What I've learned playing Frosthaven....so far

hey everyone as you might know I've been playing through Frost haven over on my twitch Channel but also been uploading the vods here on YouTube for a while done about 25-ish scenarios now and I feel like I've got quite a good grasp of frost Haven versus gloomhaven now I want to do a full review of frost Haven at some point but I feel like I want to actually kind of complete the game first before I do that or at least get very close to completing the game so that I can give it a very nice kind of summary really but I wanted to do a quick video really about what I've learned playing Frost haven over the last 25 scenarios and how it differs from gloomhaven and things that I think that you might kind of pitfalls that you might fall into if you're playing this for the first time if you're coming from gloomhaven or if you're just coming from uh no experience whatsoever and I think there are some key differences with frost Haven that I want to cover so yeah let's just go over those and let's have a chat before we get started a big thank you to all of my supporters over on patreon and the subscribers over on Twitch thank you all so much for the shout out to my legendary supporters here and Obi-Wan kansi thank you so much for the support first thing I want to talk about is party composition and player count two things that we've talked about a lot in gloomhaven since Play account it's no secret that gloomhaven wasn't a brilliant game at two player um you lose out on a lot of the kind of fun interaction of playing with four you know four potential personal quests being completed for new characters to be unlocked you know more enemies to deal with so they're the scenarios themselves felt Fuller More Alive with enemies for you to deal with and it just gives a more well-rounded experience because you can get all of the different classes in there and everyone has their own role and you can really play into your role in your party and uh yeah you have less gaps as you go along now in Frost Haven I feel like this problem is kind of Amplified a little bit compared to glue Maven gloomhaven you could still play your character as it's kind of unique twist would intend but because the characters were a little bit simple color a little bit more kind of wider in their scope sometimes than what they can do it felt like you had the freedom still at two player to be able to kind of play your character how you wanted and you had lots of powerful abilities that could get you through scenarios regardless Frost Haven isn't quite like that uh two player I've been playing it on stream with just two mercenaries for a couple of reasons mainly because you know it's quite difficult to manage more than two characters especially with more complicated ones but also in terms of like space for my stream it's hard for me to show so many enemies on screen and for me to kind of complete a scenario in a single stream it just works out better for me to play two mercenaries but I do get the feeling that in Frost Haven although they have made some changes the inspiration system to be able to unlock characters a bit quicker because you gain inspiration points so you don't kind of fall behind in the campaign elements of it maybe a little bit with some of the resource Gathering but then you do also have the cards to give you additional resources if you draw them if you are playing it too so it does feel like they kind of they do give you a lot of that and I've not been struggling in that department at all really I've always kind of had the resources that I need pretty much every time so yeah I would say that the main failing really here is that a two-player the characters are more difficult to play they're a little bit more narrow sometimes than what they do and what they're trying to do and the scenario design in Frost Haven can be sometimes uh you know quite um elaborate and they and they can be quite difficult for certain characters to deal with and it feels like a two-player those gaps that you might have in your party because you maybe you're you're not really great at healing maybe you're too glass cannons two characters with very little health and you might die quite quickly just feels like those problems are kind of Amplified a little bit in Frost Haven because the characters themselves don't always have tools that you can fall back on but also the items aren't necessarily there to fill in those gaps as well and also you've got this problem of the scenarios being a little bit more complicated and frustrating and asking a little bit more from you sometimes or if you to a change your angle of attack sometimes so yeah I would say that if you are considering playing Frost Haven I really wouldn't recommend a two mercenary setup I think if you're playing two of you then maybe go with two characters each if you feel comfortable maybe if one person feels comfortable to play two maybe play three there are definite party compositions and things you can do to still make it work or two I want to be clear the game is not like unplayable at all I'm playing through the game and I'm still having a great time but I just feel like uh I may be having a harder time than I necessarily need to have and I know there is some great two-party pairings especially like bone shaper and banner spear early on seems very very strong and seems to be um you know a really good time and fun to play and you get you get everything in that party pretty much but it does feel like once you get to the unlockables and