Weekly Trash - Twilight Imperium

You want Ameritrash? You want freakin Ameritrash?? YOU GOT IT!!!


I've only played 2nd Edition a few times and haven't yet played 3rd. I'd still play 2nd happily if the opportunity came along. Of course I'd also give 3rd a shot. I've read the rules and feel I've got a good grasp on how it plays out. Then again I didn't get the impression from my rules reading that the Imperial Strategy role had anything wrong with it. I thought it was meant to keep the game playing quickly as it would get taken every turn. A lot of comments imply that its broken though.

I don't own the 3rd edition either. For the record I don't own any of the coffin-box games. The boxes are just too much of a hassle for shelf space and if I store them in a closet they'll never get played. Out of sight, out of mind. I have seen the game in person and can say the bits are awesome. I used to be a big fan of games like Master of Orion II in the days when I had the time to waste on them. So the theme really interests me as well.

What do you think about the game? Do you think the role selection works for it? How long have your games been taking? What's your preferred number of players? Did you play any of 1st or 2nd edition? Do you feel the game captures the 4x style of gameplay well? What about the expansion? Do you use any optional or house rules?

The game is great and I bet you won't notice any flaws in your first 5 plays (and then you've probably enjoyed 30 hours of play time already). However, after that certain things can get repetitious. The prime example is the urge for one player having to take Imperial and another player sitting next to him having to take Initiative. After several plays you'll also note that really only War Suns and masses of fighters are efficient for space combat, with the exception of the L1Z1X maybe who concentrate on dreadnoughts. Furthermore space combat is also rare because it almost always hurts the attacker more than the defender, even if the attacker wins the battle.

The expansion clears those issues nicely though, by encouraging players to battle, allowing for more diversity in fleet composition and a general rewrite of the strategy cards.

I still haven't had a chance to play Twilight Imperium. My current gaming group plays only AmeriTrash games (except when one of the game designers in the group wants us to playtest something different), but attention spans max out at the two-hour mark unless it's Arkham Horror. I'm not willing to plunk down the money for the base set and expansion unless I think I can find the players. And my best friend has played twice (with his EuroGame group) and now refuses to ever touch TI again.

TI3 is the best game available to buy right now. It is a classic and when it goes out of print people will be looking for it....

So yeah I like the game.

It needs the expansion, and not for the replacement of imperial, but for the new objectives that actually require conflict to score. I do much prefer to play witht he new strategy cards, I think bureaucracy is a much better option than playing with face up objectives. Games take 1 hour per player. Add 30 min for each newbie. The game works extremely well on the wiki website ( www.ti3wiki.org ), and I suggest that as the place to learn the game before you shell out for a real copy.

I like to play this with 3 or 4 in that it can be played on a weeknight with that many. 6 and 8 player games are fun if you have a day to kill or at cons. As for house rules the only one I like is changing the number of cards you draw when resolving political cards to give more chance of you getting something useful. Politics is still the weakest part of the game, and I would like to see some new cards here, there are some powerful ones but you need to play a bunch to know to hold onto them.

I have never played 1st or 2nd edition but I am looking to pick them up just to try them out.

-M

I don't think the ISC is broken, but it does seem to make people feel restricted in their choices, and it gives the players who start the game as speaker a distinct advantage. I really like the Bureaucracy card, though. And the new Trade card. About and hour per players seems about right.

I liked 2nd edition, too, but I like 3rd edition more. It has better minis and production values, more races, more ship types, more strategic options, pretty much more everything.

Ti3 is my #1 rated game. I have it rated a perfect 10. The only problem I have with the Ti3 is that once I played it a couple times half my game collecion seemed weak and frail in comparison.

Likely a topic for another thread...but what does one need to play at the online site mentioned above? Does it "do it all" or is a player required to have things from the game on hand? I have only played this game on the board once...and as it was an 8 player newb fest we all walked away highly confused. But it seems like a game I really should have a go at. Any input on the online game would be great! Esp if a game for new online players was to form

ozjesting
Playing online is a great way to better learn the game because it's played in slow motion. To play online the may thing you need is the rules for Ti3 and expansion. It's helpful to own the game to look stuff up but it's not necessary.

Here's the link to the Ameritrash Newbies game which is painfully slow. I think we're only on turn 3. http://www.ti3wiki.org/index.php?title=Ameritrash_Newbies . The turns are done through a yahoo or google user group.

TI3 - with the expansion - is one of my top three games.

What I love most about it is the way it satisfies so many gaming urges in one sitting. There's a lot of strategy in there that rewards careful thinking and consideration. Within a turn itself there's lots of tactical considerations especially around timing your actions. There's diplomacy between players which actually enhances the strategic options in the game instead of dominating them, as happens so often in many open-negotiation games and there's the icing of Political and Trade aspects to diplomacy as well. If you want combat, you can have combat. If you want civilisation building you can have civilisation building. There's tension and excitement galore from dice rolling and hidden cards. If all that were not enough then there are options to turn the game more RPG style (leaders) and to make it more focused on exploration (distant suns).

