Ive thinking about what the best opening techs. In ti3 probably the best early game tech was XRD.

With the new rules unit upgrades are something that must be worked towards rather than researched piecemeal as part of the tree

When researching a tech you have to weigh up it's abilities vs it's colour

Take Sarween tools for example. It has been down powered since the last edition but still remains a source of free resources but in terms of colour it is useful for about half the unit upgrades on the game.

Antimass deflectors remain the weakest of the four starting Technologies. This is because there are few asteroid fields and the pds modifier is less useful than say free resources or ACs.

But it's blue and therefore is needed to move towards dreadnoughts, carriers and Fighters.

Unit upgrades I think will make a real difference on tabletop and they are lumped into two parts.

On one hand there is the green blue axis which gives you dreadnought carriers and fighters. On the other hand who is the red yellow choice which gives you Destroyers Warsuns and PDS and Spacedocks.

There are other possible paths with cruisers requiring a bit of everything and a dedicated advanced fighter strategy needing carriers and space dock upgrades

A third possible consideration is your racial tech. Most of these are very powerful and make a good early game goal for the ones that are not unit upgrades. This will help your thinking as you will have a fairly good idea of what colour's you will have after completing them.

I think the key here is to work out what units you wanted to use and build tech towards upgrading them.

This was my approach as well. If I'm playing a faction that isn't trying to get warsuns out as soon as possible I'd stick with the green/blue tech's. If I'm going for warsuns then I'm might as well also upgrade destroyers.

The two games I've played now didn't last past round 7 before somebody had 10 victory points - so it probably does't make sense to go for both the red/yellow upgrades and the blue/green upgrades unless you are playing as the tech heavy space fish, or have a way to bypass tech requirements for unit upgrades.

I personally would have limited the tech depth to 3 instead of 4 to avoid making different colors so incompatible. But I'm hoping tech specially planets reduce it in a meaningful way.

I'm concerned about their choice to add colored prerequisites to racial tech. Racial tech is one of the fun highlights of playing a faction and should be encouraged to hit the table. Some of them will never see play now due to the way they unduly force a specific tech path to acquire. If I thought FFG had made some smart decisions regarding which colors to pick I would be less concerned. But the colors appear pretty much dictated by the theme of the ability. Some like the Mentak have them both on the same path making it easy to grab both even. The one saving grace is the possibility of tech specially planets again.

There are lots of opportunities to gain tech however. There are agenda's that allow everyone to gain technologies, action cards that allow you to buy a tech (basically a repeat of the secondary ability on the Technology card), promissory notes that can give other factions technology, etc. That being said, there is generally one faction technology that strikes me as one that I will ALWAYS try to get if/when I'm playing that faction, but there are very few factions that have two technologies that I feel like I have to have.

For example, the L1x1z has two amazing technologies, Super-Dreadnought II (2 blue/1 yellow) and Inheritance Systems (2 yellow), both of which are blue and/or yellow and feel like MUST have. The Yin Brotherhood on the other hand has the YIN Spinner (two green), and the Impulse Core (two yellow) - and neither feel like 'must' haves. The vast majority of races, however, have at least one that is core to how that race players, and the other is a strong boon.

What factions do you think will not see either of their racial technology hit the table early/mid game?

Red seems by far the weakest unless you're planning on war suns. All the most useful combat techs moved over to unit upgrades.

Plasma Scoring- Even less useful than anti-mass deflectors.

Magen- Honestly this seems like the most useful of the red techs. Why only tier 2?

Duranium Armor- "At the end of the second round of space combat, repair a single unit that was damaged on round one." A space battle would have to last 5 rounds for this tech to mean otherwise. How often does that happen? This is way less useful than Magen.

Assault Cannon- A useful bonus, but tier 4? The same tier as Integrated Economy and Light Wave Deflectors?

Then there's green techs. Am I the only one who thinks neural motivator is better than almost all the rest of them? It's without a doubt better than Dacxive animators (what are those going to get you, 2? 3 infantry over the whole game?). A good action card is better than a command token, so neural motivators is conditionally better than tier 3 hyper metabolism.

