Shards of the Throne isn't needed to "fix" the base game the way Shattered Empire is, or the way Dunwich Horror is for Arkham Horror. It does, however, add quite a lot to your Twilight Imperium experience and is well worth the money spent to acquire it.

Great writeup! Here's the crux:

And I fully agree.

One note: Not all Mercenaries can evade; at least one has Sustain Damage instead.

Great writeup. This expansion certainly does add a lot to the game, and I personally use Trade III, and Assembly II in all my games now.

You are definitely right about the PO not being balanced though. When playing, I sometimes seperate them before the game into piles of easy, medium, and hard and deal them out according to the player experience level.

I do feel that playing with them when the Yssaril are involved is almost neccessary though, just to help slow them down.

Add to that the fact that Secret Objectives usually take a large amount of work to set up in the first place, yet you won't even receive one until you complete your PI, thus greatly lessening the chances that you'll be able to fulfill your Secret Objective!

Option Five, Mechanized Units, give you a new unit to occupy and invade planets. You're limited to only four of these, each of which cost two Resources, roll two dice each combat round, hitting on six or less,


Six or more ?

The first requires you to have all five Dreadnaughts on the board. The second requires you to have three Yellow Technology Advances. The third is completed if you control a planet that was controlled by an enemy player this round. And the fourth is completed if you control two systems adjacent to Mecatol Rex. See what I mean?

Sorry, no i don't. They are all relatively easy.

Five dreadnought requires a couple of turns of resources put into building them. No opponent can trully block this.

3 Yellow techs... requires 1 to 3 turns of resource spending in techs. No opponent can trully block this.

Control a planet controled by an ennemy player... requires only 1 turn, but can usually only be done at best on turn 2 or 3. There's always an easy planet to grab somewhere, making this easy to do.

Controlling two systems adjacent to Mecatol, can be done relatively easilly by turn 2 or 3, depending on the race. It's so difficult to guess and even harder to prevent that no one will make this difficult to do.

They are all very similar difficulty and time required-wise. Of course, some might be easier depending on your race. Building dreadnoughs when you have L1Z1X as your race for example... but then, even the secret objectives have such a tendancy.

Perhaps using the word "difficulty" was a poor choice of phrasing on my part. What I meant to say was that the costs between achieving various Preliminary Objectives are insanely unbalanced and disproportinate. Taking an enemy planet will cost a player what? One command counter, a Carrier and a Ground Force? While building FIVE Dreadnaughts costs you a massive twenty-five resources and more than one turn of construction at your Space Docks, all in exchange for five nearly worthless lemon ships. By the same token, three Yellow Techs costs you up to eighteen resources, THREE choices of Strategy cards, or a combination thereof. A heck of a a huge loss, compared to inhabiting two systems near Mecatol Rix.

I will concede that terming the five Dreadnaughts "worthless" is an exaggeration on my part-but I would argue not by much. Basically all they're good for is protecting where they were built, and who wants to blow twenty-five resources on that? Yes, you could say they're a "mighty fleet", but one which is unbearably slow and hence all but useless for any offensive operations. Not to mention that while I've been wasting all this time and resources on building Dreadnaughts, I have NOT been building the Carriers, Fighters, Cruisers and Mechs which are actually necessary in the game.

I should probably mention that my group always plays with Artifacts, which only further accentuates the importance of having fast ships, ones which can reach said Artifact worlds.

The same goes for Yellow Techs as for Dreadnaughts. If I wanted three Yellow Techs, I would have bought three Yellow Techs of my own volition, but I will never want three Yellow Techs, ESPECIALLY if I'm using a race which doesn't even start with Antimass Deflectors, much less the essential XRD Transports!

I think you're really stretching the difficultly on the other two Objectives I mentioned to try to compare them to these two; it's not that hard to seize an undefended planet from another player either after he has passed or when he has no unactivated ground forces close enough to retake it. Furthermore, Mecatol often has a lot of empty space around it when my group plays and thus two systems aren't difficult to get. Finally, if you have a neighboring player thin-skinned and petty enough to become your game-long enemy just because you took ONE of his planets to fulfill your PI, for one turn (it's often good diplomacy to offer to give back a conquered planet to the player who originally owned it)then it's likely you would have ended up ticking him off regardless.

Why do I despise the Preliminary and not the Secret Objectives? First, because while the Secret Objectives do vary in cost and difficulty, I find the variance to be far less and much more reasonable than with the Preliminary Objectives. Second, because the PI's bar you from even getting a Secret Objective until your PI is completed. This vastly compounds the already great unfairness for those stuck with the ridiculous PI's, not to mention taking away the time you would usually have to work on completing your Secret Objectives. I fully realize and accept that much of the game is random, turning on the rolls of the dice and draws of the cards, but when one player can be stuck wasting twenty-five resources on all his Dreadnaughts while another only has a to take a planet, then that's too blatantly unfair for me.

You talk about the conquest of Mecatol Rex being easier with PI's like that's a GOOD thing; I don't find it so. I want the game to have lots of space battles and conflict; saying that PI's make taking Mecatol Rex easier is yet another strike against them in my reckoning.

I can't comment on figuring out other player's SO's and blocking them because that hasn't been much of an issue in my group. I will say, however, that the figuring out should be just as easy when you know someone has completed his PI and gotten his SO as when he has his SO initially. The ship distribution might be different and it might be harder to stop, but the same considerations that led you to figure it out when there were only SO's still apply.

And if the players in your group who have the Occupy a Homeworld SO always go right for it at the beginning, then I would say they really need to work on their subtlelty and patience.

Well, I think we've done a good job of presenting our differing viewpoints. The rest is up to the readers. There you have it, folks: the case both for and against Preliminary Objectives!