Twilight Imperium (3ed) - Tips & Strategies

The systems immediately adjacent to your home system will comprise where most of your dependable resources will come from. It is important to efficiently acquire them in as few turns as possible. Analyze your race’s abilities, technologies and starting units so that you pick the perfect strategy card during round one to not falter off the starting blocks.

Generally speaking, to take control of four different planets on round 1, you will need at least four ground forces and two different ships with large capacity. If you do not already have them, Imperial II will help you build what you lack and still have them available for exploration. Alternately, Warfare provides one of your ship and crew the ability to take over two different systems. Certain technologies also ensure faster expansion. Stasis Capsules are invaluable if your starting forces contain dreadnoughts or carriers (think Mentak!). This makes Technology a must have for first round. If you cannot utilize your strategy card to enhance expansion, Trade offers a nice option to offset a slow start.

By the rules as written, there are two possibilities for how the Speaker role changes:

1. With the much-maligned Strategy Cards from the base game, the player that selects the Initiative Strategy takes the Speaker role, and chooses his or her Strategy first on the next turn. This is notoriously unpopular because the base Strategies include the Imperial card that simply grants one Victory Point — it is rare to choose another Strategy as the Speaker, and the person to the Speaker’s left will generally choose Initiative, to repeat the cycle.

2. With the Shattered Empire expansion, the new Strategy Cards exclude Initiative. The Speaker role is granted during the Assembly phase upon selection of a Political Card agenda. In this case, the person playing the Assembly Strategy will simply select the player to their right as the new Speaker and give themselves second choice or, less likely, allow an opponent to select the Political Card and give themselves the Speaker role. As the Assembly card is a relatively unpopular choice in comparison to other Strategies, the Speaker role remains with one player for long periods of time.

Suggested House Rule

This House Rule only works if playing with Strategies from the Shattered Empire Expansion.

The first person to Pass each turn becomes the Speaker. This encourages players to play their turns quickly and efficiently, speeding up gameplay.

If the Assembly (or Assembly II) Strategy is selected, the Speaker role is assigned in whichever order the Strategy and “first Pass” instances occur — this means that when Assembly is in play, the order in which the two events occur matters.

Should a player have no Strategies, Command Pool counters, or “Play as an Action” Action Cards remaining and be forced to Pass before the player with Assembly plays their Strategy, they may lose the Speaker role to a player selected by the Active Player during Assembly.

In the more likely event that the Assembly Strategy is played before any player has Passed, the player selected as Speaker gains the final vote and Speaker role during the Assembly, but may lose that role before the next Strategy Phase begins to the first player to Pass. This has the added bonus of the Active Player that has played the Assembly Strategy of selecting a Speaker that affects the Political Card agenda, rather than choosing a player that will simply give him or her an early Strategy choice.

Often times I’ve seen players kind of give up early in the game if they get cut-off from expanding to the middle area by aggressive neighbors. They are cut-off from having a large empire, from going after tech planets or from setting up for a push to Mecatol Rex.

I’ve also seen more industrious players simply alter their course of victory to the straight commerce route.
If you find your self cut-off and it looks daunting to build up an armada and good techs to fight back, closely review the public strategies, especially the ones worth 2 VPs. There is typically at least 1, 1, 2, 2, 2 VPs (for a total of 8) on hand regarding spending resources, influence and/or command counters. If this is the case consider turtle mode and playing the political and diplomatic antagonist.
Bunker up the systems you have to deter invasion, but don’t overspend. Save a little each round to go after one of the VPs that ask you to spend resources. Don’t worry about going after techs either (unless its for VPs).
If players are being expansionist, then they are likely spending all their resources on techs, military and command counters to be active and aren’t particularly concerned with “wasting” 20 influence for 2 VPs. This can get you a good 7-8 VPs.

Now, because you are hording your influence for the status phase, you typically will always have influence during the assembly (which is a great strategy to play every other turn) and if the better political cards pop-up, you might get a chance at rogue VP (attack elected player and score 1 VP) and the political muscle to ensure it.
Also, with the Shards of the Throne expansion, the promissory notes can also benefit you. You can coyly broadcast that your vote is for “sale” and maybe you can get another player to offer you “You require 1 less VP to win”.
One of the benefits of being in turtle mode with a small empire and not lots of tech, you’re low on the radar.

