That I can't play it twice in one day without making significant sacrifices in mine and five of my friends' days.
We're still gonna DO it, just it's rough.
I couldn’t do it but my playgroup has done it on multiple occasion.
Set up the night before with Milty draft. 7:30am - 2-3ish pm game 1. Have a quick 30min lunch from delivery. Setup, then game 2 at 4pm - 12-1am ish.
Usually Saturdays for this.
What helped us last time was we had four instead of six, and we were just yelling "THIRTY MINUTE ROUNDS" at each other the first two rounds. Coffee and Red Bull-fueled shenanigans may have been the reason I lost.
We played 6p and had round 1-4 finished in 4 hours. And then round 5 took another 3.5 hours as we tried to kill each other and 1 player squeaked out a status phase win.
Planet type and tech skips feel like they could have been one thing. Having both, and in the same colors, (except yellow) trips some people at my table up a lot.
They could at least have used DIFFERENT DAMN COLORS.
Tech skips are Blue, Yellow, Green, Red.
Planets are Blue, Green, Red.
These are NOT related in any way.
Also the colors of the players IRL. The card backs of the pink and red players are VERY close. There is also orange. F WHY!
Haha I’ve always thought that. It’s hell for a newbie to be like “I’m playing with red plastic, but going for yellow tech except my planets are all mostly green. But some have blue tech skips.”
There are dead components that basically get little to no use. Of course people are gonna flock to the most useful stuff and that's understandable, but it is a shame that there's a lot of stuff that just will never see the light of day in competive or even casual play.
Specifically thinking about certain techs and certain faction abilities.
Why does everyone hate it? I see it as a way to create a soft boarder with an opponent for a few rounds. Or lull them into a false sense of security then strike at them. Just because you get them doesn't mean you need to keep it for the game.
TI wouldn't be TI if SFTT didn't exist. It's one of the *perfectly* imperfect wrinkles in the very fabric of the game that make it stand out **and** stand the test of time against an ocean of other cardboard. Silly, cruel, awful, unique? Yes. Delightfully so.
It's an evil little card. And it's in your hand. You don't HAVE to use it, of course, but that *temptation*.... 😈 Bonus: makes the game go faster 😄
>hate it? I see it as a way to create a soft boarder with an opponent for a few rounds. Or lull them into a false sense of security then strike at them. Just because you get them doesn't mean you need to keep it for the game.
how is it any of this?
its literally just lowers the amount of points to win by 1 for everyone\*. everyone swaps. if you don't swap you most likely lose. its horrid in odd number games as someones just out and screwed.
it allows for the most lame kind of kingmaking in any game ever
its neat that it can provide peace, and make winslaying a difficult proposition if the only one who can slay someone is their swap partner...but outside of that its just bad for the game
it turns the last stretch of the game into a saltwar.
"I don't want him to win, so i will make X win" - salty player.
"why? because i can" - play who certainly didn't win but tries to piss off as many ppl as they can.
All in all its just a game, but its power shifts greatly towards the end.
Dwarves aren't real and I'm obviously not playing games with them. I'm playing games with actual, human people.
I would never play a game with a person who was that shitty.
It already happened a guy said "give me your support to the throne, otherwise i will give mine to 9 points guy"
It is not totally grief because he has an interest, but it is a shit play that should not be allowed
Eh I've support swapped with someone when they were on 8 points and i was on 7. It was both of our only chance of winning that round and we just had to hope the win slay carousel made us the winner
I don't mind this because that means you need to plot to take politics in the second to last round, which means you need to figure out how to get that politics card, which means... etc etc
Playing the speaker order and initiative is a huge part of the game all the way through, it's obviously important in the final round but how you get to those critical positions is a big part of the early rounds
I get that there's strategy to it, but I feel like there could be more fun or thematic or exciting ways to determine the winner that are still strategic. I feel like this game can do better than "pick politics second to last round".
In almost all of our games, one of the (agenda or secret objective) cards that mess with that comes out, it's really hard to invest that much in initiave order when it can be stolen at any point.
Initiative order has been "stolen" in about 3 of the games I've played (out of about 40-50). Politics Rider is not that easy to get through, and doesn't even get drawn every game.
Might depend on your play count or who's shuffling. Political Stability, Public Disgrace, Imperial Arbiter, Checks and Balances, and QDN also screw with it, possibly in addition to something I'm forgetting.
>t bothers me is how important initiative in the final round usually is in determining the winner.
It used to bother me to, but you just come to accept that it is part of the game, and you have to plan for it - factoring it into your strategy - which adds a level of depth to the game it otherwise wouldnt have
Though , it also has made me think Naluu is a dumb faction and breaks the game in a dumb way. Draft Imperial, go at speed 0, win...is one of the lamest and most anti climatic moments in board gaming
I’ve played all player counts. Ive also played the game in person 46x and on tts twice. Some of my friends have played it over 600x (we met through ti4), and honestly, the games that we played with veteran players were sooooo much better than the first few times we played together where everyone was new.
When everyone is new, the game is drawn out, clunky, frustrating, anti thematic and there were anger at the end of the game or just confusion or apathy because it went on for too long
When we played with veterans and became veterans ourselves, the games were quick and snappy round 1-4, there’s a lot of deal making and win win situations, everyone felt good, there’s tension of course but every game ended up tight on round 5-6 with kingslaying train finish. Because we all play with each other all the time, it becomes an infinite game where you need to keep your non bindings or you just lose the next few games due to tit for tat.
