Twilight Imperium 4 Discussion

I've sort of intimated this in several other threads, but I'll put it out here again in a general thread. So the last 6 months I've gotten super into watching competitive Twilight Imperium 4 TTS games as an idle thing while I do low effort work. The game has some problems, but watching these games has completely changed the way I think about this game. I'm not sure I'll ever play this game, it just doesn't fit into my life very well and really really wanting the full 6p for 6-8 hours or whatever is just a huge ask, but it fits really nicely into my life as something to watch in the background.

Been really interesting to see the meta drastically evolve since the expansion was released. The expansion seems to have way up-resourced the game, which is a smart move, injecting a bunch of trade goods into the early game so the openings are more flexible. As a criticism, I do think it's pretty obvious at this point that the number of new powers and the big addition of the agents really just produces special power overload. You can see the players forgetting their own and especially other people's powers because there's too much text on the table. Overall, it does seem like the new expansion was a good thing, the game's a bit less scripted in its opening.

I've mostly been watching the Space Cats Peace Turtles community, their commentary is pretty good usually on the normal tourney games and this is running for like 5 months. Their first two prelim games are up if you want to watch them, the TTS mod viewing tools are pretty slick when they're working right:
www.twitch.tv/videos/955121033

I thought about your implied criticism when I saw the detail of the new expansion (Details on all current factions are here , for those interested.) That's a LOT of special powers and ship abilities and special techs to keep track of. It's obviously less in any individual game, but it's still a lot of info. But then I immediately thought of video games like League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm and realized that regular players of those keep a fairly encyclopedic knowledge in their heads of not only each champion/hero's base abilities but talented stuff, as well. Is the difference that you can play a dozen games of League in the time you could play a game of TI4, so the repetition makes the memory both more reinforced and instinctive?

Or is it a question of complexity? I can sit here and rattle off almost every ability of the various Root factions except some of the Vagabond stuff because most of them aren't that complicated and are, thus, easier to remember. But there's also only 10 of them with the impending Marauder expac, compared to 24 in TI4. And TI4 also has stuff, like techs, that won't show up every game like abilities in Root do.

I’ve mostly internalized the 17 base game factions’ abilities, so I’ll be curious to see how I do with all the new stuff thrown in when I can actually play a game with the expansion. They’re still out of stock so I haven’t really looked at any of the new abilities.

The wildly expanding League and DOTA rosters and item tables are great references here, good pull.

The last I heard was that they did a release of the first printing of the TI expansion and it was small, at best. And it's still out of stock most places. I don't have any info and don't know any rumors but I'm very skittish about this kind of thing from FFG now that they've been virtually gutted of properties and designers. It feels like this is being sent out to die before they shutter the fucking place honestly.

I bought TI3 and the first expansion about 10 years ago, then discovered that none of my friends wanted to play. Fortunately, there was a weekly group at the FFG Event Center, so I did get to play it a few times. I don't mind long, complex games, but the information overload aspect to TI3 always left me drained afterwards. Thanks to my game hoarding tendencies, I still have my TI3 games as shelf toads, in practically mint condition. Selling them will be a problem, too, because they are obsoleted by 4th edition and so bulky to ship.

Shellhead, if you're willing to do a trade, there might still be some demand for it. I ended up trading mine to Boardgameco (Alex Radcliffe on BGG) and this was post-TI4, which means he still thought it had selling value (he trades for stuff that he can auction.) You might give his site a look and see if that's still true: boardgametraders.com/#/

Gary Sax wrote: The last I heard was that they did a release of the first printing of the TI expansion and it was small, at best. And it's still out of stock most places.

They did a small print run for mostly preorders back in November and there were a number of color issues with the printing. Some people think it’s taking so long because they are trying to fix the color issues, but that is probably too big of an ask for Asmodee to actually do. I imagine it’s just COVID related delays or the demand was way higher than they expected. I could have gotten a copy at my LGS at the time, but I held off in hopes that any color discrepancies might be fixed. Maybe that was a mistake.

Shellhead wrote: Thanks to my game hoarding tendencies, I still have my TI3 games as shelf toads, in practically mint condition. Selling them will be a problem, too, because they are obsoleted by 4th edition and so bulky to ship.

I managed to offload my full set of TI3 for $90 shortly after 4th edition came out. Some guy preferred 3rd Edition and wanted a copy, so I lucked out. There might still be people out there who prefer 3rd.

Gary Sax wrote: The wildly expanding League and DOTA rosters and item tables are great references here, good pull.

The last I heard was that they did a release of the first printing of the TI expansion and it was small, at best. And it's still out of stock most places. I don't have any info and don't know any rumors but I'm very skittish about this kind of thing from FFG now that they've been virtually gutted of properties and designers. It feels like this is being sent out to die before they shutter the fucking place honestly.

Yeah there is a thread on BGG that said the last print run was pretty small; allocated and most places got a fraction of what they ordered. Kind of reminds me of the run on GW stuff when FFG lost the license awhile back. If and when the TI stuff gets back in print its gonna be a feeding frenzy. Nobody has any long term faith in FFG being able to support series games. This is strange since this used to be their bread and butter.

Gary Sax wrote: The game has some problems, but watching these games has completely changed the way I think about this game.

I would love to hear your thoughts if you don't mind sharing them.

