After reading through the forums, many players are suggesting that planets are either exhausted going into the agenda phase from your previous turn, or will be exhausted during your next turn as a result of the agenda phase. I did not read the rules this way, and am hoping for some clarification on this aspect.

Here is how I understand things. Taking a look at the phases and their components, we have

1. Strategy Phase
2. Action Phase
3. Status Phase
   1. Score Objective
   2. Reveal Public Objective
   3. Draw Action Cards
   4. Remove Command Tokens
   5. Gain and Redistribute Command TOkens
   6. Ready Cards
   7. Repair Units
   8. Return Strategy Cards
4. Agenda Phase
   1. First Agenda
   2. Second Agenda
   3. Ready Planets

As we can see, prior to the Agenda Phase occurring, all planet cards will be refreshed during the status phase, without any relevant opportunity to use the planet cards. Then again, at the end of the agenda phase, all planet cards are again readied, in preparation for the upcoming turn.

Am I misinterpreting something, or missing an errata / rules update somewhere? Or is this indeed how the refresh works, and planets are always fully available going into the agenda phase and again leaving the agenda phase?

When you vote, you now use the planets. Also, there is at least one AC that taps a players planets during the agenda phase.

macraigh, you are correct on all counts as far as I can tell. People who are saying otherwise don't understand the new rules yet, or have misspoken.

In TI3, if Leadership/Logistics came up before the Political Agenda, you had to (theoretically) consider whether to spend your influence on CCs, or hold onto the influence so that you could vote instead. In fact, part of the advantage of taking Leadership or Logistics was that you'd get some CC's for free and didn't have to (or in Logistics' case, couldn't ) spend influence on CCs, so you'd go into the vote with more influence than your opponents. In practice, though, it was almost always best to just buy as many CCs as were allowed to you. The vote was very often unimportant, and/or CCs were cheaper (with Leadership) so you'd often have some leftover influence available anyway, not to mention a small remaining pool of influence on your high-resource planets that you would never spend on CCs.

In TI4, you can spend that influence freely, because you'll get back all of your planets after the Status Phase and be able to spend them again on votes. Even though I usually just spent all influence available on CC's in TI3, it still feels very freeing to be able to go hog wild buying up CCs, knowing you'll get to use those planets to vote with anyway. :) Even if those CCs are more expensive to come by.

I agree with @Robofish and @MikeEvans and would also like to place some emphasis on the fact that one still needs to choose wisely how much influence to spend on votes for the first agenda since the planets are not refreshed between the two agendas.

This also means if you have a 2/3 planet and a 1/1 planet, you are not able to vote with TWO votes.

You need to exhaust the planet cards to cast the vote.

In TI3 only having 6 influence mattered to spend on CC's (with leadership) as you were restricted to buying 3CC max.

In TI4 the price of each CC may have increased, but the restriction of the amount is gone. This means Mecatol Rex will ALWAYS be valuable to anyone as it grants you two extra CC.

On 4.12.2017 at 4:45 PM, MikeEvans said:

macraigh, you are correct on all counts as far as I can tell. People who are saying otherwise don't understand the new rules yet, or have misspoken.

In TI3, if Leadership/Logistics came up before the Political Agenda, you had to (theoretically) consider whether to spend your influence on CCs, or hold onto the influence so that you could vote instead. In fact, part of the advantage of taking Leadership or Logistics was that you'd get some CC's for free and didn't have to (or in Logistics' case, couldn't ) spend influence on CCs, so you'd go into the vote with more influence than your opponents. In practice, though, it was almost always best to just buy as many CCs as were allowed to you. The vote was very often unimportant, and/or CCs were cheaper (with Leadership) so you'd often have some leftover influence available anyway, not to mention a small remaining pool of influence on your high-resource planets that you would never spend on CCs.

In TI4, you can spend that influence freely, because you'll get back all of your planets after the Status Phase and be able to spend them again on votes. Even though I usually just spent all influence available on CC's in TI3, it still feels very freeing to be able to go hog wild buying up CCs, knowing you'll get to use those planets to vote with anyway. Even if those CCs are more expensive to come by.

Hah! Using your VP system, voting was crazy important in our games all the time