you want to start kind of oh that looks like an interesting character I want to play that you're going to start to kind of like hamstring yourself a little bit so that's one thing I wanted to talk about a lot of people have asked me to do a full-on party composition guide for frost Haven I'm not there yet I would love to do that in the future but I'm not at that point yet because I haven't played enough I just purely haven't played enough yet so I don't want to put content out there where I just don't know and I'm just guessing so we will uh I will get to that point at some point for you guys but not quite yet but those are my initial fours around party composition and things like that don't fall into like traps of thinking okay we really need to have uh like a tank or we need to have a Healer or we need to have this or we need to have that feels like a lot of the characters have those abilities or those play Styles but they're a lot weirder now than they used to be right bone shaper is an example of a of a tanking character who doesn't on the surface look like a tanking character once you realize that those skeletons that you keep making are actually saving you points of damage because they're going in and they're taking hits from enemies suddenly you can kind of like change the angle that you look at a character and there are a few like that that you come across as well unlockable ones that kind of allow you to attack the game in a different way that you might not normally be used to and so our kind of general terms of saying okay that's a tanking character that's this character that's that character feels like the lines are a lot more blurred in Frost Haven in that sense so I wouldn't get necessarily really locked into that way of thinking but certainly having you know a character who's got a big hand size and a healthy uh Health pool is going to be a pretty decent indication that there'll be like a front lining type character for you at least but yeah all I would say is be careful about trying to fall into those uh those kind of stereotypes because I think you'll probably be a little bit disappointed because you're going to have opportunities to play characters that are going to be like far into the left field that do crazy stuff I don't think you'd really want to yeah like hamstring yourself like you might have done in gloomhaven to get that perfect party com because gloomhaven had a lot more of those kind of like you just straight up that was that character's role whereas it feels like the roles are yeah just a little bit more blurred this time around next up is the campaign overview so the campaign is set um in a couple of different branching story paths I'm not going to spoil anything in this video to do with anything that I can so I won't talk about any specifics really but it is a branching campaign path a lot more branching than gloomhaven was bloomhaven you occasionally had a few options to maybe do this one or this one and that would maybe determine your path think of it like that except for there's multiple different paths with that going on at the same time there are kind of like several different kind of quests or main kind of quests that are going on that are in kind of different parts of the world that are following slightly different storylines but they are all equally as important and part of the main story um so there's a lot to choose from there is a lot of different directions you can go from which then gives you a lot of flexibility early on to be able to kind of go with what sounds interesting one of the kind of slight downsides to this though I think is the calendar system and the way that works along with the campaign a lot of the time when you complete a mission sometimes you will add a calendar entry for three or four weeks in where you'll have to wait to unlock maybe the next mission in that chain which thematically at times is pretty reasonable like it's pretty well explained and it kind of makes sense that oh we need to wait for this character to to do this thing you know to create this artifact or something to them give us that artifact for us to then be able to go and use it stuff like that it got kind of like yeah they're a good thematic justifications here or there for it but it can get a little bit frustrating at times when you really want to do something and the game says I'm really sorry but you're gonna have to wait you know three more scenarios or three more attempts at least to be able to maybe go and do that so it's a bit of a a bit of a kind of it's a bit of a 50 50 point for me it's not necessarily a negative because at times it's justifies quite well and the game does give you enough content to go and do something else you know you never really bored there's never really like a situation where you're like oh wow I really wanted to go do that and now I have to go and do this like that doesn't really happen but there are situations where you know you could maybe be doing the storyline really really invested in it then the game's like whoa you're gonna have to wait a little while before you can continue on and then maybe you might forget those plot points you might go off and do something else and then you kind of you know there's a bit of a disconnect in your mind there and if you're not playing the game uh super regularly maybe you're only playing once a week or something like that I could see this being a maybe a slight negative for some people because it might be hard to kind of you know really kind of keep track of what's going on in