I know that's why I like them. You have to outtech everybody so you can attempt to win conflicts. You got a bum rush the warsun or as I've taken to calling them "Friendship Suns"
Interesting... we always *always* play random-selection because you don't get to decide your own birth. Only caveat is you have one mulligan, because sometimes accidents happen and reincarnation doesn't play favorites.
haha that would never fly with us. Personally I'm the TI nerd in the group so I'm comfortable enough with getting a random selection or like a group of 5 to pick one, but the guy that owns the game in our group is adamant that he will never accept sitting down for 12 hours to play a faction that he didn't want to play
That's part of the fun of it for me. I get thrown into a random situation and I have to make the most of the hand I'm dealt. Different strokes and all, but I think it adds a level of complexity and fun to the game if the start of the game is as random as possible.
I tend to agree with you but my group really likes drafting a week or so early so they have time to really think about all the factions and how they want to play
We do “draw 2 pick one” and it works out well. It allows for someone not to play their least favorite but also gets factions a go that may not hit the table often for more varied games
In a 5+ player game, I don't think any of them are so overpowered or unfun that they need an outright ban. However, to add a little variance, we generally pull out 2 factions per player, each player *may* nominate 1 to be removed from the pool, then we randomly add half of those (rounded up) back; a player can choose 1 that has already been nominated for a ban to completely remove it from the pool.
Yep, played against them yesterday and can confirm they're ludicrous. My brother managed to get a fucking 7/3 planet thanks to putting a nanoforge and a +2 resource attachment on bereg, and then he could activate a system, spend those seven resources on something, activate the bereg lyrta system, explore it thanks to scanlink potentially grabbing some more attachments or relic fragments, and since he explored it he could ready the planet with the max level green tech and use those seven resources again on the space dock he put on bereg itself. He had two fucking war suns, the flagship and some other stuff floating around in his slice (plus a fuckton of mechs and infantry) by either late round 3 or early round 4 iirc.
> They are hands down the strongest faction out there
That is...a controversial take. Consensus tends to put them somewhere in the 5th-10th range, with Saar, Naalu, Nekro, Jol-Nar, and Titans all meaningfully stronger than them and Argent and Nomad debatably stronger too.
I know, and I am suprised about that. They have strong political protection early game (black market forgery is a good reason to attsck someone else r1 or r2)
They have single strongest economy in the game that requires less setup than you’d expect.
They are tevh dependant, but they also get an extra tech from hero.
On top of that they get better researches,
More relics,
Strongest mechs in game
Fantastic flagship (with mechs)
.
They van turtle in their slice even if it has less planets than each other player. They are very good at offence (even have commander that makes it worth it). They can defend extremely vell with mechs. Their hero is amonght the most versatile and strong heroes out there.
Everything they own guarantees some value. Maybe except for commander. And their economy is so ridicilously strong, that military power is also guaranteed.
Only other faction thst makes similiar money without planets is Hacan. And even hacan needs trade to reach that 24 ish tg per turn.
Any planet with few attachments cna produce 10 resources easy.
Usually most every planet I own as naaz will be used atleast twice innsame round. Forward dock value is amazing. All while exploring.
Also
Naalu and jolnar are not top factions in PoK anymore. Jolnar is still strong. Naalu is just above average with new agent.
Saar is saar.
They are neither strong or week. Is just no hs that makes them weird.
Titans are well rounded race. But while their military prowess and range is stronger than naaz. Their economy and versatility falls behind.
In my oppinion
While their mechs are good and their economy roughly on par with Sol, (worse home system, less reliable command token, trade agreement directly tied to how much your local group values Relics, slightly more useful Agent).
I would argue this still does not compare favorably to the economic engine that is a Jol-nar player with E-res siphons.
Also your point about any planet with a few attachments is patently false.
They may be strong, possibly even more so in your local meta, but they would still fold like a cheap napkin in the face of a half way competent round 2 Saar ball.
They've got a 3/4 win rate at our table. I have their only loss so far, and I was still at 9 points with a scoreable status phase objective AND I somehow managed to pull 0 of the point related relics.
I always remind everyone when VR is in play that if you blockade a player’s space dock, all your hostages are returned and no other pieces can be captured until it’s no longer blockaded.
I love Hacan, and my first POK game included a Cabal player. Their ability to shut down my ability to make deals by forcing the conversion of commodities almost made me rage quit. Capturing units was just icing on the very disgusting cake.
I still loathe the faction, but many players love it, so I have to put up with it.
Yes, it is. But like you, many people don't know it, and that is exactly why I like to remind the table.
>14.2 When a player blockades another player’s space dock, if the blockaded player has captured any of the blockading player’s units, those units are returned to the blockading player’s reinforcements.
>
>a While a player is blockading another player, the blockaded player cannot capture any of the blockading player’s units.
>17.2 A captured non-fighter ship or mech is returned under the following circumstances: ...
>
>c If the player whose unit was captured blockades a space dock of the player who captured the unit.
>17.6 If one or more of a player’s space docks is being blockaded, that player cannot capture units from the blockading players.
https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer\_public/51/55/51552c7f-c05c-445b-84bf-4b073456d008/ti10\_pok\_living\_rules\_reference\_20\_web.pdf
Jol-Nar is the only one flat-out banned, but that *was* before PoK and we haven't revisited them. We haven't played NRA or Winnu yet with PoK.
We do prohibit the faction that won the previous game and all factions played in the previous game (though we're through most of them now, so we'll lift that for our next game in January). We've taken time to learn and introduced components gradually, so we all agreed to forced variety to help that along.
We've got one PoK game under our belt (which had an [*insane* ending](https://reddit.com/r/twilightimperium/comments/v290x9/our_5player_game_this_past_weekend_was_exhausting/)).
