List Building 101 - Action Economy

About a 10 min. read.

One very highly debated subject in the ASOIAF community, and everyone got their own take on this, is:  how many activations do you need in your army setup?

The answers will vary wildly from players to players and factions to factions. I've seen people swear on the head of their shiny starter Pokemon, that it is impossible to win a game if you go under 9 activations. Others, more rare I'll admit, that they play 6 activations regularly and still maintain a healthy win/loss ratio. Others, that you can barely play if you don't have 3 NCU, because theses are the cheapest activation you can get, cannot die and thus, cannot be stolen from your activation tempo. 

This question is obviously very meta oriented, but I am not here to say talk about meta. I am here to present you another way to look at your list building, and maybe this will help you see things in a new light. 

Now, this hasn't been an official term game wise, but players often refers to the number of activations per round available in a list as "Activation Economy". 

Activation Economy

For people a bit newer to the game, let me just quickly describe a couple reasons why this term is important. Since the game is based on alternating activations from players to players, it makes the game more dynamic than if player 1 played all their pieces and then player 2 did the same. Some other games do that and it works, just differently. 

With alternating activations, comes the direct consequence of an advantage when one player has more activations than the other. This might be from the get go, because one list simply had less units than the other at the start, or it can progress with the game as units are destroyed and activations are lost. 

I will not lie, more often than not, having less activations than your opponent is likely to lead into an uphill battle for yourself. You will see this phenomenon take a real hold of your game when you realize that you have activated every pieces for the round, and your opponent still have a couple left to do. This leaves him free reign over what happens for a couple turns, because you are powerless to react. This can be made even worse if he also happens to be first next round. So he can take his time to deal some attacks free of retaliation, maybe position a bit better to deal charges in flanks next round, etc... you see the deal here, it's not pretty.

Activation Economy is often a starting point in any players list building. Even before choosing your commander, how many of you think: I need to make a 8 activation list minimum. I'd wager a lot of you, and I've been guilty of doing it myself in the past. It's simply natural. Nobody want to just go into a game where they don't feel they have a chance at winning because they haven't respected a recommended quota.

An Activation Economy can be fed in 3 ways: Combat Units, Non Combat Units and the "Relentless" ability.

However, not all factions are good at meeting an activation quota, and some players just outright prefer to bring a low count of elite units, so how would you compete with an advantage in activation?

For myself, I've found that the answer to that question lies into the "Action Economy".

Action Economy

And this is where people will either start to get interested or outright disagree with me, as is the nature of all debate. 

So in short, your "Action Economy" is the number of actions your army can take in any given round. 

The difference is subtle, but it's there. If you were playing a card game, let's say Legends of Runeterra (not trying to plug anything here), that would be like considering the amount of cards you have in your hand that can be played, each one would be an action. Some of them are Slow spells that you can use only on your turn, one at a time (like an activation that result in an action). Others are Fast spells that can be used on any turn and interrupt Slow spells resolution (interrupting an action with another action).

A typical activation will amount to 1 action (Maneuver, March, Retreat, Attack or Charge). Some specific unit abilities or tactic cards will give you more of them. The easiest example that we can use is a cavalry unit, which gets a free maneuver at the start of it's activation. 

Of course, an actual activation will always remain more powerful than an action, as it is unhindered by triggers or conditions like an order, ability or tactic cards. But, even if there is some disparity in your number of activations, if you have the same number of actions available to your opponent, then the overall impact on any given round should be about the same. 

The use you get out of additional actions is very important as well, because when properly used, they can actually steal the tempo of your opponent. Activations are pretty slow, as outside of a few edge cases, you will only be able to activate one unit per turn. Additional actions are limited by their trigger, but there can be many in a single turn. 

Let's say you have the order "Set for Charge" on a unit, and your opponent has 2 vanilla units. Well then he could charge you with one unit, you use your order to attack him first. If he dies then and there, you just stole tempo from him since he doesn't get anything out of his own action. If he survives, well he can carry on with his attack. Then you activate, you attack, and he can then activate his last unit and charge you. In this very basic case, both players got to resolve 2 attacks in the end, and the player with "Set for Charge" resolved them much quickly than the other player, giving him the opportunity to steal tempo from his opponent. 

Some units are infamous for their number of extra actions available to them. The Night's Watch Ranger Hunter being very known for it by this point. Their combination of abilities can effectively let them do 3 actions in a single turn by Attacking, Retreating and Attacking again.

