...what happens if you run out of tokens for them?  Because we had nearly all of them in play.  We started using dice to keep track of them.

Wow, never seen that happen.  The official rules state that once you run out, you run out, and thus people have to spend them in order to replenish the supply.  Honestly, there's no really good reason to save them up unless you have something in mind to spend them on, as all it takes is someone to hit you with a "Steal" or "lose all" action card or law, and all those resources go down the drain.

If you have both expansions, there's so many that it's almost impossible to run out.  I take it you're just playing with core rules or with one expansion?

Bowoodstock said:

The base game without expansions, we were spending them, on each other.  The big reason we ran out was the Hacan player played the trade card a little too much at the start.

adamwehn said:

We did not understand that we could use trade goods for purchasing units and tech and such.

Well that's a doozy of a miss... Rtm much? ;-)

It's also important to note that Trade Goods can be used as influence when a game effect requires you to SPEND influence (i.e., and not just have it available for voting).  Trade Goods are very handy for balancing out which planets to exhaust when you have to spend resources or influence to minimize wasting influence or resources, respectively, from the exhausted planets. 

The Archon said:

This I understand now, trade goods are like wild cards.

Fnoffen said:

:P

adamwehn said:

Just FYI, everything in the game is limited to available components except for FT and GF bonus tokens.  On the off chance that you ever manage to run out of those, you're allowed to break out the dice/pennies/whatever to build more.  Honestly, though, I'd be skeptical about the tactics used in any game where that even came close to happening.  Trade Goods we've run low on before, but FT/GF tokens, I doubt we've ever built more than half of them.

 In the Fall of the Empire scenario I played recently I was chosen by the other players to be the Lazax. Mostly because I was the most experienced player. IIRC, I came close to building half of all the GF tokens. And 90 % of them where deployed on Mecatol Rex and Quann together with, maybe not half but a substantial amount, of the FT tokens.