Assassin's Creed Recollection - Ubisoft

[Top Shelf]

I’ve been having a fair amount of success with the following deck Red/Green site deck I’ve named Siteology. I’d love to get your feedback on the card choices and possible matchups.

Siteology

Sites
5 Basilica Di San Pietro
3 Roman Temple Ruins
5 Great Library
5 Seeking Sanctuary
3 Quiet Chapel - I want 5
4 Prestigious College
3 Basilica Di Santa Maria Novella - Great combination with Basilica Di San Pietro

Agents
5 Amerigo Vespuco - Amazing rush control
4 Borgia Cardinal - Great finisher
1 Rodrigo Borgia, Pope - Not sure I need him
1 Leonardo Da Vinci - Not sure I need him

Actions
3 Field Study - Seems like the right number
5 Papal Influence - Love this card and every red deck
3 Wrath of the Righteous

Matchups
Siteology is great vs. Rush decks and midrange control decks. It’s struggling against reset/combo decks although it operates quickly enough that it can achieve victory with Papal Influence or Borgia Cardinal before they go off. My guess is the win % against true control decks and combo decks is 30%.

Input Requested!

• Does anyone have any suggestions on replacing the two late game “finisher agents”? It seems I’m winning before they become relevant and they scream as outliers in my deck construction.
  
• I’m also looking for cards that can increase my win chances vs. combo decks. Any card suggestions?

I’m happy to explain any of the cards or reasoning behind their selection.
If anyone would like to play on Game Center you can find me at Top Shelf in TX. I have a long history of playing Magic the Gathering including a few Pro Tours, as well as WoW, and Vs CCG. (almost accepted a job to work at Upper Deck). I’m really enjoying AC: Recollection so far.

[Brontobeuf]

What about cards that increase your influence?
Judgement day, Seeking Sanctuary or Pontifical High Mass maybe.

And if you want to win vs combo, add Scientific Espionage.

[ategaw]

Originally Posted by Top Shelf

Siteology

Sites

I have similar deck with yours but I don't have my iPad with me to compare listing. There are few things for considerations:

> 3 Basilica Di Santa Maria Novella - Great combination with Basilica Di San Pietro

I had 4-5 of these as well but I find that at most I get +2 out of the synergy. So I replaced them with Lair of Romulus, site cost 6 / income -1, influence 5. Same cost but +2 influence with drawback -2 income difference. I find my deck tend to have more gold than it can use so having -1 income is no big deal. The deck ended up faster as well.

> 5 Seeking Sanctuary
Consider Pontifical High mass, action 5, +2 to all sites influence.. and Judgment Day, action 2, lose all gold and each is converted to +1 influence to target site. Good finisher as well although I don't want to have 5 of them.. I put only 1 or 2.

> 5 Amerigo Vespuco - Amazing rush control
I like Roma site (cost 4, influence 2) that prevents agents from campaigning in the region and it also improves your site theme.

> vs other site deck:
I forgot the name.. there's a Golden site that neutralize opposite site when it resolved. cost 4, influence 1.

> Leonardo and the Pope
I think Judgment day and Daring experiments, action 2, lose all gold and draw 1 for each 2 gold.. are better to make use of the excess gold late game.

> 3 Roman Temple Ruins
I use divine Interventions for cost 1 income booster (discards opponent highest cost card) but it's Assassin rare so not easy to get.

> I also like to use that Golden (Stables?) site that cost 2, influence 1, income +X (X=number of sites) as well.

[Tortimer]

I just purchase the game and plan on doing the solo portion before attempting online. I'm a old time MTG player and at one time was fairly good. I started playing MTG just after the first couple of sets came out Legends etc. I had some great cards that were worth a lot at the time. I haven't played MTG in years though. I also tried the Star Wars game back then also but didn't care for it. I just like collecting the cards but the game wasn't that great IMO. From the sounds of this topic/posts I think I will enjoy Assassin's Creed. The one problem I might have is I have never play a Assassin's Creed game before but hopefully it doesn't make much difference when playing this game.

[ktern]

300 credits a day is enough for someone who just wants to buy Templar packs and play more casually, which I'm hoping will become more of an option again once there's a better matchmaking system. I think it's great that there's potential here for both the hardcore and the casuals, and this game seems like it'll give back as much as you put in.

(Sure, the game isn't quite at that point yet, but I've already gotten my $3 of fun out of it, and there seems to be more on the horizon.)

I won't have enough time to spend on this game to justify sinking more cash into it for IAP (I used to play MTG but also stopped because of all the IRL things going on), but I'm far from upset that I can't compete with the top tiers. Anyone who's played a CCG even remotely seriously understands that's just how it works.

