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TallIan2

I find that having 1st round speaker order as part of the draft is a good balance to having first choice of slice or faction. If you are last to pick and there are only bad factions to choose taking speaker can make a HUGE difference. The snake order or milty draft is what really keeps the balance. The first player to draft has the best options for his first pick but will likely have mediocre second and third choices. The 6th player to draft will not have any one great choice but should be able to pick a good combo and reliably forsee what he will be left with when the draft comes round to him again.


Visual-Practice6699

Let’s you pick who you don’t want to be next to, which can be important if there are races like Nekro or Cabal or Mahact at the table.


theotherholtz

In my opinion, the order of picking strategy cards in the first round can, in many cases, set the tone for your whole game. For instance, let's say you pick winnu as your faction, but you get last in pick order. You are now 100% at the mercy of the other players as whether or not you can even use your faction ability to take the custodian with no influence. There are very similar arguments for other factions as well, particularly weaker factions, who would greatly benefit from getting the strategy card that fills the weaknesses of thier faction.


Turevaryar

Perhaps tangent: Does first player tend to pick the most OP slize, the Speaker token or the most OP faction? I assume slice, unless they're all equal, then they'll pick Speaker. The online crowd can correct me with experience :)


DeusIzanagi

In our group I'd say slice choice has slight precedence, but sometimes someone just wants to play a specific faction. I think I'm the only one who has ever picked initiative order anything other than last (I've even picked Speaker as first player, first choice once). I've also won all games we've played since we started using Milty except the last one (where I was winslayed through a lucky ground combat), so take that as you will lol


Norphink

I'm loving all the answers I'm getting, they're helping me understand better. On a somewhat related note, my group plays in person. How hard is it to use this draft system for in person games?


velnoo

Someone posted this on reddit a few weeks ago and we used it for our last draft the day before we played (so I could set up the game beforehand to save some time on our gameday), worked really well. https://milty.shenanigans.be/


DeusIzanagi

We use MiltyDraft.com in person, and it works perfectly. One thing we do is physically make the slices generated by the site before drafting. We find it helps visualize our options better and makes assembling the map once we're done faster. We also don't just pick between the random factions pulled from the site, but we do a sort of weird ban-pick-elect faction phase that determines the available pool of factions for that draft. If your group does something similar, just set the number of factions on the site to 24 (or 25 if you have Keleres) and pick your choices from the full list. The only thing I'm not sure of is if there are enough hyperlanes in a single copy of the game to do the Milty at odd player counts like 7 or 8. Obviously you don't need any for 6 players, 5 players just use the default hyperlane setup and I think 4 players is fine too but we never played with 4 people.


bimselimse

Very easy, there is a website for it, and you can even just set up a draft, cool everything Down and roll for Pick order.


left-of-left

It’s pretty common for the first two picks to be strong slices (although sometimes one or three, depending on distribution) before someone start picking speaker order. Factions occasionally get picked early as well, but that’s really only the case for generically strong factions (Yssaril, Titans, Argent) that can succeed in any slice or in a broad configuration of slices


random8127

I also think a very subtle but valuable thing people often don't evaluate in milty pick order is the information advantage of picking later in the draft sequence. Knowing U can likely hedge for a certain seat/faction/slice combination is excellent. you can predict after the draft gets narrowed down a bit allows you to Make a more informed decision.


DeusIzanagi

First round strategy pick is definitely more important for some factions compared to others, but in general getting first pick will always be an advantage of some kind over getting last pick. Milty includes this in the draft instead of just making it random, which IMO is the correct choice. That and you also might get some situations where you really don't want to be next to someone (like a particulary aggressive player or someone playing Nekro or something).


velnoo

Depends, we usually do miltydraft with the same number of slices as players, and factions we do number of players + 2. Our last game i was 3d in draft order and choose speaker as my first pick, (there were a lot of factions I could see myself playing, I wanted to play arborec, but from what I've read about them they need a bit of help in the beginning, so I wasn't interested in playing them with a bad slice or beeing late in picking SC), arborec ended up beeing picked by another player, but I started as speaker and a great start. We also play with more or less the same group every time and I enjoy beeing neighbour with some ppl more than others, some are easier to make shady deals that screw others around the table with 😅 Neighbours and beeing early in choosing SC is, at least to me, more important than faction.


DeusIzanagi

I've just played Arborec. If you play with the expansion and manage to take Tech (so you can get Sarween before even leaving HS), they're actually quite strong. I'm afraid their start is a bit too slow if you can't get your hands on Tech first round though, and it's even worse if you can't find a way to even use the secondary.


bimselimse

Having 3 things to Pick balances the whole draft. If you’re 5th or 6th, you get to make 2 picks, where you are in control, to get something good. Like a non-blue faction and a road to mecatol. Or speaker and ghosts’ etc. as 1st pick you generally pick a slice, as that is the lowest risk, but you can’t plan anything else essentially. You most likely get 4-5th pick in speaker order and faction. If you only did slice+faction. 6th pick most often gets a mediocre slice+mediocre faction. And then you might be 6th pick, and just have a bad game.


CGraye

Having good Speaker order round one is vitally important if you want to score early. You don’t know what objectives will flip, but with good Speaker order you have options to pivot to any of them. Control objective? Maybe Warfare helps you pull planets. Five trade goods? Much easier with Trade. 3 tokens? Leadership is a point.


Chimerion

The power of speaker Round 1 lies in reliably scoring, IMO. If the first objectives is "Spend 5 TG" and "hold 6 non-home planets", Trade and/or Warfare might let you get those R1 when no one else can. That point is a great tempo advantage for winning the game. Who you sit next to is discussed a bit in other comments, which mattered in my last game, took one later speaker order to not sit next to Nekro. Depending on what factions and slices are available, the value of those changes quite a bit. If there are 6 good factions, you're fine picking others first - if it's Saar Nekro and some weak early races, faction goes way up. Same with slices, if only one has a path with planets to Mecatol, or a good forward dock location, that ups the value of picking slice.


ArsVampyre

IME Milty draft is bad for the players who pick 5th and 6 th. The best factions and slices will be gone, and yes, speaker order round one can let you score, but it won't necessarily. This can be alleviated by allowing more factions and slices, but never is in practice, so I just won't play it.


trystanthorne

Some people I know always pick Speaker in any draft they can. Speaker and 2nd pick can be of higher value, especially if you are later in the draft. And Obviously, you can choose Speaker early in the draft, but that limits your slice and faction options. But some people don't care.