Hey there guys

A couple of weeks ago i had the pleasure of trying TE for the first time, which resulted in me going out and buying it including the expansions.

So tomorrow I am going for my second game of TE, with a new group which of whom have never tried it before, making me the only one who have played it and that’s a one game play through. We are 4 players and I got 2 quick questions:

1 ) Now the group and me like knowing stuff so we play with Age of empire, and I found this variant on the internet called “red tape”. I have been reading up on it and got the strategy card, but I am still a little unsure of how to build the objective deck. I was thinking creating it of 6 stage 1 cards and 4 stage 2 cards removing Imperium rex and the 3 “I win” stage 2 objectives, does that work? Or should they remain in with the red tape? And in that case, how does imperium rex work?

2) So in a four player game every player gets to choose 2 strategic cards, all good. So does this mean you get 2 turns each round (when going through the strategic cards from 1-8), say I have card number 1 and 4 I get to act on both 1 and 4? So if I pick card 1 and 2, I get 2 activations before everyone, or if I pick 7 and 8 I get the last ones? The Naaluu collective then have 0 on both cards and are sure to make 2 activations before anyone else?

Also about the strategic cards, I am going for

1. Initiative
2. Dip 2
3. Political 2
4. Production
5. Trade 3
6. Warfare 2
7. Tech 2
8. Bureaucracy (red tape variant as mentioned above)

2 questions related to this, so when a player uses the secondary of the bureaucracy he draws a political card so there are 3 (or even more) to choose from when a player resolves political 2 right?

In the first game I had everybody had tons of CC available, now none of the cards give CC tokens (we played with leadership in that game), will we be to starved for them? What would your recommendation be for the strategic cards?

Thanks for the clarification

I'm not sure on the Red Tape option, I have only just heard of that house rule myself a few weeks ago.

for your second question, the rulebook, somewhere, I think says that in 3 or 4 player games players act on the highest number initiative on their strategy cards, however, the FAQ for the game reverses that and says use the lowest number. I have found lowest to work better, personally. Either way, you should only be acting on one of the numbers, just decide which before the game starts.

For actual SC selection, the rules say that you should pick one set or the other and only swap out cards that have the same names, so you should have either:

Initiative, Political, Logistics and Imperial (1 or 2) or

Leadership, Assembly, Production and Bureaucracy

and 1 card of each named Trade, Technology, Warfare, Diplomacy.

Any selection of cards that deviates from that is likely to cause problems of one sort or another, such as leaving everyone VERY starved for Command Tokens (although I have never seen a strong reason why card 8 couldn't be mixed and matched as well). If it is just you (with limited experience) and a bunch of new players, I would strongly recommend using the full set of one color or the other, just for simplicities sake.

Uh, rereading it i get your point. I read as you could swap any of the same number, now this makes more sense

Thanks for all the clarifications, i think i will stick to the SE versions then.

I'd also recommend sticking with the SE cards as a set. The general rule is to pick either the base or SE cards to start with, then you can swap in cards of the same name (Trade III instead of Trade II, for example) without a problem.

To clarify the question about political cards, when using the SE strategy cards, all players have a hand of political cards, starting the game with 2 each (and a maximum of 5). When someone picks Assembly, they pick someone to read an agenda from their hand (or the top card of the deck if the selected person doesn't have any) and also picks another person to become the speaker.

Any political cards drawn get added to your hand of political cards. These can also be discarded to be spent as a trade good too.

I'm sure by now you have had your game, i would be curious about how it went.

Just a tip however, the Imperial II card is a really combination with the Age of Empire variant especially with new players.

We have had it, we played with the "original cards" but swapped for diplomacy 2, Trade 3 (playing with mercs), Warfare 2 and Technology 2 and used Red tape burecracy.

It worked great. The only minor issues was that the secondary on the burecracy makes you draw 1 political card, we played this in such a way that it mean one card was added to those you were able to choose from. It worked decently well, the combination made the political scene very interesting and intense (something that was lacking first time i played the game in my opinion). We discussed how it worked, and have made up 2 variants of the red tape, where the secondary have been changed, which we will try, but overall we might as well go back to the original card and make it add more political cards.

The issue with imperial (for me) is that the objectives is all open for the taking in the first round, and it eliminates some of the forward planning as you can just set it up and then qualify for 5 objectives in one round and win.

Although that would be difficult to pull off since you're normally only allowed to qualify for one objective per round.

Imperial allows you to qualify for any number of objectives, so you could claim 2, 3 or more in a turn with it.

Yeah I can see how you might think that would happen based on a reading of the card but in practice this really never happens. There is a number of reasons for that. The first and most obvious is that while you can see what objectives you can score, so can everyone else. This is actually a huge disadvantage, players will unload their withheld attack power on you and dismantle you. secondly is that more than half of the objectives require to either accomplish something specific in a specific round, hold a position, blow up a space dock, or what have you or it requires you to expend something, counters, resources, influence. Quite often you simply can't do it all in one round and if you don't score points when you can, holding out for that big score, everyone will know thats exactly what you are doing and again.. with 4 or 5 other players aiming to stop you.. they most certainly can and will.

What typically happens with open objectives and the Imperial II card is that the mid and late game (the most exciting part) comes a lot earlier, since everyone can kind of see where your going and what your after objective wise, hostilities and the stopping power of players fleets and action cards all come out a lot sooner. The game becomes as a result a lot messier with a lot more interaction, usually resulting in people scoring less points not more. Ultimately the game will end with someone scoring multiple points ... 2 or 3 maybe, but thats how most games of TI3 end anyway.

The most points I have ever seen someone score with Imperial II was 4 and that was early in the game which is actually what more typically happens.. people score the easy points to catapult themselves when they aren't an obvious contender for the win and then grind out the rest in the mid and late game.