Hell, this game could easily have just been a cheap cash-in on the Assassin's Creed franchise like so many other iOS games from big-name series. I'm amazed that there's so much meat to this game and such an enthusiastic community for it already.

[braczynski17]

Originally Posted by Proc19

Just as a simple scenario, imagine that only 1 engineer employee spent time on this game for 6 months and was miraculously able to do all of the game design, balancing, development, integration of artistic assets, and testing. Let's say that's 50K engineering time (half a year's salary plus benefits at a fairly conservative/low-ball rate for software engineers). That means to recoup the cost of the game, revenue needs to meet or exceed 50K/0.7 (Apple gets a 30% cut) = ~$71K. Let's say that they priced at $0.99 out of the gates. They need 71,000 downloads to recoup their up-front cost.

Long time lurker, but I had to create an account to reply to this. I am quite fed up with all the complaints about Ubisoft being greedy. Just look at the game's credits page and you will see that more than 15 people worked on this game. Assuming about a year of development time, that means the game cost about $850 000 to produce. At this price, the game will not make any money for Ubisoft at the $2.99 price point, and even less now that it's $0.99. So if that means that IAP is necessary, I don't have a problem with that. No one is forcing you to buy anything, and all this complaining is getting a bit ridiculous IMHO.

[Proc19]

Originally Posted by braczynski17

Long time lurker, but I had to create an account to reply to this. I am quite fed up with all the complaints about Ubisoft being greedy. Just look at the game's credits page and you will see that more than 15 people worked on this game. Assuming about a year of development time, that means the game cost about $850 000 to produce. At this price, the game will not make any money for Ubisoft at the $2.99 price point, and even less now that it's $0.99. So if that means that IAP is necessary, I don't have a problem with that. No one is forcing you to buy anything, and all this complaining is getting a bit ridiculous IMHO.

Hope you got the point that I was taking an extreme example and showing that even then, Ubi might not recoup their costs. I wholeheartedly agree that the complaints of "greed" are a bit exaggerated, especially when one actually starts doing even simple calculations.

[Proc19]

Originally Posted by Brontobeuf

...

@Proc19:
Media is my favorite faction so far. The flavor is great in it, and the cards are all full of tricks.

Love the deck. I hope you'll get your copies asap to improve oit the way you want.

Exit Stage Right has to stay. It's a strong card, and your deck is good with it (i posted a deck fully based on it with Carnefice on the official forum thread btw ^^).

I'm really not sure about Knowledge has a price in your deck. I don't like the card (without mass control in the deck), and maybe you should play one more Knowledge is power and 4x Plentifull Crop instead. Giving a card to a starter deck is ok, but giving a card to another strong deck is lethal.

[edit: removed the crappy idea and replaced it by a good one]
you should try Scientific Espionage. It's a key card in my deck. Think about how your deck will behave against the Pantheon/Ri combo, and you'll see that you would just lose to it. This card is the solution to this. And a quite radical one.

...

I've found most of the factions to be quite enjoyable, although I think I find the Crime faction to be the least enjoyable for me (perhaps due to me having the least complete set of deck building materials in that faction).

I did see your butcher deck posting, and it was an interesting one. I haven't run across too many people playing Exit Stage Right, though. It may be tough to build a deck around it until you accumulate enough copies of it along with the suitable bigs to swap. Fun to play for sure, so I'll probably try to keep it in.

The suggestion to add Scientific Espionage is a great one, albeit one I can't try out yet. I have yet to pull one out of a booster =). I will keep it in mind when the Auction House opens, though. In the meantime, I tend to have to play Pick Your Poison to break combos, and then rely on a quicker beat down to stop Pantheon/RI. I've only played such a deck once or twice with this deck, though.

Lastly, regarding Knowledge Has a Price, I haven't really thought it through fully, but it's also the speed of resolution (surprise) that I like about it, with the +3 resources coming in a fraction of a day, vs. having to wait on the other alternatives to resolve across half a day. Would it be nearly 2 resources accumulated by that time? I'll have to give the alternatives a try as well and see how they fare.

[Evilkarma]

what is this Pantheon/RI combo?

[braczynski17]

Originally Posted by Proc19

Hope you got the point that I was taking an extreme example and showing that even then, Ubi might not recoup their costs. I wholeheartedly agree that the complaints of "greed" are a bit exaggerated, especially when one actually starts doing even simple calculations.

Yeah, sorry, that wasn't aimed at you... I was just elaborating on your analysis. I'm just happy Ubisoft has made a smart, fun game. This could've easily been a title that just relies on the license name, without any innovative ideas. Instead we get a really polished, solid game (one that I've now sunk countless hours into).