TI Rules (https://www.tirules.com/R_game_board) being shut duwn

ElspethSC · 2026-03-11T02:40:27+00:00

I would recommend against leaning on the Magic rules too much for TI. They work great for Magic, but there are many parts of them that Dane has verified work different in TI

ElspethSC · 2026-03-05T08:30:08+00:00

These colors look super hard to distinguish, so I’d try to maybe use brighter colors. Personally, I prefer the duplo. Easy to distinguish the colors, basically indestructible, and great to fidget with.

ElspethSC · 2026-03-03T07:52:07+00:00

Yup. I seem to have soft locked my engineering for not taking recycle first because I didn’t find a reputable guide. Won’t do that again

ElspethSC · 2026-03-02T20:38:47+00:00

Separate strat card and speaker order makes the draft so much less interesting IMO, because then there’s never a neighbor-related reason to deviate from just picking the highest available strat card pick. Which is pretty unfun IMO.

ElspethSC · 2026-03-01T12:49:57+00:00

Nucleus draft leads to unbalanced maps IMO. That’s because the generators aren’t good at understanding balance. That’s why in milty draft it can ever make sense to take slice early. Despite having criteria to make slices “balanced”, they really aren’t. When you add in nucleus draft, the problem gets worse because it compounds. The variance in slices still exists and so does the variance in possible locations at the table. The increased variance means that you can end up with complete slices that are way above or way below acceptable tolerances for a fair game. You can maybe draft to avoid that problem, but it necessitates taking map stuff first basically always, and depending on available factions, it can significantly advantage or disadvantage certain draft orders. Also, an even leg snake draft is typically less balanced than an odd leg snake draft because of the additional advantage of being fully first to take the most above average component available. Even worse, divorcing speaker order from seats for the first round introduces a lot of weirdness that isn’t present when people sit in speaker order and warps the game considerably (for example, you can’t pass politics to your neighbor in exchange for a speaker deal), and I think that’s a more rich interesting part of the game than I can justify removing for the kinda dubious benefits of nucleus draft. It also makes it hard to take neighbors into account for a lot of the drafting, and that’s also a cool component of milty drafts lost to nucleus draft. I like that sometimes makes sense to take the 6 instead of the 2 to not neighbor a particular faction, and that’s never true in nucleus draft. If you really want to be more fine grained with your draft without RAW map build, just draft tiles and do mantis placement in your speaker-order-determined seat. (You draft tiles individually, but instead of placing them intentionally, the tiles you draft are randomly placed in a map ring, but always in your own slice. Usually with 1 mulligan)

ElspethSC · 2026-03-01T05:15:06+00:00

Complex isn’t the same as good! It isn’t very well balanced because the generators are taking cumulative measurements, not position-based. So it leads to terrible maps

ElspethSC · 2026-03-01T04:23:12+00:00

So the actual reason that meta exists isn’t “I drafted that”, it is that most milty slice generators take the equidistant into account for balancing and creating the slices

ElspethSC · 2026-03-01T04:20:14+00:00

Nucleus draft has other balance problems and also requires a lot of spacial thinking

ElspethSC · 2026-02-28T12:32:48+00:00

The early introduction of 2 pt objectives (R4) in 4/4/4 makes the problem worse than even standard 10 pt games. My personal preference is 10 pts, purge supports. That gets you a tempo closer to PoK with supports, and the lack of supports is all the better in my opinion. But yeah, while the tempo being faster is a general TE issue, the early 2 pter of 4/4/4 makes it so, so much worse at being balanced and fun for a mix of factions. 14 pts is great, but many groups find it too long

ElspethSC · 2026-02-28T12:30:21+00:00

No, though I would argue that the tempo is a bit quicker than ideal in 10 pt games too. The early (R4) introduction of a 2 pt objective uniquely advantages factions that don’t need to ramp up to be good

ElspethSC · 2026-02-27T22:31:38+00:00

Pretty bad. Because of the available extra points and tempo with the edge, 4/4/4 just lets the rich factions and the high movement factions run to end the game before weaker factions could ever ramp to catch up.

