My Space Fleet is Invincible! — Let's Play Twilight Imperium Third Edition

Playing the following:

Public Disgrace
Play immediately after a player has chosen a Strategy Card. Force that player to return the card and choose a different one.

Pick a new card Epiphet!

:0

I'll take Trade II, then.

That nets you a bonus Trade Good, don't forget.

Lucas is up.

I'll take Tech II.

`Hrist will take Production, I'm betting

Production! I choose you!

And I'll form the head take Bureaucracy!

Play order for the round is as follows:

1. Googleshng (SPEAKER) — Leadership
2. SilentSnake — Diplomacy II
3. Severian — Assembly
4. `Hrist — Production
5. Epithet — Trade II
6. Egarwaen — Warfare
7. Lucas — Technology II
8. Sarcasmorator — Bureaucracy

Round 5 begins with Googleshng, provided no one is playing any last-minute Strategy Phase Action Cards.

Like this one of mine: Trade Stop: Play during the Strategy Phase. Break all trade agreements in play, including yours.

CONSUMABLES
Action Cards: 1
Political Cards: 0
Trade Goods: 0

TRADE CONTRACTS
Sol 2 (INACTIVE)
Sol 2 (INACTIVE)

This will probably tick someone off. But when Trade II time comes I'll be kindly disposed toward anyone who attacks Googleshng and/or Sabotages any Action Card he might play that would allow him to move his War Sun into my Home system. Heck, when I play Bureaucracy I'll even choose an objective that will be easily fulfilled by anyone who helps, if there is one such.

By the way, as a courtesy to make things fair, Sarcasmorator is letting me replace any number of Action Cards since he's already seen most of my hand. I replaced one of them with Action Card 122 and put one of my other cards back in the deck.

(This isn't an official action or anything. I'm just letting everyone know what I'm doing and that Sarc said I could.)

Yeah... anyone trying to take Sarc up on this bribe might also want to remember that not only am I the big scary freak with a War Sun on the table, I'm also the owner of the only 3 resource trade contract in the game. The most he can offer you is 2, and he's parked on the most valuable planet in the game pretty much everyone is within striking distance of. Besides which, we're still ultimately a peaceful bunch of space brains! The humans here are simply the subject of an ongoing study in non-peaceful interspecies relations, which will be concluding presently.

Activating Jord. (When the heck did you get those destroyers there anyway? We went WAY too long without a new map.) And making sure it's an exciting exchange by immediately playing...

Flank Speed: Play immediately after activating a system with a Command Counter. Choose a system you have just activated; increase speed of ships moving there by 1.

Giving people time to react before I move ships in, and just double checking- war suns can carry... 4 things total?

War Suns are like Carriers with giant guns. They each have a capacity of 6.

And anyone reading that should remember that Googleshng is ahead in points and trying to blockade my Space Dock for another one! Plus it's obvious that his 3-value contract is just a honeyed lure to trick his trade partners into a false sense of security. You think he'll just up and leave Jord after his point is won? Don't be fools! He's outside easy striking distance of anyone but me at the moment, but he comes for you next! He comes for you all!

But there is a chance. His outlying worlds are weak and soft, and his lone Space Dock is far! Help me, comrades! FIGHT THE FISH

War Suns carry 6, just like Carriers. They're like a Carrier, a Dreadnought and 3 huge guns all wrapped up in one. I built those Destroyers at the tail end of last round.

Don't forget my Destroyers do an anti-Fighter barrage before the battle starts.

EDIT: I just realized I'm jumping the gun here, since Googleshng hasn't actually announced which ships he's bringing in. Blacking out my die rolls until he does; Googleshng, kindly don't peek until you've made your choices.

Well, I guess I'm not getting any help.

Anti-Fighter barrage gives me 5, 6, 3 — no hits! On to the rest:

Cruiser x1: 3
Destroyer x3: 1, 1, 6
Fighter x2: 9(+1), 3(+1)

So that's 1 hit total, which is just shockingly terrible. Going to have to talk to the Mindnet about getting some cyber-eyes for my gunners.

Yeah sorry. Thought I specified right before I went to bed that I was going all in here. Every single thing off the Vegas (I just don't feel comfortable being that close to that wormhole now that the Mindnet has a player behind it), and the War Sun from home, carrying along all those fighters, and the groundies. Now to look at how your opening volley went, and then edit in my crazy attack roll mess.


And now that I've peaked... rock on! Survived the anti-fighter spam! That means I get to roll a disgusting amount of dice! Let's go alphabetically.

