Greetings, I am new here and would like to draw upon the experience of the posters.

I infrequently play TI3, not with the expansion pack and want to know about some ways to prevent people from being able to huddle up and just build. I think this is called turtling. I have seen that this really slows down the game flow and drags the game on for more hours than needed. Every time I see the same defensive, passive aggresive tactics employed by other players and I don't know how to stop the game from turning in to a build up.

One player will never do anything until he has received war suns then he goes on a massive rampage. I would be interested in hearing any strategies that can be employed to attempt to lead the flow of the game more towards early battle.

That in and of itself is part of the problem. In most cases, in the original game, there is no incentive for a battle. There are no objectives that give you points for beating the snot out of your neighbour. One way to encourage less "turtling" is to play in a smaller universe. Take a ring out and ensure people are closer together. But, I really don't think that the lack of combat is prolonging the game since there is almost no reason to fight at all and fighting adds time to the game.

As long as the Initiative/Imperial cycle is going strong, the game can only last so many rounds and usually is over far before Imperium Rex shows up.

War Suns are over-rated. If you see someone going for them, that means they are spending resources on Tech instead of ships and their territory should be more vulnerable to attack. 12 resources is a lot of resources.

If you are flexible about house-rules and fan-variants then you should check out the boardgamegeek.com or ti3wiki.org websites. They have quite a few of both.

I've played TI3 quite a lot, and whilst winning is my main goal when playing games, I've started using a sneaky meta-game political tactic in my games over the last few months: I talk to everyone about 'fun'.

I dislike turtling, and I dislike other people turtling, and to be honest, no one really has much fun if they're turtling. Everyone sits there, everyone builds some ships, everyone builds some more ships, and then one person wins. By reminding people how boring it is to turtle, I ensure that they don't. Once other people turtle less, by virtue of myself being the only person who never turtles *I'm more likely to win*.

The game does take longer if there are more battles, and it can surprise and frustrate you when massive completely pointless battles start happening, especially if it's between the two players with the least points and you're about to win. Overall, though, people will have more fun, and the more fun the game is, the more often people will come back for another go.

First: TI is not a war game. Keep that in mind. It's about victory points, not about who wins the most battles.

Besides this favouredenemies advice is a very good one. Meta-gameing will help you a lot. But even with this it may be hard to stop the other players from turtling because in the original game you are not rewarded if you figth. You loose ressources, command counters and time and you don't get instant victory points. So you should think about using the expansions objectives which reward fighting with victory points or at least use the Imperial II strategy card (you can download it here at ffg).

If you want to stick with plain vanilla TI then you should try to find a way to let the people think fighting will help them winning. There are two ways to do this:

1) Make them suffer:

If everyone is turtling or researching warsuns then you have the chance to grab the initiative. They wast time end resources doing research and fortifying their home system. Use this time for your advantage. Go for Mecatol Rex as soon as possible, grab it and get as many ground-troops there as possible. If they give you enough time to build up a substantial ground force they will have to invest a lot of resources and time to conquor it from you. Even if you don't have a secret objective that needs mecatol rex it is very likely that one or more of the other players do have such an objective. So you deny them 2 victory points which gives you an advantage. It's often best not to have a big space fleet on mecatol rex because an invasion fleet could destroy it. Instead use ground forces. Ground battles are much harder to win. Have a big space fleet neraby so you can crush their invasion fleet after they have attacked mecatol rex. You will see, they will not like such moves

I do this in may game ground regulary and now they try very hard to stop me getting mecatol rex which often gives me the opportunity to invade production heavy systems of my neighbours.

By the way: Sol and Yin Brotherhood are extremely good for doing this stunt.

2) Spread fear and war:

The following trick works best if you are Hacan: First select one neighbour you want to attack. Make a good peace treatment with the other neighbour. (If you are Hacan give him a trade agreement). Attack your neighbour as soon as you think you can win without loosing too much. Now you neighbour is weakened and will throw his forces against you. What an opportunity for his other neighbour. You will probably see your neighbour getting attacked on his other front. To top this you should try to talk your other neighbour (the one you have a peace treaty with) into attacking his neighbour. And so on....

I personally prefer using option 1. It will help you, hurt your opponents and will result in nice battles at mecatol rex. In addition you don't attack someone directly so you will not make an arch-enemy that wants to retaliate. Instead you will have multiple players waiting for the first one to attack you so he can attack him and so on. If you use Imperial II your advantage from conquering mecatol rex will increase even more. When using the expansions objectives other fights beside mecatol rex will be rewarded, too.

Hubaaaa said:

Hi There,

Long time player (mainly TI2, only just got TI3) but first time poster here - so sorry if it's a daft question. I've had a look all round the site and cant find where to download the Stratergy II card from. Could you please point me in the right direction.

Thanks

www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite_sec.asp

The Shattered Empires rules has the Imperial II strategy card in it. Also, the official variant rules has the text for it (it doesn't call it Imperial II, it calls it "The Ancient Throne")

Brilliant - thanks fo the help

grandad said:

In this case I think the most effective solution is also the simplest - take the intiative (no, not the SC) and attack one of your opponents whom you know has a tendancy to turtle. If possible, find another player in your group whom you know is also of like mind and ally with him to both go on a killing spree early on. If you and your friend each attack different players known for turtling, you now have 4 players who aren't turtling (your chosen opponents will likely respond to your aggression, or at the very least they will be unable to build up too many forces with you constantly attacking them.) This will also likely illicit attention from other players who aren't directly involved as either you or your opponents attempt to gain assistance from them.

In my experience most people turtle for one of two reasons - #1) they want to make sure they have enough extra forces for home defense before they go out and attack and/or #2) they are unwilling to be the one who "starts things." Regardless of which motivation your friends have, if you start stirring the pot they will be motivated to respond. If you repeat the process over several games, your friends will gradually become accustomed to acting faster and not turtling. Just be careful not to pick on any one opponent game after game. Remember, you want to get people moving in the game, but you don't want to piss off the players and possibly ruin friendships. Mix up which players you target from one game to another, only focussing on hitting people who insist on turtling. If you get some amazingly lucky die rolls and decimate one opponent, consider backing off and going after another player - again, your goal here is to make people do things in the game and eliminating a player early is not going to do that.

This strategy will almost certainly NOT help you to win the game. In fact it will probably take you out of the running as people start to team up against you, but it will teach them how to play without turtling. This method assumes your goal is to stop people from turtling, not to win the game. After a few games like this you can probably return to your normal style of play and see if your friends still turtle quite so much.

Another, less hostile method would be to get the expansion. The new SCs really do get things moving more early on.