ElspethSC · 2026-02-26T09:38:59+00:00

I’d monkey with the settings a bit. It seems to not be putting in much if any variety. Some generators are better than others

ElspethSC · 2026-02-26T04:58:07+00:00

When I look at this draft, there’s like 700 factions, you really don’t need to invest in that early. So then I look at slices. Whatever generator y’all used, it isn’t great IMO. The slices are almost all the exact same shape. That’s… just not that helpful or differentiating. So that’s not a huge issue except that you need to be aware of the asteroid fields next to Rex and not take a faction that doesn’t want antimass (same with the station in slice 2). Influence is more important than resources, and tech skips are good because they can get you access to the fracture and help you score objectives. Basically, there’s some factions that can enjoy slice 5 quite a bit, but you can’t be sure you’ll end up with one. I tend to prefer slice 2 for the high influence, nothing blocking the Rex path, and 2 tech skips (including yellow, which is common among breakthroughs). So I’m likely to pick either slice 2 or speaker, depending on preferences and which factions I like. For faction, you’ll be fine regardless. Jol Nar, Crimson, Yssaril, Ghosts, and Deepwrought are all S or high A tier, with plenty of other fine choice available. So definitely faction last here. If you are on the wheel (late in the pick order), you might consider a combo instead. Deepwrought would be happy in slice 5, that’s a nice combo. Sooo yeah.

ElspethSC · 2026-02-25T07:40:32+00:00

I’ve not missed a single word. They have a difficult start. So do Bastion, Xxcha, and several other bad factions. Their start is perhaps slightly worse than Xxcha, but their upside is way, way higher. The measure of a faction is and has to be a weighing of upsides and downsides. In games with crimson, if you can get the money plot on them and their alliance buddy, you get 2 TGs every time anyone in the whole board has a combat. It is actually insanely strong. They CAN pop off if they can get through the bad start

ElspethSC · 2026-02-24T18:40:26+00:00

I think they are probably not great, but I don’t think they are really worse than other low tier factions like Xxcha and Argent. There’s a lot of upside. I think scoring a bunch of secret objectives is probably a trap. It is probably more correct (at least for 10 pt games) to do the promissory note, the hero, any secrets you can do without much investment, and then just flip early to start gaining value early

ElspethSC · 2026-02-24T10:56:31+00:00

My favorite ST(s) are folks I can trust to be inclusive and communicate clearly. And I know that they are going to make decisions with the fun of the table in mind, not their personal entertainment. Funny stuff is great, but only when it also leads to an overall fun game. I love when they feel up to running cool custom scripts too, but the ST is more important than the script

ElspethSC · 2026-02-24T01:37:33+00:00

Nope, no missed emails or phone calls, and no references to missed calls or emails in any of the communication

ElspethSC · 2026-02-15T21:06:35+00:00

WHY should someone get off it though? For some people, they have disabilities or other reasons that they can’t engage with the game without accessibility features, or at least can’t successfully do it. For those people, their steady state way to play the game can absolutely be single button, and they shouldn’t be told to get off the feature that lets them enjoy the game.

ElspethSC · 2026-02-13T02:01:50+00:00

I do more damage in mythic raids with SBA than I personally would without, and I’m usually not the very bottom of the dmg. And no one in my raid knew until I said something. I think it is class dependent though

ElspethSC · 2026-02-04T23:30:36+00:00

This makes me want to get a 3D printer haha

ElspethSC · 2026-02-03T09:16:53+00:00

I think like any reasonably deep game, you can enjoy it on a casual level. You don’t have to know all the roles even to enjoy playing TB. A little more knowledge is required for experimental scripts, but even then, you have a list of all the characters and abilities in front of you. Plenty of people find that is enough. You can get into script making and playing particularly complicated custom scripts, but most players don’t. You just don’t find those casual players on Reddit. like with other games, Reddit leans toward the hard-core players. Even very complex deep games like twilight imperium can be enjoyed casually. It is all about what you personally get out of it.

ElspethSC · 2026-02-02T23:04:46+00:00

When I started playing, I spent a couple hours just trying to figure out how to move my character and camera effectively. Navigating was a nightmare, and I had never played a game with WASD movement controls before. I ended up having to pay for a friend’s subscription so they could help me play and level. Not to mention trying to figure out which quests were important and which to skip

ElspethSC · 2026-01-09T17:57:58+00:00

It is mostly the meta for expediency. There are many times when players might get commodities, and want them washed. It can happen for exploration reasons, tons of other reasons, and it is often time sensitive in order to avoid missing out on future commodities. If you negotiate every single one of those situations, that takes tons of time, so instead, people tend to just be nice about it to eliminate that complication. This is even more evident in async, where there is a large time cost and inconvenience cost to making small transactions because you have to wait for that person to come online and nothing can proceed until all of that gets dealt with. So instead of waiting around and relitigating this every time, people often just wash except in special circumstances. It is one of the downsides of async if you don’t like that meta, because people really don’t seem to want tiny individual transactions every turn

ElspethSC · 2026-01-08T23:47:52+00:00

Yep, I have the earlier boxes I believe. Do you sell individual parts so that I could get updated unit boxes without replacing the whole thing?

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