Friday, January 9, 2009

CE alien survey #6: ANTI-MATTER

First appearance: Eon expansion set #2.

Plain-English power: Your ships are negative; the other guy's aren't; lower total wins.

Loved by: The mathematically-inclined; those who enjoy pounding powerhouses such as Warrior and Macron.

Loathed by: Those who don't "get" integer addition; the aforementioned powerhouses.

Three ways to win as Anti-Matter:
  1. Attack a planet with a ton of ships on it, then send as many ships as you can. The enemy is in a hole already.
  2. Remember that reinforcements add to your total. If you need to play them, play them on the enemy's side.
  3. Try to manipulate alliances such that you'll win whether you get zapped or not.
Three ways to win against Anti-Matter:
  1. Alliances. Without allies, you are guaranteed to be "behind" before cards are played (even with only 1 ship).
  2. Do the math. You don't want to waste a zap if Anti-Matter wins anyway. Powerhouses such as Macron should consider the virtues of self-zapping.
  3. The 00 card is like gold, especially to Virus or Tripler, who can use it pull off a game-changing upset.
At CE Online? Yes. And CEO has -1 and -4 pods, too.

Anything else? Oddly, Anti-Matter's flare has pretty much nothing to do with its power.

— Contributed by Toomai Glittershine

8 comments:

Lindsey said...

Standard way #4 to win as Anti-Matter: Cosmic Zap yourself. (But beware of the Unzap.)

Anonymous said...

The main problem with this Alien is that it makes your opponents' bad cards into good cards (but only against you). And it doesn't provide the same benefit to you, so you can still get plenty of bad cards.

If it wasn't for the ability to subtract ships while opponents add theirs, this would be a horrible power.

TheDukester said...

That's a fair point, and one I hadn't even thought of until someone brought it up a couple of weeks ago in the CE Online lobby. I like the way that Cosmic can still surprise me with little things like that.

My new theory is that an A-M player MUST try for a quick start. The first two offensive encounters, for example, should bring an advantage of 8 (-4 to 4), which is a pretty nice deal. After that, though (and as A-M probably starts having to play his poorer cards), I think it's a less-powerful alien.

Adam said...

When I brought it up a couple weeks ago, that was really the first time it occurred to me, too. I agree also that you need to make your name on the first two encounters. Anti has an advantage online because he can play Mobius Tubes forcing players to put ships on home planets, but in the FFG game (and all the board games) the player can put those ships on foreign colonies so as to remain safe from Anti. Of course, the exclusion of negative numbers in the FFG version is oddly good for Anti because they benefit his opponents more who have no other way to get a negative total.

It's not the greatest alien, and the whole "which ships subtract and which don't" confuses the heck out of new players, but it mixes up how the game is played, so it is definitely a worthy power for that fact alone.

Lindsey said...

Antimatter's strength depends a lot on the card distribution of the deck you're playing with. The reason a mere +5 or so can be such a big advantage is that both players are using low cards.

In the Eon full set, there are lots of low cards of about the same value. If you play, say, an Attack 8 (which is a very common card), then a 5 point advantage means you'll only lose to the Attack 1. And there's only one of those in the deck. When going for high totals, a ~5 point advantage is much less important, since the values of the higher cards have a much greater range.

Of course, everyone will save that Attack 1 for you, so you can depend on losing to it at an inconvenient moment.

Some online decks I've seen include a -20 or such. Cards like that make the Antimatter pretty weak. The Fantasy Flight deck has a 0 along with the 1, which weakens the Antimatter somewhat. But the Mimic card is pure gold.

Adam said...

The deck in the online game includes -1 and -4, which I think make Anti a much less desirable alien there than in the board game, Eon or FFG. You bring up a good point about the lower cards being close in range though, in light of the ~5 spread Anti tends to get in ships.

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