430: Crimson Rebellion Beginner's Guide

This is Space Cat's Peace Turtles, the unofficial podcast for Fantasy Flight's Twilight Imperium, Episode 430, Introduction to the Crimson Rebellion, with music by Ben Prunty Art by Sun Sanders, produced by Shelton Brister, and hosted by Hunter Donaldson. A friend of mine told me this, and I think it's a really good podcasting wisdom. He blew up on Tik Tok now, he does these like reels where he's explaining scams and stuff. He's a very funny guy, but we used to be in a podcast together a long time ago called Best Thing Ever, and he told me this thing about podcasting that I always think about, which is that if you get done with a podcast and you feel like, oh man, there was more, I wanted to say that I didn't get to say, that's a good sign, because that means like, you probably said the best stuff and the stuff that probably wasn't even really worth saying, you didn't get out there. But if you finish a podcast and you're like, wow, I don't have anything more to say about that, that's bad, because now you're like secondary and tertiary thoughts kind of got out there. And those aren't as good. You know what I mean? You want the good stuff, the cream at the top of your sort of mind crop, right? And this and this way people get to tell us everything that we missed, which they do. Is it something that I'm now that I now realize that you're in on it? You are. You are telling you everything you do wrong or like last time I got one one thing wrong. It was about how like neutral units work with regard to secrets. And I saw like four people correct me on them. Like I know, I know, I get it down. Dude, do you, are you starting to understand like why I am the way I am a little bit? Is there a point where you're like, oh man, because that's the thing is like, sometimes people will, they'll react a certain way to me like on stream. And I'll be like, ah, yeah, I got to remember that like they don't understand that like my thoughts about this game are that I am subject to so much ongoing criticism about those thoughts, which is great that it's not like, it's not personal. It's not like people are, I'm not the type of content creator that makes stuff where people are like, oh, you know, you yourself. It's just my thoughts about this game. But yeah, it can, it can drive you a little crazy. You got to be careful, you know, about that. Now I think, I think we see the game very similarly, which is more like a recent thing for me is I've just been a lot more like, I don't want to say jaded to the game, but just like accepting of everything that is wrong with it. Right. I'm like, oh, this is kind of, this is kind of how you, you see the game of things. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I do think that there is a certain contradiction at play with Twilight Imperium, which I think I don't know that we could ever get someone to admit, although I feel like Dane would admit it. I feel like if I pose it to him like on a show or on a stream or something, which is that this is, this is a game with a lot of rules and so many details. And, you know, you can watch, you can watch me in Matt play a game of Thunder's Edge on the fantasy flight YouTube. We streamed that earlier. Not, I guess it would be last week from this episode dropping. And we're playing with, you know, fantasy flight people that worked on the game. And let me tell you, they didn't know, they didn't even know, they didn't know much at all about the rules of the game. Like they were, they were all these little details. They didn't have right even a little, you know, and that's the thing is this game wasn't built imagining that a bunch of people would actually learn how to play it. Like not really, right? So we showed up and we're like, oh, we're going to play this every weekend and we're going to learn the rules. And it's like, well, they didn't make it for that. You know, that's not they didn't, they didn't assume that would ever happen. So you know, the Dane is trying his best for that. I think of this. I think so too, especially, like I think he tried to, to gear at least a little bit, like more towards our strange twisted community. Right. In a way that it wasn't quite in the past, like base and, and POK. And you know, I'm definitely thankful for that. But yeah, just because like I played a game with some some friends in real life and like three of them hadn't really played that much before. I'm like, oh my god, this is how this is how normal human beings play this game. It's so different from from everything that that we do online. Yeah. I also, there's something about like the way that the details, the little implications of the rules can have like a huge effect on how you actually play. We're going to have a discussion in this episode about the definition of the word use, right? And to a normal person, I think they would read the sentence in question. And they they would have zero. They don't care. It's like, oh, yeah, sure. That's what it means. And then they probably forget about the rule, even they don't even really, and like, and it doesn't even get enforced. I bet this is how it happens most of the time, you know. But for us, we're like, well, what does use mean? And we, the answer, the short answer is that we sort of, we sort of don't have an answer, and I bet it will change. So this is a very, I would say, important episode so far. Maybe the most important episode we've done all year, because this is the first of our faction specific episodes for Thunder's Edge. So this is an episode I know from doing the show so long this episode will get listened to a significantly more than any of the other episodes around it. Okay. But I want to emphasize that this is an introductory episode. We're going to be taking our time with the Thunder's Edge factions. We're going to throw out these, I'm going to call them beginners guides. Okay. Therefore just getting into Thunder's Edge, over viewing the components, getting a little bit into the nitty-gritty of what it could look like to play this on like a deeper level, right? But it isn't. None of it is set in stone. None of it's decided because two things have to happen first is we have to get dain to sort of rule on the tiniere implications of a lot of these components. And we will talk about what has been ruled on and what hasn't. And then also like, I feel like the community has to sit down and sort of over time decide like what makes the most sense from a meta or above the table perspective. Like it's attitude is very important with defining how these factions will actually play. And that's going to go into the commander. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, let's talk a little bit about some story stuff, some lore stuff. You big lore guy, Blasto. You like lore? You my big lore guy. So the extent of my lore expertise is reading the planet cards when I'm bored, which I pretty much all forgot about now. And I did read the lore snippets at the beginning of the Twilight's Fall and normal game rulebook. Yeah. If you're really good, by the way. Yeah, those are good. Yeah, some time. You should check, like, yeah, I think you have. But everyone else is listening, should really check those out. They're actually, they're a lot of fun. They're fun. You get to get to learn some valuable information, some super secretive information that day and just just kind of confirmed. Yeah. So we've got in the Twilight's Fall one, the very end of the story confirms who the nomad is, which I mean, I'm just going to leave that kind of hanging in the air for a little bit. I think we will do some some lore episodes where we will spoil everything and go deep. But for now, you know, I want, you know, I want y'all bought this game. Y'all should be reading all of the beautiful lore that's been written on the back of the faction sheets and inside those rulebooks. But just to summarize, who are the Crimson rebellion? And what happened to them? What is their role in the story? I like them a lot because they feel like the most direct sequel to prophecy of kings. All of the factions are sort of playing into this ongoing storyline that that Danes started in prophecy of kings, but their origin is that they are the enthralled Crimson Legionnaires, which is when the Mahawk were discovered by the Ghost of Crius all the way back in POK lore. The first thing that the Mahawk did was enthrall them. And then that's why the Mahawk infantry were Crimson Legionnaires who had an ability. If you remember, I mean, I say had, they still have it. But their ability is when they're destroyed, you gain a commodity or turn it into a trade-good if you already have commodities, which we're going to see that theme carried into this. It's like one of the first times we've ever seen this happen, where a theme from a mechanic from one faction has jumped to be a mechanic of a new faction, which I really, really dig. But basically, what happens is the Crimson Legionnaires are these enthralled Ghost of Crius, and then the deep-wrought scholarate build a sort of weapon called the wave form arbitrator, which is designed to take to shatter the control of the Mahawk of the Crimson Legionnaires, sort of take away their Crimson Legionnaires. And presumably, there are presumably other different, you know, peoples that the Mahawk have enthralled. But we're primarily focusing on the Crimson here. So they use the weapon. It is used in a historic event called the Ikatana incident. And then these Crimson are freed. And they don't free all of them. Obviously, they can't because we still have that infantry there on the Mahawk faction sheet. But they free a lot of them. And then it's very sad because those those freed Crimson, they, what do they want to do? Well, they want to rejoin the other Ghost of Crius back at their their homeland. And the, the ghosts that still live in Crius are like, eh, ik, yucky, we don't like you. That's like commentary on, on war there. Yeah, it does. It's just, yeah, just hearing that now, like, wow, that's, that's deep. Yeah, they're coming back. Yeah, they're coming back from the war. And everyone's like, oh, you all have changed too much. And you can't be reintegrated. And they're, they, the way it's written on the faction sheet, it's like, they're afraid that just associating with the Crimson will allow the Mahawk to like take over all of the Ghost of Crius, which as far as what they're giving us in the lore is not, that just seems like superstition. Like, I don't know that that's actually sourced than anything that could really happen. But it's just kind of a thing they're afraid of. So then the Crimson, they can't go home. They're all sad. So they build their own home that is exactly like Crius, but it's red and it's not as, it's, it's more volatile. It's less stable. And then they just, they just live there. But they really just want to go back home. You know, people have been calling them the Crimson sad boys because they're kind of, it's, it's, it's a dark kind of tragic faction origin for them. But yeah, that's, that's who they are. I check out the, the back of the faction sheet though. So it's, it's, it's good stuff. They are I think of all the new factions. I think they are, they're not evil, but they're also not necessarily good. They really operate in a very gray area. But and they're not fascist either. Like a lot of the, a lot of the factions have you break them down. They're essentially just conquering fascists at the end of the day. These guys are just kind of lost. They're, they're lost and they're, they're angry and they're sad. They're misunderstood. Yeah. They're very, they just want to, they just want to go home to their family, but they can't. So they'll make some scary-looking, evil-looking, home planet, and they'll chill there. Yeah. Yeah. They're, they're teenagers, you know, they're like, oh, I hope they grow out of this, you know. And I hope the world comes to accept them. But you're not here for story or acceptance or any of those things. You're here for the nitty-gritty, the details. So let's get into it. Blasto, what are their starting units and what are their tech? Yes, they're starting units. And it sounds bad initially, but they start with one carrier, two destroyers, three fighters, four infantry, a space stock, and hilariously a PDS. Yes. So one C for I, which is normally not a good thing, but as we'll get to in their, in their leader suite, they do have an agent that will partially fix that problem. Yes. And the reason the PDS is so funny is because they're, we're going to talk about a faction ability that they have that means that no one can go to their home system. So the PDS, as nothing, it can in fact, shoot at really. It could with PDS to shoot through your wormhole in your home, but that that won't come up who really appears. Yeah. What's their starting tech? So their starting tech is one blue or red technology with no pre-requisites. So that would be dark energy tap, anti-mass AI development algorithm, or plasma scoring. And I saw that choices. Yeah, I know really good, really good choices, especially because they're very clear, which we'll talk about in a second has blue red synergy. So no matter which one you pick, you'll have synergy for both. But I think and track me if I'm wrong. I don't think there's ever a situation where I wouldn't pick dark energy tap or anti-mass here. Yeah. I can see an argument for AI dev. It's very efficient as far as whatever other tech you're going to pick up. But to me, DET is going to give you a lot of value, almost 100% of the time. And then anti-mass is kind of one of those texts where like, well, if you need anti-mass, you have to get anti-mass. You take it if you need to. And like DET, you have, so your home system is like the ghost, you have an empty. So DET is, you're going to have more tokens in your slice than you otherwise would have. So yeah, you really want to, nine times out of 10, you're going to be picking up dark energy tap. In all of my research games, I only deviated from DET one time. And that was to get AI dev. The one I can't really ever see an argument for is plasma scoring. I'm not sure there's ever a reason for you to start with plasma. It's just not really doing anything for you that you wouldn't get better from these other texts. So yeah. Yeah, for sure. Their breakthrough is resonance generator. We'll probably talk about this later because it you kind of need to know what a breach is to know what their breakthrough does. But it's a it's a it's a blue red synergy. So you can you can do all the things that that entails. I think blue red is probably the best one of the best synergies. Yeah, it's absolutely good. Yeah, you love the deep blue. You love the deep red. Yeah, they'll need to get their destroyer twos at some point. So yeah. The notable thing about their breakthrough, the thing that that they have that no one else kind of experiences is that they start with it. And people ask a lot, well, does this mean that you roll for the fracture? And as far as we know, it does mean that you roll for the fracture. It's not clear exactly when you roll, which obviously here's another thing. It doesn't matter to normal normal people does matter to us. A lot of actions now have decisions to make during setup. They have to decide what tech they're going to get. Obviously, this is a faction that decides what tech they're going to get. The order of that to me is still unclear. I'm actually wondering if you have any thoughts about it. Do you know? Do you have you ever had any thoughts about what order people are supposed to set up in? It doesn't happen in speaker order, perhaps. So that is a great question because I've never even read the rule book. So I don't actually know. I don't know. Is there like a set up? I guess gather components is a step. You know, gather components might be well, no, but when does that when does gather components happen? Here, let me look. Let's let's let's take just a second to see if we can figure this out. GI rule book. This would be like the original. This is like base game rule. Same rule would be established. So one home system, seven, two technology or each player's faction, specific components contain a faction symbol. But that's before. Oh no, you've already determined speaker, but it doesn't say what happens before. I imagine like, I mean, there's no precedent for this, right? We've never had to do this before, but I guess if you had to, it would you do it in speaker order, right? Yeah, I think that's just their stuff first. That's probably it. And you know, some people are going to be like, well, who cares? Why does that even matter? And you're right. You're right to think that. But the fracture, causing the fracture propping and like it coming out is a pretty big game defining thing. I would want to know that before I choose my tech because they're, I don't know, there, there might be a reason that like, oh, that ambulance is my decision now. I think of one reason. Yeah. So there's now a planet that is a red skip in an asteroid field. And if you don't know how the fracture comes into play, the the faction that reveals it. So in this case, it'd be Crimson places in grist tokens on all your rights that have skips that match their breakthrough in the breakthroughs blue red. So they would put a ingress token probably on the red skip inside that asteroid field. So that might mean, oh, I'm going to get, I'm going to get anti mass now, right? From the faction that can choose blue, even Crimson Crimson can now choose anti mass. So they can access that ingress token. Oh, okay. So now we have to think, okay, so what order do they even do it on their sheet? Because I would say the way it's written suggests that you would choose your tech and then you would gain your breakthrough because of that, that's the order of it. But maybe it's any order. I don't know. See, we got any order. We just