My TI group wants to play a game where it's all about us just building armadas and fighting it out. I was wondering if anyone's done something like this and if they modified some of the rules and in what way.

We were thinking of taking out the political card and using both warfare cards. Possibly even doubling the resource value on all planets and the production capacity for space docks. Some really radical stuff for pure combat, possibly last man standing kind of game. Any possibly suggestions would be appreciated also.

And yeah I know, why play TI if you're not going to include any of the diplomacy? My group just loves the combat so much they want to see at least one game where we're all duking it out. We usually play 5-8 players. Thx!

Team Wrong said:

That could leave the issue of initiative order since both Warfare SCs have the same Initiative. Unless you simply let Warfare take presedence over Warfare II.

Doubling the resource yield of planets would probably be a bad idea, though, since that would inrease any gaps in resource availability that might already exist between players due to crappy galaxy creation hands. If you, on the other hand, can create a balanced preset map it could work.

An increse in production capacity (by 1 or 2, 3 at the very most) might be a useful alteration. It would still let trade be a concern since you would then need to have a TG income to pay for all your shiny new toys.

Team Wrong said:

As for more ideas, you might want to prep the objective deck to include only the war-oriented objectives.

You could also choose to go for "the long war" and award 1VP for each space battle victory.

That coupled with changing the objectives so that they reward 10/20 TGs instead of 1/2 VPs would make battles the only viable way to gain VPs.

Just off the top of my head. Given time I might come up with more ideas.

Anyone else have $.02 to chip in with? (a.k.a. bump)

A domination-style game could be possible:

In the Statusphase Players gain +1VP per enemy Homesystem they control, as well as Mecatol Rex.

I'm not sure the use of objectives would make much sense here, except for, yes, maybe the war-orientied objectives as possible bonus-points. But things like "I destroyed 3 ships this round" are rather obsolete here and just shorten the game.

In a pure wargame the racial balance-gaps significantly shift around. This should be addressed somehow as well.

There's a boring option: Waive all the racial specialities, and thus have blank equal races. You'd have to equalize homeplanets and starting Techs etc then as well of course. But that would be kind of boring in it's own way. The fun lies in the differences of everyone