just keep on rollin
Oy. It's one of those days where the car is rockin, and you just wanna drive. There's no sun, it's windy as hell, kind of wet, and things just look grey, but the shit pumping outta the speakers might be the only thing keeping you alive today. Stop driving and die. One of those days.
But enough of the waxing bad poetic.
Last night I started learning to play Twilight Imperium. 3rd edition. Damn fun game. Complex as all hell, but damn fun. It's a game of galactic conquest, essentially, but I imagine it's impossible to win by violently ejecting ALL of your opponents from the game. Hell, I don't even know how to do that (having not read the rules). The key goal is just to get to 10 victory points. To that, you have to meet certain objectives, one of which is a secret objective only for you (I forgot what John's was, so I won't mention mine in hopes that he forgot what it was and won't move to block it.) During the game, you have to manage trade agreements, a fleet of ships and ground forces, and technology research, as well as vote for political agendas and laws.
Here's a rough idea of game play, since there are probably little things I'm missing and nuances in strategy that I'll pick up if I ever get to read the rules.....
You start the game by blindly picking a race. Each race has certain bonuses and penalties. My insect people get a +1 to all combat, whereas John's smart squid men have a buy 1/get 1 free sort of tech research deal, but get a -1 to all combat. Mecatal Rex is the main planet/capital and sets in the middle. Each player has a stack of hex cards which they'll use to build the game board, placing a hex on their turn until the board is made. The hexes contain planets, star systems, and hazards such as asteroid fields, supernovas (going pop), wormholes, etc. Each race starts with a certain fleet, and you get two command counters for strategy allocation (used to buy secondary strategy options), three fleet supply (the maximum number of ships you can have on one hex) and three command counters (the number of actions you can take in a turn). You spend these throughout your turn and get two back after each turn.
A round starts with each player selecting a strategy card. These cards have a primary action, which you have to trigger on one of your turns (only on the card you picked) and a secondary action that the other players can buy when you trigger the primary. For instance, Logistics gives you for command tokens to put on your board, and the other players can spend 3 influence each to buy more command tokens. The cards also have a number on them and that determines the order of play that round. A round consists of alternating actions until everyone has passed.
On your turn in a round, you can move your ships, activate your strategy card, build shit, play an action card, or pass. Building is the last thing you do on each turn, but if you activate your strategy card, that's all you get to do.
When someone activates the technology card, you can buy tech. When someone activates the political card, you all vote on an action or law. So far in our game, I got voted into the minister of war position, and then got voted against causing me to get a -1 to combat for a round and lose all of my action cards. Ouch. If someone controls Mecatal Rex and uses the Imperial strategy, they get 2 victory points.
You can build ground forces, space fighters, carriers, destroyers (anti-fighter ships), cruisers, dreadnoughts (battleships) and war suns (the Death Star). Oh yeah, y0u need a space dock to build, and you can put pds systems on your planets for extra defense. Each planet can support two, but you can haul em around in carriers. Each ship has a move speed and an attack nuber (3-9). You have to roll equal to or higher than the attack number on a 10 sider to score a hit. The defender decides where the hit lands (only dreadnoughts and war suns can take multiple hits) then declares return fire. Most combat seems to result in fighters being destroyed first, cause you get 2 for $1. Dreadnoughts can bombard planets, and destroyers can make an anti-fighter barrage before battle even begins to wipe out fighters.
That's about all I know right now. Fun game, but it can be slow and take awhile.
If I had to make any theories, I'd say a good fleet might include a dreadnought, carrier with at least 4 fighters, a cruiser, and 1 or two destroyers. Good luck getting one together, though, cause your space docks have a limit on how much they can build in a round, and no planet is resourcefull enough to build that fleet in one go. However, if you bought the secondary imperial strategy action, even a crappy 3 resource planet with a space dock and Eviro tech thingy could throw it out in a couple. Warfare would let you do it, too... Now, if you want to capture planets, that's another story, but it would be damn fun to send this fleet around as a space buster squad.
Unfortunately, it's too late in the current game to make up something like that, cause we just have a melee coming up, possibly as early as the first round Thursday, but it's possible we all just bomb ourselves back into the stone age and then it's another arms race to Mecatal Rex. *shrug*
Regardless, I might be buying this game offa eBay soon.