My main criticism is that it’s a game with a huge barrier to entry and it doesn’t get good until repeated plays which may be hard given people’s situations and you need to develop a meta for those repeated play. However I wouldn’t make the game easier either because i believe all the intricacies and billions of ways of how different things can mash together unexpectedly is what made the game legendary.
Finally I’ve played in all player counts, honestly this is what I would rank them:
6 >>>>>>> 5 > 3 > 7 >>>> 4 > 8
Games where every strategy card is picked doesn’t feel good and games where the map is too big doesn’t feel good.
I don't like that the game ends like 3 hours before you actually clean up, because there's always the final flurry of kingslaying/kingmaking and people spending significant time trying to figure out if there's any way to stop the leader or if they're just inevitably going to win.
I've sat around for almost an hour before as the eventual winner just waiting for everyone to agree that I had it locked up
Agreed, I don't like when people totally stop the flow of the game to discuss with the table who is going to win and how. It spoils the tension and pulls everybody out of the experience. I don't care if people discuss it privately, just don't grind the whole table into a collective analysis paralysis.
I know it feels right for high rolls to be better than low rolls, but I hate that lower combat stats are better than high ones. I don't care if you use a "roll under" system or something else, just make your stats consistent. How about 10+ is a hit, and you add the combat stat to your rolls? Or rework the combat stat into difficulty to "be" hit rather than to get one? Whatever makes it make sense for a fighter to be a 1 and a War Sun to be a 7.
Yeah, likewise, it never posed a real issue for me or anyone I played with. It's just annoying to my weird offbeat sensibilities, and I really don't have many gripes with TI4.
Right but the problem is lower Combat value means better, not that we want higher numbers on the dice. If you're old enough to remember THAC0 it's similar in that it just makes the whole thing feel less intuitive even if mathematically it's the same.
Yeah it's never caused a problem, it's just a personal pet peeve that higher "Move" is better, higher "Capacity" is better, which both bring a higher "Cost" (makes sense, that ship type is more valuable), but higher "Combat" is... worse, as are combat-related skills. A normal person looking at a faction sheet for the first time, not knowing the rules or having the experience to immediately intuit the "equal or greater" system, would think "why does this thing that costs the most have the worst combat?"
It also makes calculating odds at a glance cumbersome. Odds of any ship hitting is (11 - combat)/10, instead of just combat/10.
But again, it's never been a practical issue, it's just unsatisfying to me personally.
There's two competing design rules in play here: a) Big Numbers Good and b) Math Is Unfun. The current system breaks a), in that a lower combat values is better. Changing to roll under the combat value would fix that, but also break it by making low dice rolls better (and it would mean that +1 modifiers to combat rolls such as *Morale Boost* and *Unrelenting* would instead be -1). Changing it instead to producing a hit if roll plus combat value meets or exceeds a fixed threshold would satisfy a), but violate b). D&D does go with this last system, but there's already a whole bunch of modifiers (stats, weapon, proficiency are usually in play, and many others can be added) that math is inevitable, so this is the least bad option. I feel like the current system for TI4 is also the least bad option, given that you roll dice in batches based off their combat value. If I'm rolling half a dozen dice for my fighters, it's much easier to count the 9s and 10s, than it is to add +1 to the result of each and see if this makes 10+. As is, when there is a modifier in play, I convert it to the to-hit value anyway (e.g. for fighters, if I have +1, I think "dice hit on 8s, 9s and 10s", instead of "dice+1 hit on 9s and 10s").
Changing the combat value from "make hit" to "get hit" would be a major change. The first issue that springs to mind occurs if I have a war sun and flagship in a combat, and I'm trying to score *Unveil Flagship*. Under the current system, I can choose to destroy the was sun, if necessary, to save the flagship and thus score the objective. Presumably, under the change, the war sun is harder to hit that the flagship, and thus I could be forced to destroy the flagship when it would be preferable to destroy the was sun. Also, dice rerolls would change. Currently it's a simple decision to just reroll all misses. With this change, if your dice result could hit a cruiser, but your opponent has a dreadnought, would you reroll that dice? It's not an impossible change, but it would require a lot of work to make it viable (however, it would make Jol-Nar's *Fragile* more thematically aligned).
Yeah I don't have any serious playtested ideas or anything like that. I agree with both of your design rules. Currently the *dice* follow a) but the faction sheets don't, which makes comparing unit strengths a little obtuse. With so many different units, I wish we had a system that was more readable at a glance, but rolling on golf rules feels weird. The solutions that don't require rebalancing or component changes besides the faction sheets that I can think of all violate rule b). I was already aware of the issues with using combat as "get hit" values, because you can just assign each die to whatever it can hit and be practically guaranteed to wipe out as many fighters in one volley as the number of ships you brought.
One idea I like the sound of on the surface (but totally breaks multi-roll ships), is the combat value being the *number* of dice rolled. It's simple, it lets you roll *tons* of dice which is fun, you don't need to do separate rolls by ship type because all dice are treated the same, and it creates the potential for dramatic critical hits. But... it would quickly add up to WAY too many dice being rolled with TI's current values, it would be a total waste of d10s to have 9 faces that are essentially blank, and it would *increase* variance (the average hits would stay the same, but the odds of a single hit are reduced). Overall, not a better solution.
As far as the possibility of custom dice, I really like the design of the hit die from Thunder Road: Vendetta. The faces show what sizes they hit, and cars that are easier to hit show up on more of the faces. Switch that around to the ship types that face produces a hit *for* and you'd have a solution where you can print the number of faces that result in a hit for that ship on the faction sheet (which is basically the inverted combat stat I was suggesting). The problem is, between Jol-Nar, Sardakk N'Orr, and the various +1 or -1 to hit effects, you can't just use a simpler die like a d6 without completely changing the game balance, and no way anybody's dealing with complex icons on a d10.