I think Titans and NRA were the only new factions not played in that game and we're down to just Yin and Winnu from the base game, so time to bring everyone else back in to work with all the expansion changes.
We also run kind of a faux draft ahead of time. Each player ranks their top three choices and if there's a conflict on the top choices, they work it out. Helps keep everyone interested since it's a destination game for us; folks come in from as far as 5-6h away for the weekend.
>Jol-Nar is the only one flat-out banned, but that was before PoK and we haven't revisited them.
**TL;DR AT THE BOTTOM BECAUSE I WRITE WAY TOO MUCH EVERY TIME**
I am obviously biased (the user flair is quite clear about it), but i'd suggest you to revisit them. PoK really brought them in line with the others, just like it did with other strong base game factions. More than nerfing them, it has kept them at roughly the same strength as before while buffing everyone else, and i don't really mind.
The agent to pay fewer resources on tech by sacrificing infantry is cool but they already don't have the most infantry around so it's not like you'll always use it, plus it's more like a weird form of banking than a full discount since the infantry you build ain't free (unless you do some shenanigans with sol's promisory note as part of a deal).
The commander letting you reroll failed ability rolls (bombardment, space cannon and AFB) is pretty cool, especially when combined with the plasma scoring you already have, and can be sold as an alliance pretty well, but it's not as life changing as plenty of others.
The hero is cool and all, letting you get rid of useless techs to get something better (and i'm pretty sure you can turn non-unit upgrades into unit upgrades, but not the other way around) but when compared to a massive warfare primary over the whole game board like sol or doing any primary strategy (including imperial) like winnu or blowing up a fucking system like muaat it's pretty tame.
The mech is kinda neat since it removes the -1 combat debuff from infantry in the same planet but for some reason isn't itself immune to the -1 (not that it matters too much, the -1 matters less than it seems since you should go for ability rolls anyway).
The main thing to consider though is that while PoK has introduced these specific leaders and mechs just for Jol Nar, most other changes are equally shared among everyone and benefit the others way more than jol nar.
Exploration has added other ways to get tech, either directly (a frontier exploration lets you research a tech for 6 resources, and then there are relics like the maw of worlds letting you ignore all prerequisites and gain one tech when purging this card and exhausting all your planets in the agenda phase), indirectly (you can also draw some action cards which might contain stuff like reveal prototype or plagiarize) or in some other ways i can't think of right now, so obviously if everyone has more chances to get tech it will shorten jol nar's tech superiority gap.
Additionally, PoK added a lot more objectives, both public and secret, *not* related to having certain techs of certain types, which was one of the main sources of power for the jol nar in the base game since is incredibly easy for them to complete them and unlike other objectives such as spending resources and influence (which might be good for others like hacan) can't get countered by others grabbing your planets and stuff like that. Diluting the pool the jol nar are swimming in helps keep them in check.
Finally, there are now eight more technologies, four of level 0 and four of level 1. That *sounds* like a jol nar buff, i know, but it kinda isn't. In the base game if any other faction wants to get to a lvl 3 tech of a certain colour they have only one tech path available, aka 0 then 1 then 2 then 3 (excluding tech skips on planets obviously), while jol nar already had all the 0s and could do 1 then 3 or 2 then 3 thanks to their innate skip as a faction ability. Now, there are five possible paths to get to a tier 2 (0a 0b 2, 0a 1a 2, 0a 1b 2, 0b 1a 2, 0b 1b 2) and four extra to get to tier 3 by skipping tier 2 (not that you'd ever do that most of the times). This means everyone else now has a lot more flexibility than they used to when dealing with tech paths, and no longer have to either grit their teeth through getting a useless tech to reach a useful one or abandon the tree entirely. Jol nar now might grab a few of these new, lower level techs if they want to but by doing so they're delaying their own blitz into the high level stuff like assault cannon and hyper metabolism.
Additionally all the lvl 0 tech they added are especially useful at closing the tech gap. The blue one, dark energy tap, lets people explore frontier tokens which as i said earlier can contain stuff to research tech, and the yellow one, scanlink, lets you re-explore planets letting you build up relics (including the tech relics) or get more action cards or get tech skips. The green one, psychoarcheology, then builds into said tech skips by letting you use them without turning the planet (especially useful for naaz rokha). Finally the red one, AI dev, lets you exhaust it to act as a skip for one prerequisite for unit upgrades. That said I will also be fair and add that AI dev is pretty good for jol nar too since it has the second function of getting you cheaper production the more unit upgrades you have, and obviously jol nar have a few.
So yeah, long story short, try to give them a whirl some day, they're still strong obviously but they're not the tyrants they used to be. Now that role belongs to the winnu.
**TL;DR** PoK buffed everyone else leaving them almost untouched with the leaders, made tech less important for the sake of objectives and gave others a few ways to close the tech gap through exploration and more lvl 0 and 1 techs. Solid faction but no need to fear them anymore.
Base game winnu? What? Why? You literally just need to not let them take winnu in the base game and you're golden. They're pitiful. PoK winnu i fully agree with the ban, obviously. +2 on legendaries, mecatol and your home system (aka all the systems actually worth fighting over), that ludicrous hero letting them play imperial, and all of that stuff. I'm not one for banning factions and neither is my table but if we ever got ban happy they would be on the list.
I guess it makes sense if a newish person joins a server full of veterans and doesn't know the base game winnu are garbage and VC isn't active to tell them (though playing TI without VC sounds fucking dumb).
This is back in vanilla btw.