the story because you're kind of bouncing around a fair amount so um I think the campaign structure is certainly a step up from gloomhaven is much better than Gloom even in the way that it is done the narrative is much better I'm really enjoying some of the stories and and how that's going but I will say that as a slight negative of you know slight kind of point is that the calendar might not be for some that might be an element of the game that some people you know kind of don't really jive with because at times it can feel a little bit contrived a little bit gamey where you're trying to to wait for these things to happen but it's there for a reason it's there to stop players from potentially motoring on and to try and kind of gate a little bit of progression in certain elements of the game I get it that it's there for a reason to try and stop players from maybe you know racing to the end getting a super super powerful item or something through some kind of reward and then that kind of warps the rest of the game there's definitely a conscious effort here to be able to balance the acquisition of items in a way so that not only the items and sales of the acquisition of the items to try and make it so that you know the the power level kind of feels like you're gradually rising up rather than necessarily going you know feeling like relatively strong and then suddenly you get a massive power Spike with some item that suddenly you know you find in a chest that just completely changes the game for you so it does feel like it's a bit more of a measured approach but that can be yeah sometimes it can be a little bit frustrating when you just want to try and finish a storyline my quick tip with this is that if you do have a personal Quest that seems like it might be a bit too easy or it says to follow a scenario to a certain point generally speaking pretty much all personal quests will take around about 15 scenarios they've managed to hit that number pretty much on the nose with most of them there are a couple of exceptions to this but if you do have a personal Quest and requires you to go and do a scenario I really recommend that you do them as soon as possible because you're not just going to be able to roll these scenarios into each other like I found out with a certain one I can't remember which one it was but it was the personal quest to do with gaining Lumber cards that I had on my drift I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head but essentially there is a sequence of scenarios that you need to play through that is actually quite heavily time gated behind the calendar and requires um you to actually get some unlocks from another area to be able to get it first it's a bit elaborate anyway that one's kind of like I think a lot of people have talked about this personal questions being a bit weird um but yeah just worth considering do the quests just do them if you have ones that you need to get done do them because you might find that although it looks like just from eyeballing the uh the calendar you might not know exactly how long that you might have to wait for these so just do them get them out of the way next let's talk about scenario design and like General kind of difficulty I think uh it's been a big talking point for both me and my playthrough but also I think a lot of people who are playing this game are talking about this I would say playing Frost Haven has been quite a humbling experience for me as a player as someone who was used to playing gloomhaven on the highest levels of difficulty um really got stuck into the characters really um Min maxing strategies things like that Frost Haven really has kind of reset my experience really in many ways because the scenarios and the tools that we have as players are just wildly different than they were in gloomhaven you know we're not just talking about balance sensing character abilities to maybe not be quite as strong some of them are just as strong but it's really rebalancing the way that you attack and strategize scenarios that's really changed in many ways you're no longer kind of able to to lean on those tools that maybe we always have done things like reusable uh stun cards reusable disarm cars there are some in the game of course they are but they usually come with some kind of like upfront cost that you need to pay or they're quite difficult to play you know they're going to require some some good planning ahead of time to be able to play and there's a significant lack of of those tools that maybe we've always relied on certain items even that you would always rely on to give you a very good um you know a very good early game something simple like Eagle Eye goggles which was a level one item that I think a lot of us Looking Back Now widely accepted it was a very powerful probably too powerful item at least as a starting item but you now have to really deal with that level one attack modifier deck for quite a lot longer and those drawers feel more swingy this time around than they did before because the lack of strength and the lack of advantage and you know certain things like that it just feels like uh it's a bit more of an uphill baffle you're really having to to fight for every inch a lot of the time and I've not been playing the game on increased difficulty I've been playing it occasionally on increased difficulty but I found that my progress has sort of stalled at certain points and I was getting a bit more frustrated with the game because of that so I've sort of had to like just say you know what let's just