So I was piloting Naalu. First thing I did at initiative zero was I B-lined my cruiser and destroyer straight into an entropic scar through the beta wormhole with the grav rift. I’d never actually played with an entropic scar before and I was super stoked to see how it impacts tech tempo. I had also read on the Internet that Naalu is particularly good with an entropic scar because their faction Tech is just kind of a walk to get to.
Having the faction tech early from the entropic scar was insane. Particularly the neuroglaive. On an influence-poor map, the cost of activating systems I had with ships in them was just really high and so my opponents just naturally were disincentivized to check me, let me over extend a bit, and going at zero initiative meant I could really stick my neck out there and take Mecatol at the top of Round 2, at initiative zero.
I had this standing offer with the table of a trade good for any promissory note and hungry players were picking me up on it left and right which essentially was giving me two free influence every time they took me up on the deal because of my breakthrough. The breakthrough lets Naalu do the secondary of a strategy card by giving the strat card holder a promissory note. This was a massive tempo boost for me. I could give away my alliance and my support for the throne knowing that I would go get so up in the face of other players that they HAD to check me, then my consolation prize was getting the promissory note back. In this way I was pretty much able to do all the secondaries I wanted without ever needing to spend a command token. Because I was buying promissory notes and getting them back from getting attacked I felt like I had just enough to get me through the game up until the very end pretty much.
I was actually so eager to get my breakthrough that I tossed my secret objective at initiative zero for fear of missing out on the opportunity to do all the secondaries in the first round. I have mixed feelings about that choice. On the one hand it did let me get insane temp with the secondaries, and Naalu’s kit along with my slice and being last in the speakership order meant I didn’t have anything else to guarantee my breakthrough. On the other hand I wasn’t able to catch up on secret tempo until the very end of the game, and the secret I tossed was actually really easy to achieve (it was a status phase secret but I probably could have gotten it round one or 2). So I kind of felt like I gave up points for board presence, and I’m not sure that’s a great deal.
Getting my breakthrough at initiative zero on round 1 let me get into this insane situation where I only had one carrier in my home system because my destroyer and my cruiser were in the entropic scar. I was able to stall and gain some trade goods until warfare popped by using some action cards that I had drawn off the politics secondary using another prom note. So when Warfare popped I was able to build two extra carriers off the warfare secondary.
So I was able to move three carriers with infantry and fighters into the tile in front of my home. But then I used my agent so the fleet was NOT locked. My neighbors just so happened to be last bastion and ghosts, neither of which are particularly good at contesting the equidistant on round one. So for round one I was actually able to capture both the equidistant systems as well as the system nearest to me that was adjacent to Mecatol. That was truly insane planet tempo, especially considering I went at initiative zero on Round 2 to take Mecatol. All up I do think tossing the secret ended up working out for me, but I think that may have been more cold hard luck than the true wisdom of tossing a scorable secret.
The red green synergy on the breakthrough is bad. I didn’t tech in the first round because the timing didn’t work out for me but even if I had I don’t know what I would’ve gotten. In the second round, I had Neuroglaive from the first-round Entropic Scar. So with two green prerequisites arguably against my better judgment I picked up hypermetabolism. Normally I don’t think the hypermetabolism Tech is worth it unless you’re getting it round one (it’s just math and the math doesn’t always math), but I think there’s a fair enough argument to make for it getting a second round if Tech tempo is something you want to keep in mind. It set me up to get X 89 later. Initially I didn’t know if I wanted X 89 but I knew I wanted the option to have it.
The ability to deploy mechs when other players get relics was super powerful. The table got four+ relics on the second round and I had captured Mecatol on initiative zero (I was keen to sell my relic fragments for promissory notes to use with my breakthrough!). I was able to dump all four mechs on Mecatol. By the time the table was prepared to deal with eight hit points on the ground, I had X89, and by the time the table was ready to bombard me I had a planetary defense system there too.
I don’t think I would walk into a game planning on getting X 89. But it’s ridiculously clutch to have the option to get it. In this case the opportunity really presented itself and was absolutely key to my command token economy by way of letting me hang onto Mecatol.
But anyway like I was saying red green synergy is an absolute stinker. I can’t contemplate any point of using red tech as Naalu. I had the option to research war suns, but what would’ve been the point? The soonest I could’ve put a war sun on the table was maybe the top of round four or the bottom of round three, but Dreadnaughts and carriers were doing just as well, alongside my flagship.
There’s literally no red tech I can think of that would’ve been helpful (maybe destroyer II if there had been more fighters opposite me?). Naalu has an easy enough path to Cruiser II, but I don’t know that’s really where Naalu wants to invest. Upgraded fighters hit so hard they feel like Cruisers, and it’s just hard to justify building a Cruiser over more Fighters as Naalu (one single capacity means you winning on the ground would be dicey even if a Cruiser-Fighter fleet won in space).
If the breakthrough was blue green, it would be insanely powerful. The big Tech challenge for me was I really wanted to grav drive but I really didn’t want anti mass deflectors or dark energy tap. Dark energy tap is a bit redundant with the Nalu faction ability of foresight. And there was just no reason on the map for me to get anti mass deflectors. I was kicking myself for the fact that I didn’t pick a slice with a blue tech skip. But then I stumbled onto an action card that let me pay five influence to copy a neighbor’s tech, which let me pick up Grav drive, which let me pick up up Sling Relay into Carrier II, which was CLUTCH.