ruined it. We just ruined it. We did it. So we're yeah, we are going to need Dane to tell us what order these things happened because and honestly, like a good fix for this would just be to say that you don't roll for the fracture for your for this breakthrough. But you know, I mean, it would, it would not cause all of this confusion. That is because I think if there's no chance of the fracture coming out, I don't care what order people choose their techs. Like it's just not that big of a deal or it to be, you know, I anybody that would care about that, I would be like, you're being hyper competitive and you're trying to make something competitive. That's not. But the the fracture matters a lot and the fact that that that crimson can bring it out before we even start play is such a big deal. That's enough on just one minor part of it. Let's talk about the home system. Yeah. On the breakthrough that that we haven't even said what it does. Yeah. Okay. Their home system is called ACCREX to like CREAS but with X's that that's cool. That's fun. It is a four two planets and I mean, that's good. Yeah. For four resources at home. Yeah. Yeah. We absolutely want that. There are commodity two faction. So they are sort of poor, although we'll you know, we'll put a pin in that for how poor rich they might be. We can at least say definitively, they start a little poor. Like that's for sure. Yes. Which I yeah, which I think will influence a lot of the decisions you will make in the early game and like who you'll swap with all that kind of fun stuff. Yes. Let's talk about their abilities though. Yeah. Their abilities. The first ability is Sundered. This is a big one. You cannot use wormholes other than epsilon wormholes. Other players, units that move or are placed into your home system are destroyed. Okay. So yeah, two big things here. You can use wormholes. Right. What this really means is you cannot move through them or maybe that's what it means maybe I so I'll be completely forthcoming here. I understood because of conversations I'd had with playtesters that you cannot use wormholes meant an all encompassing lack of like it's like wormholes don't exist for you, meaning or crimson. They don't create adjacency or the use of other abilities. I think it would work in reverse like for the other player, the wormholes would be adjacent, but not for you. If that makes sense, right? Like when you're active, they're just not they're not doing anything. We thought that's what use meant. And you know, I was playing my research games, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. And I was playing around this because this is a big detriment, right? Like wormholes are useful. So and and you'll see there are other abilities that are going to care about adjacency quite a bit. So I was doing that and then Dane went ahead on Reddit to say that and I quote, they can't move through them. Other things are fine. For now, that's my ruling. So not really sure, you know, in the future, this this information might be useless because we may have gone back to a strict reading. I did play two games where under this ruling and there was a lot chiller. So the and I that affected the writing of this guide. So we won't be talking about some stuff because of, you know, this one sentence that Dane said on a Reddit AMA. But yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Dane. Thanks, Dane. I hope you don't change your ride. Otherwise, I'll be annoyed. I have a feeling he might. I think he might. Yeah. I think he uses pretty, you know, like Marion Webster dictionary use kind of seems like a pretty set and stone definition. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't feel like they should be able to. The other thing is, yeah, your home system is untakeable. Right. Obviously, you know, we have to talk about the one situation where they can lose their home system. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. It's when you get Mirage in the sorrow. And then last fashion sends a galvanized unit into your home system. Right. destroys your space stock and pds and all ground forces. And then actually takes Mirage and uses peace accords to take your home system. There we did it. We're done. Yay. We don't talk about it anymore. It's been discussed. That's it. So don't worry. We had to do it. We had to do it. You don't have to make that comment now. We just say you were warming up your fingers to go to your keyboard. And now you can just rest your hands rest easy friends. We welcome. You're welcome. But no, this is a huge deal. It means you could kind of play like a maniac and leave your home system empty and just just have it all out there. You don't have to worry. You're unslable. Yeah. You are like just like that. You're like sorry. You're like deep rot a little bit. You you can just play on the front and never worry about reinforcing. You never have to have a stack of ground for like any infantry in your home system, they should leave. They should be getting out there and doing stuff because they're there. There's no beneficial effect to having them. All right. What's next? Yeah. Their next ability is incursion. When you activate a system that contains a breach, you may flip the breach. So the breaches, you have seven of them. They have two sides. One is inactive, which means it's not doing anything. And the other side is active. And systems that contain active breaches are adjacent. At the end of the status phase, any player with ships in a system that contains an active breach may remove that breach. Yeah. And so a big note there, this is something that I feel like took me a little bit to get. In fact, I had this messed up in my mind. Remember that that active breaches make the system adjacent for everybody, not just for you. So other people could use your breaches, which is also like that's maybe a that's fine because right, if they get back to your home system, it's not a big deal. But you have to make sure that you understand that they could use that to get into your slice. They could also use it to help out. Like you can sort of do a bit of a win/slay ghost type thing. It's just a little complicated and sometimes a bit difficult. And it's also important to note that you have seven breaches, although one of them is about to get eaten up. But you start with seven in your supply. Yes. I'm getting to a bit of the strategy here. I think for the most part, because you're going to, we're going to talk about how you put these out. And it's mostly going to be with your destroyers. And you're going to be able to choose if you want to put them on inactive or active. I think most of the time you're going to want to be putting these on the inactive side because you can pretty much flip them whenever you want. And you don't want to give the other people, like, especially if you're putting this on like mechatol or sticks, you really don't want to let other people have access to those vital places. You want to be the one to say, when I want to go there, I'll activate it and I'll flip it and then I'll move in and do it myself. So I definitely think you want to utilize the inactive side more than the active side most of the time. The inactive is great because no one can remove it and no one can use it, right? But I will say, there is a little bit of, there's a bit of carrot and stick happening here. Whenever we get to the breakthrough, I'm going to, I'm going to push back a little bit just to say that like, you're also going to want to use them to move around yourself. And so it becomes this sort of tricky thing of, you don't want to have a breach that you have to activate to use if you're using it to go somewhere, right? Like it's good to have ships on active breaches that can then suddenly pop up where an inactive breaches. But also if all of your slice is full of active breaches, which I have experience is not necessarily the smartest thing to do. The odds that you're going to get attacked, I think go up quite a bit. But yeah, let's finish up the faction abilities. What's the next one? It's called the sorrow. Yes. When you create the game board, place the sorrow tile 94 where your home system would be placed and place an inactive breach in it. The sorrow is not a home system. Then place your home system tile 118 in your play area. So this is like the ghost setup. Right. You have an empty system in your home where your home system would be and your home system is off the game board. So if I mean, your home system's safe anyways, but if it weren't, it would be even harder to do. Yeah, it would be yeah, I don't even know why you need all of this. Yeah, why do you even need the sorrow? It's kind of silly. You're like further away, but also it's impossible. But whatever, I mean, I feel like it works more on a lower level than it makes sense strategically. Also, it's important to note there is a clarification on the back of the rule book that relates to breaches, which is, and this is also another reason to what Blasto was saying of like keeping them on the inactive side is gives you more options strategically. But if the component limit of breaches is reached, inactive breaches can be moved from elsewhere to resolve the effect. Active breaches, however, must be removed or flipped before they can be placed again. So basically like inactive breaches can be scuttled anytime you want to move one around, that's totally cool. Active ones, you're literally going to have to do something to flip it back over before you can do anything with it. I will say just to clarify though, you also have plenty. You're not going to be running out really. If you had it anymore, you would probably run out of time to be able to use them frankly. But you know, that's my opinion anyways. Just just be cognizant of it. Also, you can remove your own breaches. If you have an active breach, incursion lets you remove your own breaches, which is one of the few ways to like otherwise you'd have to activate to flip it. Just keep that in mind. Be careful. When you flip a breach, obviously you're going to be doing that a lot and get to active. Just be sure you're good with doing that. It's hard to reflip them. Honestly, that's good advice right there and something that I probably forgot in some of my research games is just to take advantage of getting rid of them yourself. Like I said, you don't want to have active breaches all over your slide. So, you know, if you get a chance to put one back in the supply, that's not a bad idea. But they also have a faction specific unit, which is how they get the breaches, one of the ways they get the breaches out. Yeah, I think it's the main way. So it's a it's a destroyer. So cost one and it's it's combat eight. So the stores are usually combat nine, right? Yeah, yeah. That's true. So move. Yep. Yeah. Movement two, normal stuff, AFB 9x2. And at the end of any players, combat in this unit system or an adjacent system, you may place one in active breaches in that system. Yeah. So that's good. This is the main way you get your breaches onto the board, I think. Yeah. And just to remind everybody, you start with two destroyers. And yeah, you're going to send them out there. They're going to get close to to combats, especially if DT, you're kind of going to get double benefit, right? That sort of plays into it. Is your sort of like impurrying where you want to you want to clog up the empty systems because you want to explore, but also just you want that adjacency. If any combats happen, you would love to place an inactive breach. It's funny because we're going to talk about the upgrade a little bit, which I mean, actually the upgrade is next. It's a little interesting because the inactive breaches are generally better to place. So it's weird what the upgrade provides you. But yeah, let's let's just get into the upgrade. Yeah, tell me about exile too. Yeah, the upgrade. It's a destroy upgrade. So to read combat seven, cost one, move to so increase the combat by one AFB six times three. So normal normal destroyer two stuff so far. And then the special text is at the end of any players combat in this unit system or up to two systems away. You may place one active or inactive breach in that system. So you can now place them two systems away and you get to choose you get to choose which side you want to put your breach on. Right. And I do want to call out the window here at the end of any player's combat. If you destroy your like let's say you're the one doing the combat. If you and this is something that I feel like is this is a new player trap that you could run into. If you're the one starting the combat and your destroyer dies at the end of it, you don't get to place a breach basically because the destroyer isn't there. But I will say what this is doing for you the fact that it's giving you the option of active or inactive. I could care less. I'm probably always going to pick inactive, especially just just because of how the movement works out even having an active that's out there is pretty much only detriment. But what's good about this is two systems away. That's fun and that can help you get the breaches into hard to reach places like specifically sticks. It's maybe the only way to easily get it on sticks. Yeah, no, there really isn't any other way. And I think I will push back a little bit on the you're not like almost ever going to be doing active or inactive. I think if you're going to be putting on mechatal or sticks or some place you want to go, you're going to be choosing inactive. So these are adjacent. So say you want to move somewhere next to the breach. You'll need that to be active. So if you want to put it one away from mechatal and then you still want to go to mechatal, you need to be active because otherwise you'll have to activate it to flip it. You'll put it on inactive if you want to go to that system specifically. Exactly. And maybe put it on active if you don't care much about the system it's in, but you want to go somewhere near that system. That's true. I'll say I think in the games that I played, I almost never had a reason to place an active system like that though because mostly the way it would work out is I would just have the active system be like the one outside of my home system would be like the best example. So the one in the sorrow, you flip that to active. It starts inactive. You flip it to active whenever you go in to explore with DET. And from then on, it's really just what is my destination? What am I trying to send all of my home systems ships into? Then get an inactive breach there and then go. But you're right. Also, if you're helping with a win slay, which is kind of a scenario I didn't see play out personally, which I wanted to see play out so that I could be talking about that anecdotally in this guide. I think they could really help with win slaying. And I think the destroyer to upgrade is probably necessary or that, you know, like you need the versatility of of to away and also to be able to place them active and have it not be so slow is like, okay, I guess I'll put an inactive breach in here by this like frivolous combat. We're starting. And then next round I'll activate it. I don't know that that seems like way way too slow for a win slay. But you know, it is what it is. What's there other faction tech? Yeah. So the other faction tech is subatomic splicer. This is a tier one yellow tech and it reads when one of your ships is destroyed, you may produce a ship of the same type at a space stop in your home system. Yeah, so I wish I wish it was not limited to home system, but I guess if it if it wasn't, then you could use it like in a combat, I guess is the idea. So well, actually, man, oh yeah, so you still need to answer that question. Wow. So Necro gets a better version of this. I'm realizing because they could then produce like, I mean, it says when one of your ships is destroyed, you may. So if Necro gets this, you can't invade their home system. Oh, well, if you run out of money, basically, and they might. Yeah, they're limited. And I don't know. I don't know the wording on like produce. Can you inherently not produce if you're blockaded? Or is that like a every time that comes up, it explicitly states you can't produce if you're blockaded? Yeah, because I'm thinking like, thinking like star commander, it explicitly says you cannot produce if you're blockaded. Right. This doesn't say that. So maybe, maybe you can, and maybe you can just keep producing destroyers or fighters or whatever, but yeah, well, I'm going to highlight this one for a thing. Yeah, Necro stores. Add to the 100 page list of questions for desking. Or day to answer, would Necro get some atomic splicer? Can they produce during combat? So yeah, obviously for Crimson Rebellion, this question doesn't matter at all because they will never be having a combat in their home system. So you'll just produce the ships. Also, we'll talk about their hero in a little bit. And their hero is going to be the place that you're probably putting a lot of this plastic on. To be honest, I think the tech almost exists to enable the hero to have more juice, basically, because a hero, it's kind of one of those ones where it, it, it doesn't come up or it does come up and it's like the biggest deal in the world. It's that type of one. It's not reliant. It's like Men Tech hero. I think that's the best, the best comparison. But yeah, we'll obviously get to that later. I think this tech is a lot, would be a lot more impactful if we saw around five status for sure phase wins more often because this is like a, because when I played this in the liberation of Ordinian scenario as Necro, because Necro starts with this tech. It was so useful in round five when I was like, I'd send all my stuff there. I'd purposely kill a carrier, rebuild it in my home and locks and that somewhere. It was a lot of fun. But I think a lot of the time, Crimson, you know, you have your home system locked down. Either you're going to be going for an action phase win, like, you know, everyone else. Right. Or you'll just have like a locked up easy point in your home system for status. So it feels less, less impactful than it would if you were playing a non Crimson rebellion faction, which is ironic. Yeah. Yeah. It's like better out of their hands and that kind of way. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of it comes out to the amount of time you have in the game and also your economy. Your economy has, it goes on such a weird journey. And I can't wait to talk about it. But we probably should have talked about this already. But what finally, what does resonance generator actually do? What is it? What is its ability? Yes. As mentioned, it is a blue red synergy and it has two effects. The first one is very similar to the ghost ability. During your tactical actions apply plus one to the move value of each of your ships that starts its movement in your home system or in a system that contains an active breach. This actually lets them get out of their home system. Right. The second part is an action exhaust this car to flip any breach or to place an active breach in a non home system that contains your units. Yeah. Two notes there. First of all, units. Well, that's fun. So it's not just ships. And then second, when you exhaust the breakthrough, you still get the effect of the earlier paragraph. That's something I saw people ask about where they would be like, oh, so do I have to time the resonance generator to be like late in the round after I use all the plus ones and no, no, no, it's fine. There are other components that also work this way. But I just wanted to emphasize for newer players that like if you exhaust it, you're still getting that plus one move value. And also the plus one move value is the reason to have to use active breaches. Like if you're not even using them for especially early game, there will be a sort of reason to use your active breach in the same way that we'd use like gravity drive, right. You're just using it to try to get somewhere round two. And that's the Achilles heel is that you are incentivized to at times, you know, leave an active breach that's just kind of sitting there and then later players are like, oh, okay, well, I'm going to try and come in here. But yeah, you have to try to mitigate that as best you can. Yeah. Sometimes you'll need to put active breaches down, especially like this, let's you get like the Stodians without without gravity drive, which is nice. So you don't need grab drive on this faction, which is interesting because everything in your home system can get to a flipped active breach if you have an active breach in the sorrow. So you don't actually need grab drive, no, which means you can go sling do all that fun stuff. And with this breakthrough, you can still use it to get mechital round two. Yeah, that's primarily where my my love of the AI dev start or Crimson comes from is that you could just get right into stuff like carrier two that I think is super helpful for them. Because honestly, there are problems, I think, come more from a lack of lunch than it does from anything else, really, and also the weird shape of their economy. Oh, yeah. I can also see fighter two being a thing that that's an argument for AI dev over a brain thing else is fighter two. So next up, they have their flagship, which it's pretty good flagship. Yeah. Quiet is. It is a cost, I don't know what I'm saying. That all flagships are costate. Combat five on a two on a five movement one capacity three sustained damage. While this unit is in a system that contains an active breach, other players units and systems with active breaches lose all of their unit abilities. Oh, so what is a unit ability? Is that is that like the van hog blowing up or what is that? Yeah, totally. No, unit ability is anything that's it's like in in bold in bold letters on the on the on the unit. So like sustained damage. Yeah, fighter broad, yeah, bombardment, Floyd production, planetary shield, space cannon. Yeah, anything that's like in bold on the on the unit, essentially. Yeah, that correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that's I actually I think deploy isn't one, but I think all of those others are that's that's correct. A lot of the time the way this works out just to keep it really simple because I think there's something about crimson that like as you're taking in the components, you'll kind of think of it in terms of like, wow, this could be for anything. And it's like, well, it's not really it's like any time we're talking about a faction that has like high movement potential or they can get anywhere. You'd be like, oh my god, but I'm playing as ghost. I could go anywhere. It's like, well, you always want to go to the same places though in Twilight Imperium. And quiet is I feel like the play is to have it in a breach. It could be in the sorrow where you have a breach or you've sent the quiet is to mechital wrecks or sticks. These are two places that you're going to want to go. It's not, you know, it's not rocket science. And then when they're there, anybody sending a fleet against you is not going to have we'll just say primarily sustain damage. A lot of it's about taking sustained damage away and AFB because AFB is a big way to kind of close the gap on a fleet. And that kind of shuts a lot of options off. I one of the first crimson games I ever saw where someone was playing them super effectively was there was a squeamish eamoo game where he was playing as crimson. He used his hero to put out the flagship in a bunch of other units. And it was this weird surprise thing where suddenly no one had just no one had a fleet that could do could dent the fleet at all because you would lose your ability. So suddenly your HP would go down and there were so many fighters that you're just kind of ran out of ran out of juice in order to do anything about it. And I'll say this too. This is a part of my carrier to argument is that one of the best things that you can do with a hero is stack fighters on top of it. And if you have carrier to then the likelihood that you actually have the capacity to keep those fighters after the combat is a lot higher basically. Yeah. If you'll lose some of them. Yeah. So yeah. Hopefully you'll have space afterwards. The flagship is really, really good. Yeah. I think you I think you realize very quickly just how important unit abilities are when you lose them. Yes. Because because fights are snowballly. Right. If you if you if you have an unlucky role at the beginning of a fight and you lose your HP and then you get less hits and they get more hits and then it creates the snowball effect and not having sustained damage on your units. Really exponentially accelerates that that snowball effect. Yeah. And it's it it really it really turns the battle. It turns the tide of a lot of fights. Turns a lot of a faction advantages off to like the most obvious one would be like Barrony. They're basically Barrony isn't even doing anything to this at all. Yeah. Yeah. No sustained damage means no NES means no word. I mean what what are even you doing? And now Barrony is also sort of a destroyer to faction. So we're sort of double done. Titans. They they don't have anything they can say about this. It's just sort of like, oh, my fleet is demonstrably worse now. So and yeah, space can and even so doesn't really make sense. I will say you can still pds to the quiet us. But that's about that's about the only thing I can think of that's going around this in any you know, definable way. The quiet us though the type of flagship it is is it's a closer it's not something you build the whole strategy around. Hopefully you'll have the money for it and you'll be able to make this mechital play or perhaps a sticks play happen. But a lot of times you might you might run out of time before you can really get it going or you might have to make the the desperate play before you're ready to get the the quiet us out. That was something that I think me and you had a game where I remember at the end of it being like if only I'd built quiet us speak. Oh, it was because you you were playing Mewat and you came in with with bombardments. Yeah. Yeah. I had I had make an example of their worlds. Yeah. And there was an active breach on mechital. And I mean, I didn't even think about like I didn't even check if you had your flagship on a breach. But if you did, I wouldn't have been able to bombard. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't do the secret. I don't even know if I would have been able to take the planet. I didn't have that many infantry with me. I was completely relying on the on the bombardment. So yeah, I know I would have I would have had no chance of winning that game if the quietest was on an active breach. Yeah. I'm going to blame that one on just running out of time, though, because it wasn't even the kind of thing where I had an opportunity to build it and like decided not to for some strategic reason. It was just I think we were first action round five or actually maybe even first. No, was it round? No, it was round five. I think I think first action, round five, you negotiated for the fashion commander. Yes. The commander then played overrule. Yes. And then on the next action, I came in with fleet log and imperial. Yeah. And did that thing. Yeah, there was like they're they're really we didn't have any time. Yeah, time. Yeah. It's something you have to kind of you kind of have to be set up for it in advance. If you want to to do it, like it needs to be probably on the sorrow. The sorrow seems like the best place for the flagship to be or sure breach and still be still be safe. I mean, or it's still fine to have it on the hero as long as there's already an active breach on, you know, a critical system like mechatal wrecks, for example, because them being able to just kind of throw it in there. And obviously in that in that theory, you have to control mechatal wrecks and have a ship there, right? So if there's no combat, then there's no getting quiet us out suddenly. So, you know, it's it's go either way, but you you probably probably safer to just stage it in the sorrow because then, you know, you can't be played around in that way. It's like they're not going to I mean, I guess they could still come to the sorrow and blow it up. But at least then they got to do that. And you'll know that they've done that before, you know, anything else really happens. But yeah, it's a it's great flagship good closer. Let's talk about that. Mech. Yeah, their mech is called the Revenant cost to combat six, sustained damage, all your typical stuff. And it has a deploy during the commit ground forces step of your tactical action in a system that contains an active breach. You may commit one mech even if you have no units in the system. Yeah. Only thing I want to emphasize there is that it's on your tactical action. A lot of people get really excited about this. They'll read the oh, I can just commit mechs out of nowhere. And I've I've heard players talk about it as if you can do it defensively. You cannot do it defensively. It's only something you can do to like surprise attack someone. And it's not much of a surprise attack. It's just one mech. But sometimes that's enough. In fact, oh, it was yeah, that was another thing from our game. That was the game where I was able to use this to take mech at all right, sneakily. Yeah. Yeah, there were exo-try room twos in the space. And I just like swoops down a little mech and was like, all right, we're all good. Yeah. It's very like gamma mama. Yes. If you I mean, this is like really sneaky for control objectives because something we'll talk about later is Crimson's a really good stalling faction. Yes. And if you can just stall out for a while, stall someone out and then somehow get a breach into a system you need to get to, either by initiating the combat yourself or maybe someone else went there. And then you can just send a mech throughout through the entire through the entire space area, get around all the ships and and hopefully take whatever you need to take. It's really it's really sneaky. It's what it is. Yeah, it's fun. But yeah, it always comes down to do you already have your breaches though. And I would say remember the order of operations is on activation, you flip the breach. So you could have an inactive breach on a system. Let's say it's not mech at all Rex. Let's say it's one of the, I don't know, maybe it's in sticks or or in one of the other planets in the fracture. You're flipping it, then you're committing. If you could for some reason, I don't know how this would work out, but if you ended up with a with a breach in the planets with the neutral systems, you could do a funny thing of like committing the mech underneath them and having the neutral ships defending your planet, which I dig a lot. Actually, I saw something similar to that recently, but I forget who it was or how they were doing it, but it was it was again. Yes, it was in hero committed underneath the neutral ships. God, I love it. Next up is their prom note, which is, you know, it's not as important, but it is still there. No, not really. So it's an action places card face up in your play area and place the severed token, which is like a little zero with a cross through it in a system that contains your units, wormholes in that system have no effect during movement. That's funny. This one says no effect during movement, but the their their abilities doesn't say no effect during movement. That's funny. Remove the severed token and return this card to the rebellion player at the end of the status phase. Wow. And yeah, it's funny. He wrote, he wrote it right on the prom note for what he wants, you know, why not just why could they just have the same if it's really supposed to be that Dane, why doesn't it just say the same thing? You know, the thing I don't like about this is that because it the you remove this ever token at the end of the status phase, I get that it's like, okay, well, maybe sell it in rare like it's like forcing you to sell it in a way that that doesn't really make that much sense. So I try to sell it personally, I sell it as a stall. I just say if somebody needs a stall, then, you know, a buck for a stall or just some kind of anything or a stall, then that's cool. And I sold it. I definitely sold it more than once. So it's not like, you know, people want a stall every once in a while. So there you go. It's also useful. It's also good for scoring secrets. Yeah. It's one of the it's one of the few ways that you can score betrayer friends like on multiple tries. Right. The first time and then fail, you can try it again. That's true. It's in your player. It's like it's like a terraform. The tight, yeah, the tight, yeah, terraform. So that's useful. Yeah, yeah, it's not enough, but it's not nothing. It's a stall really. I mean, be careful about who you sell it too, because they can use it to block up your epsilon token in your home system. Oh, yeah. That's horrible. Be careful with that. Probably don't give Dane one who has lightweight. Oh, wow. That's I didn't even think about that. That is a point against selligate right there. Maybe that's a reason not because I feel like the way it was written, you know, let me know what you think about this. But I feel like the way it was written was like Dane was trying to say like, I don't want to lock down a wormhole for the whole game. You know, I don't want it to be terraform where it just sits there forever and we just permanently say there's a wormhole not in play. Okay, fine. I totally get it. But then you so you sort of take away some of the usefulness where it's like, okay, so what? I'm selling this in round five at the very beginning, you know? And if I'm selling it to somebody, like am I selling it to the player that's winning so they can like block up a wormhole that we would use to like attack them. Like, why am I doing that really? Like, that's the thing I can't work out with this is like what the intended effect on gameplay is because it seems like a like the logic it's a little bit at odds with itself. And then on top of that, for you to throw in this extra thing of you could use it on an epsilon wormhole and basically turn off your your pipeline to the map. Well, now I hate it. You know, now I'm like, well, what's it for a buck? I'm going to risk that. That's not worth a buck, you know? Like, what if I sell it for a buck in round one and then they keep it the whole game? And then they use it to stop me at the end like that's something that what happened to be, you know? Yeah, I mean, if I got this in round one, I wouldn't play it immediately. Yeah, like really need to. I'd save it. I mean, that's what that's what you usually do with stalls is you save it until you need it and you usually need it in the late game. Yeah. So I think if you're going to, if you're going to sell this, you probably want to make a condition of you need to play it immediately. Yeah. And like, you don't even have to play this on a system that has a wormhole. You just place it like you can place it in a system without a wormhole and just does nothing. Oh, you're right. Yeah. You could just place the severed token. Yeah. I mean, all it's saying is place the severed token in the system that contains your units, wormholes. Yeah. Oh, wow. That's it. There we go. Another. Also, if you're with ghosts, you can, you can put this in mouse. That is one use case because it doesn't affect ghosts moving out of mouse because they're ghosts, but it prevents other people from going in. Also, those are, well, so I guess it wouldn't affect their breakthrough either because it's just wormholes in that system have no effect during movement. It wouldn't affect production. So, okay. Yeah. Good point. I'll say this. This is one of those