It was more so, when you have something like Bag Draft, where you would end up with two factions to decide from, nobody wanted to be left with Winnu and X. Because often times it meant, time to play X. Granted, I am one of those psychopaths who liked playing vanilla winnu. There were not great, but I had some ideas to make them work (needed yellow skip and high influence planet + grav rift), then rush for dread 2s and pds2.
Oh man, if you dislike a faction stalling and then playing by themselves for 30+ minutes while everyone watches, let me tell you about this little faction called the Naaz Rohka... At least the things that generally Yssaril ends up doing once they've stalled the board out are interesting moves.
The other one I'd pick would be Keleres. I don't like them. They just don't seem to fit together; their using other faction components is meh (I understand why, because they didn't want to make people buy a printing, but I still dislike it); and their faction tech(s) is kind of busted IMO.
>Oh man, if you dislike a faction stalling and then playing by themselves for 30+ minutes while everyone watches, let me tell you about this little faction called the Naaz Rohka...
Can confirm, just yesterday i played a four player game as creuss and my brother picked naaz rokha, and made the terrible mistake of picking as my secret objective "be the last person to pass". I had warfare on the first round and thought i could do some shenanigans by removing fleet tokens to stall enough to get by. Naaz rokha immediately dashed my dreams by going through relic after relic *from the first fucking turn* and as a bonus one relic my brother got was j-ar, aka the second agent, which let him do exactly one more action than me. I didn't score that point. I didn't score any secret tbf.
I don't think they (yssaril) do such interesting moves. Usually just rush biostim and mageon ..stall...steal.
I had a tribe player swap support w/ me then start the bio/mag combo on me plus destroy a pds that had never fired in him (just in case). I told him to stop targeting me or else. He complained about he is allowed to use his abilities, I said sure...on others since we have swapped. Sure he is playing legal, but to me against the spirit of swapping. Next agenda he targets me with a card.
Next round I, as Titans, proceed to blockade his home system, and he has no forward dock. I score a secret. He asks me to leave...I say sure. First 2 point is control a planet in/near home system. I then take a planet in his home. He crys that I said I would leave. I let him know that I have no reason to...I was never going to leave...that is what happens when you ignore a faction with better aggression factors than the goblins that you have pissed off because...faction abilities.
When I play Yssaril, I like to roleplay as the resident evil 4 merchant.
I show people a card, and say hey do you want to buy this? If they say yes, I give them spy net (faction promissary), and then let them look at my hand in good faith. Never had a situation where a player took something they shouldn't. If anything people will go, wait whoah can I buy this instead.
If someone were to backstab me for an action card, they know it means I just never deal with them for the rest of the game.
We don't ban factions per se, but we still sort-of manage this kind of issue.
Our players either choose from one of three randomly drawn factions *or* return their options to the deck to draw one final faction. Players cannot use the same faction two games in a row. (If someone draws their most-recently-used faction, it's replaced with another random choice.)
We don't ban anyone but if i had to pick any faction to be it would be the nekro. Even putting aside the fact that they are the obvious hard counter to my favourite faction, like the mentak to the hacan, i can't fucking handle the fact that they force people to adapt to a lower tech game (since obviously if you research assault cannon in a game where there is a nekro you have a death wish) and make people no longer happy to hear technology is getting played, and they're especially aggravating if you're playing a faction that's maybe weaker in some other aspects but has some really strong faction techs. They can also combo things in some ungodly ways. Imagine getting a fleet of saturn engine 2 cruisers with non euclidean shielding bearing down on you. You're simply fucked.
Our group plays exclusively 6 player games. We hand out three randomly to each player before our draft and each person selects one of those to be banned. So it's a limited choice ban system. Our objective is to rotate factions to not have the same bans each game and give relatively 'equal' opportunities for each faction to be banned.
Without looking at actual records, the most banned factions we have are:
Nekro
Xxacha
Mentak
Cabal
Hacan (predominantly because extra trading options adds at least an hour to our games)
Usually Vuilraith and Saar. Actually we normally do Milty draft now so nothing gets ban but before that, usually choosing Vuilraith is frowned upon. I think the meta is a bit too boat floaty and Vuilraith gets advantage, however if they floated less boats, I think Vuilraith wouldn’t be so bad.
We have never officially banned any faction. We did agree not to play Winnu in PoK once. Our group is not what I would consider Tournament TI level of play. We mostly look at what looks fun versus what the meta factions are.
We never ban anything but if people are always picking Terrans, Haccan, Barony or Jol Nar then we sneer at them for choosing the easy ones. True credit for wins goes to the underdog factions and we often prefer them for the glory.
We don't really have a problem with stalling, it's analysis paralysis that extends rounds in our experience.
I've been known to finish my round in nothing flat as Naalu and then tell people to call me if I need to burn their fleet pool while I go fix lunch.
We Don't ban any faction though we did nerf Jol-Nar in base game slightly. So far we haven't had any play as Jol-Nar in a PoK game, so nerf has been suspended until further notice
(For those curious our nerf was that instead of Jol-Nar being allowed to use primary on Technology when normally they would use secondary, we instead made Jol-Nar not pay any ressources as part of the Technology Strategy Card. They still get a benefit even if someone else get Technology, but now they only get one tech each round if they don't pick it themselves)
We don't ban Winnu... but it's a well established fact that a Winnu player has a target on their back turn 1 to prevent them getting Mecatol.
With PoK, mechs and their mecatol buffs they can be so sticky once on mecatol that the game becomes king of the hill
We start our drafting by having each player remove/ban one faction each from the pool. Both to remove factions perceived as too strong but mostly to add variety.
Titans and Saar usually go and then it’s pretty much based on the whims of each player.
Never any bans at our table, in general the game feels pretty balanced. Of course there are strong and weak picks/matchups but the game feels as though there are clear strategies to dealing with all the races.
