Hi,

so TI4, I think, made a step in the right direction. It threw out a lot of unnecessary overhead stuff, streamlined research, and generally understood that playability and game-flow comes before "lets push another of those insane ideas we got into the game, independent of implications".

The action deck got smaller, and reliability of stuff is higher. Politics card have less useless stuff, and agenda phase re-design is gorgeous. So overall, I am happy with TI4. However, there is one thing I still am not convinced about:

The way I think about it is this:

6 players gather to meet the whole day to spend a lot of time together. They reserve that day, and do a huge commitment. On top of this, since this is not a computer game, but a social experience, you also have that extra factor of "having a fun time together" in there. This approach, in my opinion, is totally contradicting any game design philosophy that works with elimination. I have done it, I have been on the receiving end, and ultimately, I have to say that this aspect of the game just does not fit for an hours game event where people come together to have fun. The person loosing it's home-system is frustrated, and has nothing to do, and the person doing it is maybe feeling remorse/regret. For more sensible personalities, being "a nice person" and not going for the kill, might actually cost them the game or otherwise make them play a less strong game.

In the end, I am convinced that such elimination game-play has nothing to do in a modern 2018 board game, and the euro-games design shows this. Games are fun till the end, and even the losers take part in it, till the game comes to a conclusion with all participants being part of the game round at the end.

Imho this approach would be much better for a TI game, given the investment players do to play one match.

My 2 cent.

I agree with you that an early elimination can be an issue (although remarkably hard to actually do), however, I do think that addressing it needs a light touch, especially in a game like this. Even in games that can't eliminate a player, it is still possible to put a player in such a bad spot that they have no chance of winning. That can be even worse for the player than being outright eliminated. "Yeah, by round 2 it is clear you are definitely going to loose, but you can't go do something else, you have to stay here and continue to play for the next 4 hours anyway." Also not ideal.

I've been impressed with how Sentinels of the Multiverse handles the issue. Players can still be eliminated, but once they are they are given other decisions they can make (based on the character they were playing) and still contribute to the game (though its a co-op game, so that means something different). Translated to a game like TI, I would be looking at something to represent an eliminated race's continued existence, just not on a grand military/political level. Something like directing partisan insurgents, or taking espionage actions, or influencing trade or technology or something. Once truly "eliminated", they have no real chance of winning, but they can still influence galactic events in ways that small groups might.

No idea how to implement such a thing in TI, but if I were to tackle such a project, that is the direction I would start looking in.

That seems like a fun idea, taking the approach of an "after death" game-play. Lots of ideas could be explored there. I like that thinking.

That made me think of a "semi-death" state, like you could become part of the empire that eliminated you. You are now a vassal of them. A proxy for their interest and stakes. Meaning that "absorbing" an enemy into your empire would make you stronger through game-play mechanics, while the absorbed player could still be in control of some planets and fleets. all his votes must go to the empire leader and all technology researched is automatically shared. The empire leader gets to choose a strategy card for you, and he can veto any fleet move you want to make. On the other hand, the empire ruler would need some sort of upkeep cost to mange the vassal. Some condition maybe. Have at least X groundforces on the home system of that player, and pay 1 CC every round or something like that. Other players could then try to "liberate" that homesystem, or the vassal could start a "rebellion" by having twice the amount of GF on the homeworld and paying 2CC.

There is a lot of stuff one could brainstorm and come up with for such rules.

Endless Space 2, which is a 4x computer strategy game, also has a nice mechanic: Keeping up war as a state between 2 factions requires you to pay influence. You rarely can eliminate someone without triggering an automatic "peace treaty" before that, which is triggered when a war is taking too long, or one side has made considerable advancements. The defeated faction will automatically offer peace, loosing the planets that were conquered during the war. The victor then has to choose to accept the peace, or pay influence cost to keep it going. The more losses the more unhappy the people get. And absorbing foreign population into your empire has other implications.

I would love for TI4 to get some form of abstract treaty system rule-set with states such as cold war, war, vassal, hidden war etc. that all have different affects on the parties involved. But to keep this intuitive and elegant would be a real challenge for the game design, I reckon.

I have been playing this game for a very long time, I think the better part of 10 years. In all time I can't recall a single game where a player was ever eliminated from the game. Certainly people have and almost always do end up in positions from which they aren't likely to recover and win the game, but eliminated.. never seen it.

I do believe that inherently as part of the core mechanic of the game there really is no real benefit to eliminating someone and quite a few drawbacks. Twilight Imperium is a game of gaining victory points and in equal part preventing opponents from getting victory points. War is a major detractor from gaining victory points, it's a resource sink that rarely pays back as much as it takes and typically going to war slows down your progress even if you are winning it as much as it does your target. Typically the winners of any wars between players are the players not in the war (the third party). Eliminating someone really requires a considerable effort and resource commitment and it's unlikely that if you make that commitment that it will earn you as many points as you would earn if you don't commit to a war. In particular given that even a player in a terribly weak position can still snipe at you with very damaging action cards for example, or blocking moves that can give an advantage to someone other than you as they go after you on the basis of vendetta.

In our games if I as a player for example tried to eliminate you, its paramount to me throwing the game, I will definitely not win. For one, the player that I'm at war with him will do everything in his power to ensure that I don't win and in TI, if a player decides you are not going to win and is willing to sacrifice his own chances of winning, the chances of you still winning that game are just shy of 0%. A player that sacrifices himself to keep you from winning will succeed 100% of the time, in 10 years I have never seen it play out any other way. We call this the revenge factor at my table as once a player thinks your responsible for his loss and decides to throw the game to take you out, you are done for.

In my experience most even marginally experienced TI players quickly learn that there is a time to fight, but in on itself war is almost always a losing proposition which is exactly why the races that have the greatest advantages in war like the Sardek for example, actually are hands down the worst races in the game always playing it from a massive disadvantage.

I do believe of course that you see elimination in your games, certainly, if as a player decision you make eliminating a player from the game a goal, it can be achieved, but I can't imagine a player with that sort of objective would have any chance in **** of actually winning the game, so it begs the question, why would anyone have this strategy?

I think by design, TI assumes that players will be playing to win, not to eliminate each other. So while you can certainly claim that TI has player elimination, this really shouldn't be a problem in a game where everyone at the table is actually playing to win the game.

I agree with your analysis Big Kahuna as long as everyone is playing on the assumption that you should be trying to win and winning means points elimination should be -rare. Its when you have someone at the table who goes 'stuff it i'm gonna play space risk and screw points' that elimination becomes more of a consideration. But that is not necessarily a problem to be solved by mechanics.

Its worth pointing out as well that this concept of "elimination" as a player goal and it being opposed to winning the game (going for the win strategy) is actually really common in Euro games.

Just off the top of my head, Through The Ages, Ticket to Ride, Terra-forming Mars, Great Western Trail, 7 Wonders, even CamelUp. Any one of those games if you don't care about winning and you just want to make sure someone at the table loses, its super simple to do it.

This idea of throwing the game to make sure someone at the table loses the game is possible in I would say the overwhelming majority of all games. The fact that it can also be done in Twilight Imperium is hardly even worth discussion, if someone at your table plays to lose and is just there to ruin someone elses fun, your problem isn't the game, its your gaming group.