play it without any increased difficulty and let's just try it out I'm only using the solo rules that are printed in the book I'm not using plus one difficulty as solo rules and perhaps if I play through the game again I might put the difficulty up once I've got a few more kind of like learnings under my belt with the game but it certainly does feel more difficult but it feels more difficult in the sense that you kind of just need to come at it from a fresh perspective you can't really come at it from the angle that we always have and control tools that we used to use like those disarms and things they've now changed into different things they've now changed into like force movement abilities where you can force the enemies to move around it's changed to immobilize I see immobilize being used a lot more which is uh which is really good and handy to use I've seen um lots of ways to uh you know block off the enemies with terrain manipulation and things like that is definitely in the game Focus manipulation of enemies that kind of side of things and of course good old-fashioned running away is also like a big part of the game initiative dancing on being able to go early then late it's something that I've always want to go early when my play style of gloomhaven was always I want to be the first to go because I always have the abilities to back that up but I don't necessarily always have the abilities this time around so there's definitely a more measured approach with the way you use your initiative you know there's definitely a slight kind of Nerf if you like the early initiative although initiative dance has always been a part of the game if you did have a character with just really strong abilities and very fast initiatives and you could kill things before they went or disown them or stun them before they went always went early which is simple right whereas now it's a huge huge part of the game um doing that kind of stuff so I feel like there's a real adjustment that I've had to make and I think a lot of other people are going to have to in terms of approaching these scenarios and also the scenario conditions we're used to lots of scenarios in gloomhaven which are just kill all enemies and there are a fair amount of kill all enemy style scenarios in in Frost Haven but a lot of them kind of have another wrinkle to them something else that you need to do as part of it it's not quite as simple as that or perhaps they introduce a different mechanic on how you move between the rooms something that will really kind of like throw a bit of a spanner in the works I'll make you have to pause and think about how you're going to kind of really strategize and address this scenario not every scenario is the same and you're definitely having to look through your pool of cards and really think about okay what's the best cards for this kind of situation and how are we going to do this this is also kind of coupled a little bit with the scenario book and the section book right we had in gloomhaven some people probably did and if effectively maybe you probably did play it with like the fog of War not looking into different kind of rooms having that kind of revealed gradually to you might have used an app if you were playing physically but it was never like part of the original rule so many of us me included I had to play the original game um you know initially not necessarily you know knowing everything but you know having a general idea of the layout and you know it was there for you to see right uh with the section book there's lots of surprises that Frost Haven can kind of like throw at you at times which will really kind of uh you know there have been many times when I played through a scenario and I felt like I'm doing pretty well and then like you know the scenario book section hits we flipped to it and suddenly there's like if it throws a massive spanner in the works and I've suddenly got to reassess everything that I'm doing and I'm not doing quite as well as I thought I was so there's going to be a lot more instances I feel of players feeling a little bit more hard done by because you get surprised by things and also that kind of element of needing to play through a scenario to understand what it's going to do to then maybe restart it then with like a good strategy in your mind to be able to do it you can definitely look at a scenario and go okay I think this type of card is going to be useful to pick from your pool but there might be a bit more trial and error compared to what maybe you're used to in gloomhaven just being able to use the same cards every time and kind of bulldozer through the scenario it's not really going to happen here you're going to have to strategize a lot more and the challenges are are much different so in terms of difficulty I don't feel like it's necessarily like streets more difficult than gloomhaven I see I've had people talk to me about it and said like they feel like it's really really like loads more difficult it's not really it's just that the tools that you have are different and the scenarios are proposing like much different kind of like problems to the players it doesn't feel like you yeah it feels much more puzzly and thinky than perhaps gloomhaven did which could be a positive for you could be a negative depending on how you want to address things but certainly if you're someone who likes playing like the big dumb brute and just you like to go in and hit things and that's what you like to do I walk in and I hit things and you know you that's how you like