My problem with Caprice is that it adds a game mechanic to Netrunner which wasn’t part of the game I originally liked. I like games where you have to count expected values&odds and can affect those calculations. Netrunner does this exactly with random accesses. During the game you can estimate agenda density of R&D/HQ quite well which will really help to make odds for your favor and help win the game.
Most of the time I find Caprice quite boring because the choices can be too obvious. Bidding 1-2 creds more than opponent is too often a small price to pay of stealing/scoring agenda. I would like Psi mechanic if it would come more often and have smaller payouts. That happens in some games especially when players are low on credits. However, too often game is decided on 1-2 major psi games about huge payout while credit total doesn’t matter so much. I don’t feel I am thinking so much in my head about tactics and probalities when facing Caprice, chance is about blank 33% often so that makes calculations quite easy. I understand people liking the “mind games” aspect of Caprice but I don’t enjoy it being a big aspect in competitive games I play.
Also Caprice adds variance on top of variance. Random accesses in Netrunner can already have too big effect especially in early game. Caprice will add even more variance on top of that (not necessary blind luck) but I would say that playing poker with one deck instead of more requires always more skill. So my problem with Caprice is not being able to affect the psi game (Vamp is bit extreme) and it sometimes doesn’t offer analytical thinking for me.
Card like Caprice to promote remote games is still needed but with different mechanisms. Off the Grif is a good try but was too weak. BS and HB FA/remote hybrid are still very good decks which can score from remote. Cards which “breaks what the game is really about” are usually the strongest ones and this can be seen with the power of RP and NEH FA.
No it’s not, he very much dislikes Caprice and he believes that she screws up valuation and yomi layers. He just plays with her because she hands him easy wins based on the result of an out of game die roll.
The very person abusing this card dislikes it, what’s that tell you.
P.S. In his mind TFP and mk2 are fine it’s just that when combined with Caprice they create a very unfair and unfun situation.
It tells me this person values winning more than enjoying the cards they play. Which is perfectly acceptable even if it’s a bit baffling to me personally.
IMO, people get a little too psyched out by the Caprice in the remote against RP and try to win on centrals (specifically R&D) when they should be trying to burn down the remote.
Just save up your Sucker tokens and Parasites and level that shit.
Is running 49 instead of 45 corp cards random? It’s designed to lower your agenda distribution and it’s a skillful choice to manipulate the odds of an important chance-based event. That’s my point of contention: you’re trying to reduce Caprice to “randomness” where that’s not really a useful way to think about the mechanic unless one side actually bids randomly with an even distribution (or, I guess, a known distribution like if your opponent announces his system is 10%, 40%, 50% or something for 0,1,2 and then actually follows through on that system). If he’s manipulating the odds so that it’s not an even distribution, he’s making very skillful choices to manipulate his die roll’s results based on his expected outcomes. I can’t actually think of anything in this game done during a match that utilizes more skill than that past your basic mechanics of making a run. If he’s really altering his distribution to account for your behaviors within the space of a single match and that’s giving him better than 66% performance on a regular basis, he’s doing some excellent character reading and board state analysis. The fact that in the end he does roll a die to pick within his skillfully determined distributions is less important than all the effort he put into making his odds better than 2/3rds in the first place.
That it’s not his favorite mechanic? There’s loads of chance and randomness in this game; skill is used to manipulate those odds into a win. You do that in deckbuilding to manage the distributions of cards you hope to draw over the game to make sure you’re sustaining a good economy balanced with threat cards. You do that when you choose between your main netrunner actions to figure out what gives you the best expected value (in PPVP kate you draw for money, even though it’s only chance compared to the sure fire click for a credit). You do that when you decide whether to run HQ or RnD for an agenda by paying attention to how Jackson has been used and how many agendas have been scored. The game’s most skillful moments are all about assessing and manipulating odds; I don’t see why Caprice is some kind of exception that is truly “random” while these other events are what make this game skillful. The best I can tell is it’s because some people use dice and that signals odds culturally in a way that drawing cards doesn’t.
