284: Super Mahact Gene-Sorcerers Guide

[music] This is Space Cat's Peace Turtles, the unofficial podcast for Fantasy Flights Twilight Imperium. Episode 284. Super Mahox Gene Sorcerer's Guide. Music by Ben Prunty, featuring Matt Martin and Hunter Donaldson. [music] It's February. Did you know that Hunter? It's February of 2023. It's February and we are welcoming you to February. Hello. A month of love. A month of love. A month of love. And guess what? Because it's the month of love, it means we're one month away from a thing we want to talk about and I wish I had more details but we have some details for you. We are doing a live show. We referenced it a while back. We're going to Portland Oregon, Portland Oregon and we are doing a live show in Portland Oregon at the Helium Comedy Club in Portland Oregon. It's a live show at the Helium Comedy Club in Portland Oregon. Hunter? Yes. Give them the dates. Yeah. I'm talking. Here's what I got for you. On March 22nd at the Helium Comedy Club in Portland Oregon, we will be performing. The show starts at 8. The tickets are on sale now. Go to the Helium Comedy or Portland dot Helium Comedy dot com and look at the calendar and you can find our little mug there sandwiched in between their open mic night, which is on Tuesday and then Dana Gould of Simpsons fame and the voice of Gek's and we're kind of right there where we belong in between Gek's and no literally no one. So there you go. That's that's that's that's our core of the internet. Now Matt, are we asking you to possibly travel to Portland Oregon to just see a standup comedy or not a standup comedy show, a live podcast taping on a Wednesday night and then that's it. You just go back home. Is that what we're doing? That's one of the things we're asking you to do. We want to do more and I tell you if we had a venue nailed down, I'd give you really specific details right now. But what we know is there's a lot of amazing places to play games in Portland Oregon and we'll be playing games with you at one of them the rest of the weekend basically. We've booked through Sunday to do stuff. We are more or less considering this SCPT con whatever that means. It's just a thing where we want people to hang out with us in Portland actually. I think the plan is more or less at least two days of just like lock ourselves in a cafe and play games, play some TI, play some spirit island, play some root, play whatever. Our hearts content hang out with people, maybe put together a little tournament, maybe just let it be open table game stuff. We just want to play games and then maybe like a couple days of let's meet up and all get lunch at a place or whatever. This sounds very shaky. Just want to be clear with people. There will actually be an itinerary. It is not a maybe there no and it is not we we are not going to be at a cafe. We're going to be at a specific place with tables where lots of us can play. Yes. But the idea being this you come to Portland on a Wednesday, you come see our show and then we will be there Thursday through Sunday and we are going to be at I really wish we already had the place. We are having conversations that are it's weird. It didn't take us very long to get the comedy club locked down. I'll tell you that much. We got that figured out. Look at his foot. Apparently the world also recognizes us as comedy first, board game second. Yeah. You know what it is? I got this, you know, comedy people are responding to our emails like quickly and we're just getting to the point. And then as far as getting us a place to play Twilight Imperium all weekend. That has been harder. But we guarantee you we are going to get at least two days locked in. It'll maybe be Thursday, Friday, maybe it'll be Friday, Saturday. It's going to be something like that. And then the days in between we will likely be doing like meetups and going to possibly we'll all I don't know how many people to expect. Right. Obviously that's why that's the kind of unknown aspect of it. But we will inform you of more stuff as more stuff opens up as more things are figured out. It's going to be a really awesome time. That's what I want to say for sure. No matter what we have to do in order to figure out how to make this work, this is yeah, the unofficial first annual, no, not annual. This is our first SPPT con. That's not really a con, it's more of a hoot and Annie. That's the full title. There we go. Yeah. More than likely as we get things properly solidified. People have like an event bright thing that has like a proper itinerary spelled out. Like we'll have like a thing that's really nice and organized. But we were kind of tired of not getting to talk about it in detail because we want people to get hyped for it. And especially people that are like sort of near Portland, but aren't in Portland might, you know, they might need to plan a little bit ahead for this kind of a thing. And so we want people to know that this is all happening. Luckily it's like the week of some places spring break, which is good and bad. It means flights are expensive, but it means people might have time to do all of this, which is the whole hopefully we all can hang out for extended periods of time. So yeah, I don't know, come spring break, spring, spring, spring break with space cats, Easter elves. So one thing I want to try and do that I've been kind of keeping quiet, but I might start communicating with Brassbird and some of the some of the Portland chapter of a SCPT West is I kind of want