Sardakk N'orr Battle Report - Thunder's Edge Win
This is from memory, I had no intention of writing this down but my brain wouldn't shut up unless I did. Hope there aren't too many spelling/grammar mistakes. 5 Round Game lasting 7 hours.
Players (Clockwise): Sardakk (me), Titans (2^(nd) game), NRA (1^(st) full game), Deepwrought, Ghosts, Arborec
Set up and draw secret objective. Keep Win a home system battle. First two publics are have a flagship/war sun and have ships in two systems next to Mecatol, so pretty hard for anyone to score. I’m last pick which absolutely sucks as the bugs. I last pick Politics to right this wrong. My Round 1 strategy is just try to fix my bad start with any money I can get. I’m sitting next to a pick 5 Trade Arborec. I make quite a few deals with Arborec to my right, anything for a buck, so Arbo is pretty scary by the end of Round 1 and threatening a Mecatol play. I first action Politics into discard 2 action cards for my Breakthrough, and the Fracture is placed on the first die roll. Ghosts takes Wormhole Nexus. I sell Speaker to Arborec. In return I park a trade Destroyer in our Equidistant Scar. I skip Tech round 1 to get Exotrireme. No one scores R1, reveal Spend 3 influence, 3 resources, 3 TG obj.
Round 2: 2^(nd) pick Trade. I make a lot of money and get Arborec to convert my cruiser into an Exo into return for a comms refresh, and grab Titan’s promissory note for a buck. I skip Construction secondary because of lack of tokens and limited influence in my slice. I will spend this game relying heavily on Deepwrought for tech, and this will be a very tech heavy game in general. In addition, I trade all my relics pretty aggressively to both the NRA and the Deepwrought player, who will end the game with quite a few relics as Deepwrought is given NRA’s promissory note in return for tech. The Titan’s player to the left of me takes our equidistant Hope’s End, and will explore it three times over the course of this game with Scanlink, each time revealing a sacrifice infantry for a benefit that he will never take because it’s his only infantry and he’s sitting next to a Sardakk with a Round 2 Commander. There will be fewer PDS than usual for a Titan’s player because they score the 4 mech secret objective by deploying mechs. They deploy their flagship to Hope’s End at some point and place Thunder’s Edge in the empty space next to their home system. Arborec plants himself on Mecatol with Leadership pick and is never uprooted for the rest of the game. I make a deal with Arbo to keep ships over their Mecatol adjacent system so I can score Intimidate the Council. Ghosts makes their flagship and the map gets super weird as she can make it to most systems. I bribe Titans 3 Trade Goods for Speaker. We end the action phase with everyone at either 1 or 2 points. I cash in some trade debt during the Agenda phase. There’s some drama as Ixthian Artifact is revealed while Arbo has 9 or so ground forces on Mecatol. For passes, we roll the die and everyone gets 2 tech. I grab Sling Relay and Carrier 2. In retrospect I should have grabbed Psychoarchaeology instead of Carrier 2 and used my Breakthrough for all of my unit upgrades, but thankfully it won’t matter. Reveal Control 2 planets that have attachments, something I already am qualified for through an explore and Titan’s promissory note.
Round 3: I pick Leadership as I am still command token starved and I plan on venturing into the Fracture. I finally get my second space dock, then I move to the double planet in the Fracture and have an awful first combat round, receiving 3 hits and giving one. I can’t retreat because I don’t have Dark Energy Tap yet. Thankfully the next two combat rounds go my way, and I successfully grab the planets, exhausting my AI Dev to research Fighter 2 and receive 2 command tokens on the ground combats with my Breakthrough. I get two relics, one that gives me a secret objective (have ships in systems with A and B wormholes) and lets me hold 4 secrets. The other lets me research two tech with no prereqs, so I grab Antimass and DET so I can unlock the two asteroids between my slice and Titan’s slice, one with a space station. I make a deal with Ghosts to park ships on a system with a wormhole and a wormhole token that Ghosts had placed there. Deepwrought takes the single Relic planet system on the other side of the Fracture, then Titans attacks my double Fracture system. I retreat with minimal losses with DET, there are too many cruisers, and I lose the systems. It’s pretty clear they are gunning for Styx. Arborec reinforces home and Mecatol, but little growth outside of that. NRA turns his four mechs into super mech and the host puts on Gundam music. I score my Wormhole secret objective and control 2 attachments, going to 3 points, pretty middle of the pack. Reveal Control more planets than each of 2 of your neighbors objective, another good objective for me. During the Agendas the Ghosts player gets Minister of Exploration and everyone gets a point through Mutiny, putting me to 4.
