Do I understand the Twilight Imperium rules wrong, or do the Naalu have a significant advantage in having Initiative #0? Does that mean they can choose every time the Imperial Strategy card, giving them 2 victory points?

The question arose in a game we played this summer... And strategy felt anti-climatic for the Naalu player.

You got slightly mixed up in how the Initiative works here.

The Speaker chooses the first Strategy card, the choice then goes around clockwise from them until everyone has chosen a Strategy.

Then you proceed taking actions in Initiative order, this is where Naalu comes in. This means that they can always act first, but not always choose first.

Hope this helps

Also, no one can choose the imperial or the iniciative strategy card twice in a row.. ;)

fillen7 said:

This restriction only applies to the Initiative strategy, not Imperial.

There is an Action Card, though, that lets you keep your current strategy card; and this card DOES explicitly prohibit you keeping Imperial AND Initiative.

In a normal game, however, a player will basically be prevented from taking Imperial twice because most likely, whoever has Initiative is going to take it!

Well, there ARE a lot of problems with this Strategy Card, but we did have the impression we had the rules mixed up... That Speaker thing, we totally forgot since we assumed the Naalu power cancelled its bonuses in all effects (nobody took the #1 card because of this).

Get Shattered Empire and play with the alternate Strategy Cards, they're much better overall anyway :)

haslo said:

I second that!

haslo said:

I'll add in the opinion of every other TI3 player on the board: I agree.

At least, I haven't run across one yet who doesn't.

silenceindigo said:

Um, nothing the Naalu power does cancels any bonus of the Speaker token.  The only loosely related "cancellation" is that Naalu cancels the power of Initiative going first, but that doesn't really have much to do with the Speaker token itself.

The Speaker still:

• Always votes last, and breaks ties; Initiative order is irrelevant in voting.
• Always picks the Strategy Card first next round; Initiative order has no bearing.
• Always breaks ties in "simultaneous" things that aren't covered by the rules; IE, if someone Multiculturalism's the Naalu ability, the SPEAKER decides who goes first.

The Naalu don't affect those main powers the Speaker brings to the table.  So selecting the Speaker token can still be an important thing!

Thanks everyone; though buying the expansion for one card is a bit steep...

Don't just buy it for the one card :)  Everything the expansion provides is well worth it - new systems, new races, more ACs, more PCs, new unit colors to choose from...  It's definitely a package worth having :)

The expansion makes the game feel complete.  It adds a whole bevy of fixes to the game that were needed and a few new races to throw into the mix.  I would not want to play without it.

Joram said:

Actually, I use a blend.  I prefer the original Warfare Strategy Card and use the Imperial II card because we always play with the Age of Empire variant (It makes for a better planning game).  These are the SC cards we use:

  1 - Initiative

  2 - Diplomacy II

  3 - Political

  4 - Logistics

  5 - Trade II

  6 - Warfare

  7 - Technology II

  8 - Imperial II

 - Steve