to try and do and I know this is impossible. What I'm about to say, but is it impossible? I don't know. I want to play the canonical game of Twilight with 25 players. Yes, yes. And somehow it all makes sense. Now I don't know where you put that. I don't know how that works. But I might that might be something that happens. A strange team. And if you're not the canonical game of Twilight Imperium, you won't know what happened in the canonical game. You need to be there to witness 25 people play Twilight Imperium. Now what will their strategy cards be? Shut up you. Back off. How long will it take to play a 25 player game? Yeah, that sounds like Nase. Okay, hearing some Nase. I mean in real life, yes, I know it would be easier on tabletop simulator or tabletop playground. Or async, which has already got something like this. Uh-huh. Sure, sure. I want to do it. I don't even care that it doesn't make sense and it's stupid and won't work. I don't even care about those facts. You're like Steve Jobs. I just wanted to be a phone and a computer. Shut up and make it work. And everyone's like, "Poke computer now." All right, we have a boy. Do we have a proper episode for you today? It's proper. It's big. It's super Mahawk to Gene Sorcerer's Guide. Let me tell you, it's been like two years since last we broached the topic of Mahawk. And I got to say, Hunter, last time, maybe we weren't fully aware. And I'm, hey, listen, I'm not the one who prepped Mahawk stuff, which means I'm twice as responsible for things being off. But I feel like we missed the mark on the first Mahawk Guide. I was not much of a contributor. I'm saying I'm taking the fall here for you. This is Hunter coming to you from under the bus. Where I'm currently living. Yeah, sure. We didn't quite get it. We didn't quite get it last time. No, we've talked about this though. We're doing these again. We are approaching the POK factions again because the first time we did them was more or less like our first round strategies guide of the base game stuff, which is like, listen, we just learned this game. We are just figuring out what POK even means. We don't know what like the dominant strategies are going to be. And now we're, you know, two to three years in. We've seen Mahawk have a bad, bad, bad year in the tournament. And that's like the context under which the first guide was sort of building itself, right? Was what Mahawk was performing poorly. And it wasn't feeling good. And nothing seemed right. And now we've had one year of stellar Mahawk wins. And this year is also shaping up to be a Mahawk year. We've got a decent number of Mahawk wins in the early qualifiers. So we're coming around on Mahawk is pretty good as a faction, which was not necessarily our stance before. Yeah. I think it just, it took some time for Mahawk to kind of settle. Everyone was so overwhelmed by prophecy of kings when it first came out. And I think that there were a lot of other factions that got picked up a lot faster that people are people understood what made them good. I'm thinking, uh, Argent. Yeah. And then now that POK has kind of settled into, we now everyone sort of gets it. Yeah. It's now easier to read like what is actually good. And guess what's actually. actually good, it's mahawk. - Yeah. - It's neal time. You better be kneeling for this one. - That is everyone kneeling. Yeah, mahawk gene sorcerers are a funny faction too because they are the lower sheet offers just as many questions as answers. The mahawk were before POK sort of a legend, the stuff of legend. The mahawk kings, the mahawk gene sorcerers were referenced. You knew they existed. They are what preceded the Lazax Empire? And the game we are playing is in a post Lazax Empire world. So this is two full dynasties back of the ruling nation state or whatever. And I'll tell you, if you're looking for answers of what happened to the mahawk, don't go to the back of the faction sheet. It won't tell you. It'll just be like, well, the Lazax beat them and that's what happened, okay? Quit asking questions. - I like it in spite. What do you mean? - I hate them in spite of the fact that they shut up. - Hey, shut up you. - Oh, oh. Hey, why are there faces like a galaxy? Hey, shut up you. We're not gonna talk about their physiology at all. - Where did they come from and why are they bang? - No, shut up you. - No, where did that come from? - That's slightly answered. They retreated. They ran away. Those surviving members of the mahawk gene sorcerers escaped Lazax rule. Sort of like how the L1Z1X is a faction, right? Those are the Lazax that ran away and then did weird cybernetic engineering to themselves and then came back the L1Z1X. - Yeah, yeah. - This is like that if the mahawk didn't cybernetically engineer themselves, but they locked themselves behind a wormhole that then the rest of the universe closed off for seemingly forever until the chief events of prophecy of kings is the Gosacreus unlocking that portal boom mahawked her back. They live on itx. It's like a big dead planet. They wanna make everybody else just as dead as their dead planet and there's not very many of them and it's very weird. And also the big thing I would say is I would categorize mahawked as one of the not-agree factions. They're, this is not a great, they're the bad ones. They're mean. They're evil. - They're really evil. - Pure evil. Are they the most pure evil faction mat, which I say? - I feel like, 'cause there's others that are like, they are evil, but they