Let's Terraform: MARS

Erik Twice wrote: Some thoughts:

1) Don't waste your time with any variants, just play with all the cards. Playing Terraforming Mars without the "Corporate Era" cards is like playing a fighting game with nothing but basic punches. There's not much of a difference in difficulty or game lenght so I believe it's just unnecessary.

The difference is that the corporate era cards add in a lot more faffing around with stuff that doesn't contribute to the endgame triggers, and in my experience that drags the game out without making it more fun. Also since you start with zero production that makes finding the right cards more important and that means drafting becomes the way to go so you see more cards. But I hate drafting TM, since it doesn't make the game less lucky and it turns a LOT of the game into hate drafting: the game, and it makes it take even longer. I like TM fine as a 60-90 minute game game of making Mars lemonade out of whatever cards you draw (and then someone crushes because they drew a crazy combo), and I very much don't like it as a 3-4 hour slog of hate drafting and trying to eke together an engine (and then still someone crushes because they happened to top deck a combo that couldn't get hate drafted away from them, or they were sitting to the left of whoever is bad at the game).

I agree with what others have said:

1) play with base game, corporate cards at first
2) add alt maps and prelude

you are now good to go for many, many games. Venus and Colonies can wait.

This was my wife’s favorite game for a while (it is now War of the Ring) and it’s a top five for me. So many different opinions on best ways to play it. No matter what, you should have a great time discovering it.

I agree with the sentiment here - get the base game, check it out, play it your way.

We decided to stick with Corporate Era because it adds some asymmetry and gets strategies moving quickly. Prelude is like dropping rocket fuel onto this as it gives you all a head start whilst putting players into wildly asymmetric positions. The maps are unexpectedly good value for how much they change the feel of the game, but I would say that Prelude is the best first stop if you do enjoy playing and want to expand. We don't use the draft variant because it drags things out and doesn't really add much given that you can't buy every card let alone build them all anyway.

I am one of the weirdos who likes Colonies. I think that it facilitates some of the more esoteric strategies in the game and offers opportunities to pick up resources that might otherwise be challenging to the point of being almost impossible depending on circumstance. It also gives you something to spend Power on which is otherwise a pita if you are accruing loads of it and the Temperature is maxing out early. Then again I am saying this from a position of having played several dozen times including periods of intensive play (it's been our vacation game for the last couple of years) so we now crave variety and options when we play. It does add complexity and can overwhelm with too much choice so not worth acquiring unless you really get into it. I think it also supports Venus which felt like an incomplete offering (which isn't surprising given that the original design was apparently broken down into a much smaller game supported with an expansion model). I wouldn't recommend either of these products because you'll know yourself if and when you want them just by playing the base game a few times.

Haven't had any interest in picking up Turmoil yet. If TM ends up being our vacation game again this year then I will probably get it as we'll be able to give it a good go. If you like the Corporate Era game then I think it's worth picking up the three promo corps but the other promo cards are completely irrelevant.

Game trays i'd hold off until you decide if you want to keep it. In all the times we've played there have only been one or two occasions where we've nudged the player mats and even then we knew exactly where the cubes had to go back to as you are so intensely aware of what you have and are producing at any given time. A lot of people like them though, it might be something you also want to get.

Thanks again y'all, reading carefully.

mezike wrote: I agree with the sentiment here - get the base game, check it out, play it your way.
I am one of the weirdos who likes Colonies. I think that it facilitates some of the more esoteric strategies in the game and offers opportunities to pick up resources that might otherwise be challenging to the point of being almost impossible depending on circumstance. It also gives you something to spend Power on which is otherwise a pita if you are accruing loads of it and the Temperature is maxing out early. Then again I am saying this from a position of having played several dozen times including periods of intensive play (it's been our vacation game for the last couple of years) so we now crave variety and options when we play. It does add complexity and can overwhelm with too much choice so not worth acquiring unless you really get into it. I think it also supports Venus which felt like an incomplete offering (which isn't surprising given that the original design was apparently broken down into a much smaller game supported with an expansion model). I wouldn't recommend either of these products because you'll know yourself if and when you want them just by playing the base game a few times.

