Just got the original without the expansion, have a decent group that plays totaling 9 people ( allowing for personal lives and such)

So far we have gotten 5 games in in about a month. Every game except the first seems to consist of the same thing:

Me and 1 other player go for points. Everyone else goes for warsuns and Turtles till they have a massive fleet, then they all have "gratuitous space Battles" till i get bored and take my game home with me. Last time i won on the 6th round ( i think ) and they continued to battle it out not really caring that i had won. The points were me 10 other guy 7, rest 3.....

Any advice on how to steer the game back towards actually taking command of the Imperial throne and not playing "Space Risk" ??

The challenge you face is probably the way the Imperial card is designed. This card has the trouble of affording a player victory very quickly if no other players chose to take it. The odd thing is that the Imperial card isn't that overbearing if it get's spread around, it's just when it gets neglected that it borks the game and trivializes objectives.

The expansion fixes this with two different alternative cards that are designed to encourage more serious play. The expansion also includes an alternative set of objective cards designed to award points for players engaging in war and conquest rather than the more hum drum empire building cards from the base game. That said, these are not creative solutions when it comes to my quality as an advice giver.

Essentially the problem is that they don't see how to connect point scoring with the game that they want to play which is one of galactic conquest. It's like trying to teach people to associate money with valued goods, they have to buy in.

I don't know your group. I don't know how they play games or how what other games they play. The best advice I can offer is stop trying to win for a while and just try to make winning matter. Whenever players score points dole out accolades to reinforce the behavior. Encourage speculation on who will win the game regularly. Harp on the score constantly and if someone pulls ahead in points instruct other players to hurt that player mercilessly to stop them from winning. Do this even if you're wining, do this espeically if you're winning. My guess is that the players will gladly double or triple team you at if you intimate the idea properly. Any allies you can enlist in this will help your cause, the more people who are on board the easier it will be to convince the rest of your group.

If your friends keep playing even after you've won, then I don't know there's really anything you can do to change their minds. I mean, there's a difference between "not getting it" and "deliberately ignoring the real goal." It sounds like your friends want to play something else, something more military. You can try talking to them before you pull it out again, but given what you've said here I don't know if that would really help anything. The game is designed to discourage turtling and large military conflicts, but if that's what everyone wants to do, it is technically allowed. I think outright denying them this tactic would be against the spirit of the game too.

Try stopping the game as soon as someone wins. The rules do say the game ends when someone gets 10 (or 14) VP. If all their military plots and plans get cut short, maybe they'll stop focusing on it. Or maybe they'll stop agreeing to play the game. I don't know your friends like you do, so take that with a grain of salt. Alternatively, find a new group of friends to play with, or start taking advantage of their procrastination to do some things you might not think you have time for while you play. If you can't beat them, after all...

Such a weird situation, when you think of it... :r

Never had that, nor in TI nor in another FFG... you should be concerned more about your friends than the game

Just teasing you

Yeah, this isn't a problem with the imperial card, or objectives, or anything - it's a problem with players not caring who wins. If they don;'t care who wins, there's no point playing.

Try playing a "short game", e.g. to 6VP, and immediately packing away each time you achieve victory. They might pick up on it if they don't get a chance to have have huge pointless wars.

Or just introduce tasers in your game, like that when you just won, you can electrocute any moron that goes crazily like "lets keep on moving these cuty tiny ship-toys !"

Thanks for all the tips and advice! Actually managed to "steer" everyone in the right direction.

Involved playing with specific shall we say "trouble makers" and playing a 4 player game instead of the usual 6. This forced the imperial card to be taken every round shortening the game considerably from 6 or so hours to 4.

By intentionally not going for max points, ( and defeating warsuns without having them ) i managed to make everyone realize the real fun in the game and not play galaxy war anymore. Not to mention totally obliterating someone who spent all their resources on war sun tech and had little to defend himself with.

DarkRyno said:

Ah, the harsh light of tactical sense finally dawns. Having the big guns is good, but having all your eggs in one basket is bad This is definitely a lesson TI teaches us.

Besides including tasers or similar effects into the game making them grow up and go for the game objectives, you could be eager to harass the turtlers early on, forcing them to abandon their shell to protect their interest sphere . Also turtlers tend to want to pick their own races, so maybe handing out random race-cards helps some? Some races simply can't go for war-suns as the way is to long (that is if the rest of the players cause them enough distress/disrupts).