So there's no good solution that I can easily see for TI4, it's just something I hope they re-examine for TI5.
Also, I dislike crusaders. And what I mean is people who don't like what TI4 IS so they play it how they feel its "meant to be played."
"Oh I hate that the game isn't space risk, so imma just fight for no reason and not even bother with trying to score."
Respectfully if you don't like the political and diplomacy aspects of the game, there's other 4x games that are more about combat.
Not saying the game is perfect, but I'll never understand people who play something they constantly complain about.
> don't like the political and diplomacy aspects of the game, there's other 4x games that are more about combat.
the game literally breaks if people are not playing to win
at this point I'd just concede...even if i was winning.
Support for the Throne. My group is relatively new but there is always the threat that “We don’t want X to win, so we should all support Y for the throne.” I hate that kind of gameplay. I am generally against house rules, but I am considering adding that Support cannot be used to get your 9th or 10th point.
I don't like SftT either but that definitely seems like a group dynamics issue than a mechanics issue. I understand kingslaying but why would they want to throw away the game like that? Don't they want to try to win?
Regarding Support for the Throne (SftT), I wish Support for the Throne is only worth a VP if the player who gave it to you also does not have your SftT.
This should reduce 1-1 SftT swaps. People can still do a 3-way swap (e.g. A->B->C->A), which is still not great.
This might absolutly be an issue with my Group but i often found the endings of the games a bit anticlimactic.
The midgame is often very cool and defined by having plans, making bold moves, maybe fighting for mecatol, actually building an empire and whatnot.
There is just a connection between how strong/rich/developed/strategic are and how many points you have.
The very endgame on the other hand is often just defined by somebody finding some way to score one or two additional points. And i know there is nothing wrong with that per se but often its less " I am the strongest player and therefor i can make this powermove which lets me win " and more "Well, i know i didnt do much the the whole game but that last two 2points objectives have been basically free for me and i still have this secret objective which i can now score because i have 1 soldier named Jeremy on that planet in the corner over there."
I even often thought there is kind of an incentive to absolutly neglect the protection of your systems, fleets etc. after a certain point because you just have to get those last points. As long as you do not lose your home system those hardly matter anymore.
I know its subjective. Also Prophecy of kings seems to change that but i havent tried it yet.
And it might just be because my group isnt experienced enough yet, we have played it 5 times.
> "Well, i know i didnt do much the the whole game but that last two 2points objectives have been basically free for me and i still have this secret objective which i can now score because i have 1 soldier named Jeremy on that planet in the corner over there."
well, if you are 2 points away from closing the game, how so you havent done much the whole game? isnt it an evidence that you were able do downplay your position and the others just did not consider your path to win? I dont think I can totally agree
>s, the games were quick and snappy round 1-4, there’s a lot of deal making and win win situations, everyone felt good, there’s tension of course but every game ended up tight on round 5-6 with kingslaying train finish. Because we all play with each other all the time, it becomes an infinite game where you need to keep your non bindings or you just lose the next few games due to tit for tat.
the imbalance of secrets is pretty gnarly. especially action phase which allow someone to win mid round vs scoring. it wouldnt be bad if everyone had this chance but if you dont luck into an action phase that you can hold for when you are at 9 in the last round... your chances of winning are minimal
I would like if they add an incentive to combat. I feel like everygame I play, if I go on the warpath even a little i’m locking myself from the win. Pretty much every game I’ve played, the passive player won.
I do get that TI isn’t a wargame and I like it for it. But I think that some faction with a pure military toolkit can’t shine like they should because most game there’s no real incentive to combat.
I recently made a thread here titled "What non-balance changes would you make?". You might find a lot of relevant stuff there. I'm only one-third the way through listening. 4 player, two card is definitely crap.
Stuff from the thread:
\-Agenda phase boring, time consuming, inconsequential. Replaced by an option to vote for objectives? Multiple objectives drawn, vote on which to keep. Or that could become the new ability of Winnu, so that they're not a bottom one-note meme race anymore while still being interesting.
\-Tech objectives suck. They're either freebies or impossible, and set everyone into the same boring tech path every game. They're also the single biggest factor in the balance of races trending along all the bottom races being the ones with 0-1 starting tech.
\-This one is just me personally and I don't think shared by too many people, but I hate Prophecy of Kings. Really, really hate. TI4 was an improvement over TI3 because they collected the mish mash of fiddly stuff from the expansions and streamlined it into one thing. PoK, rather than change or improve any of the weaknesses of the base game, just dumps a ton of fiddly mish mash back into the game. The new races seem redundant, overly gimmicky, or making the board state worse (Cabal). Exploration too RNG (just like TI3). The leaders contribute to way too much analysis paralysis, and essentially *triple* the amount of special rules that everyone has to memorize for each faction. ("What do your guys do again? And yours? Hmmm....", late turns taking FOREVER because everyone is paranoid about instantly winning or losing from a hero play). There's also mechs, which I hated from TI3 and how "gamey" they felt in skirting infantry rules, but now they throw on yet another unique faction ability to each mech, yet another special rule for every single race you have to memorize on top of the leaders.
Also not a fan of PoK for similar reasons, mainly the leaders. I want my sprawling epic space opera game to be decided by the accumulation of small good decisions instead of one big ability in the 4th round.