have some sort of strange like, like the plants, like Arburet, right? Like they're seemingly evil, but they're also just sort of like naturalistic. They're sort of indifferent and that's part of their evilness. Like Necro is pretty evil, but. - Yeah. - Also they're like a spurned group. Like they, they, you know, something happened to them and they have these like, they have this history. Mahawked are just like, we used to be in charge and we wished we still were. And we like it when everyone is our slaves. It's like, okay, I don't know that I, you don't really get any wiggle room there. - It's almost as if Dane didn't like all the complex moral aspects of Twilight Imperium and then decided to just introduce, well here's a dinosaur. - Yeah. - And then here is a man with a galaxy for a brain and he's evil. - Well, it's like, okay, the history of the game is that the lasacks were pretty evil and we had to do away with them, right? 'Cause they were pretty bad. So how do the lasacks have to rise to power by being the good guys and for them to be as gray as they are? Whoever they're defeating must be less gray than themselves and they're not very gray. So yeah, they had to unseat a ruling dynasty of about as black as you can get in terms of, I mean, everything on their sheet is Neil, is obey, is everything must follow the whims of the exceptionally few. They literally take over your brain and just control your body. That's their armies are other factions that they have just rested control of. - Yeah, yeah, they're just a mind control faction and that's what they do. But they're also somehow gene sorcerers. - Whatever that means. - That means, I don't know. We kinda, does anyone think, like, I liked this faction, I like playing them. I've had a good time with them. You can check out on the YouTube. I've posted a game that I played as Mahawk. I have a good time. It's nice. Let's just level though. They're kind of stupid. Okay, like, let's just be real. It's kind of a lot. It's kind of not. If you look at the other factions, they have a lot more personality and aren't quite so self-serious. Whereas the Mahawk are just kinda like, okay, this should have chilled a little bit. The Kabal are evil, but they're also dinosaurs. So that's pretty funny. Yeah, that's really good. All the other POK factions have some sort of levity to them. Yeah. And then the Mahawk are kinda just, you know. Oh, baby. (laughing) I like how their symbol looks like a crown, but they don't wear crowns. Their whole helmets are sort of crowned like though. Oh, I guess you're right. We don't know what they look like without the crown on. As far as we can tell, they literally just are little small galaxies. As much as I know about their physiology, they just are little. I mean, they don't seem that far removed from Ghosts of Crius. So I don't know, I don't know what the deal is with these folks. They're kind of just evil ghosts of Crius. I guess we could say lore wise. Okay, that makes sense. That would be really good. Anyone angry at us? Nope, we're not in trouble. Listen, Matt, when you're talking, you can get all the lore stuff right. Yeah. When I'm talking, I'll get it wrong. And then Absel will post and say, "Hey Hunter, you got this wrong?" That was incorrect. That comment you made. And then I'll lock it away in your spare. Special violin cabinet. Oh yeah, yeah, every time Absel posts, one of those posts, I take a screenshot of it and I put it in my little folder. That's what I do. It's called Hunter's Mistake. And I keep it. And it's got a lot of stuff in there. You know what I see by Hunter's Mistake's folder. It's 16 minutes into the episode. We haven't talked strategy at all yet. Let's do overviews of components. I mean, we've done this stuff kind of before, but it's worth sort of rehashing what this faction has under its belt hunter. I want to tell you about it starting units. They start with one dread, not one carrier, one cruiser, two fighters, three infantry in a space dock. That's a fine start sort of, right? I mean, it's three capacity, I mean, five capacity, three infantry, you can take three planets round one without any issue. That is three planets. Yeah, that's what you got basically. Yeah, it's okay. It's not, I would say by POK standards, though technically it's like bad. Yeah, right. Because POK made it so that pretty much everybody either is 2C4i or if some sort of hack to make them 2C4i. So this is technically 2C3i. So like we're a little bit off there. So yeah, I would say by POK standards, this is a little bit rough. And also overall most of the things in the Mahawk kit isn't rough. So it's fair to say at this point, I would say that the starting units are not my favorite part of the faction. Yeah, they're starting tech as a bio stems, which is the green tech that allows you to either refresh a planet with a tech skip or another technology. You of course don't really start with a technology worthy of refreshing, but if you can find a planet with a tech skip round one, that's great. And then you'll use bio stems for all the other purposes later on. Their second tech is predictive intelligence, which is the one where you rearrange command tokens on your sheet, which can come in handy because we'll get into the faction abilities, basically. Yeah, also though I just want to say for the record, I love predictive. It's an awesome tech. And I've kind of gravitated towards it in pretty much every game that I've played, regardless of whether I'm