Hello,

I am quite new to GoT (only 10 games under the belt), but with my group, we felt during most of our games that the game was often too passive and "locked", with some players only playing 2-3 cards in the whole game. Nobody would dare to make a move before the last round(s), because of :
- king bashing if the move would succeed
- inability to make a successful attack, without getting help from another player

The first point is expected (and enjoyable), as this is fundamental to ffa games.
However, the second point is where I feel more frustrated about. This is mainly due to one main design point in the game, which lies in the support mecanism (and the way the map is designed). Most houses have one specific sea where they can put 3 ships, and support from this point most of their territories. This is also the case with lands, albeit less prevalent.
Combined with the fact that this is almost very hard to push forward in an ennemy sea (because you cannot support the fight, while the defender can), I feel like the game often ends in a locked state where attacking a position is incredibly hard.

Is there something that I am missing, and is this feeling disappearing after more games, or is it a general feeling/issue with the game ?

Following that, the proposed variant that we are currently thinking about (but did not have the time to test it yet) is to remove the support token once its used once. Meaning that you could only support one fight per round. This would allows several things :
- make the player really thinks about which fights he wants to support (especially when supporting another player)
- add the possibility to do multiple attacks on the same territories in one round, knowing that the defender will only be able to support the fight once.

What do you guys think about this variant ? And do you think this would affect the balance of the game, and that some houses would be far more impacted by it than others ?

I am not talking specifically about lanni-greyjoy fight. More about the fact that with how strong supporting is, it really reduces your panel of options.
Example would be : as stark, I may want to fake an attack by putting a march order on a big army in winterfell, and instead of attacking greyjoy, I would attack Bara. In most cases, this will not even be an option, even if Bara did not read it at all, because he will have massive support anyway from blackwater (and maybe even kings landing).
And while allying with someone else (that could raid the support for example) may be doable, in a lot of case, this is not even possible (cf. support in sea of dorne, blackwater, etc. that are unraidable).

And what I mean by king bashing is that even if your attack is successful, this makes you the most powerful player, meaning that people will then all try to attack you. This, combined with the massive investment and planning you need to do to land a successful attack, makes aggressive play quite unrewarding.

Again, maybe its just in our group, but are we really the only ones having played games where most players did not cycle once through their deck ?

EDIT : On the balancing aspect, it may indeed make the lanni-greyjoy fight even more unbalanced, so this may be something to look upon with additional change if we want to try this variant (maybe combining it with the 6-T variant).

Last edited by Rainbooow on 2018-Apr-09 18:32, edited 2x in total

Thank you for the explanation, and indeed, I think we are not using enough siege engine to break deadlocks.
Even tough, I still do not like how prominent support token is - it really reduces quite a bit the panel of moves you can do and the decision making for the defender (put as much boats/units in your unraidable territory, then put a support token on this territory for the rest of the game). It really is frustrating to not be able to attack even with twice more land power, because there are 3 boats supporting it from behind...and if you want to remove those boats, then this is even harder as you first need to win a sea battle.

Even if you can break a defense with the help of SE, this requires so many preparations (and enough luck so that you are on the right place on the bidding tracks, that you have the military advantage, etc.) that your whole mid/late game will be along this specific move. So you are playing a 5-6 hours where you will spent half of the time (or more) planning a single move (with some mock attacks maybe), and this may not even happen depending on the events that are drawn.

But indeed, you are right, and that was one of our fear about the proposed variant : it will make almost impossible to defend a 1v2, even temporarily, which is definitely an issue...