There are a lot of mechanics that really work a lot different than the reading of the card suggests. You might think that using Artifact planets will result in players scoring more points hence resulting in a quicker game. What really happens is that there is a lot more conflict, players take a lot more loses and the result is a much much slower game with far fewer points being scored in an average round for example.

You really have to experiment of course to find your own groove with TI3. Every group ultimately finds their own preffered setups, but I would suggest that you really experiment without the hypothesis and presumptions about what will and won't happen based on the reading of the cards and the rules. in particular (the irony here) avoid internet advice because I'll be honest with you (trying not to sound elitist here), there is a ton of really bad information floating around on the internet about TI3. Its quite common for people to play one or two games of TI3 and write a thesis about all the things that are wrong with it and provide ridiculous amounts of house rules and homebrewed systems. BoardGameGeek.com is particularly bad, so much bad advice on the forums there.

TI3 strategy cards are pretty well thought, all of them serve the game by providing focus on different elements of the game. There are obviously some exceptions here, well established and tested elements. For example the Imperial I card I think is pretty universally seen as kind of boring and perhaps a little broken to use. In general though, again, I recommend experimenting. The open Objective deck with Imperial II makes for a very complex and very dynamic game, not at all what the reading of the rules and the card might suggest.

Wow, that was a long and very interesting read , thanks for that.

To take some of your points

First, and properly most important, I myself have, with the above game played a mighty total of 2 games of TI, so it is a very limited experience I can base anything off.

About the internet, I know that. I have played tabletop wargames for years, and never really followed the internet, despite that I had a pretty good win rate at turneys back when I played that. I play lol (and pathfinder) and see it all the time there as well. I really like looking into the internet for inspiration and other ways to look at it, because in the end that’s how you grow, both as a player and a person, by meeting with people who does things differently and listen to them and learn something. Sometimes its waste of time, sometimes you change perspective, but most often you just learn something.

About seeing what people do we are still new to the game, and none of us is really that far in thinking of what the others do, and is more focused on our own play, learning by doing and see what happens. There if someone thinking those moves ahead does this, we properly don’t realize this, before its to late. Take the last game as an example. I was leading up a win, so they got the public execution political card in two turns in a row on me (due to an action card allowing one of the players to play a political card from the discard pile) and despite this, I still won. The easy was to stop me was taking two planets I had control of with artifacts, with only a random ship and on one of them a ground force and just shy of two great armies. Therefore, for us, I am pretty sure that wont work. In the future when we get some games under our belt, we will properly swap something out, just to try, because as you say, you might be surprised.

Artifacts made this game a lot faster (took two hours off game time compared to my first game) though we were only 4 players (my first was with 5) but this time all expect me was newcomers, in my first I was the only newcomer. My hope was that these would make more fighting to the game, though that was not the effect. Actually people just accepted, he have that one victory point, and so it is. I em pretty sure this will change we get some more games going.

You might think that using Artifact planets will result in players scoring more points hence resulting in a quicker game. What really happens is that there is a lot more conflict, players take a lot more loses and the result is a much much slower game with far fewer points being scored in an average round for example.

Wow, gotta disagree massively on this one. using artifacts radically reduces game length, IME. By a couple hours at least. Games using artifacts are the ONLY games I have ever played where someone wins by getting to 10 VP instead of just having the most when Imperium Rex flips up.

I do see artifacts adding more conflict to the game, but that conflict tends to be focused on VPs instead of just random aggression. Really don't ever want to play without artifacts at this point.

If there is one thing that is true is that every group will have its own formula and result from the use of variants. My old group in particular was a really experienced one, I don't think there was a person in it that didn't have 30+ games under their belt. Something like Artifact Planets was typically heavily disputed in that group, conflicts that would severely draw out games. Those results however might not repeat with a different group, the impact of Artifact Planets or any variant really might be completely benign with one group while expediting or slowing it down with another. Also when dealing with inexperienced players results of a particular variant may vary greatly from game to game, sometimes causing one type of results other another. I don't think it will really stabilize until players gain some experience at which point certain elements of the game will be viewed in a group specific perspective. For example in my group Imperium Rex card is perma-banned because it has prematurely and very anti-climatically ended games in the most exciting and disputed moments in the past. Other groups might find Imperium Rex essential to ensure the game doesn't go beyond a certain time frame. I guess the point is that its all very dynamic, experiences will differ wildly.

A good example of that dynamic group effect is Racial strength. Many people will claim for example that races like Yssaril Tribes are the most powerful in the game, but in my gaming group that played TI3 for the better part of a decade they never won a single game. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. I think, in our group, the threat of a powerful race on the table pushed alliances and conflicts into unfavorable results for the Tribe player making it impossible for him to win, just a guess but its possible. The most common winner in our group was the Mentak Coaltion which if you follow internet opinion is usually said to be kind of a weak race.

I think results of variants, racial strengths etc. differ, which is again why I think you really have to experiment with your own group to see how things affect them specifically as opposed to trying to find some sort of general consensus or reading into the cards/rules of the game.

The good news experimentation is fun, so its not like its a terrible burden.

One thing I do always recommend to new groups is to avoid getting into house ruling and rules creation until you have a good handle on the game. There is a lot of really great player create stuff out there, much of which for me personally has not only been adapted but is an auto-add into every game. So I'm not suggesting there isn't good stuff out there, but until your know your groups dynamic it will be difficult to know what is good and what is bad. Believe me when I say one sure fire way to ruin a hopeful group of TI3 players is to have a couple of really awful TI3 games. 6+ hours games that aren't exciting and fun to play will very quickly wear out their welcome. So you have to be very careful about elements you put into a game.