playing the Hawk or not. I think it's that kind of thing where you're like, oh, this is nice, but it's kind of extra. But then every time I get it, I'm like, oh, look, I can do this. Like that happens like 100% of the time. Oh, yeah, it's a good, cool to start with. Yes, it's good to start with. It's good to not have to go out of your way to research and it's good to have in the late game. That's the whole idea. Just set it and forget it is the kind of thing with predictive, just like you got it. And that's going to be great when it comes up. Their home system is a single planet. Three resources, five influence, X, a dry, dead world of black volcanic mountains and molten seas of lava. The great necropolis of A or Dolgor ghosts on the plateau and puria is the only evidence of civilization. So three resources at a home system is in the middle of the, is like, okay, not having a second planet for more dogs, rough, but the five influence is something you will hear remarked about quite often and we will talk about as well. And finally, they have three commodities. And that's, you know, middle of the pack, that's fine, nothing wrong with that. Let's talk about their abilities because this is where things get incredibly complex. This is one of those factions where the abilities section is just a big ol' wall of text and it's dain trying to be like, okay, I have a concept and I'm going to do everything I can to help you understand this concept. But, yeah, it's weird. (laughs) First up is Edict. When you win a combat, place one command token from your opponent's reinforcements in your fleet pool if it does not already contain one of that player's tokens. Other players tokens in your fleet pool increase your fleet limit but cannot be redistributed. So when you win a combat, you gain a token in your fleet pool and it sticks around. That's why the predictive is useful. You can then like later if you want to cycle your own tokens out if you've got enough opponent tokens in your fleet pool. So I'll find a dainty. You have more stuff to do. Their second one is Empuria. While another player's command token is in your fleet pool, you can use the ability of that player's commander if it is unlocked. So you can go around collecting effectively people's alliances by, [BLANK_AUDIO] sucking up their commander abilities with their command tokens. And the last ability that is relevant to all of this is hubris during setup you purge your own Alliance Promissory note and other players cannot give you Alliance Promissory notes. So impure as an ability is actually the only way you can acquire the Alliance powers of other people you don't gain Alliance Promissory notes you impure them via your fleet pool. Yeah, it's a pretty cool thing to do the first time you play as Mahaktau to realize that you're gonna purge one of the standard components. It's like very dramatic. Like Dane could have written that like several different ways. Right. But chose purge your Alliance like it feels like something the Mahaktau would do. Like you sit down and play a Mahaktau game and the first thing you do is you take one of your components and you destroy it. You turn it to the box. You pick Mahaktau King Sources and then it says look everyone in the eyes as you crumple up the Alliance Promissory note and you tell them there will be no alliances today. Yes, we will not be trading. I will. Okay. Yeah, that'd be cool. They also have a faction unit that you will be able to upgrade later there. Infantry are called Crimson Legionnaires. They hit on an A you build them one two two for one like the other infantry. But after this unit is destroyed gain one commodity or convert one of your commodities to a trade good. So they have this weird refund policy on their infantry. It's like a two steps removed refund policy on their infantry. Yeah. And I believe the way this happens is it's when they're destroyed, you can like it's like I can gain a commodity and then a media like let's say we killed two infantry. I can gain a commodity and then turn it into a trade good right. That's right. It's not like they're both resolved at once. They're both in the order. Right. Or like one is destroyed and then the next one and then the next one and then the next one and then the next one and then the next one. You get what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Their flagship is the Arvicon Rex. It is a build eight two on a five. So in the good flagships one move three capacity. That's the first standard. The ability is during combat against an opponent whose command token is not in your fleet pool, apply plus two to the results of this unit's combat roles. Remember that wording because things are going to get confusing if you think too much about what tokens are in your factory. This is the one ability you need to pay attention to what is not in your pool. Think of the Arvicon Rex as your tool to go get more tokens if you want to. It's also just like a good ship. You're just going to use it as a good ship. But just in terms of remembering what you're doing with your various components. This is the one thing that isn't based on what you already have on your sheet. It's based on what you don't have on your sheet. I definitely trip myself up with that because the Mac cares about what you have. The commanders you have access to compares about cares about what you have. This is the one thing that's the inverse of that. Yeah. Yeah. Matt did nail it with the yeah. You should think about what