Ok, so I've got my copy now, and I was sharing the juicy tidbits with my buddy @Robofish . He and I were theorycrafting about his favorite race (you can guess it by his screen name, and the title of this post). He immediately saw the potential for a pretty powerful opening that I'm about to write about. I'm bringing it up here to make sure that we're understanding this right.
Let me post some necessary info so those of you without the game (which is most of you) can understand what I'm talking about.
Jol Nar Racial abilities:
- -1 to combat
- When you do the secondary of Technology SC, you can do the primary instead
- When you research a tech that is not a unit upgrade, you may ignore 1 prerequisite.
Jol Nar Racial techs:
- Spatial Conduit Cylinder - Counts as Blue tech, requires 2 blue techs. You may exhaust this card after you activate a system that contains 1 or more of your units; that system is adjacent to all other systems that contain 1 or more of your units during this activation.
- E-Res Siphons - Counts as Yellow tech, requires 2 yellow techs. After another player ativates a system that contains 1 or more of your ships, gain 4 trade goods.
Jol Nar Starting Techs: 1 tech of each color (all of the ones without prereqs)
Ok, here's the scenario. You're Jol Nar. You take the Trade Strategy Card. You use it to get 3 Trade Goods. Later on in the turn, a player does the Technology SC. You do the primary ability. That gives you one free tech plus the option to purchase another for 6 resources. For your free tech, you use your ability to skip a prereq (yellow) and buy either Transit Diodes or E-Res Siphons. Then you pay 6 resources (3 TGs plus your planets), use your ability to skip a prereq AGAIN (yellow) and buy Integrated Economy.
Integrated Economy: Counts as a Yellow tech. Requires 3 Yellow techs (2 for you). After you gain control of a planet, you may produce any number of units on that planet that have a combined cost equal to or less than that planet's resource value.
Now you're golden. From my reading of Integrated Economy, you don't need a unit that can produce units (like a space dock or whatever) in order to make the units. If you did the tech would be absolutely worthless to all but a few races since it only works when you take a planet for the first time. So the units you produce just appear out of thin air. There is no production limit, either, so you can build as much as you can afford, and what you can afford is determined by the planets you land on.
So what you do is move your carrier out of your home system and take a nice resource-rich system. Let's assume Bereg/Lirta or Abyz/Fria. You may now build up to 5 resources' worth of stuff in this system. That could be up to 10 Ground Forces or Fighters, capacity permitting. You basically don't need to resupply your colonization forces at all as you move along. If you get attacked, you get tons of money which you can use to buy ships. Pick up your other racial tech the following turn (for free) to shuttle all your shiny new ships to the front line.
I'm trying to imagine a scenario where Jol Nar doesn't just steamroll everybody until everybody else in the game unites to put them down. Even that will be hard with every single attack feeding them fat stacks of Trade Goods.
The reason Robofish saw this immediately is because it's a variation of a pretty common Jol Nar early-game tactic from 3rd edition. You take trade, use the money to double-tech to Nanotechnology. Nanotechnology let you refresh planets immediately when you took them. This gave Jol Nar a ton of money in the beginning, and it was a strong enough opening that people had to watch out for it. "Don't let a good Jol Nar player take trade 1st turn or you'll regret it!" This is the same thing only you GET TO MAKE UNITS ON THOSE PLANETS TOO. And you can reinforce them very easily from great distances away thanks to Spatial Conduit and E-Res Siphons, which are SO much easier for Jol Nar to afford early in this edition.
Am I missing some vital rule that prevents this exploit? If not... Did anybody playtest this? Anybody out there who can tell me how it went? Because this seems nuts.
Edited by MikeEvans