factions where I feel like the lead. If you're feeling like this sounds like a bad faction, the leader suite is I think the star of the show solves basically all the problems. And it kind of makes them. It's, I think the people that are arguing that this is an S tier faction with, which personally just kind of spoilers. I don't think they're an S tier faction. I think they're good. I don't think they're in the best of the best. It's because of these next two things that we're going to tell you about. Yes. So their agent is called rock raven. It is an action. So, we're stalls. Exhaust this card and choose one player. That player may swap the position of two of their ships in any systems. They may transport units when they swap. Yeah. So just kind of, they're a new new term there. Swapping. They just swap. It's sort of like, you know, it's it's, it's like married to the the ghost of krius hero ability, but on like a minor level. So, it's kind of echoing that kind of thing. But it's the reason that they're not really a one carrier start is because you send out your carrier. You you take some planets. You swap it with a destroyer. And then you go again. So you get to go twice. And obviously, as we go, it gets more and more impactful whenever we, you know, it's like we're just like this weird faction of like, we we kind of tunnel into a spot that we're like, okay, we're here. And I can even do stuff like, okay, I'm I maybe I don't have I built the flagship at home. And I swap it into mechital wrecks. And now blammo. I have I have that ability on lock. And we're all there and ready to go. And the fact that you transport stuff to it's it's great ability super useful in the early game. And then kind of comes back into vogue in the late game as well. Yeah, for sure. The only thing I'd say is, I think this agent kind of encourages you to just like never build another carrier in their game. Yeah, you need to like be cognizant of that and still build more ships or sure, because I've seen so many times where they just build up like a complete glass house sort of slice where there's because you bring the infantry, you're going to swap the infantry back so you can take other systems. And then your plans are empty. Yes, you're only really having a destroyer protect it. So, you know, they're they're really weak in the early game, which is one reason why I think they might not be a great fact. Right. That's your factions because their start is not great. I love that you're saying this, man, like this is this is exactly where I'm at with this faction is like they are they have potential for greatness, but there are they're they're a bit leaky. We've got holes that are taken on water. And that's one of them. Because I mean, you always want to like, okay, so here's here's a confluence of things. We've got oh, they're good at custodians. Okay. And that's we should probably do that, right. Like if we can do that, you should do that. In the situation where we do that, though, we're probably not having the best economic start because we maybe didn't, you know, do tech and plastic, by the way. Also, I feel like they're more plastic than tech if you're choosing between those because they can get away with a super light tech game because of this agent and because of their breakthrough. And also really like the they sort of don't need either of their faction tech, like that both of those upgrades are like pretty optional. So you could live in a world where you just didn't really do this or two. This or two seems pretty pretty necessary. I don't know. I don't know because if you if you just have the plastic, like let's say you just have a lot of destroyers and they're out everywhere, then you could be in a situation where you're just kind of like, well, I pretty much have the breaches where I want them to be. Once you get like mextal wrecks with an inactive breach, maybe, I mean, where else are you even even care, you know, like at a certain point, you can sort of feel like, well, depending on what objectives are out, you might not even care about going anywhere else, you know, so maybe not. Once you have that option, sticks is a big thing. Sticks is great, but you could also go from, you know, once the fracture comes out, if you have gotten into mechital wrecks, all you have to do is send a destroyer through one because there's a there's a ingress token on mechital wrecks, but that's one and then two. Now you're adjacent to sticks, right? Like, yeah, you have base movement in order to get there. And technically, you may even be able to, you know, you could you could send two destroyers through at different times and have that second one take a plus one movement and actually be the one that starts the combat that puts it in there. And that was all just with destroyer once. Really, the thing is I almost feel like it should be written backwards. I think destroyer ones should be active breaches only and then destroyer two is where you can place inactive because in active is better. We know inactive is better, you know. Yeah, no, that's a good point. I also just think the destroyer two upgrade, like even even discounting the additional range, like the AFB destroyer two upgrade is is also just a big deal. That's the reason to get it really. I think that's the, no, yeah, I think that's the reason to get it. I agree with you. Like the active breach part of it isn't as important, but like, especially in the early game, you're just you're going to be having carrier and destroy your fleets. I don't expect to see a dread not now until honestly almost never like I you can go through the entire game and not build a dread not and I'd be kind of okay with that. Yeah, destroyer destroyer twos are your early game deterrent is mainly the reason why I think they're they're useful to get. Yeah, I I agree with it. If that's the if that's a utility you're looking for and absolutely, but there's no reason to like rush like I there were there was a game I played where I rushed for the destroyer to upgrade and I just felt like it didn't offer me any and then I was kind of embarrassed because I was like, okay, well, have all this this, you know, utility now that two systems away, I can put a breach, but then it just never came up and I just was like, oh, well, I guess I just keep doing it in systems that are right next to me and not ones that are like way far away. Let's talk about the commander though. It's time it's time to talk. Oh, yeah, it's time we'll be here for a little while. Their their commander is called Aksever. The unlock is to place a breach token in a system that contains another player's units. So usually they'll be with your destroyer, but you can also kind of you can also kind of make it so you place it with your breakthrough if you have if you're like above a system that contains another player's. If you took a zoo, basically, if you just kept somebody's infantry on a planet. Yeah. Yeah. But the ability is at the end of a combat between any players gain one commodity or convert one of your commodities to a trade good. Oh boy. Yeah, pretty nutty. Obviously, even nutty are with the fact that this is the commander, which means we can, you know, we can give this ability to somebody else. I, you know, push back. If you want, I think current logic is you want this and somebody else's hands so that you can both sort of both float styles say like, well, we're going to we're going to continue to wash each other because otherwise you're I mean, if you if you have someone to wash with every time this go this doubles in value. If you have to do it all on your own, you're taking a commodity, you're taking another commodity. And then after that, you're converting because you're only a two commodity faction. But it remains to be seen if if washing with someone else is smart because I don't know that it is a lot, right? Because we so in the game we played as when you're crimson, I was muah, we swapped alliances. And I think what you're looking for in a swap is some early game benefit that will offset your bad early game because you're you're you're giving someone like 20 trade goods, right? Maybe even more in in the late game, but not much right now, right? Because not a lot of combats happen in round round one and two. And whatever you're getting for that, whether it's actual value in terms of like I gave you my muah alliance, which was unlocked. And also just the nebulous, this person is not going to attack me because they don't want to lose this ability. They really don't it's a like support really thrown level, you know, like yeah, no, it definitely not. It's it's something like I built my game around it. Right. Maybe maybe I won't go that far, but it it significantly impacted my game and fixed my economy to the point where like I was not even going to consider attacking you. I think you did a lot of things that that a muah player would not normally get to do in a game. Like you you seem like I would say around a head of where a normal muah game would be just thinking about all that you accomplished. I remember in that game, you you got to sticks before anybody else did. And before that, even you had gotten into the fracture and taken some of those planets before you even went to stick. So you got in, got some relics, then you went, took sticks. And then your journey even took you all the way back to max. So yeah. And I was able to go like deep blue like my I was just I was able to do all the spendies and not worry and and get plastic and get tokens to start. Yeah. So I guess it did kind of it did kind of significantly alter my game that I'm thinking about. I think so. And I think that like I'm not sure what the trade should be like I'm not sure that like because you can't get anything that matches this value, right? Like that's just kind of and that's okay. Like I think that that if if the way it works out is like, well, yeah, I mean, you'll never be paid what it's worth because that's impossible. No one has a way to pay you what it's worth. And even if they if people were like, oh, I'll give you support for the throne for it. Like that's not a that's not interesting policy for like a strategy guide to be like, oh, get a support for the throne for this. It's like, well, a lot of people are just never going to do that. And I don't think they should, you know, I would never do that. Yeah. That's it's not it's not like that. But it does alter things quite a bit. I'll tell you, I was cooking up I was cooking up a trade that I wanted to see happen, which was I think the deep rot commander swap is comparative value because by the end of the game, the the crimson commander is going to have made more money overall. But the deep rot commander starts printing money right away right away. We're making money. Yep. Round one. I think that's that is I think the trade. But when I tried to cook it up, I tried to like make it happen. Bam Bam got in there and, you know, just kind of spun a web of lies. And deep route went for it. And then it was just like, well, we're not, but it would just it would have been also like overall, the deep rot commander makes a lot of money. If you don't off the top of your head, essentially it allows players to spend less or tech. And when they do that, you gain a commodity. So it's going to happen that most of the time the players want to save a little money. So they do it a lot. And so you make a lot of money. I think the deep rut player would be crazy not to do that swap. I think it's I think it's a completely valid trade for like it solves both of your problems. We brought has a really strong early game with their home system. They like starting tech. They get they get so much tech, but as as everyone gets the the non unit upgrade tax, you kind of start to peter out because you have you have sort of everything. And then eventually everyone sort of catches up with you, but that kind of fixes your late game because you just have so much money on. Right. Right. So kind of it kind of solves both of your problems, which is your crimson's early game and deep ross late game. Yeah. I don't I don't know why either of those players would never never do that swap. Yeah, I'm disappointed that I don't have that game for you all. I will I think in the future, whenever we circle back around to crimson, I will try and and make this game happen and try to even preserve it on YouTube. Just say like, Hey, here's what this looks like. But I think it is in the same way that we used to talk about catfish, a con and Jolnar. I think this crimson deep rot thing is it's going to happen in a tournament game and people are going to watch it and they're going to be disgusted by it. And I think it will have kind of its own heuristic and shorthand or it. But then get to do it yet. It's going to happen though. Let's close out the all of the components here, the component overview with that hero. Yes, their hero is called fragment reality. We don't have the name here. I don't remember it, but when you produce ships, yeah, that's okay. When you produce ships, you may place any of the ships onto this card at the start of a space combat. It's a very important timing window. At the service space combat, you may purge this card to place all ships from this card into the active system. Yes. And capacity is not checked in combat. Okay. So you could just pile on as many fighters as you can build. And then you get to, you know, just plop more fighters than as possible into a combat, of course, at the end of combat capacity. We'll be checked again and all of the excess fighters will die. But I think in a lot of ways, this hero is the reason that just like Blasto was saying earlier, I see them as a carrier, destroyer, fighter, action with fighters being like kind of the cherry on top. You don't, you don't have to do that, but they're not a, I don't think they are really a dread two faction. Leans out of this component, basically. And I would rather win fights with as Crimson by just overwhelming you with as many HP as possible. I think that's just more reliably going to mean that you that you lose basically HP ones fights. And especially when they cannot sustain, yes, if you have your flagship, they cannot sustain damage. Like HP will win fights. Like you will, you will snowball over them if you have enough fighters. Yes. And this hero is kind of the, it's the closer, right? You use it to take mechital with like fleet logistics and like playing period, you use it to take sticks with a million fighters if they are defending the air and not the ground, which if you don't have integrated, you're not going to be able to defend the ground very well. Right. So yeah, it's, it's, it's a hero that I feel like half of the time will do nothing. Yeah. And half of the time is going to be like Mentech hero and just win you a fight, which might win you the game. Right. Yeah. It's, I will say it has another aspect to it that I like quite a bit, which is like if you do happen to pile a bunch of plastic on it, then the other players have to factor it in as a possibility every time they attack you, which can help if the way that they're trying to stop you is by sort of slowly picking off your ability to score, let's say a control objective or you know, like a influence resource, spendy type situation. The fact that you're deciding which combat it is and it could be any of them means they really have to break their brain sort of figuring out like which is the right place, which is good. And that's, that is going to be helpful in those cases. Also, you know, we mentioned this before, but it's, it's worth reiterating that I think subatomic splicer is sort of designed in a way to help bring this hero online because it's giving you more instances where you could be building ships that are then going to go onto the hero. It's also just helping you perhaps get kind of a head on production. We're starting with low plastic, right? So the idea that we have a build that can kind of get to the front lines instantaneously, that is that's a good way to kind of get that sort of tempo up, right? We got to build the plastic and then we have to get it to where it's going. And this is helping you skip the get it to where it's going part of that equation. But yeah, it's not, it's not game defining. It's a closer and besides that's not much else. It would be a bigger deal if like for say they could attack your home system than then we would be saying like, well, this is important or defending your home system. But you don't have to worry about that. So I, you know, and I think that's actually part of why that rule is the way that it is, is the maddock stuff. But it's also so that this hero doesn't function basically in the same way that the men tech hero does so that it does have to be used on the front lines. Even if it's defensive, it's at, you know, it's at a place that we're defending out there because that's our win and not just, okay, we've turtled up and this is our, this is our get out of jail free card as far as like defending our home system. But yeah, it's good. I love the art for it. It's kind of like the most heavy metal art that I feel like is in all of Twilight Imperium. So that's, that's pretty cool. Oh, yeah, it is. It's ridiculous. It's like, yeah, it is heavy metal cover. It's very 80s. But let's just kind of summarize real quick before we go on break and then we'll talk about strategy cards and stuff. Crimson rebellion. They're an excellent mechitalrex faction with a demonstrably good kit. We're working their way into custodians or other mid game bonus points. If the fracture, that is, I mean like taking mechitalrex later on the eight and, you know, playing Imperial to get those points. If the fracture comes into play, they have plenty of ways to sneak into sticks. They struggle with coming as heavy as other factions can manage. They're more sneaky than they are like big and strong economically. Their