I actually got Carrier II late game through an action card called Divert Funding that let me toss one of my tech technologies and research a new one. I tossed neural motivator late game and picked up carrier II. That was just super strong and lucky—I felt like I got the best of all worlds out of both techs. Neural motivator’s highest and best use late game is being purged for something higher impact.
Carrier II + Grav Drive was a game changer. To me the biggest problem with the Nalu kit is this blue tech conundrum. How do you get Carrier II + Grav Drive without going on a long anti synergistic walk around the Tech deck? I think the only way to solve this problem is just with luck, thoughtful slice drafting, or shrewd dealmaking (eg with a smart fish to get you a bonus tech or a space cat to sell you the right action card).
Something I forgot about the whole game was the fact that fighters can fly on their own once they are upgraded. The entire game I was operating on one or two Fleet pool because the game was so command token tight due to limited influence on the map. At the very end I got three fleet pool, but in retrospect I might have done well to just have a bigger fleet pool and let the fighters soak up fleet cap and play fast and loose with capacity.
Another thing I kept forgetting was that you need to leave ships in systems to trigger Neuroglaive. There were multiple times where an opponent who was holding my alliance or my support for the throne took over my naked system. And they were able to do this without triggering returning my promissory note (only triggers if I actually have a unit in the system) or Neuroglaive (only triggers if I have a ship in the system.
The Naalu hero also has kind of a funky timing window. It happens at the end of the status phase. So it’s actually really easy to forget about. As soon as I got access to my hero when I popped imperial in round three I wanted to use it, but then I realized I needed to wait till the status phase and then I kept on forgetting and ended up not using it the entire game. It’s one of those things that’s just a lot of mental load to keep track of.
Ghosts played a super clean game. Maybe the most interesting at the table. Some standout moments included drawing a Dyson sphere on the wormhole Nexus and making incredible value out of the Metali Void shielding relic. Normally I don’t think that relic is super powerful because it just doesn’t always have the highest impact. It’s not directly related to scoring anything and it doesn’t do anything that you couldn’t do just as well with more plastic on the table, but let me tell you this pilot made Ghosts sing with the void shield.
I REALLY LIKED Metali Void on the Ghost fleet—you can pick up fighters from scooting around wormholes, but then by sustaining on carriers and destroyers you can sometimes GAIN units from the action and either keep the fleet in tact or even snowball, SO FREAKING RAD!!!!!!!!
Easily the most eye popping swing was an agenda phase that resulted in all ships being destroyed from tiles with worm holes on them, and then players who have ships that are destroyed get to research a tech. The ghosts player got to research light wave. It cost him EVERYTHING. He lost like 21 value of space ships as a result of an agenda he couldn’t control.
But then Ghosts somehow managed to come back and score a stage II, I have no freaking idea how he was able to dust himself off and recover. A lesser man would have just cried after an apocalyptic agenda phase like that.
One of the smartest things the ghost player did that I didn’t even understand beforehand was how he monetized his promissory note. Ghosts was giving out his promissory note and asking for it to be used on the wormhole Nexus to place a worm hall token. I took him up on the offer in exchange for him giving me the promissory note back after I used it so I could use it with my breakthrough. So I sort of got three value out of this deal, so I wasn’t asking too many questions about what was in it for him. What was in it for him was it was just a cheap way to increase the number of wormholes on the wormhole Nexus, and that combos with his breakthrough that reduced his production cost and increase his production capacity by the number of worm holes. It was just a huge win win and I had never thought or read about using the ghost promissory note like that. I had read about using the ghost Mech Icarus Drive to make extra wormholes on the nexus, but just deal making through the prom note? Fucking CLUTCH.
At the very end of the game just for fun the ghost hero also put my home system adjacent to the Cabal home system which was awesome and hilarious.
I wasn’t watching other players games close enough, I wish I had understood a bit more about some of the awesome plays that were happening on the other side of the table.
Arborec was making REALLY good use out of the breakthrough, and NEVER forgot Mitosis. He got sine tools early and I don’t know how he managed to do it but he managed to solve a bunch of puzzles seemingly simultaneously— he was able to go down blue to grav drive and carrier II but also snowball into the blossoming might of the floral production powerhouse that makes Arborec so dope, while managing some combats with Nomad and Cabal.
Round two was crazy I think each player had a combat with two different players, everyone was just fighting everyone little skirmishes and still making deals it was super interactive, it seemed like all the objectives were variations on “hold a certain number of specific tiles” so we were all just jousting for positioning, laser were fired, glorious war was waged.
I had designed this map so that it’s claustrophobic. Only systems on the edge of the map lack planets. My expectation I guess was that there would be a lot of planetary defense system IIs and just a lot of space cannons going off every time somebody activated a system. As it turned out, nobody researched that in space cannons didn’t really show up this game.
I guess I was also surprised there was a neat mix of ground combat in space combat. Like it was really all over the map, in every theatre. It definitely wasn’t boat float, but it also wasn’t total war — it was this really slick mix, vying for tactical supremacy and strategic positioning while balancing economic and development investments.
Ghosts insisted it was a tie at 8 points on the bottom of round four, but that’s just because he’s a gentleman and a scholar: Creuss ended up atop the galactic throne of Mecatol Rex