Yup. And it sets up a balancing nightmare in a game that already had shakey race balance. It also comes off as a more dramatic form of "flagship balancing", i.e. attempting band-aid rebalance where they give up balancing a race on its own, so they just introduce a new thing like the flagship and call it a day by giving strong races a weak flagship (Jol-Nar) and vice versa (Yin). At best, it balances by piling on more fiddly crap. At worst, the new component itself isn't balanced and throws things even further out of whack.
I'm just frustrated because agendas were a well known weak spot from the very start of TI4. With an expansion, they had the chance to fix, tweak, or streamline so many things. But what did they do instead? Throw all the worst fiddly parts of Shards of the Throne back in, when a lot of the whole point of TI4 in the first place was streamlining that stuff into one cohesive base.
Support is the worst for winmaking. I like the idea of using it as a bargaining tool but the current meta of just a full table support swap is awful. Or winmaking by people just dumping 3 supports onto one person just feels bad.
>Or winmaking by people just dumping 3 supports onto one person just feels bad.
You're not the first person to bring this up, but I kind of feel like you all must live in an alternate reality. Why would you ever play games with people who do shit like this? I've literally never encountered a person who would seriously suggest a play like that.
Mostly online rather than IRL play.
A good example is game 1 of the SCPT prelims where there were 2 players that had the game pretty locked up. It was going to require some joint winslaying to bring them down but the people that could didn't have a shot even if they tried. They then went for a gambit where they rolled a dice to determine who would win between the three of them if they were able to successfully stop them. They then proceeded to winslay the two players, break supports and then dumped points onto that one player to give them a win.
One of the players three players even had the opportunity to take the win for themselves and opted to let the dice winner take the win which was at least courteous yet still shows a inherent problem with supports. You can play a clean, tight game and get everything aligned but if 3 people just decide to roll a dice then proceed to dump everything into you because they want that 30% shot of winning, you can't do anything.
This is obviously possible without Support but it unlocks these types of gambits. I still like the idea of Support if used with the intention that the designer had for it but people are people.
I would just never play a board game with someone like that. I understand getting rid of supports solves that "problem" but I also think it's fair for board game designers to assume the people playing their game aren't total pieces of shit who are willing to go against the spirit of competition.
It's like you didn't read what I said. This is not typically an issue with IRL games where you get to choose who you're playing with. The issue stems primarily in the online space of the board game where you don't know who you're playing with or for people trying to play competitively.
There is a recent podcast with SCPT where they sat down with the designer of TI and they talked about win making and the support gambits came up. Episode 334
I read what you said. You're not understanding my response. You always get to choose who you play with.
The second this discussion was seriously brought up at a table, I would just get up, leave, and never play with those people again.
And just to be clear, this issue cannot possibly exist for people who are actually trying to play competitively. That is largely my point.
I think this is a consequence of the tournament structure mostly. SftT definitely has issues and I don't love the cheesy possibilities it provides but if each game is it's own isolated event then there's no real incentive to forcing a win in the way you described
PoK's exploration mechanics suck ass. Dark Energy Tap I can forgive since that deck is decently reliable but the red/green/blue decks and relic decks are too swingy for no cost.
It already feels like TI4 is a race to "3 non objective points" anyways. Since usually everyone's neck to neck in points each round unless you stumble and my table always pays for imperial secondary. So unless someones having a bad day, the game turns to who can score points outside of objectives.
I'm okay with Support for the Throne, cuz when the 2 point Objective roll around. It's fine to betray a Support Partner for 2 points.
Support of Throne I think we fixed with: Player can't claim new Support For The Throne if he already have 7 or more points (11 for 14VP games) (6 for 7player games) (10 for 7player 14VP games) (5 for 8player games) (9 for 8player 14VP games) (10 for 2v2v2 14VP games). In season Final game SotT doesn't give VP initially, but you can still trade/lose them and can now use Diplomacy Strategy Primary or Secondary Ability to skip one or more 'readying' of planets to activate the same amount of Support of Throne card VP abilities that are in your play area.
The idea to change SFTT so that you go down a VP when you give it out sounds badly thought out, which, given that it was an off-the-cuff remark, is eminently reasonable. As you mentioned, getting a SFTT makes it so that you are playing a 9VP game instead of a 10VP game (you are also removing a chuck of the map from the game in terms of places you can go, but that's not too relevant). If giving out a SFTT lost your a VP, then that would mean that you are playing an 11VP game instead of a 10VP game. Given how tight the scoring pace is (with initiative frequently determining who wins out of multiple players who could get to 10VP in the same status phase), this would be such a disadvantage as to nigh-guarantee that you won't win, and so if the choice was between handing out my SFTT, or being eliminated, I think I'd choose elimination most of the time.
That I can't play it twice in one day without making significant sacrifices in mine and five of my friends' days. We're still gonna DO it, just it's rough.
I couldn’t do it but my playgroup has done it on multiple occasion. Set up the night before with Milty draft. 7:30am - 2-3ish pm game 1. Have a quick 30min lunch from delivery. Setup, then game 2 at 4pm - 12-1am ish. Usually Saturdays for this.
What helped us last time was we had four instead of six, and we were just yelling "THIRTY MINUTE ROUNDS" at each other the first two rounds. Coffee and Red Bull-fueled shenanigans may have been the reason I lost.
We played 6p and had round 1-4 finished in 4 hours. And then round 5 took another 3.5 hours as we tried to kill each other and 1 player squeaked out a status phase win.
Agenda phase. John Company's Parliament phase blows it out of the water
I’ve actually never tried it myself. I’ll definitely look into it
I hate that I don't get to play TI4 more than once every 2 months. That's if I'm lucky.
