9 hours ago, Brikhause said:

So those symbols on the right I am leaning more and more to a sort of distance sun mechanic. Red couldmean it is a more hostile planet to take control of or something so there will be a heftier price in doing so or it might require more troops to take it. While a green planet would be a more peaceful means of takeover.

That might be the case, the resource values are higher on the red than they are on the green.

My thought was that they might be a way of causing disruption on the board through politics.

The Green and Blue symbols are the symbols for that colours tech. The big red one on verfut is also the symbol for red tech.

I wonder if one is a discount for tech, and the other is a preq for landing on it, or an additional cost. The old colours for distant suns was Red for hazard and green for no hazard. Could be that the better planets all have hazards built in, or additional costs. It's a good way to balance bereg and Abyz if they do

If you check the player aid part of the race sheet, it mentions anomalies. Those symbols are likely tied to them...

The new symbols are also on the planet cards as well. I doubt they act as a Distant Suns mechanic after having noticed that. There also appears to be some blue symbols, they look oval shaped.

It could be that they are linked to tech, where now the matching tech symbols on planets count towards prerequisites, perhaps the new symbol acts as a discount. But I doubt that, as it looks like most planets have them.

3 hours ago, Adny said:

If you check the player aid part of the race sheet, it mentions anomalies. Those symbols are likely tied to them...

Anomalies are special systems, like

• Asteroid Field
• Nebula
• Supernova
• Gravity Rift

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1828586/text-news-post

I see three bigs symbols (green, blue, red) that are different from the technology discount symbols and it looks like they are on every non homeplanet:

https://boardgamegeek.com/article/26633151#26633151

Current ideas

• As Distant Sun Replacement
• For some Agendas
• For some Objecetvies

On 13.8.2017 at 6:06 AM, Brikhause said:

So those symbols on the right I am leaning more and more to a sort of distance sun mechanic. Red couldmean it is a more hostile planet to take control of or something so there will be a heftier price in doing so or it might require more troops to take it. While a green planet would be a more peaceful means of takeover.

I'm pretty sure it is more about objectives, laws and action cards. "control at least 4 green planets", "blue planets may not have PDS", "destroy one ground-force on a red planet, if it was the only ground-force that planet becomes neutral", that sort of thing. Previews of the box-contend does not show anything that looks like a distant sun mechanic, so it would have to come in form of text from the rule-book. Also fix events would be boring, so the only thing I can see then doing would be rolling on random event tables, since that would not require any additional components, but so far, it seems FFG is trying to improve game-flow, and that would go against that.

The agenda change sounds good. It just wasn't worth bothering with political agenda 90% of the time in TI3. They were more a waste of time "eh, I guess" and distraction than a meaningful game mechanic.

The main things I'd like to see is simply cutting down on the disparity between races, secret objectives, and action cards. TI3 was getting to the point where you could almost call the winner right after setup.

Although to be honest, I'd rather they just did away with secret objectives all together. I've always hated random hidden victory condition mechanics. They always feel like the Cylon leader agendas in BSG: something that's random and hidden so you can't really block it so you just shrug your shoulders and hope they don't achieve it. That's not a very compelling mechanic for a strategy game. I'd rather it just went entirely off of public objectives.

17 hours ago, GrooveChamp said:

The agenda change sounds good. It just wasn't worth bothering with political agenda 90% of the time in TI3. They were more a waste of time "eh, I guess" and distraction than a meaningful game mechanic.

I hope they make it so it's like when you play with 4 players and use the 2 card variant. That meant all cards were picked, always.

Which is how it felt the game should really be, it got it moving a lot better.

Just finished reading the learn to play rules. No surprises, pretty much most of the changes were covered in the articles. During the action phase only the active player can make trades and he can only deal with each player once. During the agenda phase any player can deal with any player, but still only once per pairing.

To take control of mecatol Rex you have to spend 6 influence before landing ground troops. That gains you a victory point and activated the galactic council and the agenda phase.

No sign of a transfer action, but maybe in the rules reference.

Some objectives can now be scored during the activation phase. If I'm reading it right, you could conceivably score several objectives in one round, but only one per turn.

They are planet types (there are 3). Referenced by cards amongst other things. Homeworlds don't have them.

Some minor changes I noticed while skimming the rule-book:

• Technology Specialties no longer give a discount to research, instead they count as a prerequisite.
• Systems connected by worm-holes now count as adjacent for all purposes, not just movement.
• You can have up to 3 secret objectives total, both scored and un-scored.
  • You can draw new secret objectives to cycle through your old one

Further changes I found (not mentioning the obvious big ones, like different strategy cards and trading):

• Always use trade good as bonus marker (no more CC as bonus)
• If I interpret the rules right, fighter and groundtroops can be redistributed after combat. Previously only fighter were capable of redistribution.
• Ships can have space cannons
• Flagships can be produced outside the home system
• No more transfer action
• Scoring outside the status phase - (once per action/battle when objective allows)
• Parallel Invasion
• One Transaction per Action
• Scuttling by Rebuilding

2 hours ago, Flolo said:

• If I interpret the rules right, fighter and groundtroops can be redistributed after combat. Previously only fighter were capable of redistribution.

Can you explain what you mean by this? How are ground troops redistributed?

27 minutes ago, Network57 said:

Can you explain what you mean by this? How are ground troops redistributed?

Imagine you are bringing 2 carriers, each one having 1 ground force and 1 fighter. Now you get 3 hits, and assign two to the fighter and one to the carrier.