So, fret not if you are bludgeoned early and are forced to retreat into your neck of the woods in the early game, think commerce.

You want to win at TI. You can’t do it without choosing bureaucracy and choosing it more than your opponents. And on top of that if you choose bureaucracy you don’t necessarily need to be the strongest player. You just need to know what other objective cards come up. If you know this you can plan ahead and save influence, trade goods and get points quickly. Also you will know when Imperium Rex comes up an be ahead of everyone else. You cannot win TI with ignoring bureaucracy.

To ensure that the game flows smoothly and timely (as best as it can), one of the best things is to everyone agree and make the habit of keeping an eye on:

1. Whose turn is it now;
2. Who wants and, from those, who has responded (executing the secondary ability) to the primary ability of a Strategy Card;
3. Executing the Status Phase steps IN ORDER;

All of this calling out firmly (but not yelling), so that everyone keeps their attention elevated and focused in the game. It’s incredibly tiresome if one (and usually the same) player gets the “mission” of tracking this all by himself.

Don’t ever forget that roughly 60% of the game time comes from distractions and delayed actions because of lack of engagement to keep things going (in an orderly manner).

Calculate. Wait to strike at good moment and don’t hesitate when it’s time to act! Remember of secondary rules of all Strategy Card that going to be used in this game round. If you need to skip and you’re not playing the Yssaril Tribe you may always activate a random system on the opposite of the board or you may pay Resources to another player asking him to activate his Strategy Card sooner or later that they planned to do it. It’s also important when you exhausting your planets with large Influence (best to do after voting political agendas) and technological discounts (obviously best is to keep the one with the color of technology you want to buy until Technology will be played).

The Shards of the Throne expansion includes Preliminary Objectives, which provide players each a small and easy to obtain goal before randomly selecting a Secret Objective. Unfortunately this slows down the game, as players cannot focus on their Secret Objective from the start.

The SO MANY OBJECTIVES House Rule

Players start the game with a Preliminary Objective AND a Secret Objective, and can fulfill either one in a given Status Phase (along with a Public Objective, if applicable).

Upon turning in a Preliminary Objective, a player takes ANOTHER Secret Objective as indicated on the Preliminary Objective card.

This House Rule allows players to potentially score up to three personal objectives each, and can generally provide five Victory Points if all goals are achieved.

Create the galaxy before players get their race. Leave space in the galaxy for the home worlds. Then each player in turn can select either a location for their home world, in one of the open spaces, or a race. Then going around in reverse order have players select which ever one they did not. In this way a player can get either a better position or race, but probably not both.

*How to get set-up time down to 30min*

The following fits all the expansions and items into the main box, but I bought two aluminum cases from Home Depot for super pimpiness.

I bought 18 plastic tuck boxes to place all the race specific pieces into the tuck and made labels on the side of the tuck. These tuck boxes are sturdier than print and fold tucks allow you table ready spots to keep these things organized during gameplay. As the tucks lay in the box, its super easy to find, remove and return the tucks.

I also bought 8 plastic clear containers (4″x6″x1.5″) to place the colored spaceships. Again easy to find, remove and replace. Plus its another spot in your area to keep this organized.

Jewlery box for all the cards, tokens, etc.. This keeps everything organized and easy to find. Plus, you can leave it in one spot and not have to spend all that time unpacking and figdeting with the gear during the game.

Plastic Tubes for the deep space and planet counters. If you decide to use these, you just drop out as many as you need and it stays random.

Cigarette card sleeve page to hold all the planets. I made labels for all the planets in alphabetical order and we hand it on a nearby wall. Easy to find and replace the planet cards.

I have an area in my box for the board hexes that are separated with labels for the different hex types. easy to find and return.

This is about it. This helps cuts the set-up and pack away time down to 30minutes on each side and it has the added benefit of cleaner and faster gameplay.

Our group can crack out a 6 player game of TI:3 in 7 hours.

While there are a HUGE amount of rules to master in this masterpiece, the basics are, after all, just that: The base upon which all other rules rest. Learning at least them (a.k.a. said basics) can spare you and your opponents a nigh-on metric ton of rulebook page-fliping. To this end I present a site I have found invaluable in teaching new players how to play:

http://www.preeminent.org/steve/games/ti3/ti3demo/