Right now I’m gonna say that HQ is less defended against non siphon / vamp deck and it will probably cost less to run HQ 3 time than archive once.
If all the agendas are in Archives, the Psi games on Caprice and TFP are of no use whatsoever to the Corp: they are just a credit drain. Psi games are ultimately only useful if you can leverage them to score agendas yourself, else you’re just putting off the moment when you deck yourself!
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If the credit drain is higher for the runner than for the corp, it’s still in the corp favor. Running archive 4 time to make a psi-game is exactly the same as accessing TFP on top of R&D 4 time.
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Only if you reduce it to “winning” or “losing” the Psi game. That neglects to consider the value of the win or loss.
Winning the Psi game on the top of R&D has a far higher value to the Corp than winning the Psi game in Archives.
If the Corp has a secure scoring remote the value of a Runner Psi win from R&D approaches six points (three that they steal, three that the Corp doesn’t score), and a Runner loss may well lose the chance to get that agenda. A Runner loss on Archives is more like a three-point swing (just that you didn’t steal the agenda yourself) and the agenda stays there so you don’t lose the opportunity.
So while you may want to try and bid whatever will be more likely to win on R&D, you might just decide to bid zero in Archives.
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@MasterAir So, whilst nothing is 100% skill one of the things that I feel defines netrunner when compared to other games is that decision making is so important. Do you go for RnD? Do you go for the remote? Do you go for HQ? When do you go for them? etc etc.
Assessment of the game state and your skill as a player count for a huge amount in this game.
I feel that psi games as a mechanic take most of this away. Admittedly, as you have said, sometimes you make the right decision, don’t see any agendas on RnD for ages despite what the statistics appear to say, and you still lose. These are sad times, but often when this happens I find out they were all in HQ or I didn’t check remotes. I feel with better gameplay the results could have been different.
With psi games this often doesn’t feel like the case. They make me feel like I have made the right decisions but I still lose, and that is incredibly frustrating.
I guess that’s my core gripe with them, they aren’t fun and generally decrease my enjoyment of the game. If I was alone in this I would just shut up and deal with it, but it seems psi games irritate a large number of the player base, and I wish a different solution could be found. I don’t feel that me improving as a player and making better decisions will have any real bearing on whether I win or lose psi games.
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Clearly female.
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I find Self-Modifying Code far more “unfun” than a Psi game. It massively speeds up the reduction of the board state to a “solved” state (i.e. you can run anything with impunity, and literally any card I might have played you could deal with).
And Self-Modifying Code doesn’t have a one-in-three chance of failure!
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While I think Caprice is debatable, TFP is very good design IMO. The problem with all the other 5/3s is that they’re liabilities in your centrals. TFP protecting itself is good insurance against the swingness of random access.
I love that Caprice is one of the few cards that lets the Corp win from behind. At Nats in the top 16 I lost 6 points within ten minutes to some RnD runs, and as a Glacier deck the game is basically over at that point pre Caprice. She is a bit of a weird solution, but I think that she’s much more palatable than the problem she’s solving.
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Though I don’t really mind Caprice*, I’m not convinced the “runner can always get into remotes” problem is so bad. Corp has always had ways to make them waste their money running, from Melange which was a must-run in the early days, through to taxing “Never advance” NBN builds that make the runner check everything, through to more recent must-run assets like IT Dept and Blacklist.
FFG seem to be making an effort to push strong assets recently, and if they can get that right then it’s probably a better (in design terms) way to put the remote lock issue to bed than Caprice is.
*Indefinitely shutting down runs on a certain central is the only thing I find especially obnoxious about her, not the remote stuff.
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Apart from Vamp and, situationally, Siphon’s, what options do runners have to ensure the corp is on 0 creds when the psi games start?
Love her or hate her, that is a huge point. In the current meta corps have huge issues when behind as normally runners have the econ to just hammer centrals until agendas fall out, and there is very little you can actually do about it.
I do think she does that and it is a valuable contribution to the game. I just wish Psi games weren’t the solution to this issue.
As for TFP protecting itself, I think that 5/3s are only an issue in a climate where runners can reliably RnD lock you and hit centrals hard. If their runs were more sporadic then the reduced density would be enough of a reward for the risk of having 5/3s. Right now it doesn’t seem like this is the case.
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Situationally, Lamprey. Even more situationally, Blackguard.
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Yeah was just brainstorming. Forged Activation Orders could work too, especially if you know the cost, like after a derez with crescentus or summin.
Yeah FAO is an option but it gives the Corp the option not to, which is likely if they know they have Psi games to play. Think the above options are the only ways to force the Corp to go to zero at the moment.
Bid zero on Psi games enough times!
You don’t even have to include a card in your deck for it! 
Simply put Caprice is the hero the game needs
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The only psi game you can’t predict ahead of time is the one for TFP. Which as @vinegarymink has pointed out is a good way of smoothing out the inherent variance of having 3 pointers in the deck. You can only caprice one server at a time. Most of the best runner decks have ways to exploit the vulnerabilities where caprice isn’t.
One of the other ‘bad taste’ problems with psi via caprice in a remote is that it focuses the memory on that moment rather than the play leading up to that moment.
I’m not saying that psi is perfect, just that it doesn’t remove the skill from the game, even if the psi game itself is somewhat random.
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Ahh I read it wrong. Thought the corp had to rez, and if it couldn’t, trash.
Currently yes, but I still see her as putting a plaster over a problem rather than actually finding a real solution for the underlying causes.
I think we lost sight of the issue when debating whether and how random Psi games are.
The key is that Psi games are a game in and of themselves, and it requires a skill that some Netrunner players don’t think should be a part of the game. You could compare it to physical dexterity cards in that regard.
A Caprice that ends the run if the Corp player can successfully throw her across the table onto the runner’s ID would be excellent.
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