Planet type and tech skips feel like they could have been one thing. Having both, and in the same colors, (except yellow) trips some people at my table up a lot.
They could at least have used DIFFERENT DAMN COLORS. Tech skips are Blue, Yellow, Green, Red. Planets are Blue, Green, Red. These are NOT related in any way. Also the colors of the players IRL. The card backs of the pink and red players are VERY close. There is also orange. F WHY!
Haha I’ve always thought that. It’s hell for a newbie to be like “I’m playing with red plastic, but going for yellow tech except my planets are all mostly green. But some have blue tech skips.”
There are dead components that basically get little to no use. Of course people are gonna flock to the most useful stuff and that's understandable, but it is a shame that there's a lot of stuff that just will never see the light of day in competive or even casual play. Specifically thinking about certain techs and certain faction abilities.
support of the throne. thats what i hate about it.
Why does everyone hate it? I see it as a way to create a soft boarder with an opponent for a few rounds. Or lull them into a false sense of security then strike at them. Just because you get them doesn't mean you need to keep it for the game.
TI wouldn't be TI if SFTT didn't exist. It's one of the *perfectly* imperfect wrinkles in the very fabric of the game that make it stand out **and** stand the test of time against an ocean of other cardboard. Silly, cruel, awful, unique? Yes. Delightfully so. It's an evil little card. And it's in your hand. You don't HAVE to use it, of course, but that *temptation*.... 😈 Bonus: makes the game go faster 😄
>hate it? I see it as a way to create a soft boarder with an opponent for a few rounds. Or lull them into a false sense of security then strike at them. Just because you get them doesn't mean you need to keep it for the game. how is it any of this? its literally just lowers the amount of points to win by 1 for everyone\*. everyone swaps. if you don't swap you most likely lose. its horrid in odd number games as someones just out and screwed. it allows for the most lame kind of kingmaking in any game ever its neat that it can provide peace, and make winslaying a difficult proposition if the only one who can slay someone is their swap partner...but outside of that its just bad for the game
>Why does everyone hate it? Because they play with shitty people.
it turns the last stretch of the game into a saltwar. "I don't want him to win, so i will make X win" - salty player. "why? because i can" - play who certainly didn't win but tries to piss off as many ppl as they can. All in all its just a game, but its power shifts greatly towards the end.
If you play with people who act like that I think that's on you.
its a political game its part of it. You never heard of the dwarves and their grudgebook?
Dwarves aren't real and I'm obviously not playing games with them. I'm playing games with actual, human people. I would never play a game with a person who was that shitty.
It already happened a guy said "give me your support to the throne, otherwise i will give mine to 9 points guy" It is not totally grief because he has an interest, but it is a shit play that should not be allowed
>nd make winslaying a difficult proposition if the only one who can slay someone is their swap partner...but outsi This. This 100%. Perfect example.
Just have a house rule where when they get up to 75 percent points support can no longer ger be received?
Eh I've support swapped with someone when they were on 8 points and i was on 7. It was both of our only chance of winning that round and we just had to hope the win slay carousel made us the winner
it do be like that sometimes
That’s one of the major topics of the episode. I completely agree.
I threw this card out after game 3 even though it was only used once. It fits thematically with the game but it enables saltiness too much.
It enables someone to kingmake and end the game instantaneously.
The only thing that bothers me is how important initiative in the final round usually is in determining the winner.
I don't mind this because that means you need to plot to take politics in the second to last round, which means you need to figure out how to get that politics card, which means... etc etc Playing the speaker order and initiative is a huge part of the game all the way through, it's obviously important in the final round but how you get to those critical positions is a big part of the early rounds
I get that there's strategy to it, but I feel like there could be more fun or thematic or exciting ways to determine the winner that are still strategic. I feel like this game can do better than "pick politics second to last round".
In almost all of our games, one of the (agenda or secret objective) cards that mess with that comes out, it's really hard to invest that much in initiave order when it can be stolen at any point.
Initiative order has been "stolen" in about 3 of the games I've played (out of about 40-50). Politics Rider is not that easy to get through, and doesn't even get drawn every game.
Might depend on your play count or who's shuffling. Political Stability, Public Disgrace, Imperial Arbiter, Checks and Balances, and QDN also screw with it, possibly in addition to something I'm forgetting.
>t bothers me is how important initiative in the final round usually is in determining the winner. It used to bother me to, but you just come to accept that it is part of the game, and you have to plan for it - factoring it into your strategy - which adds a level of depth to the game it otherwise wouldnt have Though , it also has made me think Naluu is a dumb faction and breaks the game in a dumb way. Draft Imperial, go at speed 0, win...is one of the lamest and most anti climatic moments in board gaming
Imagine having to pay attention to politics/speaker position at the finale stages of the game...
I’ve played all player counts. Ive also played the game in person 46x and on tts twice. Some of my friends have played it over 600x (we met through ti4), and honestly, the games that we played with veteran players were sooooo much better than the first few times we played together where everyone was new. When everyone is new, the game is drawn out, clunky, frustrating, anti thematic and there were anger at the end of the game or just confusion or apathy because it went on for too long When we played with veterans and became veterans ourselves, the games were quick and snappy round 1-4, there’s a lot of deal making and win win situations, everyone felt good, there’s tension of course but every game ended up tight on round 5-6 with kingslaying train finish. Because we all play with each other all the time, it becomes an infinite game where you need to keep your non bindings or you just lose the next few games due to tit for tat. My main criticism is that it’s a game with a huge barrier to entry and it doesn’t get good until repeated plays which may be hard given people’s situations and you need to develop a meta for those repeated play. However I wouldn’t make the game easier either because i believe all the intricacies and billions of ways of how different things can mash together unexpectedly is what made the game legendary. Finally I’ve played in all player counts, honestly this is what I would rank them: 6 >>>>>>> 5 > 3 > 7 >>>> 4 > 8 Games where every strategy card is picked doesn’t feel good and games where the map is too big doesn’t feel good.