I'd say the all around best tech is cruiser II. Having units with capacity and greater than 1 movement is one of the strongest factors in Twilight Imperium. Cruiser II gets you movement three infantry carriers AND a combat boost! It's the TI3 hylar laser, type IV drive, and stasis capsules (one of the most useful TI3 techs) all in one single tech! Even the prereqs aren't bad! It's rare that cruiser II isn't my early go to tech.

4 hours ago, GrooveChamp said:

Duranium Armor- "At the end of the second round of space combat, repair a single unit that was damaged on round one." A space battle would have to last 5 rounds for this tech to mean otherwise. How often does that happen? This is way less useful than Magen.

Assault Cannon- A useful bonus, but tier 4? The same tier as Integrated Economy and Light Wave Deflectors?

Maybe, but if you've got 3 units that can sustain without dying they can extend the length of a battle without loosing their fighter fodder. It's way more economical to preserve ships after they are built than to have to constantly rebuild them. Every round that you're not replacing ships is a round that you're either building your fleet, or using your planets for influence and not resources.

As for Assault Cannon, showing up to a battle with 3 destroyers for a cost of 3, against somebody that has a dreadnought fleet of 3 is totally worth it. You may get wiped out but you cost them an expensive unit, and with 3 destroyers you probably put a dent into their fighter escort.

In fact, you might think twice about attacking the guy with 2 dreadnoughts, 2 destroyers, a carrier and 6 fighters if he's able to blast one of your ships before combat even starts, then put a dent into your fighter escort, and then rotate healing up his dreadnoughts every other combat round as they eat a hit. I'm not saying they would win, but TI4 appears to me to be very geared towards efficiency - and sometimes the threat of war is enough to keep other people from attacking you.

That being said, the first level of red giving you an extra PDS shot is kind of fun when you've got 3 or 4 PDS in a system with upgraded PDS and seems on par with the rest of the technologies - especially considering it helps to upgrade PDS, Destroyers and Cruisers. The second level of red, does in fact seem VERY underwhelming when compared against blues' Fleet Logistics or greens' Hyper Metabolism.

Red bonuses can be useful, but it's often conditionally so. I just think they pale a LOT in comparison to what the other colors give you. I only ever get red techs for the prerequisites for other techs (mostly cruiser II and sometimes destroyer II, maybe war suns if I think I can swing it). I highly prize planets with a red tech specialty because it means I can just skip getting the reds I don't want anyway.

Barring prerequisites, then other techs like neural motivators, hyper metabolism, gravity drive, transit diodes, and integrated economy blow the reds out of the water.

Personally the new Tech system is the worst part of TI4 .

The about half of the new tech abilities are just so unreliable that nobody in my group feels that they are worth buying compared to their 3rd edition counterparts.

Like Magen Defense Grid. Giving continuous +1 bonus to PDSs and GFs is pretty sweet in 3rd but now it's an exhaust ability so if you have to deal with multiple attacks, too bad, you've tapped the ability that you bought. So good luck.

and I hate the unit specific upgrades.

I really hope they do something about it in an expansion.

So just played my first game, and we didn't get to finish since some people realized they had to go so just set the galaxy on fire in the end of turn 5, beginning of 6. But... going for Blue techs to get the speed boost was critical for me as the Xxcha. Getting speed two on my ships let me swoop in and take Mecatol simply. After that I was able to, if you'll excuse me, turtle, pretty effectively. Getting their species tech that can just end one turn means if they take the center other players are going to have to cooperate to dethrone them in most cases. Had other players been a bit more experienced there would have been more competition, but I think that a lot of players are going to have to go for Gravity Drive early in order to expand sufficiently.

Maybe it's because I only played 3 games of the original, but I appreciate the tech tree being a bit simplified. I did buy Sarween and then kind of regret it, since it did less than I remembered from 3rd, but wasn't a huge loss.