Of course, there are much more factors to take into consideration. I've only stated a few examples that are direct actions, but your Action Economy can also be influenced by other effects that even simulates actions. Such effects could include the abilities "Counterstrike" or "Tactical Reposition". While "Counterstrike" is not an actual attack, and cannot provoke panic tests, it is still retaliatory damage that can accumulate enough as if an attack had occurred. "Tactical Reposition" is not a maneuver either, but used at the right time, as shift of 3 inch can be the difference between getting shot by a ranged attack or not, a successful charge or not, getting just far enough in a flank so that your enemy has to maneuver to face you instead of charging, etc... 

Hell, even if healing cannot be considered an action, you can heal enough to remove the damage done by one or two attacks, that will effectively nullify your opponent actions. We really haven't touched upon effects that block hits either, but it goes without saying that reducing the impact of an opponent actions be really effective in fighting off an activation advantage. 

I'd say that the actual Action Economy is good to keep in mind, but it is important that the player actually gets comfortable at running extra actions. Over time, getting used to it will give a better sense of what can, can't, should or shouldn't be done with theses actions. This is something that is not as necessary when running superior activations, as it is much more forgiving. Having additional actions is often linked to specific triggers, and so, you can learn to lay traps that your opponent will need to either waste resources in circumventing, or deal with it head on. Get your practice on!

In conclusion, if you want to play with less, but more elite units on the field, and you want a good measurement of your army capabilities, I'd recommend that you take a closer look at your Action Economy instead of Activation Economy and you might just find out why even 6 activations armies can battle against 9 activations. 

Factions 101 - Specialty Charts

About a 15 min. read.

Disclaimer: This analysis is entirely fanmade and serves no actual gameplay purposes, so if you think this is only more confusing that way, I'm sorry. This has been a good way for me to limit the quantity of information I need to absorb. Now with that out of the way, let's start. 

Knowledge of your opponents capacity is a big part of improving your planning and expectation of what your opponent might do mid-match.

Know your enemy.  - Sun-Tzu (maybe? idk) 

If we strip a faction completely naked, no units, no commanders, no NCU, the only thing that is constant is a set of 7 cards that represent what your faction can actually do differently than others. Lucky for us, this is also the only information that is hidden from opponents during a match, the rest can be deduced from visible information. 

If you are able to state from the tip of your fingers what every cards in the game does, this little analysis won't help you much. Now if you are like me, remembering every cards in this ever expanding set is pretty difficult.

So, what I did, was to create categories of effects that will help me encapsulate what a faction can and can't do. Then I assigned a score to each faction by looking at their core tactic card deck. 

And this is what I call Faction Specialty.

So the categories go as follow: 

• Manipulation: Tactic cards, order or abilities manipulation friendly or enemy
• Action: Gaining/limiting actions or movement, terrain manipulation effects
• Buffer: Gaining additional keywords, bonus to stats, token removal, self dice rerolls
• Debuffer: Decreasing stats, throwing tokens, opponent dice rerolls
• Offense: Causing additional hits, wounds or panic tests
• Defense: Healing/preventing wounds, blocking hits, auto-passing panic tests
• Self-Harm: Any kind of negative impact on your own units

As you can see, the categories are rather large, but separated in a meaningful manner. This is to prevent having too many different categories, as we are trying to simplify things a bit. Of course, given the rarity of some effects, we should expect to see each stats peaking at a different level. 

And the rules of scoring are as follow:

• The score is based on the potential of each cards, not the actual quantity or quality of the effect written. 
• I.E. The Free Folk card "Surrounded and exposed" is worth 1pt in Debuffer even though it could give more than 1 condition token.
• The score is regardless of the triggers or any conditions needed to fulfill an effect. Only the possibility of an effect matter. 
• I.E. Jaime commander card "Kingslayer's Renown" would gain 1pt in Manipulation and 1pt in Defense even though each effects cannot be played at the same time

So after all of that talk and checking cards to give them score and adding them in their proper categories, we get the following sweet sweet RPG looking chart and some numbers we can analyze further.  

Now, I will not even attempt to remember the numbers this gives me, I would rater just remember the tactic cards at that point. No, the utility behind this analysis is to be able to point out what are the core strengths, weaknesses and capabilities of each factions that hides behind theses numbers. So highs and lows is what means something to us. 

So basically, all red boxes are the scores of 0, meaning the factions has no mean of getting theses kind of effects outside of explicitly bringing something that will provide it for them. The green boxes are the leading scores in all Specialty, and the yellow boxes are the secondary leader of each specialty. 

Now for you eagle eyed people, you will notice that there's 2 columns for the Night's Watch faction, I'll explain that part by itself later.