to play there's a lot more of a measured approach here although you can kind of do that a little bit here and here and there in places it's a bit more of a measured approach and uh and yeah it's certainly been a humbling experience for me and I'm sure other people have and and I've had to really address the way that I'm playing and I'm I really have to like rethink the way that I've been kind of playing a lot of these scenarios so that kind of leads on quite a nice lead to like gameplay mechanics and like ability changes and stuff I talked a little bit there about like about the lack of like having loads of that kind of top tier control stuff that we have but absolutely like there are very powerful things that you can do in Frost Haven some of the characters feel like insanely powerful when I was playing The Drifter and the death Walker both together when they are both like in their element and they are you know the tempo clicks and everything snowballs and rolls downhill they feel like really powerful characters really fun to play and I feel like I am you know easing through scenarios at times you know they just felt so strong in certain situations but the thing that kind of happens is you get derailed quite a bit in Frost Haven which means that those ability cards that you have you really need them to be a little bit more flexible to be able to kind of change up on the Fly there is so much um changing up on the Fly of different ability cards using your pool that you really need to do I'm quite part of it it's an element I always forget when I play like oh yeah I should probably review my cards before I go into this scenario I definitely um kind of just end up using the same ones I did on the previous star like if it worked last scenario why wouldn't it work maybe this scenario you actually really do need to look at that baller cards and you need to think about it this is going to affect a lot of my guide content going forward in terms of class guides because you know in my class guys have passed I was very confident most of the time to say hey this should be your hand and you should take this card out and replace it with this card and you should take this card out and replace it with this one for every level up that you do that's not really going to be the case there's going to be like the floating cars there are a couple of characters like that in gloomhaven but Frost Haven it's like every character is going to have these kind of sideboard pool of cards that you're gonna want to draw from in different situations and in different play accounts as well so certainly if you're playing two player there is much more considerations with trying to to keep a breadth of abilities open to you whereas if you're playing you know four player maybe you can be a bit more greedy and be a little bit more kind of like linear in what you're trying to do but it's uh yeah I feel like the ability cards themselves they're actually probably more powerful on balance certainly the attacks feel more powerful so there are a lot more characters are attacking for like four as standard very early on which does feel really powerful to be able to do that kind of attack and the combos feel really nice the interlinking of abilities and cards feels really really nice every character just feels like they're really well tuned they just feel like they've been play tested hundreds if not thousands of times and people have worked over every inch of them and that there's no kind of like gray area on how this works or how that works like everything is purposeful and is there for a reason and works there's very few dead cards so many like every card has a situation that you can put into it whereas there are certain cards in gloomhave and I would be like I've never played with that card because it's just never been worth it I just don't feel like that's ever going to be the case here from what I've seen so far I've not seen anything that I would consider to be a dud there's certainly cars are a little bit less attractive at times but a certain scenario comes up and you just think wow yeah if I'd actually bought that card that would be so clutch in this moment and you just yeah there's there's just a lot of of cards there for you to draw from so the ability cards I think there's a lot of people feeling like oh yeah we don't have like these big single room clear abilities that we're really used to using so used to just being able to walk into a room and just you know destroy the entire room with a combination of like one card you know a power potion and like Advantage with like Eagle Eye goggles or something like those kind of things are gone it's a lot more of a measured approach but your single Target damage is can be very consistent and very reliable across a lot of characters so definitely something to to think about and I and I do think that actually the power level is probably a little bit higher uh on average to gloomhaven but obviously there's those gloomhaven outliers that were like incredibly powerful abilities so we had actually finished an early access version of this video for the patreon and those are all one of my long-term patreon supporters thank you buddy wrote a comment and said he'd like me to talk a little bit about balance in this video so I thought I would edit this section in about balance because it is a big talking point and specifically he was interested in kind of how balance uh is handled in Frost Haven because balance was a big kind of talking point or a big kind of headline point if you like