isn't on your in your fleet pool, not what is. Next up we've got some leaders and our leaders. We have the weirdest leaders because again, remember when we get to the commander you cannot give this power away. But first we have our agent, which is also a strange one because the idea of most agents is you can do this power or you can let somebody else do this power on your behalf. You activate it, but then they do it. But Jmircon is different. This is an ability that only Mahawk does, but it does affect someone else. So the ability reads is this. When you would spend a command token during the secondary ability of a strategic action, you may exhaust this card to remove one of the active players command tokens from the board and use it instead. So this is a big thing you'll see talked about in earlier hours, but the idea is you pull it from the board. They got to have a token on the board. You pull it and then you use that to spend it. Now in most cases that just means you've just spent it. You've removed it from the board. There's a special consideration here of construction has a player take a token from their strategy pool and then place it on the board. This one implies you take their token from the board, then use their token where you want to put your space stock doing the secondary of construction and you put their token where your space stock is going. Thus not activating the system for yourself. That can be important in like rounds two and three potentially. Yeah, obviously in a situation where construction is taken, you can sort of in a Christmas landy kind of way end up using it to defend yourself to say, "I'm going to create a structure here and because you already have a token over there, blah blah blah yada yada." The thing is though that construction is oftentimes played first action, so it's not going to come up that much. It's just a cool different thing for construction. Yeah, their commander has the unlock of have two other faction command tokens in your fleet pool. So basically win two combat against other people and then have those tokens in your fleet pool. Then that gives you access to the ability during your tactical actions. You can activate systems that contain your command tokens if you do return both command tokens to your reinforcements and end your turn. This is a long-winded mechanical way of saying you can deactivate yourself. You can remove tokens from the board and move again. This is the big thing that is breaking one of the cardinal rules of Twilight Imperium, which is once you've activated a system for around, that's it. That stuff doesn't get to move again. This commander says, "Well, as long as you've got a very robust token economy, you can activate it again. You pull both tokens, throw them into your reinforcements, but all that stuff could on a later action move yet again." So a late game mahoct can move multiple times and just like go rush for mechatol or go rush for someone's home system or whatever is the important place they need to be with enough tokens, you can do anything as mahoct. With this commander, there is a strange thing that has to be sort of addressed. We have some FAQ stuff to point out. So if you're playing TI and you don't know about the Dane FAQ, there's essentially a pseudo unofficial but also official series of answers. Dane has provided us on things that aren't necessarily printed in any online rule book or whatever. It's stuff that basically hasn't been able to put into a new living rules reference. One of those is a timing about the mahoct commander that's quite confusing and worth bringing up here while we're talking about that commander. The question is in regards to the mahoct candor, Ilna Vera said, "When does your turn end? Do you resolve when/after abilities if you activate a system's abilities? Is this any different from nullification field or starlands or can you resolve your end of turn abilities?" And Dane says contrary to a previous Twitter ruling that's hilarious by itself that we're changing things that were said somewhere on Twitter, "When/after you activate and other abilities within your turn, can/off be used when the mahoct player places a second token in a system? End of turn abilities can still be used. Any ability that ends your turn should be treated as ending your turn when they occur and know for their abilities. During that same trigger window can't take place." So there's a handful of abilities that say, "End your turn. Ilna Vera's not being one of them. You place the token and then immediately end your turn." And basically because of some weird rules shenanigans, you can't then do any weird, you know, someone can't play their ceasefire on you when you're doing this remove a token thing. They can do it in some other instance, but the remove your token is really just a functional way of just taking that token away and nothing else happens. Nothing else gets to happen. You don't get to do any other crazy abilities. You're not doing scan link because you're not technically activating the system. Just think of it as a deactivate and that's it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And finally, we've got the hero, Ben Addiction, which is as an action, move all units in the space area of any system to an adjacent system that contains a different player's ships. Space combat is resolved in that system. Neither player can retreat or resolve abilities that would move their ships then purge this card. So this is the big hey maker. This