Here's some things that we can see from all this (and this is the kind of stuff that I have an easier time remembering than all the cards effects by heart):

• Manipulation
• With a high score of 4, this means that Manipulation effects are kind of rare compared to others.
• The leading faction is Lannister (kinda fitting) and secondary factions are Free Folk and Neutral. Theses are the faction that naturally bring the most tactic cards, order or abilities manipulation in the game. 
• Baratheon, Greyjoy and Targaryen have no natural means of Manipulation, so unless their commander choice bring some to the table, this is a weakness in their kit. 
• Action
• There is a big disparity of points here, the best being a 6 and secondary being 2, this makes Targaryen really big leaders in this category.
• The leading faction is Targaryen (fitting as well) and secondary factions are Night's Watch and Stark. 
• Baratheon and Lannister have no natural means of Action, so unless their commander choice bring some to the table, this is a weakness in their kit. 
• Buffer
• The leading faction is Night's Watch (Whaaaat? They are good at buffing???) and secondary factions are Stark and Targaryen
• Every faction has a mean of Buffer to some degree, with a lowest score of 3, this makes Buffer the most common category of effects available in the game. 
• While not exactly incapable in this specialty, Free Folk, Lannister and Neutral are in the lower end spectrum of it, so they might have a tougher time surprising their opponents with buffs.
• Debuffer
• The leading faction is Baratheon and the secondary faction is Lannister
• Every faction has a mean of Debuffer to some degree, with a lowest score of 1, thus, this category is also pretty common in the game.
• While not exactly incapable in this specialty, Night's Watch and Targaryen are in the lower end spectrum of it, so they might have a tougher time surprising their opponents with debuffs. 
• Offense
• With a high score of 1, this means that Offense is the rarest specialty
• The leading faction is Baratheon, Free Folk, Lannister, Neutral and Stark
• Greyjoy, Night's Watch and Targaryen have no natural means of Offense, so unless their commander choice bring some to the table, this is a weakness in their kit.
• I find this one particularly interesting in and of itself as I never realized how each faction has very little access in dealing extra wounds, hits or panic tests in their base kit. I did a similar exercise 2 years ago, and let me tell you, back then, this was one of the very high scoring specialty.
• Defense
• The leading faction is Greyjoy and secondary faction is Baratheon.
• Stark have no natural means of Defense, so unless their commander choice bring some to the table, this is a weakness in their kit.
• It's nice to see that Defense related effects are more common than the opposite category, Offense. 
• Self-Harm
• The leading faction is Greyjoy, good for you guys, you are good at healing AND self damaging :) 
• Total Scoring
• The faction that has the most accumulated points is Greyjoy, but if we remove the detrimental Self-Harm from consideration, the leading factions are Baratheon and Night's Watch. This might explain why the Night's Watch deck is recognized as pretty powerful compared to others, as they have one of the best points potential and a lot of it is reusable rounds after rounds.

Now we can go even go a bit further in checking each faction individually and the repartition of their score as well. 

Baratheon

Looking at the Baratheon faction, it is to be expected that they are supposed to be very combat oriented and the chart confirms this pretty well I think. The focus is clearly meant to represent cards that will impact an opponent capacity to defend itself, while the Baratheon player can add even more to his own attacks by buffing them. 

Baratheon also have one the highest Defense stat between all factions, so they are able to handle punishment as well. 

Their big weaknesses comes from the absence of anything in Manipulation or Action for that matter, making them extremely predictable on the field. When facing a Baratheon player, you will know that whatever they have in their hand will never be able to surprise you with a charge or make you discard a tactic card or stuff of that nature. If you manoeuvre out of their line of sight, their only mean of keeping up with you will be information available on the field (Sentinel ability or Horse zone), that is, unless they bring a commander that gives it to them like Andrew Estermont or Davos Seaworth.

Free Folk

Taking the Free Folk chart by itself, we can see that this is an extremely well balanced deck of cards, which fits the adaptability and diversity of the Free Folk perfectly. 

They have a little preference in the Manipulation and Buffer department, but their overall spread really means that their commanders cards will have a big impact on that spread and define the playstyle that they will adopt during the game.

Greyjoy

The Greyjoy chart is pretty fun to look at. Besides the arrow shape, we can see that they have a big focus in the Buffer, Defense and Self-Harm specialties. To me that reads as a faction that doesn't really care what happens to their troops, as they will heal them back up and they will also try to keep their attacks relevant throughout the game.

The rest of the stats seems circumstantial, like they get a bit in the Action and Debuffer department, but that's it. They are lacking in the Manipulation and Offense department, so outside of a commander that brings it, you are safe in theses cathegories. Fortunately for them, the majority of their commanders does seem to bring either a supplement in Offense or Manipulation, so in the majority of matchups, you might not actually get to exploit theses gap in their kit.

