Alien Frontiers - Tips & Strategies

Being able to manipulate your dice will help you a lot! While the others race for early colonies, expand your fleet and discover alien technology.

Having trouble rolling 6’s? And when you do, hate the idea of sacrificing a ship? You could always use the colony constructor, but you have to roll triples! And who’s got 3 ore just lying around with all those raider-happy opponents?

Solution: try grabbing the Asimov Crater with your first colony, then get to work with the Colonist Hub: it doesn’t matter what you roll, and you can potentially churn out a new colony every other turn without losing a ship or needing a large cache of resources. Opponents won’t know what hit’em.

When using the Raider’s Outpost, don’t be afraid to steal an opponent’s Holographic Decoy. First, it now offers you added protection from the Raider’s Outpost. Second, it makes that player vunerable again to the Outpost.

It can be hard to get ore resources at times, depending upon the value of the last die placed on the Lunar Mine. There are workarounds for this, however. One of the most volatile (but useful) methods of getting ore is to use the Orbital Market to transfer fuel to ore, but you need doubles to do it, and the value of the of the trade can be cheap (1 to 1) or expensive (6 to 1) depending on what you roll. The solution: Acquire control of the Heinlein Plains, which make the trading value of the Orbital Market always 1 to 1 for the player that controls it. Since the fuel resource is readily available, once you lock down the rate at the Orbital Market and lock it down, you can get ore in a more plentiful supply than anyone who uses the Lunar Mine.

Once you have the ore you need, you can choose to tackle the Colony Constructor, or use the Terraforming Station/Shipyard combination to recycle and build ships constantly.

With two players there isn’t as much competition for areas on the planet. A good way to change this is for each player to choose an unused color and advance a colony on the colonist hub 3 spaces every turn placing it where they want when it reaches the end of the track. This causes each off color colony to be placed about every other turn. Players don’t score points for the off color but can use them to block the other player thus increasing the competition on the planet in an even manner.

Bobo’s tip about getting tech early is awesome – the time spent acquiring technology, and the RIGHT technology for your strategy is time well spent. It’s worthwhile to know what tech is available, and get it, as this can swing a close game easily.

It’s also important to remember the tech you have – don’t get so many tech cards that you get overwhelmed and forget to use an advantage.

Remember that you can wipe the alien tech cards with every die placed leading up to your purchase. Use this to cycle through the deck to get the alien tech cards that give you victory points and protect you from theft.
If someone else has the card that protects them from raiding, take it as soon as possible. Try and get the second of these cards to cause it to be discarded.

The best way to mitigate bad rolls is using some Alien cards like Stasis Beam/Booster Pod. The first one allows you to reduce a point in one die, and the second one to add one point. Let´s say you rolled a 6 and a 4. With Stasis Beam you could convert the 6 in a 5, and with booster pod convert the 4 in a 5. There you go, you have the double you needed so badly to build a ship in the shipyard!
So, as you can see, if you happen to have both cards in your tableau, you can easily manage to get a double, or even a triple.

If you roll a 6 and doubles, place the 6 on the Terraforming Station and the doubles on the Shipyard. Resolve the Terraforming Station first, destroying your ship, and then build your ship with the Shipyard to gain that ship right back at a reduced cost.

I ordered a set of replacement cards and within the new set was the mind control helmet and space crane cards