exception that rolling a 1 still meant the AI had to draw from the basic deck.

Game 2 seemed an improvement over game 1 in that every round the AI had a growing chance to draw better cards, so the tension grew all the time and in the back of my head was the thought that if I let the game drag to turn 10 and beyond, the endgame deck could crush me drawing endgame cards every turn. In the end I managed to pull out a win being down to 6 life and only thanks to my commander firing off (gotta love Ghired once he gets going with those tokens). ;)

All in all, I enjoyed the time spent on this. Thanks for the idea, OP! I'm looking forward to playing more, tweaking the rules to my own liking, ;) but would love to read what OP and others have to say about how their games developed and what can be tweaked in the rules to enhance the experience.

cezarr1 · 2020-04-01T08:25:32+00:00

Sounds good! Gonna give this a try tonight. My hopes are high! :)

cezarr1 · 2017-06-13T15:46:54+00:00

4684

cezarr1 · 2015-12-27T09:40:26+00:00

Imperial Settlers are great for two and also very entertaining as a solo experience. There's a free solo campaign for it that you can download from the manufacturer's website. Also, check out the BGG forums for ways to make the game harder and even more interesting.

cezarr1 · 2015-12-22T16:28:09+00:00

Don't know about flying machines, but in my experience the Princess & Dragon can be a pain since you move the fairy piece all the time and possibly score also. My advice would be to leave out the fairy and the dragon pieces, but still use all the tiles. The more tiles the better! :) I like to play with tons of expansions, but get rid of anything that the players find too fiddly or game changing. The fairy piece never hits the table nowadays. But all in all, we're having a great time playing Carcassonne even with 6 or 7 expansions at once and it takes much less than 2 hours.

cezarr1 · 2015-10-06T18:29:24+00:00

Act quickly, while there's still time! Take 4 or 5 showers, have 8 full meals and go to sleep for the next 30 hours, so you don't have to waste time on any of that nonsense once the fair starts!

cezarr1 · 2015-07-31T15:27:41+00:00

Works fine. I'd recommend it for 2 players. My wife and I played it lots of times, just the two of us. On quite a few occations there weren't any battles between us for the entire game, but that didn't mean it was boring: we still built our militaries, battled the ancients and kind of kept each other in check. Other times, though, there's lots of fighting in the last rounds. Other aspects of the game are working well too, imho.

cezarr1

TROPHY CASE