when we were looking at Frost statement that we were told it's going to be a more balanced approach where it's going to be less swinginess maybe in the abilities in the rules in the gray area of the rules here or there and certainly all of the characters will feel a little bit more on par with each other and we won't necessarily have as many massive outliers in terms of this character is hugely powerful this carried up much less so so there's a lot of balancing that's been going on here and he rightly says in gloomhaven that you could in fact choose your own difficulty because you could choose to use those broken very powerful characters you could choose to use the best high Prosperity items you could choose to abuse certain mechanics more and more but that was all down to the players and you could really choose how you interacted with the game if you wanted to make the game harder for yourself because you found it easier you jacked the difficulty up you would maybe sort of say well I'm gonna try making this card work rather than always playing with this card because this card sort of like you know I can win every time that I play with this set of cards or this group of mercenaries so Frost Haven doesn't really uh have maybe that flexibility or at least that I've experienced so far I mean I am still very early on so I mean I've done 25 scenarios and you know there's still plenty more to do there's plenty more characters to unlock plenty more things to see and I'm sure once I get to very high levels of like prosperity and with lots more buildings unlocked and items available perhaps I'll say you know wow the items actually are pretty crazy but I definitely feel at this point in time that there is a balanced approach but it's a balanced approach across the board it doesn't just apply to the mercenaries that you're playing yes they have been balanced and but they've been balanced more in a sense that they are more equal to each other I'm not seeing maybe one wildly powerful class and then another class which you would say that seems on the power compared to the rest in the right situations and this is the key part in the right situations every class I think can succeed really really well that I've seen so far and really that's the Crux of it in the right situations Frost Haven the scenarios is really what kind of amps up the difficulty and the different scenario objectives the fact that pretty much every single scenario will have a wrinkle in it like I've said before in which you'll have to do something that might be against the grain of your character not really in your wheelhouse and suddenly it becomes a lot harder for you and that character might look weaker by comparison to a character who can kind of flourish in that scenario and you might go on a run of scenarios where you might feel that that's the case that oh actually I don't feel very well suited in this one and you might have a couple of scenarios back to about or you feel a little bit weaker but your time will come there will be a scenario that will come but your character will have a really great opportunity in to be the the hero of the story if you like the balancing has also been done across the board for Monsters as well so monsters have been really looked at and a lot of the initiatives have been changed around even the returning monsters have had changes to some of the their abilities to make them fit in a little bit more with what the players have as well so there's a bit more of a balanced approach between the power level of the monsters and the players players are always going to feel a bit more powerful than the monsters but certainly there are some very scary monster abilities you want to try and avoid but quite often they are on like late initiatives or they're avoidable in certain ways you've gone are the days of maybe really really early initiative night demons going invisible and just kind of ruining your day a lot of those kinds of things have kind of been measured out and have now gone to later initiatives and scary things like enemies stunning and disarming you are late pretty much consistently as well so there's plenty of opportunity for the players to react potentially to what enemies are doing um so there's um yeah there's a rebalancing across the board I would say and one of the reasons why bringing gloomhaven characters into Frost statement seems like a really bad idea is because they're completely alien to everything that's going on in this game this game really has been developed almost in a vac vacuum except for using the teachings and the learnings I guess from the previous games you know they know now what's kind of an acceptable power level for character abilities you know what is weak what is strong and they've now managed to kind of you know eliminate some of those really big highs and some of those lows and kind of pulled everything a little bit more centrally across all of the characters it doesn't mean that the characters don't have powerful abilities they still do it's just a case of just making maybe the occasional card a burn rather than a reusable card you're changing some of the items so that hey stamina potion now only gets you a level one card back rather than being able to get any card back and suddenly you know they can open up design spaces in different ways and I can definitely see some conscious decisions that have been made to try and make certain abilities powerful but with drawbacks or with other things you have to do or can't be reoccurred and stuff like that so when we talk