is the thing people talk about all game long. We've spent many, many hours all debating in game what's going to happen with Ben Addiction. Right. Yeah, it's a it's a big ability. It kind of makes the faction what it is. We've got some erota for this. Obviously this this ability was really complicated and really kind of confused people for a very long time. And I think it was mostly because just hadn't really all been fleshed out. Yeah. And the testing that would have been necessary to actually figure out all of the things that needed to be figured out for Ben Addiction is not possible. Yeah. So there you go. Right. That's what it's just not possible. Yeah. It's also a lot of cheeky stuff to you, right? It's things that maybe you could like if you were you could assume work this way, but again, the this is an ability not like a tactical action, but you're doing the like sort of steps of a tactical action. So it gets very confusing. So one of the examples is about anomalies. This includes units being moved by Mahox Ben Addiction or moving ground forces with Goms Secus. So this is this is a general rule that applies to this. Nebdiller rules, however, will be changed. A nebula will know. require being the active system, i.e. a system with a token in it, in the moment of this action, in order to move it, the rule 59.1 will effectively be changed to units, may not move through a nebula. There was weird stuff where you couldn't benedict into a nebula at one point because it was like you couldn't, you were technically only allowed to do nebula movements and tactical actions. That's sort of what's changing here. So the general rule is treat benediction like a tactical action movement that can only move to an adjacent space. But all the other rules about movement apply, basically. Yeah, absolutely. And there's another piece of erata asking who in who in the butt is the active player whenever Mahawk plays benediction. This is important for a litany of game effects. And the question is when the Mahawk hero benediction is used, who is considered the attacker and who is considered the defender or ability purposes is the combat considered the active system. The ships being moved along to the attacker and the ships not being moved along to the defender, the combat system is treated as the active system during that combat. That should settle most of the stuff. It doesn't settle everything, but it settles the majority of the things. And I know a lot of people haven't really, they don't really keep up with this FAQ document that we have. And it was never really officially published. So I thought it was worthwhile to actually go over these things again. Yeah, definitely. And our one of our final components before we get into text and stuff. But we've got our mech, of course, is the star lancer, which is standard stats to cost six combat sustained damage. The ability is after a player who's command token is in your fleet pool activates the system. You may spend their token from your fleet pool to end their turn. They gain that token. So you give their token back. You do go down in fleet pool. So you would have to like check and make sure you don't like destroy ships anywhere because you are going down. But then you completely call off all the action. Like we said before, you end the turn. They activate and then we're done. We move, we move on. They do end of turn abilities. And that is the end of it. Right. And then we have a piece of erotic here. Can Mahawk use their mech ability on themselves? The answer is yes. But you can use it as sort of a rinky dink. Really bad predictive. Yeah. Where you activate, who activate a star lancer, you take one token out of fleet pool and you give it to yourself to put in either strategy or tactics. And you know, it's good to remember that you have that option. Sure. Okay. Sure. It's good to remember that that's a thing. I hope to God you'd never need to use it. Yeah. Because you're probably not in a great spot. If you're thinking, oh, I need to just, I need to move a token around all my sheet so bad that I have to waste a token to even start. Right. The only way I perceive this being useful is like, because you can't even build you end your own turn. So you're spending a token to move a token. So I can't imagine why that would need. I don't know. See, this is this is you don't have one in strategy. You just have to put a exactly you got to get one strategy. Your agents already spent like something like that. Right. That's spending a tactic token to move a fleet token to your strategy is the only or it's a stall. And I mean, it's a stall where you get a token again. So I mean, it's not it's it's easy to imagine a desperate situation where you do need to do this. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, definitely remember that this is an option for you. So there is a their promise or you know, is the sector of dominion at the start of the strategy phase. Choose one non home system that contains your units. Each other player who has a token on the Mahawk players command sheet places a token from the reinforcements in that system then return this card to the Mahawk player. So of course, this promise or a note is kind of only as good as how the Mahawk player is doing in their quest to collect a command tokens, I guess. Yeah, it's not a very important component. It is cool that it can be used on mechital Rex. Obviously the primary diplomacy cannot be used on mechital Rex. So that's kind of a cool aspect of it. But yeah, Matt, like you said, it's it's only as good as the Mahawk fleet pool is at the moment that it's used. So I don't know. I mean, generally it's going to be worth a couple tokens in in mechital Rex or whoever has mechital Rex if that happens to be important. It's not always sometimes it is though. Yeah, it can matter. So there are texts. Of course, we have a faction specific unit. So we must have a faction unit upgrade. The Crimson Legionnaire 2 does improve the combat cost combat to seven from eights and it keeps the exact same ability. So after this unit is destroyed, gain one quantity or convert one of your commodities to a trade good. And then it does the normal infantry two thing, but not slightly better. The second half is then place the unit on this card. There's no rolling a die. You do not roll. When your unit dies, you place it on this card. And at the start of your next turn, place each unit that is on this card on a planet you control in your home system. If anything, seeing this ability like this makes the normal infantry two seem weird. Like, why do we need to roll? Wait, it could just be this simple. I could just gain all my infantry back. But instead, this is like a slight improvement of that. But also the only thing you're gaining is that that your infantry come back home ability. Yeah, that's it. It's pretty dumb. I don't like it. And we don't need it. It's just I don't even understand why that's what it is. Like, it doesn't even make sense. It's literally an ability that already exists, which is spec ops two ability. But like, it's, I don't understand why it doesn't have anything to do with the gaining commodities part, because that's why it makes the Mahawk infantry notable. Right. Yeah. It doesn't improve that at all. It just maintains that I would say this is almost like not even a tech. Right. Almost doesn't even exist. If it had been just like gain a trade good, like it, that's the upgrade is instead of commodity stuff. It's like just gain a trade good for every single infantry and they come back home. Like, you would almost have a green faction. You would maybe care about green tech as Mahawk. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. I just wonder what in play test, I mean, I would imagine that they that in play testing, it probably was like that at some point went too far and then yeah, maybe yeah. I don't know. It, it, it's a very odd thing to me to think about the fact that upgrading the Crimson Legionnaires just means that they reappear on your home system and that's all you get out of that. But overall, maybe it was just like, you know what? Infantry two is going to be dead in POK anyways. Right. So who cares? We're not going to try and resurrect a dead horse. Just let it be dead. We've all moved on with our lives in play testing. We're, we're done with infantry two. There are other faction tech as a single green requirement. Genetic, recombination. You may exhaust this card before a player casts votes. That player must cast at least one vote for an outcome of your choice or remove one token from their fleet pool and return it to their reinforcements. And yeah, we've, we've talked about this in tech episodes. We've talked about this in previous Mahawk episodes. This is also more or less a kind of useless tech. Yeah. I would say it's pretty, it's pretty dead on arrival at this point in our wish list for the next codex. We wish list very hard for a Omega or this tech in particular. I don't think we're going to be recommending that you really invest any time or thought into it. Yeah. We also have a little bit of a rata for it. This is like just something. I don't even know if this is actually some of the people be like confused about the question is can a player with zero votes be targeted by genetic recombination? This theoretically possible for someone to receive abilities via transaction to allow them to vote after the timing window of genetic recombination. Is there a defined difference between cannot vote and currently has no votes for the purposes of this technology? Here's your answer. Genetic recombination happens before a player would exhaust planets to vote. So if a player cannot vote or does not have votes to cast, they cannot be targeted by the tech. If they have tamed an ability that would allow them to vote, they could be targeted by the tech. But only before votes are cast. I think that maybe it has to do a bribery. If they're trying to figure out if you could use genetic combination on somebody. You can't do bribery because it's after they cast votes, but you can do distinguished counselor or maybe I have it backwards because distinguished counselors, when you vote, you cast with five additional votes. I don't know. It's all nonsense anyways because you're not going to research this tech. We're not going to recommend that you do that. Please don't get genetic recombination. You know what? Don't do it in protest. Refrain from researching it in protest because we deserve an Omega or overlord, dame, and evil fellow as you heard in the last episode or so, two episodes ago, you heard the evilness of dame are overlord. We must remain in protest and we must hold brothers. Do not research genetic recombination. In fact, mention it in all your games saying, I am refraining from researching genetic recombination until an Omega is published for this tech. Take a video on this and we do at dame. Yeah, exactly. Okay. That is all of the components that my hawk