Friday, August 10, 2012

Day of Destruction--Twilight Imperium Day 2012 Report



The very stars shook at the cascading explosions as fleet after fleet blossomed into vapor.  The molecules of once brave soldiers blasted in every direction to join the cold vast eternity of space.

On August 5th, we held a Twilight Imperium Day in Osaka.  Four empires stepped up to claim the imperial throne--The Yssaril Tribes (Diz in green), The Winnu (Kohei in purple), The L1z1x Mindnet (Kristos in blue), and the Emirates of Hacan (Keith in Yellow).  At the beginning of the game there were two bold moves:  The Yssaril Tribes took advantage of their fast carriers to take Mecatol Rex in the first turn and the L1z1x Mindnet took advantage of a defensive weakness to invade the home system of the Emirates of Hacan.  

Hacan seemed to be in a terrible position, with only a few measly ships left and no space dock for a few turns.  In order to stop the onslaught, Hacan negotiated a deal that highly favored the L1z1x Mindnet.  Run away to fight another day.  The Winnu had a very tough choice, go after Mecatol Rex and take on the Yssaril Tribes or go after the lightly defended home territories of the L1z1x Mindnet.  Eventually, the Winnu went for one of the victory conditions and attacked Yssaril.  The Yssaril Tribes were deeply distraught by this move as they were planning to attack the weakly defended home systems of the L1z1x Mindnet.  This act of treachery solidified the Yssaril Tribes into a policy of revenge.  To make matters worse for the Winnu, the L1z1x Mindnet decided to attack the Winnu at that time, now that the Hacan were dealt with.  A vicious three-way battle began, which led to the destruction of the Winnu war making capacity for the rest of the game.

While all this was going on, the Hacan were left to themselves to rebuild their empire.  The Hacan were able to negotiate some limited battles with the Yssaril Tribes and the L1z1x Mindnet.  Trading small battles for trade goods.  This ended up being a big mistake for those two powers.  While they were distracted with the Winnu, the Hacan were slowly building up their victory points.  As the Hacan were building up their empire, they began to amass a huge amount of trade goods, which they in turn used towards victory conditions.  The power of Hacan was unstoppable.

As Hacan was nearing it's victory, the L1z1x Mindnet went into hyper aggressive mode by attacking and taking Mecatol Rex from the Yssaril Tribes.  The power of their war suns and dreadnoughts were more than the Yssaril Tribes could handle.  In the meantime, the L1z1x Mindnet continued to hammer the Winnu.  No one could take on the Mindnet.

Eventually, the game ended with the Imperium Rex card and Hacan turned out to be a winner.  By exploiting the pity of neighboring empires due to its bad opening, Hacan was able to build to a peaceful trade victory supplemented with some small negotiated skirmishes.  The moral of the story?  Next time, show no mercy.  

3 comments:

  1. I didn't realized there were so much mercy in that day. lol

    I think I made some mistakes as newby.
    1, I made my fleet stay near MR and that was waste of a fleet. I should keep my fleet moving and working.
    2, I didn't realized Hacan was winning. If I did, I could negotiate like "Don't come to me. You should go to Hacan or Hacan will ...." or something like that.
    3, I didn't need war sun which I bought. I was thinking it is some must-buy in later game but it's not. The winner Hacan didn't have war sun tech indeed.

    And after the game I read the TI3 strategy article. The Winnu strategy article says "If you have two potentially aggressive neighbors, don’t trade with the Hacan across the board even if it is tempting to get a 3TA yourself. That’s not what it’s for. " Ur... that is exactly what I did... oh...

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  2. I had so much fun playing this. I came a close 2nd and got to kick a lot of butt and build huge fleets. I was very fortunate that Todd didnt attack me early on as I was thinly spread out across a third of the board. Also I didn't realize at first that you can only score one objective per round, which lead to some inefficiency. We definitely let keith do too much of his own thing from the mid game on. Todd and kohei's conflict proved very unfortunate for both sides, putting them on the back foot for the rest of the game. Next time I won't be such a nice guy.

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  3. The big mistake I made was to take Mecatol Rex at the beginning of the game and then spending lots of resources to defend it, especially since I didn't have a secret objective for Mecatol Rex.

    In regards to my main strategy, I was planning to take on Kristos after Keith was taken out. Since Keith didn't have a star base, I felt that I had two or three safe turns to attack Kristos' planets, which were weakly defended. I tried to convince Kohei to join me. If we had done that, then Kristos wouldn't have had enough resources to build all of those war suns and the battles would have been more even. Unfortunately, Kohei didn't allow me to pursue this option. I'm a very vengeful player, so I spent the rest of the game attacking Kohei, which again wasn't something that helped me toward victory.

    The things we learned from this game:

    1. Don't underestimate the Hacan and the power of trade goods.

    2. Demand a higher payment for negotiated attacks. Kristos and I let Keith attack, but we didn't get a fair price for it. In fact, we probably shouldn't allow negotiated attacks. If Keith hadn't gotten those two points from negotiated attacks, then Kristos would have won.

    3. The player with the highest production power should be a prime target. Kohei and I shouldn't have been attacking each other since Kristos probably had the same production capacity as the both of us combined.

    4. War Sun technology isn't the best tech? Keith developed the techs to get more trade goods which helped him win the game. This showed that there is more than one way to win the game and that non-military aims are equally legitimate.

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