A game like Twilight Imperium will always be flawed. It's an epic game in scope, with lots of details, so there is no realistic way to playtest it enough to avoid imbalances. Like Root, it requires the experienced players to police the game balance each game.

Erik Twice wrote:

Gary Sax wrote: The game has some problems, but watching these games has completely changed the way I think about this game.

I would love to hear your thoughts if you don't mind sharing them.

Sure. I'll just list three to start. This is mostly galaxy brain big picture stuff so you'll just have to put up with it.

1) I used to think this game had no war because the costs are so high, and that is absolutely true: TI is mostly space cold war played well. But the more insightful, I think, observation is that played between good players this game has very little war as an illustration of basic, classic, formal theory about the nature of war by Fearon: www.jstor.org/stable/2706903?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents .

Basically, the game has flexible enough deal-making that what separates good from great players is how creatively they can produce deals that don't end in war. Even if you are about to be attacked and wiped out in a somewhat lopside battle, both sides are almost *always* better with a negotiated settlement because of the attritional cost in TI war. This isn't just coincidence, TI:4 has intentionally leaned into this. Pretty generous dealmaking windows for the active player, lots of non-zero sum tools like promisory notes, alliances, support for the throne, and such, along with the proliferation of discrete value trade goods all make these deals possible. Even if someone is about to roll your planets, good players always put their emotion away and ask "what would you pay me to not fire the point defense cannons? How much would it cost for me to retreat in the first round to reduce the collective damage if you're going to win this anyway with high probability?" Between two sides with complete information, there is virtually always a negotiated solution better than fighting. Worse players can't hang with this for very human reasons.

2) TI:4 make cooperative tables not just a possibility, but an urgent necessity. If you want to win, you want to make deals where your opponent scores and so do you as long as they are not stretching to the final point or two or way out ahead of the table. That can be as deep as "I have to take this planet with your forces to score X objective by force, I understand this sucks, but in exchange for that let's talk about how I can make it easier for you to score your point this turn by changing my timings, vacating a planet, whatever." The objective system purposefully plays into this by allowing different players to score different objectives. So you might take a planet and then just agree to retreat after the status phase where you score the control objective you needed. Or sometimes not, breaking your non-binding deal but that's a very contextual call that you probably only want to make at the very end of the game when the End of the World effect in game theory is unraveling the ability to cooperate.

3) TI:4 (and to a much, much lesser extent Root) has me thinking a LOT about community metas and the concept of multiple equilibria. I have been thinking a lot about what it means for there to be a meta-community equilibrium. So in the TTS meta I watch, informal deals are nearly always honored until final stabs at the end of the game. Informal fiat token debt meta is largely acceptable and has developed and solidified over time. Ideas about which factions are strong and weak have wrapped themselves into the elaborate draft. There are a thousand things like this that good players in that meta master better than worse players that make them win those games (usually, TI:4 is a game of chance and incomplete information so it is not deterministic obviously).

But I find myself thinking a lot about issues in game theory related to equilibrium behaviors. So the big TTS meta right now, after being bounced around by the new expansion, is coalescing around a new equilibrium about the game in thousands of little ways. But a key insight in game theory is that you might have multiple equilibrium solutions to a game, and we know there is *always* a solution in mixed strategies where you play different things with a probability assigned to them. The most relevant to my thinking is something simple like Battle of the Sexes ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_sexes_(game_theory) ), also called Bach or Stravinsky to have a non-sexist implication. In that game, the players have different preferences over the outcome, but which nash equilibrium you settle into is largely a function outside the game itself and once it hits you're in the equilibrium with no rational way to the other one. I believe it is an equilibrium, to be clear---anyone who defects from it is going to struggle---but that doesn't mean that there isn't a whole different equilibrium that sits outside of this meta, which could have been reached for other exogenous reasons. I find that idea *fascinating.* Many people think "oh well, it's just your meta you need a real trailblazer to come in and they'll win all the games with their creative strategy." I think this is possible but mostly misunderstands game theory! The equilibrium exists because it is self-reinforcing and coming in to break it up with your maverick creativity will mean you will almost certainly lose. But what if there's a hypothetical martian TI:4 meta, or a geographic group of a large number of players, who have a different stable equilibrium? They've also solved for all the clearly inferior paths, but maybe their final game shape looks a lot different. Yet it is also self-reinforcing and stable!

From the sound of it, I would enjoy TI:4 more than I enjoyed TI:3, which played like the world's most complicated version of King of the Mountain that anybody could imagine. Almost seemed like half the available VP every game involved grabbing Mecatol Rex and holding it as long as possible.

There's a lot of jockeying over Mecatol in 4th edition but it's actually quite difficult to take and score with the Imperial strategy card in practice. So you'll generally see fighting over Mecatol but it definitely doesn't resemble king of the hill at all. I've never seen someone play 3rd but my understanding is it's way more difficult than 3rd; taking Imperial at all is not super common unless you think you're going to score. I believe it also distributes secret objectives as a secondary effect which is a big deal.

You'll often see someone come in on round 1 or early round 2 and spend influence to take the Custodians token with no intention of staying there.

Getting another Secret Objective is pretty substantial so keeping Imperial away from the person sitting on Mecatol still benefits you.

The expansion just got restocked so I ordered one. Who knows if they’ll print it again.