Guillermo Hernandez
United States
Albuquerque
New Mexico
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The game seems pretty dam cool, but the rule book is a bit of a pain to traverse.
These questions are probably more to understand the game balance.
Locations: Is there a limit to how many locations you can incorporate into your zone?
Re-development: In a three player game last night, we each had about 11 locations out not one of us ever felt the need to redevelop. If we ran out of space for VP tokens on one card, we just expanded. Incorporation distances weren't ever really a problem. I've read that some folks here complain that the extra VP is too powerful for redevelopment, but you get an extra VP if you incorporate a new location, so the only benefit I saw to redevelopment is 0 distance. Which was never a problem in our game. At some points some players were incorporating 3-4 locations in a single turn.
How long do games typically last?
Our 30 VP game lasted a good 8-10 Lock-out phases.
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Spencer Egart
United States
Independence
Kentucky
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Once you max out a location's VPs, redeveloping is strictly better than incorporating as it nets you an extra point.
Be aware that redeveloping puts two VP chips on your home base - one to make up for the location you lost and one as a bonus for redeveloping. It sounds like you were just putting one chip on.
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Lacombe
Louisiana
It was a dark and stormy night.
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I'm going to guess you missed two rules:
1) [As Spencer mentioned] you get a bonus VP every time you redevelop. It's worth twice as much as laying down a new card.
2) You can only use each basic contact / distance action [among your main player cards] once per turn. You put the resource token there on the card to remind you you can't do it again 'til next turn.
Incorporating 3-4 cards per turn is pretty unlikely, at least on a sustained basis, unless you've really messed up some rule.
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Paul Blake
United States
Westerville
Ohio
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Semi official answers, since I copy-edited the North American rulebook:
Locations
In practical terms, there is no limit to the number of locations you can have in your territory. By the strict logic of the game and its components, there are only a finite number of locations in the deck, and a finite number of Incorporation contacts available to be used, and the game ends during a scoring round if anyone has reached the point threshold, so, yes, there probably is a logical upper bound limit - but it's an "impossible to exceed" limit, not an "I'm running out of space" limit.
Re-Development
The act of redeveloping scores a VP itself, and you don't lose any of the points that were already attached to the location. Particularly with VP producing locations, once you "use them up", the only way to get any additional points out of them is to tear them down and build something on top of the site.
0 Distance is very powerful, especially considering the usefulness of the 3 Distance locations.
Regularly incorporating 3-4 Locations in a single turn is so improbable, it beggars belief. You know that the Contact cards gained from the deck are used once, then discarded, right? As are any Contact tokens gained from things like Heavy Gear.
Also, you can only use other players' open locations three times in a round, and all your resources not protected by a clock symbol (Every token of any kind, except VP and your three faction tokens [Which are returned to you if they were sent to open locations]) are discarded at the end of each round.
Game Length
If your game goes past 7 rounds, someone is probably doing something wrong. At 10 rounds, players are almost certainly passing up lots of scoring opportunities.
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Guillermo Hernandez
United States
Albuquerque
New Mexico
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We were discarding Unused resource and contact tokens at the end of every round.
My question is what is the difference in VPs from incorporation to redevelopment?
Don't you get one VP from incorporating a new location? So redeveloping an existing location gets you a VP. But you're using a new card to lay down. If you just incorporated the card you'd get a VP and a new location to tuck 3 Spoils/deals. The net gain is no different between incorporation and redevelopment except tha redevelopment has no distance requirement but instead needs a building material. At least that is how we viewed the rules. So us players never redeveloped, we just always incorporated. We never had an issue with gaining enough conquest/negotiation/incorporation tokens.
This is why we were wondering if there was a limit to incorporated sites and trying to understand the benefit of redevelopment.
Are you limited to the number of times you can use your faction specific tokens?
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Kris Moulton
Canada
Vancouver
British Columbia
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The faction specific distance cards are used once per turn. We flip them when they're used.
Incorporating a card doesn't gain you a victory point chip, but every incorporated card is worth a victory point on your board. When you redevelop, you get a new point on your base for the redevelop action, and another for the point that the old card was worth. The new location is again worth a point for being on the board. The gain is 1 extra point over just incorporating a new one.
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Lacombe
Louisiana
It was a dark and stormy night.
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magnoguido wrote: My question is what is the difference in VPs from incorporation to redevelopment?
The difference is that when you redevelop, you get to "keep" the 1 VP that the card you just built on top of was worth plus earn a "bonus" 1 VP simply for doing the redevelopment action. You physically place both of these VP tokens [so a 2 VP token in all] on your base card, and additionally count the 1 VP for the new card, so the net change [1 VP for the old card to 2 VP redeveloping + 1 VP for the new card] is 2 VP. If you simply incorporate the new card, you only earn 1 VP overall.
Quote: If you just incorporated the card you'd get a VP and a new location to tuck 3 Spoils/deals.
You can only tuck spoils/deals under your base card and very few extra cards with a specific power. This looks to be something you misplayed, and might have had an impact all its own.
Quote: We never had an issue with gaining enough conquest/negotiation/incorporation tokens.
Something is definitely wrong, then.
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Guillermo Hernandez
United States
Albuquerque
New Mexico
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Ohhhhh, I got it. We were tucking spoils and deals under different locations. That was giving us some massive resources yes it was.
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