about balance in Frost Haven there is definitely it's definitely a kind of a whole approach from the game perspective that has been that has been done it's not just that the players have been addressed and that or we needed to just address the ability guys it doesn't feel like that's what they've done here and what Isaac and the team have done it feels more like we want to make the game itself feel more balanced meaning that all of the players feel like yeah your mercenaries are valuable in certain situations and you can really Thrive but also you are going to have scenarios that are going to be very tough for your your party and that's another reason why as I said before the two player I don't recommend it as much because I feel like you will stumble into those situations especially if you kind of go for maybe one of the more underpowered uh two mercenary pairings last time I want to talk about The Outpost phase really The Outpost phase is a really like interesting part of the game it's obviously the brand new part of the game in which you are managing the The Outpost of frost Haven and you're being able to upgrade and build new buildings and being able to craft your items craft potions there's a lot of really fun mechanics here that are at work but they are kind of work there's a lot for you to manage and do here especially for me one person going through it every time you do have like phases where perhaps nothing really happens and then you have phases where lots of stuff happens but it certainly feels like there is a lot to kind of go through and to be considerate of now with looting in the early parts of the game the game is very very um Bountiful with loot I will say make hay while the sun shines folks when you get into those first couple of scenarios and you see that there is Loot on the floor there's loads of enemies to go and loot loot to your heart's content I cannot stress this enough get looting because that loot will soon dry up later on in the campaign you will find it much harder to gain low and you will find that because the scenarios also start to ramp up the first five scenarios I think it is I can't remember if it's the first five or so but I was speaking to one of the play testers someone who was involved in the project and they kind of said yes the first uh handful of scenarios in Frost Haven are designed to be a bit easier to ease you in and give you that opportunity to gain loot so you can kind of get a bit of a foothold in the game and in The Outpost phase to be able to start building things so those first scenarios you know you really do have the opportunity to get nearly every piece of Loot and you should be taking it because it is so important to start stockpiling stuff for later on because you will struggle having said that I'm I would say I am like a fairly average looter in the game I looted a lot early on because I had a lot of stamina left and I was just found the game fairly simple and easy to begin with because of those easier scenarios so I just looted a whole bunch in my first sort of five scenarios but in other scenarios I'm much my average I'm probably getting maybe about half the loot maybe about two-thirds of the loot that is on offer to me it's very rare that I have a complete clean scenario run through where I grab all the loot but I still find myself doing pretty well at two players and actually having enough to consistently build where needed the main thing that I found to be a bit of a kind of um a bit of a bottleneck for me has actually been gold funnily enough uh gold if you don't get enough of it every new building costs 10 gold to be able to build and I did find over a period of time that I was struggling to do that there are various tricks you can imply uh kind of employ here to be able to do this so you can sell crafted items back to the shop and you get two gold per resource printed on the item so you can kind of convert raw material resources this way into gold if you do need it it's a little bit a little bit cheeky but it's part of the game you know it's there it might not be obvious at first but certainly you can do that to gain a little bit of extra gold but I will say gold has been a little bit of a bottleneck at times for me um some of the herbs the times have been in bottlenecks as well when you're trying to really open up that Alchemy um table it can be a little bit tricky when you want to try and do stuff but I've found that once you kind of get them all unlocked and once you've been playing the game for a while you can absolutely kind of pretty reliably have one or two of what you need or there are ways for you to do that with the distilling system that comes in later so that kind of problem kind of starts to phase out after a period of time but I found the Outpost phase to be generally pretty engaging a lot of fun in terms of building buildings I'm not going to tell you which are the most sort of um like economic which are the best ones to build I would say just figure that out for yourself there's a lot of surprises with the building of the buildings I don't really want to ruin that plays by saying hey you should always go for this one or this one um you know just explore build what sounds interesting to you in terms of buying resources I didn't actually find the buying resources through the different camps to be particularly useful occasionally it was like I'm doing it a little bit more now that I have level two of those buildings but when I had level one I always found that I was kind of getting enough material resources