Round 4: Trade once again. Titans gets unlucky while trying to take Styx and loses a pretty sizable fleet. Ghosts uses their Wormhole generator to place a wormhole next to Styx. She wins the space battle with a huge fleet quite easily, but is unable to take the planet from the 3 neutral infantry. Deepwrought Imperials and scores an objective, I secondary and grab the kill flagship secret objective. A frontier token gives me the 3 space dock secret objective, so I feel pretty bad for not doing the secondary of construction in round 2. I take back the double fracture system with a big stack of infantry. NRA gets Shard of the Throne, causing Titans to take a planet close to a legendary planet that NRA owns. NRA starts the turtle with their Voltron mech and their many relics. I use a big fleet to take the Equidistant Hope’s End from the Titans player, killing their flagship to score my secret objective. I get Lightwave at some point during this round and feel like an unstoppable bug overlord. I score control more planets than neighbors in status, putting me at 6 points along with Arborec and Deepwrought, and Ghosts at 7. We reveal first 2 point public objective, Spend 10 Trade Goods, which is unfortunate as I currently have four trade goods and 3 comms that I refreshed using an action card. Ghosts successfully stops Wormhole Reconstruction from completely ruining her last round.
Round 5: Arborec first picks Imperial and Deepwrought uses an action card to force him to pick something else. I second pick Imperial. Both Titans and NRA don’t pick Trade, as they are pretty sure this is the last round and there’s no world in which either of them get 10 trade goods. DW and Ghosts already have enough trade goods, so there’s no Trade last round, putting me in an awkward position. DW has Leadership and I believe she can get to 10 this round and win on initiative, so I hesitate trading with her. I think my only way to win is to take a gamble, so I give my Support for the Throne to Ghosts, giving her my 3 commodities and receiving six trade goods, putting me to exactly 10 trade goods and Ghosts to 8 points. I pop Imperial, scoring the 2 pointer and going to 8. Ghosts then activates and takes Styx, putting her to 9 victory points. There’s a lot of combat going around the table. Titans takes Ghosts’s home system on his first action, then uses Thunder’s Edge to instantly Diplomacy the Ghost’s home system. However, if Ghost’s takes a home system or legendary planet from NRA then she can still win, and there are enough wormholes that it’s pretty plausible. I skip Ghost’s next turn using an Action Card, giving me just enough time to use my Hero to crash land infantry onto Styx, taking the planet with a sizable stack of infantry, putting me to 9. The Table is very scared of my remaining two secret objectives. Arbo uses the Ghost’s promissory note to place a wormhole in his home system, and the Ghost’s player swaps the Arbo’s home system with a wormhole that’s adjacent to my home system. I have no chance of stopping this home world invasion, but I use the last action of the game to activate Titan’s home system, using Lightwave to bring 4 Exotriremes. I win the space combat and score my win a combat in a home system secret objective, putting me to 10 points.
Overall I’m happy with how I played. I definitely wish I had an extra space dock round 2 as I never really had the production to make full use of my Carrier 2s and Fighter 2s. Thankfully Exotriremes are super production efficient. I also messed up my CC placement and couldn’t get a secret objective off Imperial on Round 3, but I was saved by a frontier token and a the secret objective relic. At one point Arborec was considering War Sun tech, but decided against it once he remembered he was sitting next to Exotriremes. All in all it was a super tech heavy game, which I feel like benefits the bugs more than anyone else. Even with Trade twice in this game I felt behind in the econ game compared to Ghosts and DW, but I felt pretty pretty unstoppable by the end.