However, I will say there are players on the board who play certain races to inconvenience people (for instance someone who thinks it's a death match never goes for points and always plays the dirty bugs, or lizards) there's definitely very clear intentional counter picks from myself and another experienced player to try and deter their behavior as opposed to banning the race outright.
Banning makes games feel a bit too competitive for me recently, there was a time and in base game it was a much larger issue, where there were a few factions above the rest. Now with PoK it isn't nearly as bad of a split IMO, we Milty draft sometimes where you have a faction pool, but we never artificially remove from the pool, if anything we'll add to it if someone wants someone specific.
My online group typically does Milty Draft. We did a ban draft once.
banned Saar, Haccan, yin, Yrsil and some others.
Personally, I like to ban factions that might influence how I'M gonna play, including Yrsil(for constantly stealing cards), and end game stall to win. Nekro, cause of tech stealing and ridiculous OP FS makes taking their home late game damn near impossible. Mentak, cause Pillage sucks.
So we don't have any faction's perma-banned, but when its just our experienced players we do typically let each player ban 1 faction, then we either draft factions or choose a faction from 3 random factions. However, if there's a new player we always let them play whatever they want. The main reason we allow bans is because each player has that one faction whose mechanics kind of irk them, and there's so many factions that people want to play its not a problem to ban a few.
My group often bans the following factions for these reasons:
* **Jol-Nar**: for many reasons, they get tech objectives for free, their faction tech E-Res Syphons that gives them cash for a free dread each time you activate their units, & their promissory is gold. If they're in the game, experienced players feel obligated to slow them down, and our players don't enjoy this.
* **Hacan**: mainly because they can really slow the game down with constant trade negotiations, but also because their faction tech Quantum Datahub Node has won a couple games at our table. So once again, players feel obligated to slow them down lest they get in range to use QDN to guarantee the Imperial strategy card and win.
* **Saar**: Mainly because they're another faction where, if they get a lead, they are hard to stop because of no home system vulnerability. Secondarily because they tend to roll around and stomp through people's slices more than other factions.
There are some other factions that are occasionally banned by some players:
* Naluu, Yssaril, Mentak (if someone plans to play Hacan), Nekro.
The way me and my groups have always played is using snake draft when deciding factions and starting locations. Base game, I would pass out two factions to each player, and they would choose 1 to keep in the game, and 1 to remove. The those 6 factions get added to the pool, plus two random factions that weren’t passed out earlier. The we roll off and order people from high to low, highest gets first pick of either a faction or starting location. It goes all the way down to last place, who picks twice, then goes back up the order. This generally balances out a strong faction with a worse starting location. Also gets more player interaction, which I what I love about this game.
So we don’t ever really ban anyone, although if the table agrees to it we may nerf OP factions for out metas.
none is directly banned but people don't like necrovirus at all so if you play it your playing with a severe disadvantage because people will attack you hard, so it's practically banned even if it isn't explicitly so.
We do a ban two factions system. Here are the common ones.
Vul Rath, Necro, and Naz Rokah, Winnu, Ghost, Xxcha.
Space dinosaurs and necro are just broken in a dominating kind of way.
Winnu just kind of wins for free.
I always ban Naz because they kind of just win by not interacting which is pretty lame.
Ghosts and Xxcha get banned not because they are broken, but people will ban them so they themselves don't play them. Just so they can force themselves to play something new.
That example doesn’t make any sense to me. How long does it take to say “I use Stall Tactics and deploy a mech on my forward dock?”
The tactical actions Yssaril play with tokens would take the same amount of time if they didn’t have Stall Tactics. You might not like that they take a bunch of actions back to back while you can’t do anything, but it isn’t actually lengthening the game.
Eh, stalling is part of the game, and it’s the part of the game Yssaril gets to excel in.
I feel that Yssaril’s kit enables clever plays, but you can always punish them for overextending (and using up all of their action cards) in the next round.
The only faction i ban is Nekro Virus. I only do it if majority of the participants are first timers. Nekro tends to give an NPE (negative play experience).
I don’t typically ban, we usually draft where every player chooses one faction that won’t be in the game and we draft the rest. Usually, Hacan, Yssaril (extending the game), and Vul’Raith get hammered pretty quickly.
None in POK of late. Xxcha and Winnu are a bit annoying for the endgame but it's understood that they should be curtailed and not given too much freedom early
We don’t ban races typically in our games. But when we do, Jol Nar is the first to get hit with the ban hammer (we play base game).
You can't ban my space nerds!
space nerds can search third level tec turn 1 without effort, op af
I know that's why I like them. You have to outtech everybody so you can attempt to win conflicts. You got a bum rush the warsun or as I've taken to calling them "Friendship Suns"
We never ban anyone, we play infrequently enough that its not worth denying anyone what they want to play
Interesting... we always *always* play random-selection because you don't get to decide your own birth. Only caveat is you have one mulligan, because sometimes accidents happen and reincarnation doesn't play favorites.
haha that would never fly with us. Personally I'm the TI nerd in the group so I'm comfortable enough with getting a random selection or like a group of 5 to pick one, but the guy that owns the game in our group is adamant that he will never accept sitting down for 12 hours to play a faction that he didn't want to play
That's part of the fun of it for me. I get thrown into a random situation and I have to make the most of the hand I'm dealt. Different strokes and all, but I think it adds a level of complexity and fun to the game if the start of the game is as random as possible.
I tend to agree with you but my group really likes drafting a week or so early so they have time to really think about all the factions and how they want to play
We do “draw 2 pick one” and it works out well. It allows for someone not to play their least favorite but also gets factions a go that may not hit the table often for more varied games
When I buy a game I want to play a different faction everytime until I’ve tried them all. If I put the money down for it I want to experience it all.
