Let's Play Twilight Imperium 2: The Galaxy Burns

WMDogma

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Let's Play Twilight Imperium 2: The Galaxy Burns

The Escapist staff's office game of Twilight Imperium descends into a chaos as players turn on each other. Let the galaxy wide war begin!

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Johnny Impact

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I love the personalized descriptions of events. There's a novel in there somewhere.

I've played TI a couple times with friends but it takes too frigging long to be practical. You have to play half a game, then leave the board where it is for a week! Too bad, it's a great game.
 

Imper1um

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Btw, Rules fix:
1. You used too many rings. Its three rings, not four. Check out page 8: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/Twilight%20Imperium%203/ti3rules.pdf [http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/Twilight%20Imperium%203/ti3rules.pdf]
2. You placed too many red tiles, and you disobeyed rule 3 in placement: "You may not place a Special System (with an inner red border) adjacent to another special system, unless you have no other choice."
3. Based on your initial placement, I bet you also violated rule 5, "If you placed a system that did not have a planet during your first placement, you must, if able, place a system that does contain a planet on your next placement."

Arg...so much misbalance in this game.
 

ravensshade

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Mar 18, 2009
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Imper1um said:
Btw, Rules fix:
1. You used too many rings. Its three rings, not four. Check out page 8: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/Twilight%20Imperium%203/ti3rules.pdf [http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/Twilight%20Imperium%203/ti3rules.pdf]
2. You placed too many red tiles, and you disobeyed rule 3 in placement: "You may not place a Special System (with an inner red border) adjacent to another special system, unless you have no other choice."
3. Based on your initial placement, I bet you also violated rule 5, "If you placed a system that did not have a planet during your first placement, you must, if able, place a system that does contain a planet on your next placement."

Arg...so much misbalance in this game.
considering they didn't show themselves setting up the table point 2 could fall under the rule 3's exemption still too many reds.. but with 4 rings.. of course there will be too many red tiles

once again it's not entirely clear if they did violate rule 5 the 2nd ring seems to have a fair amount of planets.

so really most of the missbalance comes from the fact they used a custom 4 ring galaxy as opposed to the standard 3 ring one (whether by accident or on purpose)
 

Imper1um

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Yeah, you're right. It is possible to have a valid placement for the first two rings:

http://imgur.com/NDR7AGs [http://imgur.com/NDR7AGs]
*shrugs* I guess the fourth ring just kind of screwed with my head.
 

WMDogma

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Imper1um said:
Btw, Rules fix:
1. You used too many rings. Its three rings, not four. Check out page 8: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/Twilight%20Imperium%203/ti3rules.pdf [http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/Twilight%20Imperium%203/ti3rules.pdf]
2. You placed too many red tiles, and you disobeyed rule 3 in placement: "You may not place a Special System (with an inner red border) adjacent to another special system, unless you have no other choice."
3. Based on your initial placement, I bet you also violated rule 5, "If you placed a system that did not have a planet during your first placement, you must, if able, place a system that does contain a planet on your next placement."

Arg...so much misbalance in this game.
We have access to both expansions, which allow for the creation of a larger 4 Ring galaxy with 6 players. I believe the core set doesn't actually come with enough tiles to make a 4 ring galaxy on its own.
 

Imper1um

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WMDogma said:
Imper1um said:
Btw, Rules fix:
1. You used too many rings. Its three rings, not four. Check out page 8: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/Twilight%20Imperium%203/ti3rules.pdf [http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/ffg_content/Twilight%20Imperium%203/ti3rules.pdf]
2. You placed too many red tiles, and you disobeyed rule 3 in placement: "You may not place a Special System (with an inner red border) adjacent to another special system, unless you have no other choice."
3. Based on your initial placement, I bet you also violated rule 5, "If you placed a system that did not have a planet during your first placement, you must, if able, place a system that does contain a planet on your next placement."

Arg...so much misbalance in this game.
We have access to both expansions, which allow for the creation of a larger 4 Ring galaxy with 6 players. I believe the core set doesn't actually come with enough tiles to make a 4 ring galaxy on its own.
Ahh, that makes sense (I see the empty space markers), but, still, the 4th ring is a 7-8 player variant. With six players, a 3 ring setup is recommended because resources are tight enough to warrant people to attack more to gain resources to attain the objectives. Otherwise, you're ending up with too many resources, and you can pretty much get every piece of plastic onto the table easily, which is kind of cool, but also slows down the game considerably. Not to mention the objectives are kind of built into the 3-ring setup.

I'm interested to know, how many hours have you played so far in this game?
 

WMDogma

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Imper1um said:
Ahh, that makes sense (I see the empty space markers), but, still, the 4th ring is a 7-8 player variant. With six players, a 3 ring setup is recommended because resources are tight enough to warrant people to attack more to gain resources to attain the objectives. Otherwise, you're ending up with too many resources, and you can pretty much get every piece of plastic onto the table easily, which is kind of cool, but also slows down the game considerably. Not to mention the objectives are kind of built into the 3-ring setup.

