The topic title says it all but let me introduce what happened to our game of Starcraft (with BW exp) on the weekend.

Our group: four 30-year-old guys:

We were playing a 4 player game and I was playing the Hivemind as 3rd player. I took the strategy card that gives me an extra Conquest point every turn while it's on the board. I place it on my 2CP home planet, giving me three! points on the first turn. So I start looking at my board position and I calculate I could probably win the game by turn 4, definitely by turn 5, but not against three other players. When placing z-axis points, player three opens up my homeplanet and player 1's homeworld. Everybody at the table starts talking that they're gonna have to smash me good, and so I think, "Well, I'm gonna smash first, first turn zergling rush! Rawr" So we're placing orders and player 1 places 3 orders on his home planet and 1 on a neighboring planet. I place my 4th order on his stack of 3, and of course it's a move order (gold). Player 1 is Protoss and has only 2 units on the board, both at his home base.

He elects to not resolve his move order and stays at home, with his two units at his base. Results were I totally smashed him, and took him out of the game, managed to take over a neighboring planet for another CP leaving me with a total of 5! CP at the end of turn one and hime not doing anything at all in the game. Nothing!

Turn two, I lose the P1's homeworld to Player 4, so at the end of turn 2, I have 9 points.

Turn three, I manage to hold on to my planet, giving me 13 points at the end of turn three.

Turn four, I mess up and only get one CP, total 14.

Turn five, I get three CP, final total is 17 CP, second place was at about 9.

So yeah, the strategy worked, but at the cost of a friend (one of my best buddies) having to sit out a really long game. Fortunately (?) player 2 was really tired and bowed out letting P1 to play his empire, but P2 was a new player and hadn't played b4 so his board position wasn't very strong when P1 took over at the end of turn two.

I felt kind of guilty as I was doing it, but I envisioned this awesome victory after only a few turns. It happened, but after reflection, I felt that I put my enjoyment of a victory over my buddy's enjoyment of the game. Game-wise a legitimate way to play, but I think breaks the social contract of a long boardgame play.

What do you all think? Should you take someone out if you can. Or should great power come with great responsibility?

I think what you did is perfectly fine. You played well and took advantage of your opponents poor unit placement, hopefully the other players will catch on and the level of play in your group will be all the better.

Now your buddy knows not to put all his starting plastics in one space. It is a harsh way to learn that defense is a quick way to lose in this game, and that you have to spread out your plasics to limit the power of mobilise orders, but hopefully it got the message across and he won't be so stupid next time.

its just a game

best defence good offense

I can relate to your feelings about what happened.

I was a player in a similar situation (although I was in the position of your friend P1).

Once the Z axes and then transports were placed, I realized that to survive the people acting after me I needed to do something unorthodox (2 people had connections to my starting world. Originally I thought about spreading my units out as much as possible and hope that I still owned a teritory that I could rebuild a base on if needed. I had also started with 2 units.

But then I came up with the idea that because I got to place before my neighbours could, I could put a mobilize order to be last executed, and then place my remaining orders to get off the rock (with either one unit or both of them), build a backup base while possibly building up my building levels, build units, then mobilize back to my starting world with additonal units and take back the important area (2CP area with my base in it) and hope for the best. I depleted an area to make sure I got all my workers back from that resource and just used my faction sheet resources to harvest the rest so I wouldn't be as exposed as I could have been and lose valuable workers early on. It ended up working. I never lost that 2CP area with my base and I collected the majority of my resources from the backup planet and faction sheet. It worked out alright in the end. I survived! But I had to plan it pretty much by the end of the galaxy setup / starting of turn 1 order placement. 2 players placed orders on my starting planet but thankfully only one followed through with moving units.

yes retreating then counter attacking is one of the best ways to deal with a first turn rush. just make sure to get that bottom mobilize order.

If your concerend with a 1st round elimination perhaps a house rule to eliminate the possibility for this to a happen. Something simple like "You may not place a order token on a players homeworld in the first round".

Or you could grow some balls.

If your oppotent was eliminated in his first round, it's probably due to his/her mistake(s).

For example: In this case, your oppotent should have attack your homeworld instead discarding order (assuming he had a transport on nawigation route). Or: he should have placed his transport / orders in another way.

This game doesn't forgive any mistakes. No matter what you'll do, you will always lose if you don't predict others' intentions.

On the other hand, sometimes you just need appropriate combat or event cards... So you cannont predict everything