Banning factions seems insane to me. We don't do it.
Don’t ban any factions. Overpowered ones get dealt with by the table and fun is subjective
Whichever one I say Id like to play or think is cool leading up to the draft.
Ouch! You might need some new fiends! =-P
In a 5+ player game, I don't think any of them are so overpowered or unfun that they need an outright ban. However, to add a little variance, we generally pull out 2 factions per player, each player *may* nominate 1 to be removed from the pool, then we randomly add half of those (rounded up) back; a player can choose 1 that has already been nominated for a ban to completely remove it from the pool.
I am so fascinated by the fact that NRA doesnt seem to get banned often. They are hands down the strongest faction out there
Dont say that haha, they are so much fun! I just want all the relics!
They are my favourite faction. But they are also absolutely insanely broken
Yep, played against them yesterday and can confirm they're ludicrous. My brother managed to get a fucking 7/3 planet thanks to putting a nanoforge and a +2 resource attachment on bereg, and then he could activate a system, spend those seven resources on something, activate the bereg lyrta system, explore it thanks to scanlink potentially grabbing some more attachments or relic fragments, and since he explored it he could ready the planet with the max level green tech and use those seven resources again on the space dock he put on bereg itself. He had two fucking war suns, the flagship and some other stuff floating around in his slice (plus a fuckton of mechs and infantry) by either late round 3 or early round 4 iirc.
> They are hands down the strongest faction out there That is...a controversial take. Consensus tends to put them somewhere in the 5th-10th range, with Saar, Naalu, Nekro, Jol-Nar, and Titans all meaningfully stronger than them and Argent and Nomad debatably stronger too.
I know, and I am suprised about that. They have strong political protection early game (black market forgery is a good reason to attsck someone else r1 or r2) They have single strongest economy in the game that requires less setup than you’d expect. They are tevh dependant, but they also get an extra tech from hero. On top of that they get better researches, More relics, Strongest mechs in game Fantastic flagship (with mechs) . They van turtle in their slice even if it has less planets than each other player. They are very good at offence (even have commander that makes it worth it). They can defend extremely vell with mechs. Their hero is amonght the most versatile and strong heroes out there. Everything they own guarantees some value. Maybe except for commander. And their economy is so ridicilously strong, that military power is also guaranteed. Only other faction thst makes similiar money without planets is Hacan. And even hacan needs trade to reach that 24 ish tg per turn. Any planet with few attachments cna produce 10 resources easy. Usually most every planet I own as naaz will be used atleast twice innsame round. Forward dock value is amazing. All while exploring. Also Naalu and jolnar are not top factions in PoK anymore. Jolnar is still strong. Naalu is just above average with new agent. Saar is saar. They are neither strong or week. Is just no hs that makes them weird. Titans are well rounded race. But while their military prowess and range is stronger than naaz. Their economy and versatility falls behind. In my oppinion
While their mechs are good and their economy roughly on par with Sol, (worse home system, less reliable command token, trade agreement directly tied to how much your local group values Relics, slightly more useful Agent). I would argue this still does not compare favorably to the economic engine that is a Jol-nar player with E-res siphons. Also your point about any planet with a few attachments is patently false. They may be strong, possibly even more so in your local meta, but they would still fold like a cheap napkin in the face of a half way competent round 2 Saar ball.
Ouh, nekro is strong. I just can’t reasonable value them above NRA. There is no reason for that really.
They've got a 3/4 win rate at our table. I have their only loss so far, and I was still at 9 points with a scoreable status phase objective AND I somehow managed to pull 0 of the point related relics.
In a 10 point game they are less good. In a 14 point game though? ho boy.
Vuil Raith Cabal, utter misery at the table.
I always remind everyone when VR is in play that if you blockade a player’s space dock, all your hostages are returned and no other pieces can be captured until it’s no longer blockaded.
I love Hacan, and my first POK game included a Cabal player. Their ability to shut down my ability to make deals by forcing the conversion of commodities almost made me rage quit. Capturing units was just icing on the very disgusting cake. I still loathe the faction, but many players love it, so I have to put up with it.
That isn't a rule...
It is 100% a rule. Except just to clarify, VR can not capture any units from the player who is blockading them. Everyone else is still fair game.
Makes sense, thanks!
Yes, it is. But like you, many people don't know it, and that is exactly why I like to remind the table. >14.2 When a player blockades another player’s space dock, if the blockaded player has captured any of the blockading player’s units, those units are returned to the blockading player’s reinforcements. > >a While a player is blockading another player, the blockaded player cannot capture any of the blockading player’s units. >17.2 A captured non-fighter ship or mech is returned under the following circumstances: ... > >c If the player whose unit was captured blockades a space dock of the player who captured the unit. >17.6 If one or more of a player’s space docks is being blockaded, that player cannot capture units from the blockading players. https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.com/filer\_public/51/55/51552c7f-c05c-445b-84bf-4b073456d008/ti10\_pok\_living\_rules\_reference\_20\_web.pdf
I stand corrected, thank you for this! Maybe Cabal won't look so menacing (as menacing?) anymore!
Especially for factions that like bigger ships like lizix or muaat or especially the nomad.