Speed up the phase and attack early, killing you neighbors carriers and so on. This doesnt sound like your problem, as you keep winning and keeps the speed up, but this will surely force your friends into thinking a bit more short termed, not tech so much and build ships to be used for battle NEXT ROUND. The scope of their strategy will have to decrease to a few rounds ahead

I myself have the same problem, but then again most of my friends wants to play lizix, jol nar and sardak, so they are defencive already as they pick the race. I had to explain to the other players that even though the sardak had deep space cannons a lot and all the techs increasing their effect, they just needed to burn some fighters to get through and kill his fleet and maybe land.

Good luck to us ecouraging our friends into harassing more

I propose to buy the Shattered Empires expansion, definitely. I don't like the massive galaxy war but original Imperial SC was boring since most passive and defensive players often win. Imperial II with Age of Empires is really great option.

DarkRyno said:

I feel your pain. My game group includes two folks that can't seem to formulate a good strategy in Munchkin, much less anything more complex. They just want to talk crap and skirmish with everybody else. It just detracts from a game like TI which requires a much more strategic approach. As a result, they simply don't get invited to our TI matches. I wish it could be different since this has limit us to four playters.

Nematode said:

If you really want to bring these two around, I'd suggest working in some less complicated but equally strategic games first. Things like Citadels or Puerto Rico. I'm sure these two will continue to look for ways to mess with each other, but by taking direct violence out of the equation it forces them to start thinking more strategically. Now, don't misunderstand, if they're determined to go after one another then they always will, but hopefully this will open their eyes to other ways besides massing ships on the border when they next play TI.

I don't think the other players are missing the point. I think TI3 was designed to downplay wargaming but it is still part of the game, and should be.

What makes this game fun is the fact it combines technology build, economic, trade, political AND wargaming into one game.

Perhaps a variant of the game can be produced by fans or by FFG that includes more VP objectives that you can gain by military objectives. I think controlling X number of planets is a type of military objective. In twilight imperium 2 you had to control X number of planets to increase your standing. So how about add variant cards players can print out and use in the game that includes military-oriented objectives.

I see that there are two types of gamers. Those who like euro-style games, and pure economy games. Great, and yes I'll play them, but in the end they aren't the be-all of gaming. They are nice and have a function, but to think those who like wargames and more axis-n-allies style games are 'not getting the point' is insulting. I suppose what I'm saying is. I don't really play DBM style historical miniature wargames but I don't knock the players who do. Let them play it. I just don't feel I'm missing out by not playing it, nor do I feel I'm missing out not playing economy games like Rail Builders or Fast Food Chain or similar games. Adding wargame elements is a good thing.

In the end though, we have a limited pool of gamers to play. I primarily play table top miniatures (non-40K games like Warzone, VOR, Chronopia), computer games, and yes boardgames, but mostly games like Talisman, and my few times I played Twilight Imperium 2 I loved it.

I now have a chance to buy a new board game and I am heavily thinking of investing in Twilight Imperium 3 and learn to live with new elements like the command-chit mechanic and I actually do like the new secret and public objective cards (over the old way to advance in the game). So there are both good things and things I might have to learn to like.

Still, the game has things I find odd. Why, if the one thing I repeatedly hear is 'this game takes a long while' would they have an official variant for a Long Game. It makes more sense to have an official variant called the Short Game. Where you play to 6 VP (or 8 VP) this way when you first play it is recommended you do this assuming your game will last 6 hours for a 6 VP game cuz you are a newbie. As you gain experience, increase the VP total to declare a winner. That to me is a more sane, and logical approach as a game designer.

Now having variant objectives or playing with rules like a player can qualify for more objectives only makes the game quicker (ie 3 to 4 hours instead of the 6 or 7), and I don't see that as a bad thing. Thus when I get the game I'll seriously think about variants ideas like this.

For example, what if we don't limit the number of technology you can buy in a turn, or objectives you can qualify for. What it might mean a player gains troops/ships and goes on the offensive sooner? Great, if you want more wargaming but bad if you don't. And apparently the original poster sat in a game where many of them liked/wanted more wargaming. I say perhaps they should use such variant ideas.

More player conflict isn't bad, it is what makes the game fun.

I figure if a game takes 8+ hours to play, either everyone is reading the rules and trying to learn the game while attempting to play it (kind of like cramming for a test after the test has already started), or a game variant was being used without anyone realizing it (so each round/phase was taking much longer).

Foreshadow said:

I certainly agree that wargaming still has a purpose in TI3. There are plenty of objectives that include control or destroying X item. In addition, controlling more planets puts the player in a better position to accomplish many other objectives.