This is the problem for me, Caprice is boring when the credits don’t matter.
I like it when a player is poor, and if they bid $2 then they can’t steal the agenda if it’s an NAPD, or if Corp doesn’t have the money to score the agenda if they bid $2. I like it too when the Runner can repeatedly force the psi and Corp has to figure out how much they’re willing to spend to keep winning.
But it’s not fun to play one critical psi for the fate of the game.
A card is definitely needed to make remote play a viable strategy, but I think Caprice is far from the ideal design. One tweak that would make her more interesting is instead of bidding 0/1/2, each player bids 0/2/4. $4 is a big enough deal that this skews the payoffs of each option far more - both players want to bid $0 but if Corp can afford the money they’re likely to win on a higher bid, unless Runner can read how much the Corp wants it…
To answer the question of this thread, yes Caprice is as influential as everyone thought it would be and yet is still not game breaking. In fact as some have argued it actually is better for the game.
I’m not sure how useful idle speculation is, but some way to brute force psi games could make them more palatable. I speculated on the netrunners UK Facebook group about a Marcus Batty that just worked and how much the Rez cost should be on such a card. Some people don’t like psi, giving them an inefficient way to not play psi might be a good idea. But then s&w exists and isn’t played. So it would have to be more efficient than that.
The reason no one uses the unregistered S&W is because of how time consuming and inefficient it is. You have to click to install, then run HQ, then, click twice. It takes an entire turn to use, requires that Caprice already be rezzed meaning you already payed to get into her server and were bounced, and then you have to pay to get into HQ. Plus 90% of the time they just immediately interns her right back into the remote, making that entire turn a wash.
So I’ve seen a bunch of apologist talk about how Caprice is good for the game, but I haven’t seen a single person actually claim to ENJOY playing Caprice. And I mean the actual Caprice interaction, not just the winning that you get from playing one of the most powerful cards in the game.
So does anyone here actually enjoy playing the Caprice psi games?
Isn’t this literally what Vamp is? Instead of playing Psi, you can choose to race the corp on money and break their remote that way. Unlike S&W, it actually is played to some degree, but its relative rarity indicates that it’s a weaker strategy than just fighting RP in the “normal” way (playing Psi and/or winning on random accesses).
edit:
I enjoy playing Psi as both the corp and the runner, although if I was king, TFP would not exist. edit2: To clarify, I think that the Caprice Psi game is fine and I think HB Glacier with Caprice is an interesting and fun deck to play as and against. I think TFP is busted and RP is obnoxious as a result.
There’s a guy in my meta that absolutely loves Nisei Division, and kicks ass with it. The games are usually really fun because of the semi-random nature of the Psi bids, and the huge importance of them on the “scoring window” he’s using (Caprice makes the runner make a lot of bad decisions, so unless they’re stupidly rich he is confident enough to win 1-2 Psi games to score an agenda).
I think, to some extent, this is because you’re making a misplay that I alluded to earlier.
If Caprice is in a remote, you bash your head against that remote until Caprice isn’t in that remote anymore. You don’t wait for an Agenda. If you wait for an Agenda, you get that “game hinges on coin-flip psi games” dynamic. If you destroy ice on the remote (save those sucker tokens!) and go HAM after that Caprice, you play a lot of psi games with low-ish stakes. It’s just a matter of making sure you keep a big enough bank to contest that rezzed Caprice (kinda like how you gotta be able to go kill a SanSan against NBN).
You don’t destroy the remote, you just kill caprice. The Corp will not have infinite money, and if they’ve gotten to about 30 cr, you’re probably doing it wrong and will lose regardless of whether Caprice is in that remote. Ash hurts too, also Excalibur + Nisei token.
Remember that every unrezzed ice they have is a drain on them economically. Getting them to lower credit totals makes predicting a psi game much, much easier. Use high impact cards (Siphon, Medium, Legwork, Maker’s, etc.) to force rezzes. Make them play your game. All runners have the ability to do that.