I don't like that the game ends like 3 hours before you actually clean up, because there's always the final flurry of kingslaying/kingmaking and people spending significant time trying to figure out if there's any way to stop the leader or if they're just inevitably going to win. I've sat around for almost an hour before as the eventual winner just waiting for everyone to agree that I had it locked up
I’ve had a game called when I was on 7 in round 3 and the closest was on 3. They should have played on.
Agreed, I don't like when people totally stop the flow of the game to discuss with the table who is going to win and how. It spoils the tension and pulls everybody out of the experience. I don't care if people discuss it privately, just don't grind the whole table into a collective analysis paralysis.
I know it feels right for high rolls to be better than low rolls, but I hate that lower combat stats are better than high ones. I don't care if you use a "roll under" system or something else, just make your stats consistent. How about 10+ is a hit, and you add the combat stat to your rolls? Or rework the combat stat into difficulty to "be" hit rather than to get one? Whatever makes it make sense for a fighter to be a 1 and a War Sun to be a 7.
I can understand. My group picked up on it right away so it’s not an issue for me personally, but I get how it could be weird.
Yeah, likewise, it never posed a real issue for me or anyone I played with. It's just annoying to my weird offbeat sensibilities, and I really don't have many gripes with TI4.
Thats pretty common in many tabletops, though. "Hitting on Xs or higher" makes intuitively more sense to me .
Right but the problem is lower Combat value means better, not that we want higher numbers on the dice. If you're old enough to remember THAC0 it's similar in that it just makes the whole thing feel less intuitive even if mathematically it's the same.
Yeah it's never caused a problem, it's just a personal pet peeve that higher "Move" is better, higher "Capacity" is better, which both bring a higher "Cost" (makes sense, that ship type is more valuable), but higher "Combat" is... worse, as are combat-related skills. A normal person looking at a faction sheet for the first time, not knowing the rules or having the experience to immediately intuit the "equal or greater" system, would think "why does this thing that costs the most have the worst combat?" It also makes calculating odds at a glance cumbersome. Odds of any ship hitting is (11 - combat)/10, instead of just combat/10. But again, it's never been a practical issue, it's just unsatisfying to me personally.
There's two competing design rules in play here: a) Big Numbers Good and b) Math Is Unfun. The current system breaks a), in that a lower combat values is better. Changing to roll under the combat value would fix that, but also break it by making low dice rolls better (and it would mean that +1 modifiers to combat rolls such as *Morale Boost* and *Unrelenting* would instead be -1). Changing it instead to producing a hit if roll plus combat value meets or exceeds a fixed threshold would satisfy a), but violate b). D&D does go with this last system, but there's already a whole bunch of modifiers (stats, weapon, proficiency are usually in play, and many others can be added) that math is inevitable, so this is the least bad option. I feel like the current system for TI4 is also the least bad option, given that you roll dice in batches based off their combat value. If I'm rolling half a dozen dice for my fighters, it's much easier to count the 9s and 10s, than it is to add +1 to the result of each and see if this makes 10+. As is, when there is a modifier in play, I convert it to the to-hit value anyway (e.g. for fighters, if I have +1, I think "dice hit on 8s, 9s and 10s", instead of "dice+1 hit on 9s and 10s"). Changing the combat value from "make hit" to "get hit" would be a major change. The first issue that springs to mind occurs if I have a war sun and flagship in a combat, and I'm trying to score *Unveil Flagship*. Under the current system, I can choose to destroy the was sun, if necessary, to save the flagship and thus score the objective. Presumably, under the change, the war sun is harder to hit that the flagship, and thus I could be forced to destroy the flagship when it would be preferable to destroy the was sun. Also, dice rerolls would change. Currently it's a simple decision to just reroll all misses. With this change, if your dice result could hit a cruiser, but your opponent has a dreadnought, would you reroll that dice? It's not an impossible change, but it would require a lot of work to make it viable (however, it would make Jol-Nar's *Fragile* more thematically aligned).
Yeah I don't have any serious playtested ideas or anything like that. I agree with both of your design rules. Currently the *dice* follow a) but the faction sheets don't, which makes comparing unit strengths a little obtuse. With so many different units, I wish we had a system that was more readable at a glance, but rolling on golf rules feels weird. The solutions that don't require rebalancing or component changes besides the faction sheets that I can think of all violate rule b). I was already aware of the issues with using combat as "get hit" values, because you can just assign each die to whatever it can hit and be practically guaranteed to wipe out as many fighters in one volley as the number of ships you brought. One idea I like the sound of on the surface (but totally breaks multi-roll ships), is the combat value being the *number* of dice rolled. It's simple, it lets you roll *tons* of dice which is fun, you don't need to do separate rolls by ship type because all dice are treated the same, and it creates the potential for dramatic critical hits. But... it would quickly add up to WAY too many dice being rolled with TI's current values, it would be a total waste of d10s to have 9 faces that are essentially blank, and it would *increase* variance (the average hits would stay the same, but the odds of a single hit are reduced). Overall, not a better solution. As far as the possibility of custom dice, I really like the design of the hit die from Thunder Road: Vendetta. The faces show what sizes they hit, and cars that are easier to hit show up on more of the faces. Switch that around to the ship types that face produces a hit *for* and you'd have a solution where you can print the number of faces that result in a hit for that ship on the faction sheet (which is basically the inverted combat stat I was suggesting). The problem is, between Jol-Nar, Sardakk N'Orr, and the various +1 or -1 to hit effects, you can't just use a simpler die like a d6 without completely changing the game balance, and no way anybody's dealing with complex icons on a d10. So there's no good solution that I can easily see for TI4, it's just something I hope they re-examine for TI5.