Carrier (Hits on 10): 1
Dreadnought (Hits on 6): 8
Fighter x5 (Hits on 9): 7, 2, 8, 2, 1
War Sun (Hits on 4): 4, 7, 3

(I just upped my target numbers here rather than taking one off the rolls, same end result)

I'll take my 1 hit to the Dreadnought (it's tough, it can take it), you've got 3 to deal with, and I just need to double check how my racial reroll ability works. Is there a limit on how many times I can reroll a particular die with it, or could I just go "1... screw that, reroll! 2. Bad die no cookie! 1. One more time! 3. OK then, finally?" all off a single die?

You were clear, I just wanted to do the rolls before work, but forgot you had specified and figured it wouldn't be fair to reroll later. In any case, they're pretty dismal. You'll have to whiff completely for me to even stand a chance of doing some real damage in the second combat round.

I think we both burned all our luck in that Mecatol Rex battle.

SRSLY

OK, so. Still waiting on Sarc to announce which 3 ships of his just went boom, and whether he has some weird crazy thing he wants to do now like play some crazy action card or whatever. Assuming he's going forward into round 2 though, here's my spoilered out rolls for round 2 of this exchange, which we can pretty safely assume include the War Sun totally killing everything he has left before I even roll:

Carrier (Hits on 10): 9
Damaged Dreadnought (Hits on 6): 2
Fighter x5 (Hits on 9): 4, 6, 8, 10, 7
War Sun (Hits on 4): 4, 5, 8

He actually can't retreat, because you have to retreat into a previously activated system. Since this is the first turn, there is nowhere to go, barring an action card.

My Destroyers pay for their shitty aim with their lives. Round 2 rolls:

Cruiser x1: 6
Fighter x2: 3, 10

Ugh, just 1 hit again. And I have fewer ships than Googleshng has hits, so everything I have dies; no Round 3.

You wanted to blockade my Space Dock, right? Or are we doing a planetary invasion?

Well, there are also Tactical Retreats, but I didn't announce one of those. Maybe I should've!

The hyper-sandal is on the other ambulatory appendage now, hooman!

Also, it's not that much of a loss. Your fighters would've been paste anyway, so you'd just have gotten away with one Cruiser.

Well, I more mean maybe I should've in the first round. I could have gotten away with a Cruiser and a Destroyer that way. But I have only one CC in Strategy and didn't want to spend it yet.

Oh yeah, that's a good point.

SilentSnake, you're up, by the way. Googleshng won the fight and his action is over, unless he has a post-battle card to play or something (which should affect you not at all).

Yes, we're going to be busy over here studying this dock of yours, and all these cool chunks of debris floating around for the time being. If and when we end up examining the surface, it won't be this round.

Don't forget to assign that lone hit of mine. Technically, as the attacker, you're supposed to take casualties first (presumably so the defender can base his casualty choices on the attacker's), though since I lost everything I didn't figure the order mattered here.

I can't recall if I went over what blockades do before, or just how to do them. Anyway: They make it so the blockaded player can't build ships in the system. They can still build Ground Forces and PDS units.

And Space Docks can't be destroyed except through a successful invasion, so this lets an opponent willing to dump resources into holding a planet prevent invasion if the invader can't pull it off right away.

On the other hand, War Suns bombard through PDSes. So it's not particularly effective when you've got one of those babies parked overhead.

Oh, missed that. I'll take the hit to the fighter from the carrier, because seeing how there seems to be a tech specifically to block it that I haven't grabbed yet, I'm assuming there's an action card specifically to kill damaged ships with damage capacity. So yeah. Summing up my turn here...

COMMAND COUNTERS
Command Pool: 1
Strategy Allocation: 4
Fleet Supply: 3
Activations: 0

UNITS
Jol/Nar - Space Dock x1, Dreadnought x1
Starpoint/New Albion - PDS x1 (Starpoint), Dreadnought x1
Mehar Xull - PDS x1
Tsion/Bellatrix - Carrier x1, Ground Forces x1, PDS x2
Vega Major/Minor - Ground Forces x3 (1 on Major, 2 on Minor),
Jord - War Sun x1: (Fighter x4, Ground Forces x2), Carrier x1: (Ground Forces x3), Dreadnought x1

Cool beans. Fighters don't need to be assigned to specific ships, by the way. Just having sufficient support in a system is enough. And the AC you're thinking of is Direct Hit, which has been played before.

There's a couple of them, aren't there?

Five or six, I think.