In 3rd edition the ground force in the carrier is killed with the carrier. And when I read the 4th edition rules correct, this is not the case, as you can redistribute them after combat (and as both fighters are dead, you can assign both ground force to the surviving carrier).

4 minutes ago, Flolo said:

Imagine you are bringing 2 carriers, each one having 1 ground force and 1 fighter. Now you get 3 hits, and assign two to the fighter and one to the carrier.

In 3rd edition the ground force in the carrier is killed with the carrier. And when I read the 4th edition rules correct, this is not the case, as you can redistribute them after combat (and as both fighters are dead, you can assign both ground force to the surviving carrier).

Ah I understand now. So it's total capacity at the end of the battle; not which ship they were assigned to beforehand, same as it's awlays been with fighters.

Not sure I like that. Hard to headcanon.

Retreating work a bit different now

• you can only retreat into systems that contains a ship or planet you control
• landed ground-forces can now be retreated with your fleet. they are put into space, *** soon as a retreat is declared.

Another thing:

• You dont kneed to have your home system to claim objectives
• You maybe have more techs (they are cheaper), but they are often less powerful, some needing to be exhausted, i.e. they can be only used once per round

7 hours ago, Flolo said:

Further changes I found (not mentioning the obvious big ones, like different strategy cards and trading):

• Always use trade good as bonus marker (no more CC as bonus)
• If I interpret the rules right, fighter and groundtroops can be redistributed after combat. Previously only fighter were capable of redistribution.
• Ships can have space cannons
• Flagships can be produced outside the home system
• No more transfer action
• Scoring outside the status phase - (once per action/battle when objective allows)
• Parallel Invasion
• One Transaction per Action
• Scuttling by Rebuilding

What do you mean? I don't see any changes to the invasions...

4 hours ago, Flolo said:

Another thing:

• You dont kneed to have your home system to claim objectives
• You maybe have more techs (they are cheaper), but they are often less powerful, some needing to be exhausted, i.e. they can be only used once per round

Yes you DO need to have your home system to claim PUBLIC objectives, but not secret objectives.

5 hours ago, Network57 said:

Ah I understand now. So it's total capacity at the end of the battle; not which ship they were assigned to beforehand, same as it's awlays been with fighters.

Not sure I like that. Hard to headcanon.

Its probably for sake of simplicity so you dont need to keep track of what ship is carrying what fighters/GF. Personally I like it, the bulk of the concept is still that you need big ships to transport small units and the idea gets through without the need of extensive bookeeping.

1 hour ago, aermet69 said:

What do you mean? I don't see any changes to the invasions...

It is different when you got systems with multiple planets.

In 3rd the play was: You select your first Planet (lets call him) A. There you assign the troops that go down, you make PDS and then the fight. Afterwards you make planet B (the other one) the same way. So when e.g. the first invasion was total fail, and you dont want to risk all your remaining other troops, you could say, that e.g. you just go down with 1 unit (or not at all).

In 4th the play is interleaved, you make planet A at the same time as with planet B. You have to commit your troops to all planets first. Then you do PDS for all. And then you do the actual Ground combat (now first A then B). So, for example, here it can happen that you already know you lost the other planet invasion before you do your actual fight for the first planet (if the PDS of the other planet kills all invading ground forces).

30 minutes ago, Soulless said:

Its probably for sake of simplicity so you dont need to keep track of what ship is carrying what fighters/GF. Personally I like it, the bulk of the concept is still that you need big ships to transport small units and the idea gets through without the need of extensive bookeeping.

I understand the need to limit bookkeeping; and I appreciate it this change. I just think flavor-wise it's less attractive

18 minutes ago, Network57 said:

I understand the need to limit bookkeeping; and I appreciate it this change. I just think flavor-wise it's less attractive

For flavor - when ship is destroyed the ground forces get into escape pods, which can only be picked up if surviving ships have enough room.

13 minutes ago, Network57 said:

I understand the need to limit bookkeeping; and I appreciate it this change. I just think flavor-wise it's less attractive

Yeah I can appreciate the thought behind making things very detailed but theres some flavour to be found, even if its stretching imagination a bit!

Lets just assume that all ships in a system will aid in salvage and recovery of what remains of a destroyed ship. The admiral and ship commanders will relocate crew and soldiers to the branches/units that need it the most. When they lose manpower they act to redistribute remaining crews to the branches in most need of it.

Lose a ship of soldiers? Take some of the maintenance crews and give them rifles and a helmet

The way I resolve the headcannon for Ground Forces being ship-independent and being able to evacuate is this: Ground Forces troop battalions have their own troop carriers that can enter and exit planetary atmospheres. They don't have FTL drives or long-term life support, however, so they need a big ship to dock with in order to travel between systems. They also don't have the kind of weapons that are useful in space battles.

With this change in rules, let's say I have 2 Carriers, carrying a combined total of 2 GFs and 2 Fighters. Both ships travel through the gravity rift. One of the ships dies. Can I remove one Carrier and carry all of the GFs and FFs on the surviving carrier? It sounds like the same goes for the Yin suicide attack ability (if it still exists). Yin has lost a lot of their scariness in space combat if they can't target the carrier that's holding all the Ground Forces and kamikaze into it.

I'm thrilled they're trying to make it all the same though. If I remember correctly (it's been years since I used them, so cut me some slack if I misremember), Space Mines could kill a carrier with its fighters as it entered the system. This was different than if a carrier was lost in regular space battles. Those sort of nit-picky differences drove me bonkers.