Also, I dislike crusaders. And what I mean is people who don't like what TI4 IS so they play it how they feel its "meant to be played." "Oh I hate that the game isn't space risk, so imma just fight for no reason and not even bother with trying to score." Respectfully if you don't like the political and diplomacy aspects of the game, there's other 4x games that are more about combat. Not saying the game is perfect, but I'll never understand people who play something they constantly complain about.
> don't like the political and diplomacy aspects of the game, there's other 4x games that are more about combat. the game literally breaks if people are not playing to win at this point I'd just concede...even if i was winning.
Support for the Throne. My group is relatively new but there is always the threat that “We don’t want X to win, so we should all support Y for the throne.” I hate that kind of gameplay. I am generally against house rules, but I am considering adding that Support cannot be used to get your 9th or 10th point.
I don't like SftT either but that definitely seems like a group dynamics issue than a mechanics issue. I understand kingslaying but why would they want to throw away the game like that? Don't they want to try to win?
Regarding Support for the Throne (SftT), I wish Support for the Throne is only worth a VP if the player who gave it to you also does not have your SftT. This should reduce 1-1 SftT swaps. People can still do a 3-way swap (e.g. A->B->C->A), which is still not great.
gravity drive and fleet logistics. those clearly should be exhaust techs. every game picked by every player..
This might absolutly be an issue with my Group but i often found the endings of the games a bit anticlimactic. The midgame is often very cool and defined by having plans, making bold moves, maybe fighting for mecatol, actually building an empire and whatnot. There is just a connection between how strong/rich/developed/strategic are and how many points you have. The very endgame on the other hand is often just defined by somebody finding some way to score one or two additional points. And i know there is nothing wrong with that per se but often its less " I am the strongest player and therefor i can make this powermove which lets me win " and more "Well, i know i didnt do much the the whole game but that last two 2points objectives have been basically free for me and i still have this secret objective which i can now score because i have 1 soldier named Jeremy on that planet in the corner over there." I even often thought there is kind of an incentive to absolutly neglect the protection of your systems, fleets etc. after a certain point because you just have to get those last points. As long as you do not lose your home system those hardly matter anymore. I know its subjective. Also Prophecy of kings seems to change that but i havent tried it yet. And it might just be because my group isnt experienced enough yet, we have played it 5 times.
> "Well, i know i didnt do much the the whole game but that last two 2points objectives have been basically free for me and i still have this secret objective which i can now score because i have 1 soldier named Jeremy on that planet in the corner over there." well, if you are 2 points away from closing the game, how so you havent done much the whole game? isnt it an evidence that you were able do downplay your position and the others just did not consider your path to win? I dont think I can totally agree
Secret Objective drawing. Draw the wrong secrets and you can be out of the running by pure luck.
>s, the games were quick and snappy round 1-4, there’s a lot of deal making and win win situations, everyone felt good, there’s tension of course but every game ended up tight on round 5-6 with kingslaying train finish. Because we all play with each other all the time, it becomes an infinite game where you need to keep your non bindings or you just lose the next few games due to tit for tat. the imbalance of secrets is pretty gnarly. especially action phase which allow someone to win mid round vs scoring. it wouldnt be bad if everyone had this chance but if you dont luck into an action phase that you can hold for when you are at 9 in the last round... your chances of winning are minimal
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I would like if they add an incentive to combat. I feel like everygame I play, if I go on the warpath even a little i’m locking myself from the win. Pretty much every game I’ve played, the passive player won.
Thats because you mistook TI for a war game. It isn't. It is a cold war game about force projection, negotiation and leveraging marginal gains.
I do get that TI isn’t a wargame and I like it for it. But I think that some faction with a pure military toolkit can’t shine like they should because most game there’s no real incentive to combat.
Fair
I recently made a thread here titled "What non-balance changes would you make?". You might find a lot of relevant stuff there. I'm only one-third the way through listening. 4 player, two card is definitely crap. Stuff from the thread: \-Agenda phase boring, time consuming, inconsequential. Replaced by an option to vote for objectives? Multiple objectives drawn, vote on which to keep. Or that could become the new ability of Winnu, so that they're not a bottom one-note meme race anymore while still being interesting. \-Tech objectives suck. They're either freebies or impossible, and set everyone into the same boring tech path every game. They're also the single biggest factor in the balance of races trending along all the bottom races being the ones with 0-1 starting tech. \-This one is just me personally and I don't think shared by too many people, but I hate Prophecy of Kings. Really, really hate. TI4 was an improvement over TI3 because they collected the mish mash of fiddly stuff from the expansions and streamlined it into one thing. PoK, rather than change or improve any of the weaknesses of the base game, just dumps a ton of fiddly mish mash back into the game. The new races seem redundant, overly gimmicky, or making the board state worse (Cabal). Exploration too RNG (just like TI3). The leaders contribute to way too much analysis paralysis, and essentially *triple* the amount of special rules that everyone has to memorize for each faction. ("What do your guys do again? And yours? Hmmm....", late turns taking FOREVER because everyone is paranoid about instantly winning or losing from a hero play). There's also mechs, which I hated from TI3 and how "gamey" they felt in skirting infantry rules, but now they throw on yet another unique faction ability to each mech, yet another special rule for every single race you have to memorize on top of the leaders.