commander is an incredibly potent component in the mid to late game. But it has some issues namely in order to really reap the benefits. You will need to give another player, preferably a neighbor, your alliance in order to have a buddy for washing comms with. This buddy is likely getting a better deal than you are. Last, they're one of the least tech dependent factions I've ever played as their kit essentially hands you most of the functionality you will be looking for in the tech deck. Anyways, that's not permission to research zero tech, but it's just an admission that passing on it early is not going to end your game the way it does or some other factions. I think your hierarchy of needs is plastic and then tech, right? We have to overcome this, you know, this like carrier to destroy your glow value start basically. But yeah, if you overcome that, you have a lot of interesting opportunities once you get your commander online. But for now, let's go ahead and take a quick break and then we will talk about strategy cards. Okay, so we're pretending that we that we didn't break. Yeah, let's have it five days. Yeah, yeah, let's have it be seamless. There's no reason to call that out. You know, it's just kind of, I mean, if we call that out every time we'd be calling it out all the time is the thing. I remember we used to me and me and Matt would do that in the old days. But after a while, you're just kind of like, well, how many times am I going to do this bit? But okay, so that would have it's already been beat to death. It's been beat to death. No, no, no, no, making a joke about they'll notice that I'm wearing a different shirt today. Well, you did. So now, but that's, it's funny. That's a fresh one. You literally found a fresh one to make. So there we go. I guess it was it fully mind to death. There was more, hey, guess what? We didn't just sit and record the whole thing. It would go. But I hope you enjoyed your ad break. And but let's get back into talking about the Crimson Rebellion. How do they work? What do they do? The next big section I want to get into is of course a strategy card discussion. I will say in the past, something I want to break from in the past, we talk about strategy cards mostly in consideration of the round one potential, the early game potential, or these introductory episodes. I kind of just want to talk about any relationship. The faction might have to a particular strategy card that seems notable or specific to that faction kind of getting tired of like sort of restating a lot of the same stuff in the strategy card section, which I'm sure, you know, that will always happen just because of the nature of the game. But the goal being let's talk about these in terms of like, what can you do that perhaps other factions cannot? And we'll start with number one with leadership. I will say something I noticed in my research games with Crimson is because we are a two stall for free action. We get a lot of opportunity or early game leadership stall that I would say is actually maybe even a little bit more effective than a sorrows would be because a sorrow has a reason to want to accumulate their action cards for round five. Right? Like we want to assemble a suite of like good ones that hit hard. So we might not want to, you know, go for a leadership stall. But Crimson, you're doing these two stall actions every time regardless. And it doesn't cost you anything. In fact, you're just incentivized to do it. You can put some early game pressure on everybody with that leadership round two or maybe even round three, although a lot of times by round three, maybe most players can survive the stall. But it's something you can do and you should pay attention to its potential. Slowing everyone else down is never a bad thing. However, you know, a lot of times whenever somebody tries to leadership stall, it's mostly in the interest of extracting a bunch of extortion value out of it, right? Yeah. That's what you should be doing with it. I'd say maybe that's not like the most important thing for us. Like we're going to make money eventually. I personally did it in one of my games and I felt like it was easy to do and was beneficial. Yeah, I think I think round three is the round. You're going to be trying to do that because round two, you know, if you have leadership, you're taking custodians. Right. And you probably like you're not going to have a lot of tokens, like especially strat tokens. Yeah. So you're probably not going to be stalling round two. But if you get it round three, you know, by that point, not everyone has their token situation figured out. And you have, you know, like you said, you have the agent, you have the breakthrough, you have DT stalls. Mm-hmm. It's just a lot you can do that isn't like you said, using up some resource like your sorrow. It's true. I will say though, like I think that even in the situation you're describing, because so I don't want theory of the case here that I'm interested to see how people respond to or like, you know, how it develops over time. My read on Crimson is they are not very tech dependent. In fact, the more and more I play, the more and more I felt like, well, maybe we don't even need to have a do tech. So in the secondary situation, I'm following Imperial round two with custodians. If that gets taken, would you it might not? And then beyond that, I don't consider anything to be a must follow, right? So potentially with even one token in the strategy pool, I might consider a leadership stall round two, because I feel like the earlier you do a leadership stall, the more damaging it is to everybody else. Yeah, that is a good point actually. You don't need to, especially early, probably want to be using your resources on plastic over tech. So yeah, you really don't have that much. You actually need to follow in round two. Yeah. That's definitely the time when it's most damaging, because usually people, you know, used all their tokens around one. So they either have like one, two, two or two to one. And you can really you can really catch some people out with that. But let's move on to diplomacy diplomacy. I feel like is it's funny. I think the theme with talking about diplomacy now will be talking about unlocking your breakthrough and what that is going to mean for all of these various factions, but for Crimson, which is our first up for Thunder's Edge, we're we're not really going to be discussing that because they already start with their breakthrough. However, in a classic last pick situation, which I would say we're not even really sure what last pick is at this point. But if if prophecy of kings, you know, standards are going to hold, then last pick is around one is going to be between diplomacy and it's going to be between construction. I'm kind of favoring Diplo still just for raw value. We have a very strange situation when it comes to our space docs in that we don't have an issue getting ships from our home system to whatever we want to go. And then also we have this kind of fiddly action tech that only procs on our home system space doc and it allows us to get around a lot of the traditional pitfalls of a single space doc, being able to produce our units as they blow up and then possibly put them on like our hero to then sort of redistribute them to the front lines very easily. Makes me feel like we're just not as, you know, kind of hamstrung by production limits as some other factions are. Ironically, if you have diplomacy, you might actually, though, then run into a situation where I say you're taking diplomacy because you want to both build early and, you know, get some tech like there's some tech that we're going to talk about. I think are very good for or Crimson in kind of a supplemental way stuff like a sling ray or sorry sling relay. I think is very good for them. But beyond that, I feel like I'm probably picking Diplo over construction early game. Yeah, I mean, like especially in the later game, right? You don't need the lock down a system part of Diplo that you get from, you know, protecting your home system. Maybe if you have sticks like if you make an early round four sticks play and then take Diplo, that's a thing. But other than that, I can't really think of a situation where I care about that second clause. And especially in the late game, like you're going to be so rich, you really don't care about refreshing planets. Yeah, there's a term that came up in our Twilight's Fall game last weekend that I thought was kind of a thing that we'll I think talk about in relation to Twilight's fall a lot of the time. But I think Crimson rebellion plenty, which is the idea of a post. I actually, I think did you say this? I said, yeah, a post planet economy, which is funny because I had I was saying that in reference to the Crimson commander, which in Twilight's Fall is an ability like I it was my entire economy, which yeah, it was kind of perfect because that I think that's exactly how Crimson will feel like in round four and round five, you will like your entire like you'll have your slice, which is great. But if you like you'll be able to get all your tokens out of the bag in round five when leadership happens, you'll feel to get most of them out in round four. Like you don't really need to save for spending objectives because you can just make that money back in round five if you really need to. Right. And I really think they will eventually be in a post planet economy. Yeah. So there's no reason to help out other people by giving them the diplo secondary. What's so interesting to about like what you're talking about is that early on you're going to have we'll talk about trading a little more. But I mean, I think everyone understands what we're going for is some sort of we give the commander to a neighbor and then we're both washing each other, right? But even in a situation where the table decided like enough is enough, you can still just make combats happen and slowly collect, you know, the few trade goods you might still need or late game spendies. So it's like the amount of versatility that you have in a round five situation is it's quite beautiful. I will say I do think they they are a little slower than than some others when it comes to getting like around four victory or something like that. But yeah, it's not politics. We're definitely a custodians faction easily. I mean, we have the kit to get there. We're maybe not around one custodians faction. So there's definitely a decent chance that we get beat by somebody else, but it's just like such a calm, cool little play here. And I would say that in the world where you take politics, you get the speaker and then you do not achieve custodians, you could still very easily think about positioning yourself or an imperial take. But let's talk about like, you know, what are we doing in order to get custodians? All you do is position your character correctly with the agent so that you then play your breakthrough to place an active breach in the carrier system. And then the carrier is going to take mechital wrecks round two. So carrier will well, I guess the way the entire round one would go is your carrier is going to go to a system and take two planets and then it's probably going to be swapped with a destroyer. And then it's going to go to its end point system after which you play the breakthrough, you place your active breach. Now you have plus one movement in that system and the carrier can make it to mechital wrecks. We don't care about tech timing. None of that stuff is going to have any effect on this. Obviously the only, you know, kind of unknown here is did you have the influence in your slice in order to do it, which is not always going to be true. But I would say if you start with the slice that just doesn't have six influence between two systems and with some trade goods in there, that's a that's a that's a rough start. But it is a thing. After round two, speaker control play can get I would say a little dicey because players are going to be hyper vigilant about you as far as your odds. Mostly I think right now players are really scared of the fact that they cannot go to your home system. You should be prepared. I think to position yourself to win from slightly behind as opposed to trying to lock every axis of the game down. It's definitely not it's if you try to do I want to have good tempo and I want to have speaker control. I think the I think your abilities are going to kind of bite you in the butt there a bit. I mean they are decent at winning from ahead. But it really depends on what the objectives are. And I think that's that's a big thing when you're trying to win from ahead. Can I can I score these objectives just for my home system is is is what is what you kind of got to think about if you're if you're trying to streak on ahead. Like is it are there a bunch of control objectives? No. Okay, maybe I'll try it. But if there are like spendies and like spend tokens or whatever, you can maybe try and and go for that. But it really it really is going to depend. I almost feel like and I didn't get to try this. But it'll definitely be something that I want to revisit whenever we come back around to these guys. But I think that more repeatable success might come from out the gate basically saying like I'm okay with factoring a stage two into my math here and not saying because the thing the thing that will always be true about them is the start is weak plastic wise, which means you are going to be starting from behind a little bit. And and also if players kind of wise and up, you are and this is always true of of any one carrier faction or really just any faction whatsoever. But like there are going to be situations where somebody looks at you and says like I'm just going to pop that. And then we're good. And your agent also incentivizes this situation where you're not really protecting your slice all that much. In a sense, I feel like they do have a ghost of creus problem. Or I guess I should say prophecy of King's era ghost of creus problem where their slice can end up being so weak that if any player decides it's aggression time, you are likely losing that fight. You don't have much of a much defensive stock, I would say. Obviously, there's going to be the point in round four and round five where your economy has come online. And now, you know, the sky is sort of the limit. And I think your hero is definitely designed in such a way as to help you catch up defensively at the end of the game. But your early game is always going to I would say kind of show your hide a little bit or maybe belly. I guess is what I mean. It's really that. And that's why I think who you choose as your alliance buddy is so important. And it's it shouldn't just be for what they give you, but what like the safety that that represents. Yes, I think is a big thing. So if you like don't I would not swap this alliance across the table, you want to I mean, one you want to be neighbors with them so you can actually trade cons. Right. Let's talk about construction. I'm curious. I kind of feel like there are little less of a construction faction. Not just not to say that it's absolutely a no. I think a forward dock is sort of always a good thing and never really a bad. And maybe the more we talk about it, the more it feels like maybe having more production is going to help them. However, in my research games, I always went production light because my economy made it so that I was never hitting the ceiling. And basically throwing in sling relay was enough for me most of the time to to feel insured as far as like I'm producing my maximum plastic. It was only until the end of the game that I would maybe feel like, oh, that ceiling had come down a little bit. And maybe I have more money than I know what to do with. I'm not sure, you know, whether a forward dock would have made like a gigantic difference there. I'm curious as to your thoughts as far as like structures and crimson. Yeah, I do think I probably want to push back a little bit because so usually a forward dock is good for positioning, right? You want to get your plastic either like on a wormhole or closer to mechital. But for crimson, that's not really the reason why you want to do it, right? If you're playing if you're playing the game well and if you have your breaches in the right spot, the actual positioning of the dock doesn't matter as much. I mean, you get more movement if you put an active breach on the dock and then everything from there gets in the digital movement. Whereas from your home system, they need to move to the sorrow and then go forward. But really, I think the forward dock is good for production capacity more than anything. And I think you did actually touch on that. But in the late game, when you have your hero, you're going to want to put fighters on it. But yeah, I don't know if you're going to be able to do that. If the only thing you're building from is your six productive capacity home system. And the faction tech, if you're even getting it, which we'll talk about later, is not good for producing fighters because you have to pay one per fighter. You don't get to pay one and get two fighters. Right. The value of the time. Yeah. The values messed up. Yeah. I think, I mean, one, it's good to get a structure out just in case that objective comes out. I mean, that's never a bad thing to touch for that in the early game. And if you have the token, I just do it. But I do think the extra production capacity does actually go a long way. I do think that if there's anything that's going to help you solve the problems we've laid out, it's going to be that. I just feel like, I don't know, I always have this kind of production math that I do. If I'm finding that I'm having to spend too much, I honestly, and there is a part of me that thinks that maybe taking custodians as crimson costs too much for you because you're essentially the curve of