actually through the scenarios to not really feel like I I massively needed to buy them and the gold like I said feels quite valuable as a resource so it makes sense to kind of keep it if possible because you know buying one material resource for two gold I mean I guess you could like craft into something and then sell it back to get the two gold back in a way so I guess you're not really losing the money but I guess it's a bit like overall and I guess that's my sometimes like my general kind of uh criticism sometimes of The Outpost phase is that it does sometimes feel a bit clunky in the way that it kind of works it feels like you could do with being a little bit more streamlined a little bit more obvious at times but there are some really cool things but it does take up a lot more of your time than perhaps you would be expecting from gloomhaven like gloomhaven you're going you're rolling from Scenario to scenario pretty quickly you're maybe doing a City Event in between maybe buying something whatever it is that you do but that City Event can really be you know it could be like a minute if you really wanted it to be it's so short um whereas in Frost Haven like there is a method that you have to do and if you've seen my video I go through it on how to do it you know the link down below I'll probably link it or something but if you've been doing that there's definitely like a little method that you kind of gonna have to follow the steps that you have to go through so it's kind of like a minimum amount of time that that's going to take even if you want to do a quick one you're still gonna have to do the event you're still gonna have to do the calendar which might lead you to having to read something from the section book you know you're probably all going to want to go wow can we craft can we do this then you're going to want to look at your constructions you've still got to do your building operations there's a lot of extra stuff that goes down plus if you're in Winter you're more likely to get attacked with an event which means that you then have to manage a whole Attack Phase that happens which is fairly quick but there is some decision making there on whether or not to use your soldiers from your barracks or you know what you're going to do and to try and avoid the attacks and how are you going to play with that so yeah I felt like The Outpost phase in general is a great addition in terms of beefing up everything that's going on um kind of around the game it gives you makes you feel a lot more like you're building something together and you can see the town grow as you progress through the campaign but if you're someone who just hardcore loves the dungeon delving mechanics of playing those abilities you might find that at times it can get a little bit kind of tiresome having to go and do these um these phases and go through all of this stuff it is more paperwork really it's enjoyable paperwork for most people I think but it is more paperwork that you're gonna have to do instead of like cracking into the game basically so there we go I just wanted to put some of my thoughts out there some kind of like little tips and things that I've kind of noticed as I've been playing hopefully it might help some of you guys out who are just starting let me know how you're finding Frost Haven down in the comments below be good to get a bit of a discourse started around this I know a lot of people are playing through the game right now and having different experiences the game is still very like spoiler heavy though at the moment you know I think we have to be very careful at this point in time about what kind of spoilers we're talking about so try and keep it spoiler free down in the comments if you can I'd appreciate it I'm sure other people will too if you did like this video please do toss it a like it helps me out so much here on YouTube and also sub if you're not already we're so close to 10 000 Subs on the channel so that's pretty insane blows my mind but I can't believe that we're we're knocking on the door for ten thousand so yeah that's pretty crazy but thank you all so much for everyone who has already done that and also a big thank you to all of my supporters over on patreon and the subscribers over on Twitch my legendary supporters over on patreon Obi-Wan kansi and Kira thank you so much guys very very kind of you both and yeah if you would like to catch me live come over to twitch.tv marriage request while I'm streaming Frost Haven a lot of the time I know a lot of people can't because of spoilers and things but yeah drop on by usually in the first like so half an hour of the stream I'm usually not actually playing the game we're usually just kind of like talking a little bit so always drop in and say hi and uh yeah I will be working on more guy content soon I'm gonna have a Drifter guy done hopefully within the next week or so that's what I'm going to start working on next and we can start hammering out guides and yeah it's been it's been fun so far it's been a wild Journey so yeah I will catch you guys uh in the next video thanks again so much for watching I will catch you next time bite I think so yeah [Laughter] that's the blessing Isaac at this point can we get your approval to add an additional attack modifier deck for allies

Channel: MandatoryQuest

Views: 10,545

Keywords: Gloomhaven, Frosthaven, Review, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Guide, Outpost

Id: 84UtW_UFpBY

Length: 39min 27sec (2367 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023