Welcome to my third theorycrafting post about the new Exode Planetary Challenges!
My previous two articles in this series are:
This one will be short and sweet, as I am trying to post it before the results go out. I'm cutting it close as the only reason Elindos hasn't already posted them is that too many people froze to death!
There really is no reason with the current collection of cards to have 5 Pilots in this challenge. The WHC Unit is from the Tom Settlers Contract and very easy to find on the market and currently selling for 75 cents.
By now you should be very familiar with the answer to this risk, any QL3 item on a team guarantees that team's survival.
Relevant Skills: Conversation, Empathy
Target Number: 2+ each round
If you weren't already planning on including Alanna Vos because of her Advantage, what would you say if we added an extra 40 point bonus? I think that's 40 points per QL, but I'm not sure.
In other words, if she's not already in use elsewhere, USE HER!
The Deck Expert Tool was very helpful, as usual, for this challenge. The one thing of note was Group-Minded is actually stored as "SocialExposure" in the database so it was a bit hard to find. That being said, there is only one character with this trait, the elusive twelve mint Cocktail Specialist. With that in mind, my approach to this challenge was to focus on survival and hope to get lucky on my mystery rolls.
Freezing
I considered just copy/pasting this portion and seeing if anyone noticed, but the armor which helps is slightly different.
Social
Security
This was one of the harder challenges to give a best / recommended solution. As mentioned there are a couple extremely limited quality cards which are perfect for it - the 12 Cocktail Specialists and 10 Nomad Navigators. To have a chance at solving the mystery I had to include the Cocktail Specialist, but I used the Taurus Transport instead of the better suited Nomad Navigator to make it slightly more accessible. This means your Colony Team is NOT protected from freezing, so higher QL cards are advised. Aside from that though, there are a LOT of options to allow you to tweak your risk dice pools and you have a huge amount of freedom for your Away Team.
While I certainly could work to further maximize my survival pool, I feel this is the best approach given the target numbers and challenges to aim for the top of the leaderboard. It's a bit of a Hail Mary as you will have a tougher time with the Mystery, but barring terrible luck you should be fairly high up the leaderboard. Even without hitting the Mystery, Alanna's bonus points will help.
That being said, if you don't have the cards for the Mystery and want to give up on it, you could maximize your Security Risk pool at QL68 by using Alanna Vos (QL24), Rebel General (QL18), Scarlet Sarah (QL16) and Arena Power Suit (QL10). While some might call this excessive, I prefer the term EPIC!
You could also easily increase your Social Risk survivability by replacing the Taurus with any QL3 armor and replacing the Cocktail Specialist with the Syndicate Geisha. This would give you QL30 instead of QL25 and remove the risk of Freezing.
While I didn't want to abandon the Mystery, I largely submitted an underpowered team. As long as I don't Freeze, it's good enough for colony work, and has a chance at solving the Mystery. Still, I don't have high hopes for it.
Is this a good lineup? Certainly not.
With a tiny dice pool, and only two attempts, its highly unlikely I'll solve the Mystery. It's also possible my Colony Team will Freeze and completely die out. I can see it now, my Away Team heads out to the planet and slaughters all the way. They thrive and return to the Colony to find an abandoned ship with the word "CROATOAN" carved into the frozen metal exterior.
Share your thoughts! Share your teams!
I look forward to seeing the results.
Thanks for reading!