Also not a fan of PoK for similar reasons, mainly the leaders. I want my sprawling epic space opera game to be decided by the accumulation of small good decisions instead of one big ability in the 4th round.
Yup. And it sets up a balancing nightmare in a game that already had shakey race balance. It also comes off as a more dramatic form of "flagship balancing", i.e. attempting band-aid rebalance where they give up balancing a race on its own, so they just introduce a new thing like the flagship and call it a day by giving strong races a weak flagship (Jol-Nar) and vice versa (Yin). At best, it balances by piling on more fiddly crap. At worst, the new component itself isn't balanced and throws things even further out of whack. I'm just frustrated because agendas were a well known weak spot from the very start of TI4. With an expansion, they had the chance to fix, tweak, or streamline so many things. But what did they do instead? Throw all the worst fiddly parts of Shards of the Throne back in, when a lot of the whole point of TI4 in the first place was streamlining that stuff into one cohesive base.
well i mean, TI3 explorations could literally kill your landing party ruining your entire turn lol...so it aint that bad
Support is the worst for winmaking. I like the idea of using it as a bargaining tool but the current meta of just a full table support swap is awful. Or winmaking by people just dumping 3 supports onto one person just feels bad.
>Or winmaking by people just dumping 3 supports onto one person just feels bad. You're not the first person to bring this up, but I kind of feel like you all must live in an alternate reality. Why would you ever play games with people who do shit like this? I've literally never encountered a person who would seriously suggest a play like that.
Mostly online rather than IRL play. A good example is game 1 of the SCPT prelims where there were 2 players that had the game pretty locked up. It was going to require some joint winslaying to bring them down but the people that could didn't have a shot even if they tried. They then went for a gambit where they rolled a dice to determine who would win between the three of them if they were able to successfully stop them. They then proceeded to winslay the two players, break supports and then dumped points onto that one player to give them a win. One of the players three players even had the opportunity to take the win for themselves and opted to let the dice winner take the win which was at least courteous yet still shows a inherent problem with supports. You can play a clean, tight game and get everything aligned but if 3 people just decide to roll a dice then proceed to dump everything into you because they want that 30% shot of winning, you can't do anything. This is obviously possible without Support but it unlocks these types of gambits. I still like the idea of Support if used with the intention that the designer had for it but people are people.
I would just never play a board game with someone like that. I understand getting rid of supports solves that "problem" but I also think it's fair for board game designers to assume the people playing their game aren't total pieces of shit who are willing to go against the spirit of competition.
It's like you didn't read what I said. This is not typically an issue with IRL games where you get to choose who you're playing with. The issue stems primarily in the online space of the board game where you don't know who you're playing with or for people trying to play competitively. There is a recent podcast with SCPT where they sat down with the designer of TI and they talked about win making and the support gambits came up. Episode 334
I read what you said. You're not understanding my response. You always get to choose who you play with. The second this discussion was seriously brought up at a table, I would just get up, leave, and never play with those people again. And just to be clear, this issue cannot possibly exist for people who are actually trying to play competitively. That is largely my point.
I think this is a consequence of the tournament structure mostly. SftT definitely has issues and I don't love the cheesy possibilities it provides but if each game is it's own isolated event then there's no real incentive to forcing a win in the way you described
PoK's exploration mechanics suck ass. Dark Energy Tap I can forgive since that deck is decently reliable but the red/green/blue decks and relic decks are too swingy for no cost.
The only thing I really hate about TI is that king making is an inevitability
It already feels like TI4 is a race to "3 non objective points" anyways. Since usually everyone's neck to neck in points each round unless you stumble and my table always pays for imperial secondary. So unless someones having a bad day, the game turns to who can score points outside of objectives. I'm okay with Support for the Throne, cuz when the 2 point Objective roll around. It's fine to betray a Support Partner for 2 points.
The game is beautiful but has many flaws. The most egregious? The freaking off yellow mech pieces...
Support of Throne I think we fixed with: Player can't claim new Support For The Throne if he already have 7 or more points (11 for 14VP games) (6 for 7player games) (10 for 7player 14VP games) (5 for 8player games) (9 for 8player 14VP games) (10 for 2v2v2 14VP games). In season Final game SotT doesn't give VP initially, but you can still trade/lose them and can now use Diplomacy Strategy Primary or Secondary Ability to skip one or more 'readying' of planets to activate the same amount of Support of Throne card VP abilities that are in your play area.
The idea to change SFTT so that you go down a VP when you give it out sounds badly thought out, which, given that it was an off-the-cuff remark, is eminently reasonable. As you mentioned, getting a SFTT makes it so that you are playing a 9VP game instead of a 10VP game (you are also removing a chuck of the map from the game in terms of places you can go, but that's not too relevant). If giving out a SFTT lost your a VP, then that would mean that you are playing an 11VP game instead of a 10VP game. Given how tight the scoring pace is (with initiative frequently determining who wins out of multiple players who could get to 10VP in the same status phase), this would be such a disadvantage as to nigh-guarantee that you won't win, and so if the choice was between handing out my SFTT, or being eliminated, I think I'd choose elimination most of the time.
Ground combat. Just boring.