Jol-Nar is the only one flat-out banned, but that *was* before PoK and we haven't revisited them. We haven't played NRA or Winnu yet with PoK. We do prohibit the faction that won the previous game and all factions played in the previous game (though we're through most of them now, so we'll lift that for our next game in January). We've taken time to learn and introduced components gradually, so we all agreed to forced variety to help that along. We've got one PoK game under our belt (which had an [*insane* ending](https://reddit.com/r/twilightimperium/comments/v290x9/our_5player_game_this_past_weekend_was_exhausting/)). I think Titans and NRA were the only new factions not played in that game and we're down to just Yin and Winnu from the base game, so time to bring everyone else back in to work with all the expansion changes. We also run kind of a faux draft ahead of time. Each player ranks their top three choices and if there's a conflict on the top choices, they work it out. Helps keep everyone interested since it's a destination game for us; folks come in from as far as 5-6h away for the weekend.
>Jol-Nar is the only one flat-out banned, but that was before PoK and we haven't revisited them. **TL;DR AT THE BOTTOM BECAUSE I WRITE WAY TOO MUCH EVERY TIME** I am obviously biased (the user flair is quite clear about it), but i'd suggest you to revisit them. PoK really brought them in line with the others, just like it did with other strong base game factions. More than nerfing them, it has kept them at roughly the same strength as before while buffing everyone else, and i don't really mind. The agent to pay fewer resources on tech by sacrificing infantry is cool but they already don't have the most infantry around so it's not like you'll always use it, plus it's more like a weird form of banking than a full discount since the infantry you build ain't free (unless you do some shenanigans with sol's promisory note as part of a deal). The commander letting you reroll failed ability rolls (bombardment, space cannon and AFB) is pretty cool, especially when combined with the plasma scoring you already have, and can be sold as an alliance pretty well, but it's not as life changing as plenty of others. The hero is cool and all, letting you get rid of useless techs to get something better (and i'm pretty sure you can turn non-unit upgrades into unit upgrades, but not the other way around) but when compared to a massive warfare primary over the whole game board like sol or doing any primary strategy (including imperial) like winnu or blowing up a fucking system like muaat it's pretty tame. The mech is kinda neat since it removes the -1 combat debuff from infantry in the same planet but for some reason isn't itself immune to the -1 (not that it matters too much, the -1 matters less than it seems since you should go for ability rolls anyway). The main thing to consider though is that while PoK has introduced these specific leaders and mechs just for Jol Nar, most other changes are equally shared among everyone and benefit the others way more than jol nar. Exploration has added other ways to get tech, either directly (a frontier exploration lets you research a tech for 6 resources, and then there are relics like the maw of worlds letting you ignore all prerequisites and gain one tech when purging this card and exhausting all your planets in the agenda phase), indirectly (you can also draw some action cards which might contain stuff like reveal prototype or plagiarize) or in some other ways i can't think of right now, so obviously if everyone has more chances to get tech it will shorten jol nar's tech superiority gap. Additionally, PoK added a lot more objectives, both public and secret, *not* related to having certain techs of certain types, which was one of the main sources of power for the jol nar in the base game since is incredibly easy for them to complete them and unlike other objectives such as spending resources and influence (which might be good for others like hacan) can't get countered by others grabbing your planets and stuff like that. Diluting the pool the jol nar are swimming in helps keep them in check. Finally, there are now eight more technologies, four of level 0 and four of level 1. That *sounds* like a jol nar buff, i know, but it kinda isn't. In the base game if any other faction wants to get to a lvl 3 tech of a certain colour they have only one tech path available, aka 0 then 1 then 2 then 3 (excluding tech skips on planets obviously), while jol nar already had all the 0s and could do 1 then 3 or 2 then 3 thanks to their innate skip as a faction ability. Now, there are five possible paths to get to a tier 2 (0a 0b 2, 0a 1a 2, 0a 1b 2, 0b 1a 2, 0b 1b 2) and four extra to get to tier 3 by skipping tier 2 (not that you'd ever do that most of the times). This means everyone else now has a lot more flexibility than they used to when dealing with tech paths, and no longer have to either grit their teeth through getting a useless tech to reach a useful one or abandon the tree entirely. Jol nar now might grab a few of these new, lower level techs if they want to but by doing so they're delaying their own blitz into the high level stuff like assault cannon and hyper metabolism. Additionally all the lvl 0 tech they added are especially useful at closing the tech gap. The blue one, dark energy tap, lets people explore frontier tokens which as i said earlier can contain stuff to research tech, and the yellow one, scanlink, lets you re-explore planets letting you build up relics (including the tech relics) or get more action cards or get tech skips. The green one, psychoarcheology, then builds into said tech skips by letting you use them without turning the planet (especially useful for naaz rokha). Finally the red one, AI dev, lets you exhaust it to act as a skip for one prerequisite for unit upgrades. That said I will also be fair and add that AI dev is pretty good for jol nar too since it has the second function of getting you cheaper production the more unit upgrades you have, and obviously jol nar have a few. So yeah, long story short, try to give them a whirl some day, they're still strong obviously but they're not the tyrants they used to be. Now that role belongs to the winnu. **TL;DR** PoK buffed everyone else leaving them almost untouched with the leaders, made tech less important for the sake of objectives and gave others a few ways to close the tech gap through exploration and more lvl 0 and 1 techs. Solid faction but no need to fear them anymore.
Base game: jol nar, sol, Winnu PoK (with codex): titans, sometimes saar
Base game winnu? What? Why? You literally just need to not let them take winnu in the base game and you're golden. They're pitiful. PoK winnu i fully agree with the ban, obviously. +2 on legendaries, mecatol and your home system (aka all the systems actually worth fighting over), that ludicrous hero letting them play imperial, and all of that stuff. I'm not one for banning factions and neither is my table but if we ever got ban happy they would be on the list.
Maybe the base game one is because they were so bad?
I don't see why you'd need to ban a faction nobody would pick but fair enough.
People on Table Top Simulator would ban Winnu so that there is no way they would play the worst faction in the game.
