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

I suppose it's fine if it's necessary and no one objects (I don't want to base it solely on my own ruling because we've been at odds the last few rounds).

And... apparently I'm good as is actually. Misread how a card works, misinterpreted how some possible action works, and forgot which Warfare card got pulled out of the game, but it seems to all pretty much balance out.

Seriously though, it gets pretty freaking complicated planning out a turn in advance when you've got so many resources to deal with and no actual little physical bits laid out in front of you.

Glad to know we've still got the good will flowing so well at least!

All right, then.

Snaaaaaaaake!

So I have a question that I've already addressed with Sarc, but I wanted to be doubly sure:

If I'm going for the "Taking a ground force planet" objective, then does it count if I bombard with my Dreadnought? Sarc originally said yes, but this thread seems to lean towards no.

So what do you all think? Again, I just want to be doubly sure.

I'll chime in on my reasoning: I say yes because you bombard after you land your GF on a planet, but before invasion combat, which you proceed to after bombardment is finished. The opponent's GF are on the planet when the invasion begins (ie, when the GF land). It doesn't say you have to defeat at least 1 GF in invasion combat, just that you have to successfully invade a planet with at least 1 GF on it.

You might ask a guy on BGG called sigmazero13. He seems to have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the game.

EDIT: Oh, hey, he's the second reply in that thread. And the thread itself leans yes, to my understanding.

Now, if you were to simply bombard with a War Sun and make no planetary landing, then that wouldn't qualify.

Then the Mindnet will be activating Perimeter and invading with three Ground Forces.

Dreadnought Bombardment: 4, 2

Ground Forces: 9+1, 4+1, 6+1

PDS roll: 2

Invasion:
GF roll: 4

We'll be planting our marker on Perimeter then.

COMMAND COUNTERS
Command Pool: 1
Strategy Allocation: 1
Fleet Supply: 7
Activations: 1
Total in play: 10/16

PLANETS (Resources/Influence)
[0.0.0.] – 5/0
Mellon – 0/2
Zohbat – 3/1, Blue tech specialty
Rigel I – 0/1
Rigel II – 1/2
Rigel III – 1/1, Blue tech specialty
Quann – 2/1, Green tech specialty
Wellon - 1/2
Perimeter 2/2

Egarwaen is up!

Assembly Time!

I'm claiming the Speaker token.

And I'm going to nominate Sarc to play a political card, which we will proceed to vote on. Go, Sarc! For great justice!

Once that's done, it's Secondary Time:

Egar - Primary
Sarc - Pass
Snake - Pass
Sev - Pass
Epithet - ???
`Hrist - ???
Google - ???

OK, that means I'll have to randomly draw a card to play. And I randomly draw Political Card 69!

Imperial Containment
For: The player (or players) with the most planets outside his Home System must discard one Command Counter from his Command Pool for each Command Counter he places during a Tactical Action for the remainder of this round.
Against: Discard this card.

Well, I'm in favor, I tell you what. Ten votes for.

Also, you can put me down as a pass on the secondary; I don't have any exhausted planets.

I will, of course, be exercising my Speaker Token and voting last.

It's not me, right? If it's not me, then The Mindnet votes for with 12 votes.

Passing on secondary.

Voting For with 11 votes, and passing on secondary.

I vote For with 12 votes

I am also passing on the secondary to lack of exhausted planets

Three votes for.

Hang on. I'd like to formally object, again, to picking someone to play a political card who has no card to play. That really doesn't seem like a thing you should be able to do. And I'm not JUST saying that because it would mean we'd have a card here that $%@#s me over personally.

When choosing what political cards do discard for extra resources, the idea is to keep the ones you might actually want to see come up. Knowing that, you want to do your best to avoid picking someone to play a card who has been able to keep it in-hand that long, but if there's never a condition where you're forced to, it's totally meaningless and you might as well throw out the whole concept of drawing them and just draw off the top of the deck if you're going to give people the option to do that like this.

I can understand not liking it, but it's on Page 15 of the Shattered Empire rules. If someone who doesn't have a Political Card is picked to play one, they draw one off the deck.

Right, but you're always free to take the Assembly card, play a Political Card yourself, and give the Speaker token to the player to your right.

I'm just not doing that right now because severian is traitorous scum that I've not yet finished eradicating from the universe.

Seriously? I thought it was a proposed house rule we were debating at one point when it came up forever ago and didn't quite resolve the matter since whoever it was said "oh you don't have any? I'll just use it on so-and-so instead."

So now I'm just sitting here fuming I guess because seriously, JUST NOW at the end of this round I made a decision whether to throw out one of two vote effecting cards specifically on the belief that any votes that were called would be cards from someone's hand they'd be saving for their own benefit, and nothing that could randomly single me out that I should hold onto veto for instead.

And I mean, I know I just sound like a pathetic whiner at this point, but seriously, that was my thought process.

Traitorous scum?! That's a paddlin'.

I only borrowed two of your planets early on in the game, I didn't go off and attack any of your fleets, nor did I blockade a space dock. I said I'll think about your offer to get out of dodge, but decided we don't want to deal with space gases who cross over DMZ's. Best hope your War Sun pilots have prayed to your gassy creators, because they'll be meeting them soon!

Yeah, I think it ended up being moot that time because the choice was changed (it was early in the game), but it's a real rule, not a house rule. I think the only house rules I've used here have been for expediency's sake when using Action Cards, voting or executing certain secondaries.

Well seriously. There's no way I would have discarded what I did just now if I'd known that. I thought we'd specifically established all votes were off cards-in-hand.

But whatever. Totally insane to ask "hey, can I take back discarding this card which is only actually useful in this one amazingly rare situation because I didn't know an obscure rule?" and I'm just having a generally stressful day and venting frustrations inappropriately.

Out of curiosity though, would anyone be willing to change their vote in exchange for bribery, with either trade goods or weird crazy favors like vacating a planet you want or attacking someone?

Google, how many votes do you have against?

Well let's see... 17 influence available, plus the potential benefit of this nigh-worthless card I'd have just discarded if bla bla bla which isn't helpful enough to flip the vote unless I can bribe at least a couple people.

I'll change my vote if you promise to get off Jord next action, take your GF from Vega with you and promise to vacate Arcturus/Sumerian next round. All without attacking me further, naturally. But of course, there's no way to make it a binding agreement ...

Here's where the Political draw first came up:

Post #344
Egarwaen: I'm going to invoke the Primary Ability of Assembly. I'm going to claim the Speaker token and nominate Lucas to play a political card.

Sarc, what happens if he doesn't have any political cards? I vaguely remember seeing a mention that he draws and executes the one from the top of the stack, but I can't find the relevant note.

Post #345
Sarc: You remember right. In our case he'll draw a random one from the list.

Oh hey, now THAT'S a bargaining chip. See, I'd possibly be willing to do that! So now that's another thing I can bribe people to vote against with- The threat of letting Sarc out of his general state of total lockdown.

I'd flip my vote if you take out all your aggressions on Egarwaen.

So you can stab him in the back and sweep through his undefended systems to his homeworld? Nah. You're going to die.