When it can do so much, who cares about the play time? Games seem to pass in the twinkling of an eye for me in any case. With the right set of options and at least one experienced player at the table you can get the play time down to 60 minutes per player, which is manageable.

I find the fiddlyness of the components annoying - there's an awful lot of cards and counters to keep track of. Many of mine are now beer-warped since there's virtually no free space on the table to safely put down drinks when we play. Also, am I the only person who finds the decision to provide a players control markers and command counters in flags and their ships and technology in colours utterly bizarre? Why not do everything by colour? Having to store eight sets of counters instead of 14 would make organising the components a whole lot easier.

I never meant this to become an essay, but it has ...

Malloc and I disagree on how it plays best. It's probably a personal preferences thing although he's played it a whole lot more than me. I find it much more interesting with Ancient Empires, for example - I consider it virtually essential. I also think that the expansion isn't "essential" although it is "very good". The original ISC card is pretty poor, although it does speed the game up, but the variant ISCII can be had as a free download from FFG anyway - and that's all you actually need to get the best out of the game.

Still pretty much a TI3 newb, but I played with the expansion and if not necessary, I see it as a great improvement and as such, wouldnt turn down a game without it, but would much prefer to play using Shattered Empires.

Of the varients, I liked all the new Strategy cards and the distant suns option. How does it play with leaders? Kinda seems like too much detail for not enough payoff, but that's just from reading the rules, so I don't really know.

Ska_baron wrote:

How does it play with leaders? Kinda seems like too much detail for not enough payoff, but that's just from reading the rules, so I don't really know.

I thought leaders would be like that, too, before I played with them, but they don't really add much complexity or anything. Mostly they're just cool. They each do something pretty simple, like add a bonus during combat or a discount buying tech. Diplomats and agents have abilities that are used MAYBE once during a game.

I'll voice a dissenting view.

I grew up with Risk, Axis&Allies, and Samurai Swords. I love epic multi-player games of conquest with lots of plastic pieces. After reading all about TI3 I bought it and the expansion. They sat on my shelf for year, but finally I got a group together for a 5 player game and I was itching to get started. Everyone had read the rules in advance and 2 had played the game before.

The game was a pretty big disappointment.

We played for about 8 hours and didn't have a winner yet. I like lots of long games, so this isn't a problem by itself, but couple it with...

The game felt very Euroy. VERY Euroy. So TI3 is an epic game of Galactic conquest. How do you win? Destroy all your enemies? No. Amass the most wealth? No. Conspire to make the most devious backroom deals? No. All of those might help, but you win the game by: having the most victory points. Ok, so what do VP's represent? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. For example, gaining new technology in a game like this is a really cool idea- research new weapons and use them on your foes. But in TI3 you can get VPs for simply having a new tech. That makes no sense. Your fleet can be a burning wreck, your enemies all aligned against you, your homeworld about to be invaded, and you develop advanced stasis pods and win the game? Ridiculous I say! If I walk by a game of Risk or any other epic conquest game, I should be able to glance at the table and say "hmm, looks like red is winning" based upon the fact that red has lots of pieces all over the board. I shouldn't have to look for the victory point track and see that little old green is actually winning because he has lots of points. If Caylus and it's ilk are all about impressing some King, so he'll dole out VP's in return for your brownosing, TI3 struck me as basically the same thing set in space with the different races working to get mythical,meaningless "points" handed out by some Galactus type figure.

Bottom line:

The game simply wasn't very fun for me. Lots of work to get a game together (at least for me) and much more of a Euro than a classic game of epic conquest.

Oh yeah, the whole role selection thing is kinda neat from a mechanical standpoint but doesn't fit the theme at all.

Evil Space Overlord: "Lackey, tell my ministers I want to focus all our efforts on developing new weapons this coming season"

Lackey: "I'm sorry my Lord, but we can't do that"

Overlord: "AND WHY NOT!?"

Lackey: "well some other civilzation on the far side of the galaxy is doing that this season, so we can't. We can make it our secondary priority though..hmm?"

Overlord shoots lackey.

One of the defining elements of Ameritrash is using the game mechanics to support the theme of the game. TI3 felt like a lot of the mechanics were there just to be neat mechanics and either added nothing or took away form the theme.

From what I've read, I'm either buying TI:3 plus the expansion, or nothing at all. And when I read remarks like Dan's, I don't want to buy TI:3 without trying it. However, it sounds like even with all the issues that he describes, it could be fun to run TI:3 as a PBEM campaign, with a moderator keeping track of everything and limited player knowledge for everybody else. Ignore the VPs and simply track the rise and fall of galactic empires.

Nice post Dan.

I agree, the victory points are my least liked part of the game. The winning conditions were done better in 2nd edition. In TI2, you won for having a bunch of planets and technology and having at least a certain income and influence. You had to pretty much dominate, or at least own more than anyone else, to win.

I love TI3, but I do wish the victory conditions made a bit more sense. There are some variants I'd like to try out sometime that make the victory cond. more like TI2, but the game takes too much time and effort to play for me to risk wasting a good game session trying out a variant that may not work.