The real problem is when somebody has the misfortune to be seated next to a particular player who has no interest in accomplishing the goals of the game and instead tries to do nothing but drag his neighbors down. Yes, I guess it is just an example of realism or whatever to be seated next to "Conan the Barbarian" who insists on attacking at every available opportunity.

Unfortunately, all this does is make the game a contest between those not seated next to these non-strategic minded players. So, in effect, the game is mostly decided based upon a totally random roll of the dice about who gets to sit on each seat for a particular game.

As a result, "Conan the Barbarian" still doesn't get invited to the game.

Nematode said:

So what usually happens then? One player spends his time trying to defend against his neighbor who insists on destroying him from the start while the rest of the players go on about with their lives by controlling planets and collecting more resources so they can buy more technology and get their VP counts going so that eventually both players are taken out? Or does someone's VP count reach 10 before that happens?

Nematode said:

You know what you could do? If everyone knows this guy is only interested in fighting, you could make an alliance with whoever's on the other side of him to help take him down. Then you two split his planets and go about the game as usual, having both dealt with the issue and established a fair number of planets to offer political and mineral support for your own efforts to win.

Of course, not inviting him to play works too, so there you go.

I've had exactly the same experience and when i talk to other TI groups they don't seem to have this problem.

After playing many many TI games (2nd and 3rd edition), I've come to the conclusion that for my group of gamers, the victory conditions are too separated from the play. I've since taken on the task of redesigning how the victory conditions are met to better integrate them into play.

We play-tested the first cut at these rules yesterday and it worked amazingly well. The players got much more engaged with the victory point system as soon as it felt it was part of the play and not separate.

btw: the expansion for 3rd edition goes a long way to fix this problem but we needed to go further.

I'd be willing to share the rules here if there was any interest.

Sure, id at least like to read them over.

Hey all,

Maybe the solution is to just build war suns yourself... most people I play with are just people who want to crush eachother, not win the game...

Cheerz,

Forshadow:

If you buy third edition you'll understand the complaint much better. If you buy the game also buy the expansion.

Foreshadow said:

They did this with the expansion, it completely changes the way the game is played. When playing with the original third edition objectives one had to buy ships or spend res for victory points. In the expansion one buys ships to earn your victory points the hard way: in combat and conquest.

Foreshadow said:

Keep in mind, Dark Ryno's Problem is not the war aspect; it's that they're not really fighting, they're turtling and and massing. If players play the game with an intention to play you'll find that the game forces players to hurt each other much sooner and more severely. This creates a dance and a tactical concern on top of the strategic.

Foreshadow said:

If you let players score all their points at once you'll encourage a waiting game, the players will sit back and try not to win till the last moment because they don't want to pull ahead and become a target. If you de-incetivize taking the initiative with combat then players won't fight each other because they know that doing so will weaken them making them targets. This leads to turtle style play and nobody wants that.

Steve-O said:

I have to agree with Steve-O, whenever a player gets beligerant as Nematode says there's always an opportunity for diplomacy. This is especially true since any attack on you weakens them giving their other neighbor incentive to come in and do your dirty work. The only thing you need to take care of is not dying outright, a few defensive measures like PDS's or Dreadnaughts can see to this. You'll need the ships and defenses to maintain power if you do pull ahead in the game, when a player decides you need to die early on he's really just saving you the bad press of attacking him first.

OP: Yeah, we had these issues when we played the game 5 years ago, too. Get the expansion, it helps.

If you also use the SA rules posted elsewhere together with the objectives and preset maps that comes with it, there are no room for turtling. Players are thrown headfirst out in conflicted zones and you have to use your elbows for every resource. You will see a great increase in skirmishes, negotiation and cool situations in general. The things that (in theory) makes this game so great.

I've posted a draft of the rules on my blog

http://onehundredfeet.wordpress.com/twilight-imperium-changrs/

Comments are welcome, but please post them as comments on the blog page so I can track them. Thanks!

Ryan.

There are two obvious solutions to this:

Make preset maps were every player do not have to start in the outer ring. This ruins the "spheres of interests", making war over contested areas a more frequent happening. To resolve problems with good starting positions i recommend playtesting ofc, wormholes are especially problematic for balancing, bidding tradegoods for starting positions is also a solution.

Try including new public objectives giving incentives to attack, or just move away from the home systems. Will spark conflict for sure.

Shattered Ascension by PsiComa solves all these problems in detail, recommended. http://www.ti3wiki.org/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1229386102

Ye I know I'm a fanboy, sorry if i spam