Lannister

The Lannister faction have a clear tendency to focus on disrupting their opponent rater than helping their own troops accomplish anything. This is clearly shown by their focus in Manipulation and respectable score in Debuffer. The rest of the scores are on the low side in every specialty and they even have a gap in Action with a score of 0. This means that a savvy opponent can take advantage of their lack of extra actions and movements unless the commander is Tywin, Gregor or Tyrion.

Neutral

The Neutral chart resembles the Free Folk chart a lot. Maybe that should not be super surprising as they are both well rounded factions know for their adaptability. They are clearly able to do a bit of everything, and digging into their deck a bit more specifically, their Manipulation lets them choose what aspect they want to focus on by letting them reuse cards multiple times. There's no obvious weakness to pick off from this, but they don't have a clear strength either. As fitting for their faction, their commander is going to be a big driving factor in the army specialty. 

Night's Watch

The Night's Watch chart is certainly not one that should be surprising to anyone. They do a little bit of everything, with an extremely high focus in the Buffer specialty. They buff their units, and the buffs stays active afterwards as long as their units stays alive. Even their points in Manipulation reflects that as it allows them to either buff their troops further or move buffs around. 

With an extremely high focus on augmenting the efficiency of their own units, however comes with a complete disability in controlling or disrupting their opponents in any capacity. They have no Offense score, barely any Debuffer score, and their Manipulation score would be 0 if we think about affecting their enemy stuff. Thus, Night's Watch opponent can be warry of provoking any additional actions, but can otherwise go into battle knowing that their tactic deck, unit stats and abilities cannot be surprisingly affected by a tactic card, unless the Night's Watch commander is Alliser Thorne. Some other commanders like Jeor and Donal also provides some measure in Offense and Debuffer, but other than that, the rest of commanders are mostly focused in adding even more points to Buffer or Action.

Night's Watch (neutral units)

So for this one, I was pretty curious to see actually how much bringing neutral units in a Night's Watch army limits their deck usability as their cards cannot be attached to them and other are outright unusable if the unit is not a Night's Watch unit. The result is pretty impressively bad as this is a combination of the lowest score in all category except Action, and even then, this is only a 2 inch shift, so nothing impressive there either. 

So, if you've seen Night's Watch players having some difficulty in including Neutral units in their lists, this is why. Their core deck is so good when used on Night's Watch units, and so bad when paired with Neutral that a really big natural synergy between a unit and it's attachment or some specific commander cards is needed before this option is even considered.  

If you play against a Night's Watch opponent that brings Neutral units, remember that this should be considered a pretty big weakness in their lineup, but also keep in mind that this could mean more cards to stack on their other Night's Watch units.

Stark

Stark chart, surprisingly has an extremely similar chart to Night's Watch even if both factions play quite differently from one another. The big differences here, even if the points value are similar, is the actual effects that can be thrown by Stark are aimed at making sure that they get the jump on their opponent, and when they do that their opponent cannot properly react to it as their Manipulation score is focused on that. Looking more specifically at their cards, we can also see that 3pts in their Buffer score is dedicated at rerolling charge distance dices, to make sure that Stark are able to pull off some charges that would otherwise have a high chance to fail.

Finally, we can also see that Stark have no score in Defense, so unless they have other means to mitigate attacks and heal up, they will feel attacks made against them pretty harshly. besides the fact that harden is a pretty good ability in this game, it comes as no surprises that attachments that provides such heavy defensive measure to Stark units is so popular in list building. 

Targaryen

As expected of the Targaryen faction, they are very single minded in the Buffer and Action specialties, leaving all other scores in the dust. Most of their commanders option adds more into theses 2 categories, making them even more efficient at it. This makes them very excellent at letting them strike first and hard. Targaryen reputation as bloodlusty is pretty well earned.

However, this naturally leaves some gaps everywhere else and they have a pretty poor score in the Manipulation, Debuffer, Offense and Defense. Targaryen players should be aware to try and fill theses gaps in list building, and besides their obviously good ability, it's not hard to see why Illyrio and Selmy are some of the most favored NCU for Targaryen. 

                                 

Little final words before you leave, this analysis could of course be extended further to include the various commander cards or even units and NCU to further flesh out what you get out of your list building. Maybe this idea will be explored at a later time, but for now I hope that this has given you some ideas for what are the gaps in your opponents defenses, but also how you can better list build your own army as well. If you are looking to create a well rounded army for example, and you know where are the gaps in your faction, it will be easier to understand what to include to fill theses gaps. Same thing if you want to get extra specialized in one way or another. 

Just remember that this analysis was made for fun and if you liked it, I am glad, but don't get obsessed with it, as it is simply a mean to remember the lows and highs of each factions. If you feel I might just have re-stated the factions identity, but with the help of numbers this time, well at least you got to see some cool looking charts :)