A Few Questions Before My First Game

By ares1618, in Twilight Imperium

Howdy! I am hosting a couple games in the coming weeks all with new players (none of us have played any Twilight Imperium editions, and I will be the only person in both games). We will be using the suggested races in both games, and I just had a few quick questions on some of the races before either game in case these situations come up.

1. Regarding the Federation of Sol’s race ability “Orbital Drop”, can this action be used multiple times in the same round to bide time and build up a huge amount of infantry? If a player wanted to, could they spend 3 turns in a row to place 6 infantry on a single planet?

2. Regarding the Emirates of Hacan’s Flagship ability ability, can you spend more than 1 trade good on a single roll? For example, if I roll a 4 and need a 7+, can I spend 3 trade goods on that single roll to make it a 7?

3. Regarding the Emirates of Hacan race ability “Arbitors” can the Hacan player both give and receive Action Cards or only give them?

4. Regarding the Universities of Joel-Nar Flagship ability, do you get 2 hits for each 9 or 10 rolled before factoring in their race ability “Fragile” which gives them a -1 to all rolls?

Thank you in advance for all your help in getting these questions answered. I’m trying to make sure I have a solid understanding of all the various possibilities before either game starts to try and avoid as many issues as possible!

Hey! Glad to hear you guys are takeing the plunge. I’ll try and answer your questions as best as I can:

1. Yep, the Feds can do Orbital Drop as much as they want... until their Strategy pool runs dry. As Command Tokens cost more Influence to buy when the Leadership Strategy Card is played than in TI3, prudent Sol players don’t do it willy nilly. OD should only be used when you really need to stall or you really need the extra manpower.

2. Generally speaking, the rules in TI4 are meant to be played as written; so I would say you can only spend the 1 trade good (so the ability is meant to be used when you fail to score a hit by one point). Though I would say you could boost multiply die rolls as long as you have trade goods to spend (as the ability states “after you roll a die”, not “after you roll 1 die”).

3. Yep - they can both give and receive Action Cards during a given transaction.

4. The ability states “before applying modifiers”, so yes - the 2 hits are scored on 9s or 10s /before/ applying Fragile.

Hope you guys have good time; hope my answers help!

Game On!

Thank you very much! Those answers definitely help clear things up! We are all really looking forward to finally playing this game :)

Also make sure you at least glance at the important errata:

https://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/1902562/verified-errata-k-yes-hyper-metabolism-wrong

Or, if you have time and aren't worried about being overwhelmed, read through the updated Living Rules Reference which includes the errata above plus much more:

https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer_public/3a/fc/3afce41b-b757-4dc8-b005-3a5efffd0fad/ti4_living_rules_reference_v1_1.pdf

Super cool! I hadn’t seen those; downloading now.