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Edward
United States
New York City
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The overarching paradigm of Twilight Struggle is that events create opportunities, and Operations are how you take advantage of those opportunities. Accordingly, you should treat events not as your primary source of influence, but rather as gamechangers that break open the game for your Operations.
The basis for this principle is the observation that Operations are generally more efficient than events, even if the event technically gives more influence. The Comecon event gives the USSR 4 influence, but they’re spread out and in a rather useless place. By contrast, the 3 Ops of the Comecon card can be played as a strong coup, can take over a crucial battleground, or can extend and create threats all over the board.
On the other hand, by the Mid War, many regions begin to degenerate into stalemates. Once your opponent controls a country, it’s hugely inefficient to try to break their control with Operations alone. Sometimes it’s still worth it, but you need to be at a significant Ops advantage (or take multiple Actions in a row) to take over an opponent-controlled country with pure Ops. Alternatively, maybe you just don’t have access to the region: without coup targets, all the Operations in the world aren’t going to get the USSR into the Americas.
This is where events come in. Their effects can have dramatic ramifications and shake up otherwise deadlocked regions. USSR secure in Africa? Boom, Nuclear Subs and all of a sudden all the battlegrounds are yours. US is dominating Europe? Bam, Socialist Governments headline, and now an AR1 Europe Scoring is -5 instead of +5.
A large part of Twilight Struggle skill is therefore recognizing which events to trigger, and when to trigger them.
To continue reading this article, visit Twilight Strategy
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