Haven't had any interest in picking up Turmoil yet. If TM ends up being our vacation game again this year then I will probably get it as we'll be able to give it a good go. If you like the Corporate Era game then I think it's worth picking up the three promo corps but the other promo cards are completely irrelevant.

Game trays i'd hold off until you decide if you want to keep it. In all the times we've played there have only been one or two occasions where we've nudged the player mats and even then we knew exactly where the cubes had to go back to as you are so intensely aware of what you have and are producing at any given time. A lot of people like them though, it might be something you also want to get.

My wife really likes Colonies, but I can take it or leave it. She beats me like a rented mule with engines unless I get a god draw or rush the global parameters.

As for player mats, I'm the guy that constantly bumps the cubes on the original mats. I take my copy to the local game club, even though they have three copies already, because I have the Broken Token trays and don't want to embarrass myself by sending cubes flying.

I have yet to make good in-game use of Colonies. My wife ignores them almost always, which makes me alone going over there less useful, but I do it anyway and keep losing. I don't think colony use is a sucker play, but I think its value depends in part on other players participating and on using colonies for very specific, strategy-enhancing boosts.

But I absolutely agree that Colonies is least necessary. We always play with Venus because it doesn't really hurt anything, but the Venus sideboard itself isn't much more than a way to boost terraform rating. Prelude is highly, highly recommended as a low-intrusion way to plot a starting direction by synergizing with the corporations.

I've always found it a little tricky to explain why TM "works" so well for me and why my wife and I have played it (occasionally with others, but usually 2p) thirteen times so far (which is a pretty high number for us), but it does. It's partly because, as I think someone here said, the game allows the engine, once built, to run a bit, which is something a lot of similar games don't permit. It's also a pretty clean and straightforward game, rules wise, despite the ever-expanding stacks of cards, and there's a good bit of variety without heavy rules complexity.

I suspect the forthcoming Turmoil expansion will be another step or half-step too far in terms of complexity and drift from the original design, but the KS includes player boards that I'd otherwise have to buy separately.

I was playing the Fields of Arle expansion the other day and I realized that euro expansions need a deft designer behind them to get it right. All these expansions look like they just add more to have more, but good ones shake up the play space of existing assets pretty hard. Uwe does a better job than most on expansions.

I think that's a fair assessment, however I note that Turmoil is supposedly the final expansion as they are instead moving to a legacy version of the game. As I mentioned before, the game was apparently all designed in one go and then broken up into pieces which is why I believe some of it has a feeling of being partially complete and a little aimless. We'll see if that's really the case, money is difficult to say no to.

If it had been released with all the expansions included it would never have taken off for me. The base game is one of my favorites, but every added expansion brings the whole thing down.

Legomancer wrote: If it had been released with all the expansions included it would never have taken off for me. The base game is one of my favorites, but every added expansion brings the whole thing down.

I'm mostly the same way. I typically love expansions when they swap out components (for example the encounter deck still has 30 cards you just have 20 base cards and 10 flavor ones depending on scenario, change the game map, more character choices). With TM added complexity doesn't actually pay off for me, Venus Next was a flop.

However the board swaps are a great value.

Recently had a period of intensively playing TM while on vacation, we managed to pack in seventeen games. We pretty much saw it all, from our lowest ever scoring game where we were both in the 50-70pt range, to our highest where we managed to miraculously tie on 136pts each. We had one game end in generation seven and another run all the way out to fifteen. We had board control where one side spammed a patchwork of double-spaced cities to take advantage of tree placements from the other side that had massive plant production (starting with enough to place a tree every turn and rising to over 20 plants per turn by the endgame). We had games where there were almost no tiles out on the board at all and we used artificial means to oxygenate the atmosphere and raise the temperature, and one game where we were only five spaces shy of filling the entire map.