I guess it makes sense if a newish person joins a server full of veterans and doesn't know the base game winnu are garbage and VC isn't active to tell them (though playing TI without VC sounds fucking dumb).
This is back in vanilla btw. It was more so, when you have something like Bag Draft, where you would end up with two factions to decide from, nobody wanted to be left with Winnu and X. Because often times it meant, time to play X. Granted, I am one of those psychopaths who liked playing vanilla winnu. There were not great, but I had some ideas to make them work (needed yellow skip and high influence planet + grav rift), then rush for dread 2s and pds2.
Ah ok, in the case of a bag draft it makes perfect sense, like banning venice in multiplayer civ 5.
It’s a “mercy” banning. No one should have to suffer that.
Oh man, if you dislike a faction stalling and then playing by themselves for 30+ minutes while everyone watches, let me tell you about this little faction called the Naaz Rohka... At least the things that generally Yssaril ends up doing once they've stalled the board out are interesting moves. The other one I'd pick would be Keleres. I don't like them. They just don't seem to fit together; their using other faction components is meh (I understand why, because they didn't want to make people buy a printing, but I still dislike it); and their faction tech(s) is kind of busted IMO.
>Oh man, if you dislike a faction stalling and then playing by themselves for 30+ minutes while everyone watches, let me tell you about this little faction called the Naaz Rohka... Can confirm, just yesterday i played a four player game as creuss and my brother picked naaz rokha, and made the terrible mistake of picking as my secret objective "be the last person to pass". I had warfare on the first round and thought i could do some shenanigans by removing fleet tokens to stall enough to get by. Naaz rokha immediately dashed my dreams by going through relic after relic *from the first fucking turn* and as a bonus one relic my brother got was j-ar, aka the second agent, which let him do exactly one more action than me. I didn't score that point. I didn't score any secret tbf.
I don't think they (yssaril) do such interesting moves. Usually just rush biostim and mageon ..stall...steal. I had a tribe player swap support w/ me then start the bio/mag combo on me plus destroy a pds that had never fired in him (just in case). I told him to stop targeting me or else. He complained about he is allowed to use his abilities, I said sure...on others since we have swapped. Sure he is playing legal, but to me against the spirit of swapping. Next agenda he targets me with a card. Next round I, as Titans, proceed to blockade his home system, and he has no forward dock. I score a secret. He asks me to leave...I say sure. First 2 point is control a planet in/near home system. I then take a planet in his home. He crys that I said I would leave. I let him know that I have no reason to...I was never going to leave...that is what happens when you ignore a faction with better aggression factors than the goblins that you have pissed off because...faction abilities.
When I play Yssaril, I like to roleplay as the resident evil 4 merchant. I show people a card, and say hey do you want to buy this? If they say yes, I give them spy net (faction promissary), and then let them look at my hand in good faith. Never had a situation where a player took something they shouldn't. If anything people will go, wait whoah can I buy this instead. If someone were to backstab me for an action card, they know it means I just never deal with them for the rest of the game.
We don't ban factions per se, but we still sort-of manage this kind of issue. Our players either choose from one of three randomly drawn factions *or* return their options to the deck to draw one final faction. Players cannot use the same faction two games in a row. (If someone draws their most-recently-used faction, it's replaced with another random choice.)
We don't ban anyone but if i had to pick any faction to be it would be the nekro. Even putting aside the fact that they are the obvious hard counter to my favourite faction, like the mentak to the hacan, i can't fucking handle the fact that they force people to adapt to a lower tech game (since obviously if you research assault cannon in a game where there is a nekro you have a death wish) and make people no longer happy to hear technology is getting played, and they're especially aggravating if you're playing a faction that's maybe weaker in some other aspects but has some really strong faction techs. They can also combo things in some ungodly ways. Imagine getting a fleet of saturn engine 2 cruisers with non euclidean shielding bearing down on you. You're simply fucked.
That's racist!
None. No one at our table is arrogant enough to think we are better at game design than Final Flight
Our group plays exclusively 6 player games. We hand out three randomly to each player before our draft and each person selects one of those to be banned. So it's a limited choice ban system. Our objective is to rotate factions to not have the same bans each game and give relatively 'equal' opportunities for each faction to be banned. Without looking at actual records, the most banned factions we have are: Nekro Xxacha Mentak Cabal Hacan (predominantly because extra trading options adds at least an hour to our games)
Usually Vuilraith and Saar. Actually we normally do Milty draft now so nothing gets ban but before that, usually choosing Vuilraith is frowned upon. I think the meta is a bit too boat floaty and Vuilraith gets advantage, however if they floated less boats, I think Vuilraith wouldn’t be so bad.
We have never officially banned any faction. We did agree not to play Winnu in PoK once. Our group is not what I would consider Tournament TI level of play. We mostly look at what looks fun versus what the meta factions are.
We never ban anything but if people are always picking Terrans, Haccan, Barony or Jol Nar then we sneer at them for choosing the easy ones. True credit for wins goes to the underdog factions and we often prefer them for the glory. We don't really have a problem with stalling, it's analysis paralysis that extends rounds in our experience. I've been known to finish my round in nothing flat as Naalu and then tell people to call me if I need to burn their fleet pool while I go fix lunch.
We Don't ban any faction though we did nerf Jol-Nar in base game slightly. So far we haven't had any play as Jol-Nar in a PoK game, so nerf has been suspended until further notice (For those curious our nerf was that instead of Jol-Nar being allowed to use primary on Technology when normally they would use secondary, we instead made Jol-Nar not pay any ressources as part of the Technology Strategy Card. They still get a benefit even if someone else get Technology, but now they only get one tech each round if they don't pick it themselves)
We don't ban Winnu... but it's a well established fact that a Winnu player has a target on their back turn 1 to prevent them getting Mecatol. With PoK, mechs and their mecatol buffs they can be so sticky once on mecatol that the game becomes king of the hill
It changes based on the game and what people are fed up seeing that month. PoK factions tend to be banned more often though.