I'm interested to know, how many hours have you played so far in this game?
We opted for a six player larger galaxy because we wanted a longer game with more chances for conflict, both militarily and diplomatically - our first time with the game playing on a regular galaxy resulted in a lot of posturing, but nothing else really happened, so we figure if we all had more resources, we'd be more inclined to use them for things like fleets and technology and such.

You're right that most of the public objectives are geared towards the 3-ring galaxy, but the expansions both come with additional public objectives you can shuffle in that account for larger maps - there's one that can grant a huge amount of victory points depending on the number of planets you own, which may come into play here soon. I even think there's one that flat out wins you the game if you hold 18 or so worlds.
 

Imper1um

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We saw that the anti-attack issue was in a few games, and it was mostly because of the objectives.

How we fixed it is that we removed a lot of the "political" objectives from the initial secret objects, where you could complete without conflict. In the Public Objectives, we set it up like this: 50% of the Public Objectives we require to have at least one military victory condition, with the first objective being non-military, just so it doesn't get too chaotic in the first round. Secret objectives we didn't need to change because they were either destroy 40% of the map (which is almost impossible), or have things that requires you to have 2x the resources you start with.

When VP is on the line, people usually decide to attack rather than turtle, but if all of the VP on the table requires you to sit in your base and do nothing, nothing usually happens. I did a timelapse of the game in which nothing happened...you'll see that same issue you ran into, WMDogma.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zayetR29dxE [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zayetR29dxE]
 

aba1

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Ahhh this is my personal favorite board game so much fun and surprisingly little chance to whether you win or not most of the time.
 

Jburton9

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Good stuff! Thank you for posting this. I also appreciate the race/faction flavor, it really breaths life into it vs a straight sanitized battle report : )

WMDogma, do you guys try to limit your diplomacy/espionage to the game table or is it full on deals, text messages, emails etc during the week before the next game?

I do have one complaint though.... my urge to click buy TI on my wish list is growing gah! lol
 

WMDogma

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Jburton9 said:
Good stuff! Thank you for posting this. I also appreciate the race/faction flavor, it really breaths life into it vs a straight sanitized battle report : )

WMDogma, do you guys try to limit your diplomacy/espionage to the game table or is it full on deals, text messages, emails etc during the week before the next game?

I do have one complaint though.... my urge to click buy TI on my wish list is growing gah! lol
We have a tendency to do both, actually - there's some banter and posturing around the table when we play as a group, but we also instant message each other in between play sessions to "negotiate" galactic policy as well :p
 

D3s_ToD3s

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good job... now i've ordered the game on amazon -.-
Hope i can persuade nuf of my ppl to try it out
 

Silentpony_v1legacy

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I absolutely hated this game. It was an absolute mess of confusing rules, nitpicking, and completely unnecessary rules/regulations.
Our game lasted a good 26hrs thanks to some expansion rules that took away the turn-based victory point generation.

Play this game only if you have no video games, you're completely out of booze, and you have whole days before you need to do anything.
 

s0osleepie

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Silentpony said:
I absolutely hated this game. It was an absolute mess of confusing rules, nitpicking, and completely unnecessary rules/regulations.
Our game lasted a good 26hrs thanks to some expansion rules that took away the turn-based victory point generation.

Play this game only if you have no video games, you're completely out of booze, and you have whole days before you need to do anything.
Wow. 26 hours? Were you playing the long game option? I would say that every regular game I have played with the base set has lasted 4-5 hours on average.
 

Silentpony_v1legacy

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s0osleepie said:
Silentpony said:
I absolutely hated this game. It was an absolute mess of confusing rules, nitpicking, and completely unnecessary rules/regulations.
Our game lasted a good 26hrs thanks to some expansion rules that took away the turn-based victory point generation.

Play this game only if you have no video games, you're completely out of booze, and you have whole days before you need to do anything.
Wow. 26 hours? Were you playing the long game option? I would say that every regular game I have played with the base set has lasted 4-5 hours on average.
We played one of the expansions that takes away the Imperial strategy card, so there was no way to get easy to get easy VPs. And the very first card played, literally the first, switched all the planets resources and influence count. So then players had +12-20 influence a turn, but only like 3 resources. So it turned an already overly long game into an absolute grind. Everyone grand strategy of having a great big punch up on the center planet was squashed and the game just dragged on and on, entire turns coming and going with no one making an progress because no one had any resources to work with.
 

D3s_ToD3s

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Silentpony said:
We played one of the expansions that takes away the Imperial strategy card, so there was no way to get easy to get easy VPs. And the very first card played, literally the first, switched all the planets resources and influence count. So then players had +12-20 influence a turn, but only like 3 resources. So it turned an already overly long game into an absolute grind. Everyone grand strategy of having a great big punch up on the center planet was squashed and the game just dragged on and on, entire turns coming and going with no one making an progress because no one had any resources to work with.
So soemone pushed a Law through without anyone thinking about the consequences?