Things I’ve learnt from a period of intense play: The toughest strategy to compete with by far is playing against a high-terraforming short game as you have to be very efficient with VP generation to keep up. There are some strategies that can be really punishing when they get up to speed, for example leveraging Jovian tags off Saturn Systems or building up a tableau of combo-ing action cards, but they can be flummoxed when the game is closed down in less than ten generations. Given that I play this exclusively as a two-player game it also makes me wonder how strategies change in effectiveness depending on the number of players as the game must be shorter when more players are speeding up the rate of terraforming. Corporations are also affected in this way as there are some that keep handing out rewards with others being limited in their return. We have so many lop-sided games that it makes me wonder how well balanced this really is for two players.

We also saw the niche value of some cards that we would normally pass over as chaff, for example reducing the global requirements by +/-2. I usually pass that one over as there is always something else to do and I’m focusing on efficiency in games like this, but with the right setup it can be powerful to get a card out a couple of turns earlier than it might otherwise make into play. Consuming your own product is something that we started to leverage as well, e.g. predating on your own animals to turn them from half a VP into a whole point.

I’ve also become convinced more than ever of the value of Colonies. I know and accept that there are many who dislike that expansion, however it completely transforms strategies based around animals, microbes and floaters as well as giving real purpose to building up a power supply beyond simply being a slow way to gain heat or to soak up the cost of some cards that require power to feed them. We had many occasions where spending three power for a small gain of just a couple of steel, a few credits, or a single floater was just enough to do one more thing that step-changed a tableau for the following round.

My interest has also renewed in Turmoil. One of the things that we’ve got really good at is assessing the relative value of things in the game, spotting the point at which cards or actions have negative or zero sum impact. From reading up on Turmoil it gives added value to having tags in your tableau which in turn changes the way you value cards and the way you spend your resources. For example some Prelude cards appear objectively better than others, however the imbalance makes more sense when you apply greater importance to tags or getting a slightly faster start on something that is harder to quantify merely in terms of megacredits. Terraforming points also degrade in Turmoil so having a small amount of terraforming or gaining plants or heat starts to look more vital than simply assessing relative value in terms of income or direct corporate compatibility. Decisions on late game card purchases would also have an additional consideration. It all sounds like something that is going to hit the top end of strategic complexity within the game. Of course, I could just be blathering all of this because I played so much in such a short time that it started to feel like the only game I know and I’m left wanting more for the sake of having something different. We’ll probably get Turmoil later this year but are quite happy to stay away from any more terraforming for a few months.

mezike wrote: Recently had a period of intensively playing TM while on vacation, we managed to pack in seventeen games. We pretty much saw it all, from our lowest ever scoring game where we were both in the 50-70pt range, to our highest where we managed to miraculously tie on 136pts each. We had one game end in generation seven and another run all the way out to fifteen. We had board control where one side spammed a patchwork of double-spaced cities to take advantage of tree placements from the other side that had massive plant production (starting with enough to place a tree every turn and rising to over 20 plants per turn by the endgame). We had games where there were almost no tiles out on the board at all and we used artificial means to oxygenate the atmosphere and raise the temperature, and one game where we were only five spaces shy of filling the entire map.

Things I’ve learnt from a period of intense play: The toughest strategy to compete with by far is playing against a high-terraforming short game as you have to be very efficient with VP generation to keep up. There are some strategies that can be really punishing when they get up to speed, for example leveraging Jovian tags off Saturn Systems or building up a tableau of combo-ing action cards, but they can be flummoxed when the game is closed down in less than ten generations. Given that I play this exclusively as a two-player game it also makes me wonder how strategies change in effectiveness depending on the number of players as the game must be shorter when more players are speeding up the rate of terraforming. Corporations are also affected in this way as there are some that keep handing out rewards with others being limited in their return. We have so many lop-sided games that it makes me wonder how well balanced this really is for two players.

We also saw the niche value of some cards that we would normally pass over as chaff, for example reducing the global requirements by +/-2. I usually pass that one over as there is always something else to do and I’m focusing on efficiency in games like this, but with the right setup it can be powerful to get a card out a couple of turns earlier than it might otherwise make into play. Consuming your own product is something that we started to leverage as well, e.g. predating on your own animals to turn them from half a VP into a whole point.