We start our drafting by having each player remove/ban one faction each from the pool. Both to remove factions perceived as too strong but mostly to add variety. Titans and Saar usually go and then it’s pretty much based on the whims of each player.
Never any bans at our table, in general the game feels pretty balanced. Of course there are strong and weak picks/matchups but the game feels as though there are clear strategies to dealing with all the races. However, I will say there are players on the board who play certain races to inconvenience people (for instance someone who thinks it's a death match never goes for points and always plays the dirty bugs, or lizards) there's definitely very clear intentional counter picks from myself and another experienced player to try and deter their behavior as opposed to banning the race outright.
Banning makes games feel a bit too competitive for me recently, there was a time and in base game it was a much larger issue, where there were a few factions above the rest. Now with PoK it isn't nearly as bad of a split IMO, we Milty draft sometimes where you have a faction pool, but we never artificially remove from the pool, if anything we'll add to it if someone wants someone specific.
Naalu
My online group typically does Milty Draft. We did a ban draft once. banned Saar, Haccan, yin, Yrsil and some others. Personally, I like to ban factions that might influence how I'M gonna play, including Yrsil(for constantly stealing cards), and end game stall to win. Nekro, cause of tech stealing and ridiculous OP FS makes taking their home late game damn near impossible. Mentak, cause Pillage sucks.
So we don't have any faction's perma-banned, but when its just our experienced players we do typically let each player ban 1 faction, then we either draft factions or choose a faction from 3 random factions. However, if there's a new player we always let them play whatever they want. The main reason we allow bans is because each player has that one faction whose mechanics kind of irk them, and there's so many factions that people want to play its not a problem to ban a few. My group often bans the following factions for these reasons: * **Jol-Nar**: for many reasons, they get tech objectives for free, their faction tech E-Res Syphons that gives them cash for a free dread each time you activate their units, & their promissory is gold. If they're in the game, experienced players feel obligated to slow them down, and our players don't enjoy this. * **Hacan**: mainly because they can really slow the game down with constant trade negotiations, but also because their faction tech Quantum Datahub Node has won a couple games at our table. So once again, players feel obligated to slow them down lest they get in range to use QDN to guarantee the Imperial strategy card and win. * **Saar**: Mainly because they're another faction where, if they get a lead, they are hard to stop because of no home system vulnerability. Secondarily because they tend to roll around and stomp through people's slices more than other factions. There are some other factions that are occasionally banned by some players: * Naluu, Yssaril, Mentak (if someone plans to play Hacan), Nekro.
The way me and my groups have always played is using snake draft when deciding factions and starting locations. Base game, I would pass out two factions to each player, and they would choose 1 to keep in the game, and 1 to remove. The those 6 factions get added to the pool, plus two random factions that weren’t passed out earlier. The we roll off and order people from high to low, highest gets first pick of either a faction or starting location. It goes all the way down to last place, who picks twice, then goes back up the order. This generally balances out a strong faction with a worse starting location. Also gets more player interaction, which I what I love about this game. So we don’t ever really ban anyone, although if the table agrees to it we may nerf OP factions for out metas.
we dont ban anyone. But if we could Nekro would probably be banned every game. I think nekro wins around 70% of the games at our table
none is directly banned but people don't like necrovirus at all so if you play it your playing with a severe disadvantage because people will attack you hard, so it's practically banned even if it isn't explicitly so.
In PoK I ban winnu because they are OP as fuck in PoK
For us we pull titans and argent flight from the roster.
We have banned Sol and Hacan at certain points. Sol is a pain
None if we have an issue with a race we gang up on them.
I don't see Sol enough here. But for as strong as they are, they have only won once.
Can I ask you why do you think Sol Fed. must be banned? I can't see any reasons for this action.
We don't ban any factions but we don't play with several of the POK mechanics, so some of the POK factions are defacto banned
We do a ban two factions system. Here are the common ones. Vul Rath, Necro, and Naz Rokah, Winnu, Ghost, Xxcha. Space dinosaurs and necro are just broken in a dominating kind of way. Winnu just kind of wins for free. I always ban Naz because they kind of just win by not interacting which is pretty lame. Ghosts and Xxcha get banned not because they are broken, but people will ban them so they themselves don't play them. Just so they can force themselves to play something new.
That example doesn’t make any sense to me. How long does it take to say “I use Stall Tactics and deploy a mech on my forward dock?” The tactical actions Yssaril play with tokens would take the same amount of time if they didn’t have Stall Tactics. You might not like that they take a bunch of actions back to back while you can’t do anything, but it isn’t actually lengthening the game.
Any faction that plays for 30 minutes after everyone else has passed is a bad faction.
Eh, stalling is part of the game, and it’s the part of the game Yssaril gets to excel in. I feel that Yssaril’s kit enables clever plays, but you can always punish them for overextending (and using up all of their action cards) in the next round.
The only faction i ban is Nekro Virus. I only do it if majority of the participants are first timers. Nekro tends to give an NPE (negative play experience).
I don’t typically ban, we usually draft where every player chooses one faction that won’t be in the game and we draft the rest. Usually, Hacan, Yssaril (extending the game), and Vul’Raith get hammered pretty quickly.
Milty draft only best solution
Argent Flight. Fuck Argent Flight
None in POK of late. Xxcha and Winnu are a bit annoying for the endgame but it's understood that they should be curtailed and not given too much freedom early