Hi, I've played quite a few games if TI with 3-4 players (I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada if you're interest in playing btw) and we've found the Initiative-Imperial strategy card dead-lock rather annoying because as soon as you get some decent techs or are ready to go to war with other players some guy has used Imperial and ended the game on us. My question is, are there any good mods for the Imperial/game that we could use that don't involve buying an expansion?

On another note.....which would you suggest we buy first, Shattered Empire or Shards of the Throne?

There's a short pdf of variant rules that can be found here in the support section. The "Ancient Throne" optional rule is basically the same thing as Imperial II from Shattered Empire.

I would recommend buying SE first, if only because there are a few odd bits in Shards of the Throne intended to fill out games with both expansions (extra plastic units in orange and white, for example. Political characters for the SE races, etc.)

Also, any rules questions you might have about SE will probably be answered already, or at least have a solid basis in past Q&A, whereas rules questions for Shards are still being hotly debated and may go back and forth several times before FFG has time to lay down the new law.

My group found that same rotation annoying, and even with the expansion the rotation just ends up shifting to another set of strategy cards. We went ahead and did hybrid strategy cards. We took the best primary and secondary of each card and just mashed them up, now every strategy card is highly viable at any point in the game. Now our games are really open ended in terms of who choses what. I have the document somewhere on my computer if your interested in seeing the changes we made, I can post them up here for you.

I would like to see it

whats the SE rotation? In my opinion all mthe SE cards are well balanced and none of them give you free Victory points..the closest equivalent lets you claim an objective you qualify for during the game round so you can effectively claim two objectives that game round.....once during that SC primary and once at the end of the round.

If a rotation happens with this group of cards it might be because everyone is using similar strategies but they all have a use...in the original game If you didn't participate in the rotation you lost....in SEyou only win if you actually qualify for objectives..much more interesting game. GET SE first...but GET SotT soon...its epically awesome....but in my opinion Shattered Empire was a patch to the game and is very necesarry to game balance(due to the replacement strategy cards)