I’ve also become convinced more than ever of the value of Colonies. I know and accept that there are many who dislike that expansion, however it completely transforms strategies based around animals, microbes and floaters as well as giving real purpose to building up a power supply beyond simply being a slow way to gain heat or to soak up the cost of some cards that require power to feed them. We had many occasions where spending three power for a small gain of just a couple of steel, a few credits, or a single floater was just enough to do one more thing that step-changed a tableau for the following round.

My interest has also renewed in Turmoil. One of the things that we’ve got really good at is assessing the relative value of things in the game, spotting the point at which cards or actions have negative or zero sum impact. From reading up on Turmoil it gives added value to having tags in your tableau which in turn changes the way you value cards and the way you spend your resources. For example some Prelude cards appear objectively better than others, however the imbalance makes more sense when you apply greater importance to tags or getting a slightly faster start on something that is harder to quantify merely in terms of megacredits. Terraforming points also degrade in Turmoil so having a small amount of terraforming or gaining plants or heat starts to look more vital than simply assessing relative value in terms of income or direct corporate compatibility. Decisions on late game card purchases would also have an additional consideration. It all sounds like something that is going to hit the top end of strategic complexity within the game. Of course, I could just be blathering all of this because I played so much in such a short time that it started to feel like the only game I know and I’m left wanting more for the sake of having something different. We’ll probably get Turmoil later this year but are quite happy to stay away from any more terraforming for a few months.

I think with 2P using Colonies you can't do a 'halfway' sort of strategy; you have to either go all-out terraforming or all-out engines. I tend to try to play "Grab the best cards you can and work with them," which makes me lose to my wife's pure engine strategy a lot.

I also think that in 2P you have to get those Milestones and Awards fast. I try to end up with at least three of them. If you don't get any, congratulations, you lost.

Is 2P balanced? I think the rich get richer in TM, and there aren't a lot of ways to reel the leader back in. Should the leader end it ASAP? If I was playing for a million dollars I would count points on all the cards, but I don't want to piss off my wife by doing a count every turn. If I think I'm leading and playing engines I'll just keep playing. If I think I'm losing I have to keep playing and hope for the best. That can give you some pretty unbalanced scores.

Also, since it's floated to the top, we can kick the Steam version around a little more.

Talking about rushing the ending vs. playing engines, you don't see many people on Steam push TR.

Win percentages there are Helion > Tharsis > everybody else.

The past few times I've played online, I've seen a lot of dropped games and players who just wandered away from the keyboard. Maybe it's because I'm an asshole, but I'm not sure how they found out, because I don't talk to anyone. Perhaps I just exude it at some subquantum level. Actually, I think the keyboard wanderers are just trying to keep from taking the karma hit, because the only player who takes the karma hit is the player that forfeits first, Players 2+ who forfeit take the L, but don't take the karma hit. So the wanders just go grab a snack and let the other players lose their patience and forfeit.

It's still an amazingly terrible implementation. It was never tested, at least not to production software standards, and I'm not 100% convinced it was even played by the developers. Since LuckyHammers folded, I wouldn't hop on one foot waiting for it to be improved, expanded, or fixed.

Man, that sounds terrible. I wonder how realistic those win rates are in such a toxic environment where people are quitting because the game isn’t being played the way they wanted it to go.

Something else that has happened for us a few times is that one side gains what looks like a burst of unassailable advantage to the point that the other felt like quitting, but then the situation would turn around in the late game and reverse the balance of power.

Maybe there is a trend/attitude in the online community where they just don’t have the patience to stick with longer term strategies? Helion is easy because every resource except plants turns into money, just keep spending, but it’s simplistic and not as nuanced as leveraging the likes of Recyclon, Manutech or Arklight in the late game that require more careful and precise planning. Anyone that’s also been screwed over by a Jovian/Floater strategy that snowballs the longer the game goes on for knows that Megacredits are not the be-all and end-all for success.