your economy is your poor, and then you slowly become rich. But if you spend six on custodians round two, I feel like you, you don't come online until even later in the game, and perhaps it's too late, basically. So a situation where you do a forward doc and you're sort of trying to save your money and you're not spending six influence on custodians and you're keeping your token economy kind of normal and your plastic out in a defensive posture. I think is maybe, maybe smarter in the long run, although I would have to play more research games to see like kind of how that to talk about results. In every single one of my research games, I was in the running as far as either second up to win or like I had a path. I never I never lost a path in any of my research games, which I consider the my measure for success with space cats research game is essentially that is the only the only time I consider it a failure is if there was no possibility of me winning in the final round, right? Like if it if it just mathematically wasn't possible, that is a fail state. However, I never closed the deal. I will say that it never actually came together. So I did feel like they were missing something and perhaps construction was the thing. Let's talk about trade. So there's not a whole lot to say here. I mean, money is great and maybe is better at solving these problems. Again, week early game economy. So trade first round for Crimson could completely change the math. I never got to do that. I will say so I never really got that early injection of money. It was always sort of the same curve with the custodians game being probably a much worse curve. But I think a trade start might really shift how everything looks for them. I will say I think that's definitely possible. What do you think? Yeah. I mean, trade is good early. You don't care as much about the like you're not doing expeditions. So the the access to the like one of the easiest expeditions, you know, cares much about. Right. That just means that you can use that money. I mean, especially if there's a spendy objective out, like usually you wouldn't be able to, you know, tech and maybe slaying and do a spendy. But with trade, you definitely can. So I don't I don't think picking trade round one is ever a bad decision. Right. You really don't need it in the late game. But in round one and round two, it's probably one of your top picks if you're not, you know, politics custodians, that kind of thing. Yeah. I do think it like would have a fairly dramatic effect on your your plastic and your your token economy in like round two, round three, especially if there is not an economy objective. If it's like you have speaker round one, you're not taking politics and pushing from that position, like a trade pick, I think I don't know. I'd be curious to see how that affects the overall tempo of of everything. Let's talk about warfare. So I feel like the agent kind of makes the warfare primary a little bit pointless. I don't think it's necessarily doing anything for you. I almost feel like it might be like daring you to spread even thinner. So I don't really like that. It's exactly what it's doing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's a trick. It's a trap. The secondary, I think is absolutely helpful. And I think I'd rather do that because again, we never have to worry about keeping ships in our home system. And obviously, you know, that means a lot at the end of the game. It means a lot at the beginning of the game too. You know, lots of other factions have to think about like, Oh, well, I don't want to leave myself open to some sort of weird early aggression play. So you play this kind of methodical like moving the ships around in a thoughtful way and not just leaving everything open. We can just leave everything open. So anything you build off the warfare secondary, just you can just get it out there, you know, and it's good to probably have it on especially considering our breakthrough. The fact that at any point we could anywhere we have ships, we could just plop down a breach and then say everything from here can move plus one. You can kind of be pretty frivolous about where you're you're putting stuff. Just get it on the board somewhere. And it's fine. You will probably be able to make some sort of play with it. So big fan of warfare secondary. I think it's kind of it's my number one priority. Although, I mean, at the end of the day, it's the important part is building the ships, right? And warfare is harder to do in Thunder's Edge because there's, you know, a lot of people do it first action now. So if you have perhaps per se like the tech card in hand, for example, then now you might not even get to do it because of police supply. Yeah, you're you really can't I think though that's more fine for Crimson because you just want to get a second carrier out there. And whether you do that through teching sling and then slinging carrier and using like the infantry already have at home or doing the warfare secondary. I think either of those are fine. Yeah, it's true, which does kind of tie into into tech next, which is you usually like tech is a lot worse than Thunder's Edge round one because of that warfare interaction. You were just talking about where where fair will go first, they will go out and then unless you're a faction that you know needs to build ground forces, you're not going to be using warfare for anything effective. You're not going to be able to build that second or third carrier off of it. Yeah. So that's why I usually I'd avoid tech. But if you're on Crimson, you know, you just care about getting that that second carrier out there. So you can tech sling and then use the resources that, you know, having the tech primary save you to sling out a carrier or a dreadnought, depending on what you need to take. So I actually actually think tech is is better on them. If people are avoiding it like the plague and you're like fifth like fifth pick. Yeah, it's still there. I just yeah, I just take it. Also, I just not do warfare. I mean, generally, I think I just love sling for them because then we are three stalls out the gate. I mean, it's just it's so good. It's so ridiculous. Again, it's you are technically better than Isarl would be in the early game because Isarl does not throw their stalls away like that. They don't just stall round one, round two and round three. They're they're saving up for the ridiculous stall and your advantage is yeah, you're just doing you're just doing three stalls with sling. I mean, there's no and it's not, you know, this isn't some sort of like aggression play. It's like, well, I have three actions I can do. I'm not going to just like not do them, you know, so yeah, I think I think tech is it's interesting. Let's talk about Imperial and we can just go back to tech and just talk about tech for a while. Not that there's a whole lot to say, but Imperial, I think, is an interesting one for them because I haven't seen a faction besides like Winu that I think has a more obvious like here are components that are put into the game that are designed to get you to Mechatal Rex, right? I feel like round two or round three taking this and going after the Mechatal Rex bonus point in that way. It's easy and it's doable with the only factor really being like how much resistance are you meeting on Mechatal Rex. But I just want to spell it out like how how simple this is to just kind of synergize all of these components. All you really need to do is move a destroyer to adjacent to Mechatal Rex. You can pick up, you know, the destroyer upgrade, which makes it a little bit easier. But like we've sort of already said, it's not the difference is I would say kind of negligible. It gives you some versatility, some some like I don't have to have the destroyer exactly where I want it to go, but it's generally better to place in active breaches so it's kind of a confusing upgrade. But yeah, destroyer adjacent to Mechatal Rex, we watch for any fight to happen over Mechatal Rex or alternatively we start one. We could just send a destroyer round two into Mechatal Rex. It doesn't even have to win the fight. It just has to go there. Reminder, you do have to have just like you can't send the destroyer that you have that's neighboring Mechatal Rex because if the destroyer dies in the combat, it does not place a breach. So we got to have one adjacent and then you know, whatever we're doing as far as one in the active system. But our our destroyers have three movement if they're moving out of a breach. So that's not very hard to make that happen. And we also start with two destroyers. So basically we we have from the jump we have exactly everything we need. So after that battle, of course, we put an inactive breach in Mechatal Rex. We activate the sorrow to flip the breach that we start with to active there. We take Imperial. We activate Mechatal Rex flipping the breach and flying all of our ships from home to Mechatal Rex. And we commit a free mech. Don't forget about your free mech. And then you play Imperial. And then I would say after you get your bonus point from Mechatal Rex, you can just go into the fracture. And I would say that's hopefully in the platonic ideal, I feel like that's what it looks like is you're going to Mechatal Rex and you're taking that ingress token into the fracture and getting sticks for the final point. I never had enough muscle to make that happen for the record. So it might not even be all that possible. But I think that's the general gist of the journey, right? Yeah. I mean, I will say in the how many Thunder's Edge games like six or seven Thunder's Edge games I played, that is exactly what I've done every like almost every single game. Like that is my that is my game plan is go to like taking Imperial round two or three, go to Mechatal, score bonus point, hopefully get above public tempo. Like that's a good thing now. Oh yeah. With the with sticks with sticks being a thing, getting above public tempo, it actually is meaningful now. And it does lead to like even if you're not getting the bonus point, just scoring all five stage ones and then giving yourself the option to take sticks for your 10 points. It's true. It's it's a big thing. But then after that, I just go right to right to sticks off of Rex. It's like I think I did it in two of the games I played with you. And it's just it's it's so effective. Yeah, you did that there was that mua game where yeah, honestly, in a lot of my games, the situation that I kept writing into and we'll talk about this more in just a second, but like right if we get on talking about tech, but I'm running into the situation where I have an economy problem that it's an early game economy, a problem, but it's there. And I'm trying to call it out because I feel like people are sort of missing that aspect of them. If you give your commander ability to a faction that doesn't have the same problem, they are, they are just generally going to turn that into more reliable situation. As far as positioning and plastic and everything, then you are is my current issue with it. And in one game, you were mua and you were and you know, at first, you'd think, Oh, well, mua, that's kind of a slow start. They have they have the necessary kit though to take money in and instantly turn it into plastic where they need it to be, right? Like, yeah, that's their whole thing. So the breakthrough. Honestly, and just star forge, yeah, star forge in umba and honestly, my big takeaway of our game was actually mua is maybe one of the worst that I could have done the commander swap with because it was, I feel like enabling you to do so much more, so much faster than I could. Without, besides sling, I had no way to replicate what you were achieving with all of that extra money, basically. Yeah. No, that that is a good point. I didn't even think about that. So just avoiding giving it to factions that some factions can just use money better. Yes. So our our brick, right. And any faction that can that can have their plastic be actionable in the same round or early in the next round. And, and, and yeah, mua is one of those with with star forge, whom bot and the dock on their, yeah, a furnace. So yeah, you probably want to give to the static factions like, right? Like L one or like the con or just you just anyone that takes time to use their money. I'm so glad you said Hakan, because I was going to say like ironically, even though Hakan is already famously the rich faction, they are probably one of the most reliable people to give us. In a sense, actually, it's your best option because it may has no impact on how rich they're going to be. They're always going to be rich and their issue is the same as yours, which is that they are wealthy, yet they have all these low ceilings for what they can do with this wealth. You only have 16 command counters. You only have you can only produce as many units as is your production cap. And they have to do all of their production slow style. They just got to do it the old way. So I would say mua is a bad option there. Let's get the tech discussion out of the way. Then we can talk a little bit more about the various factions and trading, which mostly comes down to this command or ability. As far as the start goes, we've touched on it a little bit in the first half, but DET is always an interesting start because we have an extra DET token that we're sort of putting into the game because of the sorrow, right? A frontier token goes there. So therefore, it's always going to make sense. I like AI dev as well because it is just a, it's just like an unalmost no tech approach, like a world where you got AI dev and then carry your two technically. I mean, besides sling relay would be nice. Technically, I would be like, maybe we could just stop already. It's not that big of a deal. We don't even want carry your two for the movement. We just want the capacity that at that point, I'm not even sure what we want anymore. I don't know. I've been thinking about this since we last talked about this. I don't know. I think maybe you do want to go more heavy into tech later on. You have the money for it. It's true. Why not? I think something that AI dev lets you do is it lets you get war sons. If you have that blue red, you have that blue red synergy. Yes. If you just get like three reds and one of those is AI dev, or you have a yellow skip or picked up your faction tech with an entropic scar, like you can just get war sons and then you could sling one out. You can take a system, agent it back. You can use the war son, the turn you get it, and use it multiple times with your agent. It's not a bad idea. I think that war sons are, you know, that war sons are always a tricky thing to talk about on these episodes because I would have, so there wasn't like a game where I got war sons and it didn't work or something. It's really just, I never had the economy to do war sons, right? I'm really curious though. I think what you're saying goes with what I was saying about taking, about getting trade early, which obviously you have no control over. I just want to see, there's a game I really wanted to see research wise, which is your crimson, you have speaker realm one, you take trade. How does that affect the ramp? And also are there ways to possibly unlock the commander even faster if we have the money to sort of throw ships away and just be like a little more frivolous about it? I'm curious. I guess it's not even necessarily the ships that were throwing away. It's more like the tokens, right? Yeah. You don't care about the destroyers. They're the plus one. It's really the tokens, which, like, I think that's your biggest problem early, is you use your token economy. You're too come out of the faction. You don't have any influence at home. It's entirely sliced dependent, you know, especially if you're taking custodians, if you're trying to do that path. Yeah. And that's what trade lets you do it. It lets you do all the tempo locked things like tech, like construction early. So, you know, later on, you can have all this money, but, you know, what are you going to do with it? Like, you get all your carriers out. Dreads don't really matter. And then what are you spending all that money on? I will say also like AI dev for throwing in a fighter too. Because, especially with the hero, we can be a bit of a fighter faction. But I really, I like what you're saying about the war son. And I'm not necessarily pushing back on it so much as like, I didn't get to see that game. I believe it's out there, though. In fact, I saw somebody saying that they got war sons as crimson just today in the, in the Priorata channel. I didn't have anything to include about it, though, because they didn't really say how they got there. They just sort of said, I had war sons. It's kind of what people do about war sons in general, whenever they're talking about or responding to, you know, kind of theory crafty type stuff. War sons are good people. What you got to do is explain how, how you got there. Because war sons, they cost money. They call, you got to, they do just not just get them, you know, and that's all I'm looking for is anytime you talk about war sons, you just got to show your work. I will say because of the tech path situation, a yellow skip or AI dev obviously is going to make it a lot easier because we're going to get all the reds just going blue or whatever. But I wanted to call out some obvious stuff like Assault Cannon is always going to be a good, a good thing to throw in. If you are for some reason, you have like a lot of tech tempo. What's hilarious about it is pretty sure hero and Assault Cannon are the same window with something. They are. Oh, they are. Okay. Good. Here. So I'll, I'll say this more. Yeah, they're both. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. So well, actually, yeah, I mean, you through the thing and so I'll, I'll say it like a, so yeah, so is Assault Cannon and the hero is at the same tech path. Is that right? The same timing window. Yeah. Yeah. We're sorry. Same timing. I think we should keep all of that. Let's just keep all of that. Keep all of that. That was all worth it. That's perfect. There's no point in me saying that now. It's already got it. It's all the same timing window. So you can send in like one destroyer. Yeah. And you know, poop out your other two destroyers or your red nod or whatever. And then Assault Cannon. Yeah. It's the reason I like Assault Cannon. Like it is for scoring secrets. Honestly, right. Right. Anything. Right. Is like it, it is, um, it is immune to skilled retreats, which is always a, a game ender. Yeah. So obviously, it's nice for just winning combat, but it's also really, really good for, you know, I need to score my unveil flagship or destroy their greatest. Yeah. Spark or any of that stuff. Um, obviously deep blue is always going to be good, uh, fleet log, I think is actually particularly nice because we're good at being at sneakily coming after mechital wrecks there at the end or something like that. Um, so that's, that's never a bad idea. I will say we're a little, I think we're less of a lightweight faction than, than most, uh, like it's not easy to like gum us up because Crimson can generally get breaches wherever they want, especially if the rest of the table is helping. So in like a win slay situation, you're actually, I never got to do it, but you're kind of a great win slay buddy. I feel like you could literally do, you know, the whole like IFF thing. You're doing IFF plays, but like better. All we got to do is start a frivolous combat wherever we want to go. And as long as I have a destroyer near, then suddenly we're all going, you know, um, it's, I think, I think they're incredible at that kind of thing. But sadly, I, you know, I just, I, I play too much from ahead. I got to slow myself down because it was, you do put a lot way too much way too much. Maybe that's why people attack you and not because you're hunter, no, it's because I'm me. Uh, okay. I will say the, the thing that, that messes me up about all of that is just when people aren't going in winslay carousel order. Now anytime I'm playing with you, we do go in order. Okay. But if I'm not playing with you, a lot of times people will get a little bit lost in the sauce, uh, and, and kind of lose track. And also the game is new. It's harder for people to keep track of the tempo now. I've noticed people are still using POK tempo, like in their brain and not realizing. I mean, the obvious one is just sticks like that people will just sort of play as if sticks doesn't exist. And you'll just have to explain like no, so and so is actually a score secret and sticks. And then they win. And that just comes up a lot. I feel like it's kind of ridiculous. But I'm not going to explain that because that's pretty much what I try to do every game. Yeah. I usually, I usually just leave that part out. You do. You let people live in the POK world. Yeah. Uh, so exile too. I feel like we've kind of debunked at this point. Is there anything else to say about sundered the yellow faction tech? I wish it wasn't home system limited. I feel like I've already said that, but like that really annoys me a little bit as far as like its utility. If you, if you could put it at any space stock, then suddenly construction is like even stronger get for me. And like, I feel like it will make more sense as far as the dividends, but the whole like fighter situation that you locked into as far as like it's making fighters double costly. So a lot of times you're not even going to do it. And then even like an expensive unit, it's, it's still stuck back at home. So if home is locked down already, then we're probably not even bothering. Yeah. You're probably not locking down home system, right? Like you don't need to protect it. So like it's, it's around five tech. And yeah, my, my opinions on this tech are pretty much. I think it would be, I think it would be a great tech if we were still playing POK. Yeah. We still had that the, the normal tempo is round five status. So I'm going to, you know, slay this person, throw my, like, throw like my carrier and some, and a bunch of fighters at their home system, slay them intentionally lose a carrier, then you could build that at home. I think that's the biggest use case is being able to get more capacity ships back at home to use the elsewhere. Yeah. But we're just not, we're not in that, in that game state anymore. We're not in the winslay carousel, round five, status, speaker order, like, initiative order matters. We're just not in that, in that, that place in the game anymore. So I think that this tech is just not as valuable. Yeah, it's like, it's, it's just, it's kind of slow, I guess, is the situation. In general, I, I want to take what you just said and say that this is, I think, true about this faction. Overall, I, I think Crimson is very good. I think they're like, I think they're a safe A tier in my, in my mind. That's the way I see them. That's where I have them. Yeah. If they, if, if they were a prophecy of King's faction, though, they would be S tier. Like tier 100%. Yeah. Exactly. A hundred percent. Because all, and then, and then therefore, I mean, I guess what we could say then is there probably an incredible 14 point action. If we played 14 points, I feel like we would probably be saying, like, oh, yeah, dude, like, because their economy is going to be online for so much longer, they're going to live in that post-planet economy for like three solid rounds, then. Yeah. Now, they're, they're probably much better the longer you go. Let's cover trading meta stuff. We've already talked about the commanders so, so much, but I feel like talking about them in a relation to various other factions is worth mentioning. I never got to play the deep rot game that I wanted to. I think the deep rot swap is strong. I think it would be crazy. I think it would make both of you very, very wealthy and deep rot's already extremely wealthy. But I, I just think that it's kind of the closest tip for tat component swap that you can get. Old man Guy actually through in some prearada that I wanted to mention. Of course, Mentac is sort of your worst nightmare. Pillage obviously is going to kill a sort of slow one trade get at a time economy. However, you can play around it by just converting the comms and not washing each other, but that's a lot slower. And we're already talking about like BLT mentioned, oh, you can play around it by converting the comms. If what we're saying here is it's a little too slow, this crazy economy, then slowing it down even further is that's rough. We need to get it going ASAP. Also, we would be remiss in our duties if we did not mention that in impuring swap or blood packed or wait, yeah, blood packed or dark packed. Whichever. Whichever. Yeah. It would be completely bonkers ridiculous and same. Disgusting. Yeah. Disgusting. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a 50% increase in trade goods if like the timing works out. Right. For every two you get you get another. And I mean, they're obviously going to make that trade like they'd be insane not to. Yeah. And like dark packed helps you early. Yeah. And this will just go up and value as more fights happen. Yeah. I think it's a swap. I think it's a swap that makes sense. I mean, maybe you can get some more value from in periods. I think it's still better for them. So maybe. Maybe ask for some little something little on top, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I think men, men tag definitely sucks. But you probably just trade your alliance for promise of protection. And they just do that. And then you should, frankly, you should do that. I would. Yeah. I would. I would do that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would. It's a great buddy. If anything, one thing that I can take away from this into my future games that I think is going to cause me to play a little better is I know if I'm sitting next to a crimson and I'm not crimson, I'm definitely trying to get this alliance. Like I'm not going to play it cool or coy. I'm going to look at my stuff. I'm going to say the best thing that I can possibly offer them. I'm sending that offer because I want I want it to be me. Pick me. Pick me. I will say every single time. Promise or you know, we there's not a whole lot to say about it. Besides that it's a stall. I think I already mentioned in the first half that I wish it stuck around instead of just being that a blocks a wormhole for a single round. But you know, anytime someone is looking for a stall, don't hesitate to let them know because who cares. Frankly, it doesn't matter, especially if they need it for the stall that round and it's like round two, it's basically not going to factor into literally anything. So, you know, sell it for a buck if you can or even just sell it for literally anything. I don't know. Literally anything. Literally anything. It's one of those where it has like the tiniest amount of utility. So, just get it out there. I think the only thing left of this point to talk about in relation to these guys is scoring. And I feel like, you know, we've kind of talked around it in a lot of ways. Obviously, when it comes to points, economy stuff, bad early good in the middle slash late with the commander, there's a lot of stage twos that are going to possibly just win us the game by virtue of the fact that the only other person that can score it is our alliance partner. However, that doesn't mean it's going to be you. It just means that between the two of you, it's, you know, so that's, I think that's the Achilles heel right there is our best category in points is economy. And by us being good at it, we have also made a rival who is also good at it. So, that's a little spooky. Now that you're saying that it, is it worth it to consider like speaker order in who you align swap with, like swap with someone downstream of you. Yeah. So, Blasto, I did that every time, though. That was, so I, I swapped with a person by left every single game. And it was you even one time. And I still do it. I still couldn't close it. But yeah, I mean, way ahead of you there, I definitely, yeah, again, I think it comes back to, if your speaker tempo is good, it doesn't have to be that, you know, you're first up. But even if it's like solid, people are going to be more weary about you than any other faction. They're always going to be able to make this excuse that they won't be able to make with you, which is that. Oh, well, so until it's getting ahead, but it's like, okay, well, we might do something about it. Like, we might be able to fix this at the last moment. But with Crimson, and they're not wrong. Like, I, this isn't, I'm not playing the game right now. I am just saying it straight up. They're not wrong to say, if we let Crimson cross a certain boundary, it will be too late. That is absolutely correct analysis. Yeah. They're like, sir. Yes. Same thing. Same thing as sir. And that's the problem is we can't, if we are goosing, if we, if in order for us to be very successful, we have to goose another player who is, you know, mortal as compared to us. Let's say we're immortal. We have to make like a sort of mightest touch style deal with the other person. Then I feel like the mortal is more plausibly slayed, which makes them stronger above the table. I had to happen with a Sardak too. I, it was a Sardak to the left of me. I had better speaker order. I made them fabulously rich. It was a stage two, I think it even was a stage two economy thing. But I think it was like resources or influence or something, or maybe it was even a round force situation where they were just generally trying to slow my economy down by coming into my slice. Because again, it's a weaker slice. You're looking at two people. You could stop. You're looking at Crimson, and you're looking at Sardak. Sardak's going to do a better job of defending their planet. That's just a fact that they have their kids set up for that. They literally have an agent that's letting them plop down a few more infantry here than there. We're like the opposite of that. We're, we have agents that are saying, hey, clear out of here. Don't worry about it. Just let it be. It's not a big deal. That's fine. No, we'll do anything. But then they will. And they sort of have to. They don't have a choice either because they can't just like, they don't want to just sold, you know, with the two hours on the clock, technically, because it's like, well, we played two loose with Crimson. So therefore, you know, the game is over, even though we have a lot more time to go, you know. So they're not wrong, but it is complicated. And so it's weird that, you know, economy, definitely our best category, but it's also like, maybe we don't even want it to matter. Well, I would say my ideal situation for Crimson would be no economy points come out even though it would be awesome if they did. You just don't want it to be the situation. Because here's why, let's talk about this. We got, let's talk about control. So we got a light start, right? Plastic needs to be fixed. I would rather fix it. You know, I'd rather spend all of that money and energy on fixing it because if we're talking hard to score control objectives, which I think is like the best situation for us, the breaches are suddenly going to help us do a lot more than just mechatal wrecks. They're going to help us like rule distant lands. Like this is a great example. I feel like that's one that we can like actually try to figure out in a way that and it's going to be a little bit random because it's got to be that we put breaches in weird places already. The destination system sort of already, the destination system can't be activated already, I guess is what I'm saying. So if we are just putting breaches out in various places and then it turns out it's a control objective that's hard to do, which I'm not necessarily saying rule distant lands is the hardest of all. But it is, it is one that I feel like I can imagine being like, okay, well, we do one easily regular style with bonus movement. And then the other we may happen because, oh, I have a breach over here, and now I'm going, now I'm going over here. And who else can actually achieve that? Maybe not anybody. I don't know. They're mechs are super sneaky for controls as well. Yes. Like if other people are fighting over things and you just put a breach down and then, then, you know, swoop in later, that's like, there's a lot you can do. You should always have a mech or two in your reinforcements to deploy is the other thing, I think. That is a great point. Yeah, you should, you should definitely not build them all. We need that deploy to always be possibly in play. And I think you should be frivolous with the breaches. I will say that too. Just to reiterate a concept that I feel like has not been talked about on the show that we stole from the, the old route podcast with them warriors. You never have to help the other players defeat you. Okay. So I would say, you should explain, how your faction works at the beginning, explain that they can remove the breaches. You should at some point say that out loud because that's good on us play. But you don't have to tell people to remember to remove your breaches. That is not something that you have to do. All right. It's their job to hear that they have that they can do that and then do something about it. If you throw breaches down frivolously and they do not get removed, incredible. I've even had players realize they could remove them and then talk themselves out of it because they'll just be like, you know what? Maybe we'll want that though. And I think that's what people should be. That's why you want people thinking about Crimson is like, you know, maybe these breaches are going to help us though too. So yeah, just leave them out. I think it's the way to go. I don't love tech objectives for us. I think that regardless of your takeaway from listening to this, one thing that I think is absolutely true is that we don't necessarily have to have tech. The tech is not solving a very particular problem for us as compared to like other factions. Now whether or not tech is like our closer, I don't know. I think that remains to be seen a little bit. But I don't want tech objectives out there because I don't want to have to research tech. I would rather have the agency to be like, oh, well, maybe I'm going to build plastic. Maybe I'm going to not. I think generally speaking though, I'll try to have, you know, I'll try to be one tech off of two and two and one tech off of two unit upgrades at all times in the early game. Yeah. So I don't really mind getting a tech objective late on this faction. But if you get it early, like that just sucks. You don't want to have to change what you do to follow a tech objective. I mean, no one really wants to do that, but it's easier for some harder for others. Yeah. And that's a good point. And I want to make sure people do get it that like by the time your once your economy is online, I mean, you should be doing everything. You should be getting your tokens out of the bag. You should be building plastic, and you should be doing all of those. It's really just like the versatility to not tech round one, and maybe even round two. I don't know. You could be having a bad day. It could be it could be there was an economy objective in the first two flip. And so you're and your last pick round one or something like that. You know, there's there's bad scenarios where we're going tech all the way till round three is not the craziest thing. Hopefully in that situation though, you you get to do the tech primary or something like that. So you can at least catch up a bit. Stage two's obviously work sort of economy only. We're