But enough of the waxing bad poetic.
Last night I started learning to play Twilight Imperium. 3rd edition. Damn fun game. Complex as all hell, but damn fun. It's a game of galactic conquest, essentially, but I imagine it's impossible to win by violently ejecting ALL of your opponents from the game. Hell, I don't even know how to do that (having not read the rules). The key goal is just to get to 10 victory points. To that, you have to meet certain objectives, one of which is a secret objective only for you (I forgot what John's was, so I won't mention mine in hopes that he forgot what it was and won't move to block it.) During the game, you have to manage trade agreements, a fleet of ships and ground forces, and technology research, as well as vote for political agendas and laws.
Here's a rough idea of game play, since there are probably little things I'm missing and nuances in strategy that I'll pick up if I ever get to read the rules.....
You start the game by blindly picking a race. Each race has certain bonuses and penalties. My insect people get a +1 to all combat, whereas John's smart squid men have a buy 1/get 1 free sort of tech research deal, but get a -1 to all combat. Mecatal Rex is the main planet/capital and sets in the middle. Each player has a stack of hex cards which they'll use to build the game board, placing a hex on their turn until the board is made. The hexes contain planets, star systems, and hazards such as asteroid fields, supernovas (going pop), wormholes, etc. Each race starts with a certain fleet, and you get two command counters for strategy allocation (used to buy secondary strategy options), three fleet supply (the maximum number of ships you can have on one hex) and three command counters (the number of actions you can take in a turn). You spend these throughout your turn and get two back after each turn.
A round starts with each player selecting a strategy card. These cards have a primary action, which you have to trigger on one of your turns (only on the card you picked) and a secondary action that the other players can buy when you trigger the primary. For instance, Logistics gives you for command tokens to put on your board, and the other players can spend 3 influence each to buy more command tokens. The cards also have a number on them and that determines the order of play that round. A round consists of alternating actions until everyone has passed.
On your turn in a round, you can move your ships, activate your strategy card, build shit, play an action card, or pass. Building is the last thing you do on each turn, but if you activate your strategy card, that's all you get to do.
When someone activates the technology card, you can buy tech. When someone activates the political card, you all vote on an action or law. So far in our game, I got voted into the minister of war position, and then got voted against causing me to get a -1 to combat for a round and lose all of my action cards. Ouch. If someone controls Mecatal Rex and uses the Imperial strategy, they get 2 victory points.
You can build ground forces, space fighters, carriers, destroyers (anti-fighter ships), cruisers, dreadnoughts (battleships) and war suns (the Death Star). Oh yeah, y0u need a space dock to build, and you can put pds systems on your planets for extra defense. Each planet can support two, but you can haul em around in carriers. Each ship has a move speed and an attack nuber (3-9). You have to roll equal to or higher than the attack number on a 10 sider to score a hit. The defender decides where the hit lands (only dreadnoughts and war suns can take multiple hits) then declares return fire. Most combat seems to result in fighters being destroyed first, cause you get 2 for $1. Dreadnoughts can bombard planets, and destroyers can make an anti-fighter barrage before battle even begins to wipe out fighters.
That's about all I know right now. Fun game, but it can be slow and take awhile.
If I had to make any theories, I'd say a good fleet might include a dreadnought, carrier with at least 4 fighters, a cruiser, and 1 or two destroyers. Good luck getting one together, though, cause your space docks have a limit on how much they can build in a round, and no planet is resourcefull enough to build that fleet in one go. However, if you bought the secondary imperial strategy action, even a crappy 3 resource planet with a space dock and Eviro tech thingy could throw it out in a couple. Warfare would let you do it, too... Now, if you want to capture planets, that's another story, but it would be damn fun to send this fleet around as a space buster squad.
Unfortunately, it's too late in the current game to make up something like that, cause we just have a melee coming up, possibly as early as the first round Thursday, but it's possible we all just bomb ourselves back into the stone age and then it's another arms race to Mecatal Rex. *shrug*
Regardless, I might be buying this game offa eBay soon.
posted by Amazing Shafeman at 9:12 AM
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