not super punchy, but we can't get anywhere. So I do think some of the controls are not as hard for us. One in particular, I think it's fun is like have your flagship at megatall wrecks. That one is a killer stage two for us. That's so fun, especially like even if you don't have it out, you can like build it with your hero. Yes. And then just like plop that thing down anywhere you want. Even like like that those kinds of objectives are great. Like I guess it's just that one. Like if you don't need to take the planet because you can't put ground forces on your hero. So it's only ships. So you could just if you could just send like one destroyer into someone's home system and then plop out a flagship there. Like that's really really hard to play around. Yeah. And that flagship is so potent. I love it. It's it's it's it's a great flagship. So solid. Yeah. Just playing Twilight's Fall the other day is like told me just how like damaging it is to not have unit ability. So I had the ability that turned off other people's unit abilities near your structure. Yes. Which is, you know, a reference to that flagship. It's it's you do not realize how damaging losing your unit abilities are. It's crazy. Yeah. Honestly, it's kind of why I feel like they are a carrier to faction because you're you're basically saying, okay, well with my flagship, I turn off your ability to sustain damage. And then therefore HP is even more important for deciding who the winner of this match is going to be. Suddenly fighters have like, in my opinion, almost like double value because you just got cut in half going the other direction bonus points. We don't have any real exploration advantage. I feel like we've already talked about the mechatal Rex kit going into sticks for the last point. So I mean, I feel like all of that is pretty apparent. I will add that in addition to all of the other sort of salt we can pour on Crimson, you're maybe not people's favorite support partner again because of the home system thing. I've had at least one player. Maybe I think maybe even two people at some point talk to me about like, well, if I swap with you, then we're not going to be able to do anything about it if you're going to win. I don't know. In a sense, I feel like if you can make it work without a support swap, that might be good. Your alliance partner is also sort of a support partner at the end of the day. So yeah, they really are. I mean, honestly, maybe we'll start to see just support swapping with the person you alliance swap with. Like maybe that's a condition of an alliance swap is you have to support swap early. That is a good condition because yeah, if you're going to struggle to get that support partner, then it may as well be the person that you. But again, this is another thing is like, I am just so scared that you're juicing a part. You just got to be specific about who you're telling the way. Yeah. You're just trying to make it a two-course race. It's really what you're doing. You are going to juice up that person way more than they can help you back, but it has to be somebody. It has to be somebody you're never going to get equivalent value from it. It's just not possible. Honestly, I think the most useful part of this discussion is talking about it in terms of like, you want to swap with factions that already have good economies, essentially. Factions that are like already going to hit a ceiling anyways. And Purine is great. Hakan, awesome. I think Deepra is awesome. All of the rich people. Ironically, I mean, because if you it's ironically like, that's the goal is to make the rich richer because the rich factions already built with those like annoying, you know, kind of ceilings to play with. So if you juice, I think Arburek is probably the best example I can think of. Like, if you were to make Arburek rich, that's ultimately going to make them, I think incredibly powerful. They already have the ability to sort of make good on becoming wealthy. So if you fix that problem for them, then now suddenly it's like they're a whole new faction. But yeah, I think they're a solid A tier faction, incredible array of movement abilities. It's got there's some fun early game puzzles to solve. Probably the most broken component of the game being that commander as far as like raw output of trade goods. And in the agent is really fun too. I mean, they're they're good. We're talking, we're talking weak start, but like kind of incredible late game. So like definitely nothing to ignore, definitely nothing to think is actually crimson is bad. That is not at all the takeaway here. I think I was always a contender in all of my research games. I was never out of it, even for a second. So that I mean, that is already that's incredible. But you know, you measure them against something like I think Mahaka is like the gold standard for S tier. I think they're definitely a little bit shy from something like that as far as the kid is concerned. They've got some drawbacks built into there, which I think ultimately makes them more fun to play really. There's got to be there's going to be something to play around, right. And they've Oh, yeah, history. That's that's no fun. Yeah, you got to have some drawbacks. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I like them. And I think, you know, if you haven't tried them yet, get in there, give them a shot. They are super fun. What's something, what's something you would want to see crimson do? Like, I guess you kind of talked about the war son stuff. War sons. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I want I do want to see that crimson deep rot game and just like, because usually like you said, they're pretty tech light. But in that game, I could see like full blue, full red war sons, both your faction texts. Like I want to I want to see them when they have like when they have everything. Yeah. And see what that what that becomes. You want to talk about anti-hunter meta. All right. I got it. All right. Here we go. I got I got to get this out. So I was playing a game. I was playing a game with with a deep rot and they were we were also playing with Bam Bam who is I don't know. He's just like good at talking people into stuff. And you know, I talk about anti-hunter meta mostly from a point of view of like what happens is a lot of times when I'll talk to someone, they will view what I'm saying with like a level of scrutiny that causes them to either have second thoughts or think that I'm like tricking them or something like that. Which honestly, I feel like it could be a hangout in the chat. I basically try to never do stuff like that. If I lie, I generally lie by omission. I almost never tell like bold facelies. I generally try to just leave out the important part, right? And anyways, I was excited about this deep rot deal. Well, we get into the game. The first one of the first objectives is is make history. Deep rot actually can score like so easily. They have like one, it's either an anomaly or a legendary planet in their slice. And then all they have to do is use their agent co-exist with somebody that has a, you know, a legendary planet. And they have I think like two options. Well, Bam Bam convinces deep rot to give the commander to him in exchange or the coexistence. Even though there is another eligible player that they could just do it with. Also, I just, I didn't even understand how it how it was framed as a deal. But they just totally went with it. And then there was no way for me to get in there, even though we would have made so much money. Just to just to make sure that you all understand what I'm saying. Let's talk about the deep rot agent real quick. You let me pull it up. Yeah, well, you're doing that. I did watch that game. Yeah. So I, no, I was pretty floored by that. In that situation, I would rather just not score around one and take imperial round two. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that is totally a play or like pay hilarious, which was the other person who had a legendary planet. Just pay them money to let you co-exist there or give them your, you're like, they didn't even try to negotiate with the other person who had a legendary planet. And I think what it was was I maybe cholera's like wasn't going to follow tech because they, you have to research tech in order for it to work. But the, the deep rot agent is one another player research is a technology. You may exhaust this card to allow that player to ignore one pre-rec. If they do, you may place one infantry from your reinforcements into coexistence on a non-home planet. They control. I actually feel like the tech or like cholera's had followed tech. I may be wrong. But I, at some point, I'm pretty sure they did, right? Yeah. They had to graph drive to mechital. Right. Round two. So I don't know. It was a weird situation. I remember somebody in chat called me out being like, Hey, you should speak your like basically that I should have argued like harder about it. But I also have found, and this is kind of more like, you know, just experiences I've had in the past that the more I try to argue my case, a lot of times the more people will, it will be harder for us to negotiate in the future. I, I can tend to, I think there's like some sort of pressure that I bring into the game. There's definitely a pressure that I experience on myself, but I also think I whenever someone's talking to me, they're very aware of like that they're being streamed or that I might be like judging them to be fair. A lot of the time I am judging them or streaming them judging and streaming. But, but yeah, it was, it was a bummer that I didn't get to do that game, but I'm sure someday in the future it will happen. And yeah, if you have played as Crimson Rebellion and you have made the war sons happen, please hit us up in the episode channel to say how you got there. Show us your work because I think that if they can get them online, if you have an unactivated war son top of round four, or I guess I'll even say war son on hero top of round four, I'm interested. I think that's that's something there's that's that's repeatable and something worthy of being recommended in like a guide like this. But, you know, if we're like, if you're going to say stuff like, well, it was a four player game or like, you know, or, you know, we're playing 14 points or, you know, it I made or I don't know, for some reason, you got the commander unlocked for free very, very early, or there was lots of combats like an, you know, way above average combats that like started on round two, anything like that. Also, we got to call attention to here's one thing. There is, there is an aspect of Crimson that I would be very, it would be very dumb for me not call this out, but you are a two-com faction. Sometimes there's more than two combats. And if there is, and you traded with, like Hakon's a great example. So let's say that we Hakon is my alliance partner and there's like, let's say a combat happens in a in a system with three planets. So that's four combats if they take all three planets. Let's say they do. So Hakon made four commodities and you made two. That is, that is another aspect of. Well, you make three. You make three there. Oh, yes, because you would flip. Yes, you convert one of the area. But yeah, that's me being pedantic. The point still stands is, yeah, you only have two comms. So, you know, if you and your alliance partner are back to back, then that's four other people who take turns in between you. And maybe it's because it's so early, but I really want to lay down here that that you should be making sure that the other person understands that they are, in fact, getting the better end of the deal. This is not, you know, we're not playing right now. This is just the two, like, I mean, and I feel like you agree with this, right? Like, I do, yes. So just to say it soberly outside of a game, they are getting the better end of the deal. So I don't know what we do from that, but we'll, in the future, we'll see how that develops. Maybe we'll go through a period where Crimson starts getting really stubborn and just doesn't even give it out. And they just make less money. And then I think on the whole are probably a worse faction for it, like, probably quite a bit. But we'll see how that develops. Anyways, it's exciting. And Blasto, I want to say thank you for joining me for this first introduction to a Thunder's Edge faction. Yeah, thanks for having me. Another, another long episode. It's, it's our thing. It's our thing. It's fun. Hey, it's me and I'm back for the rundown. We're going to keep this one really quick because this episode is like two and a half hours long. So it does not need to be any longer. But obviously, top of the order, as far as announcements, as far as the stuff going on in the space cat's community. If you're hearing my voice, if this episode is out, then that means that tournament signups officially have begun or are beginning at 1600 UTC slash 11 at AM Eastern on the release day of this episode. So if you are a galactic counselor or above, check out the Qualifier Games channel and sign up for your game. So there's just going to be one week that's available from a Saturday to a Friday starting in December 6th. But I'm going to roll out another week next Wednesday and so on and so forth. Okay, slices are pretty much locked in at this point. They will be revealed in a video that's coming out next week. Also, hopefully, although I don't have confirmation as of recording, hopefully you'll be getting a Crimson Rebellion gameplay video on the YouTube this week as well. No farm date there. We're trying something new. Shelton, my video editor is, is chopping it up. As far as the content you should expect it to be roughly the same as always. However, we are switching into a different program that we use to edit videos because we broke up with Adobe. And we're actually in the process of maybe even breaking up with Microsoft. If you give us some time, we might even get there. Anyways, next up is the playtesters hideout, our $10 tier. And there is an exciting new feature that is coming out on Patreon. They've been sort of promoting it lately. And I'm fully expecting this tier to be kind of about this new feature that they have. I'm going to be nebulous there because I don't fully have my thoughts together as far as what I want to do. But for no particular reason, I actually have an idea of what I think this tier should be working on right now, which is that I would like y'all to pitch me some maps. Not homebrew maps, regular maps, because I don't know if you'll notice, but Thunder's Edge is out. And in the rulebook, we just have a few maps. Those maps have been incorporated into the TTPG mod. But I would like anyone in the community that wants to contribute a map in the playtesters hideout to just put one in that channel. I will take a look at it. I will respond to it. I'll give, you know, maybe I'll talk about it on an episode. And perhaps even try to get Daryl to incorporate it into the TTPG mod. But we need some Thunder's Edge maps, okay? So just cook up some pre-made maps that people could play with. If they don't want to do a multi-draft, they don't want to go through all of that. They just want to use something that's ready made to be interesting. You can obviously incorporate homebrew elements into the map itself. You don't need to do a rules as written map. Just do whatever you think would be fun. And I'll look it over and possibly put it into the mod. Well, I'll ask Daryl to put it into the mod. Obviously, I have no control of what goes into the mod. But, you know, I'll talk about it and we'll see where it goes from there. Yensterhood, I would like to do a mock qualifier game with y'all. So there's a game available right now in the Yensterhood chat. Sign up for it. The game is going to be starting on Sunday, November 30th, starting at 11am central time. So this will be the first mock qualifier game where we're just going to pretend to play a qualifier. And we'll see, you know, how it goes. But that's all my Patreon stuff for now. Just kind of speeding through it. I've got a lot on my plate lately. I don't know if y'all've noticed. It's been a minute where things have just been crazy busy. But it's getting a little bit better. Now that I have the pre-production for the tournament done, it's hopefully going to be a little bit smoother. But let's talk weird bears. I just want to say thank you to, you know, Imlachewski, R.Y.'s Daryl, Squeamishimu, Absoul, Carnal, Ricky, M44, Dregothax, and Cabalovsoul, Tree Boy, The Truth, Mr. Brister, M. Scott, Kohaku, Crack Goblin, Lendable Buy, Riley Pool, ESQ4, Luchino, and Jean Mahawk, Sorcerer. And I would like to thank my Finder-Garner's Ryan Iangar, Headhunter, Jadim Jedi, D.L. Sauron, Averis, Urza, and Roman Empire. And thanks to our Discord moderators and tournament team, Elspeth, Wecker, Absoul. I am Katie, Jasper, The Disassper, Planet Earth, E.J., Alec, and Matt. Please rate this podcast on your podcast, app of Joyce, especially Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. You can check out our website, spacecatspacestartles.com for information for our Patreon, our Discord, our merch, our et cetera. Also, we've got tournament rules that have been updated. I updated the tournament rules. Okay, all the language in there is current. So if you're like, "Ah, I want to get into this tournament, but I don't know what the rules are," then you get a whole document. All right, it's a big legal document. It's got all these bullet points on it. Okay, it was made with heart and care and love. Okay, like I do all of this stuff. All right, it's all made with heart care and love. So you know, have a week of heart and care. And send us some period of life stories if you want, to [email protected], heart care, love, you know, live, laugh, love. That's something. Is that something? Pax Magnifica. Elam. Horosom.