has. So what does all of that culminate in? What does this faction look like? It's a faction that has lots of command counter funny business and we said we made excuse for things they can do in the early game and things in the late game. I don't know. They feel okay if not full of words and very complicated. So I definitely agree with the sentiment out there that this is a high skill floor faction and maybe not one to take in your first game of Twilight Imperium on the whole. Yeah, they have a high level of complexity to them as stated on the faction card. If you look at it, it says complexity three red bars. Oh no, avoid my friends. Be careful. Here be dragons. Do we want to take a break before we get into the rest of the guide? Love it. Welcome back. I feel like we now have the understanding these days that Mahawk are pretty good but all factions come with some sort of downside. So as there are way we can kind of summarize what are the things to have a good Mahawk game? What are the problems we are solving for? What are we trying to fix so that we have a good game? Yeah, so we are going to start with possible issues that this kit might have so that we lay those out there so that then we kind of teach you how to not have those be problems. We want to lay the problems out and then defeat them in our minds. Okay, never actually. Never play always thing. So here is the problem. The start is not perfect. So that is a seem like that big of a deal except for like most POK factions have a perfect start. Like absolutely perfect. And those that don't have some sort of trick that fixes it, we don't. We have three infantry and three resources at home. That's just not great. We're lacking in two completely different departments. We're also a three commodity faction with a pretty not great promissory note or definitely one early game that has no value whatsoever. Right. Okay, so we're a bit iffy in a couple different places. Castodians, that's an option for us. That's pretty cool. But it's sort of dependent on like a couple different moving parts. Timing of tech is a big one. Whether we have a red skip is a big one. Cruiser two is what kind of enables us. Possibly do custodians. Did someone take diplomacy? That's dependent. There's a lot of little things that could mean we don't get custodians. There's a lot of things that can play out where Mahawk can take politics round one and still not be set up to take custodians at the top around two. Luckily we're really good at stage two. So we'll talk about that when we get to it. Another problem. We need a decent tech skip planet. Now when I say that I don't mean we need a particular tech skip, although it doesn't hurt. Getting a tech skip planet that is somewhat higher value, I'm not talking to one one here. I'm talking one of the planets that something like Semlor, which is a three two. And then you get the attachment and it becomes a whatever. It becomes big lore. And then it's really great. A planet like that enables us to use bio stems to kind of economically recover. So we want to be looking for that. Okay, when we're sitting down, when we're doing our qualifier practice round or our actual qualifier, we want Mahawk to be in a slice with a pretty decent tech skip planet. Yeah, if you're drafting and you know you're late in the order or something and you don't see any left, don't forget to keep an eye out for industrial planets because industrial planets have the chance of exploring one of these faction techs. You can you can end up with a faction tech. So if you're like in your mil tea draft or something for the tournament and you're fifth pick and everyone chose slice first and you know you're going to get Mahawk or whatever. Your backup plan could end up being some industrial planets. So if you get a green skip on J.O.E. or whatever, you're going to have a fine game. That's a two three planet you're going to do just fine. So your backup plan can be those industrial planets basically. Yeah, I would say though to be fair, it's a bit of a desperate plan. Yeah, no, absolutely. You're you're gunning for three out of 20 there. Those are not great odds in your favor. Yeah. And hopefully, you know, if you're with a faction that if you're with NRA, I don't forget about it because you're just not going to get to go into the, you're not going to get to dip the bucket enough in order to make that work. So hopefully you just have one right or something. I mean bare minimum, you have a tech spec of some kind. Yeah. Okay. Another downside we want to talk about problem wise, the faction is complex. These abilities are a little bit much and a first time play, I don't know, you can be pretty overwhelmed. I certainly was a hundred episodes ago. These abilities also break like some of the main rules, the foundational rules of Twilight Imperium. I mean, command token, get to pick up off table. Right. What? Yeah. This is like warfare primary stuff. Yeah. And also, it's a lot of abilities, right? Especially if you're having a really good game of let's say you picked up a couple commanders that are interesting, you might just be sidetracked on a million different things. You're over here, you know, workshopping your gomsecus cosplay. Meanwhile, you know, another player is actually playing the game and winning. Yeah. I mean, you're, are you having fun? Sure. Are you winning? No. Right. Are you having fun or do we teach you when? What do we teach you? Never fun. Never ever how dare you. Never fun. Not here. Okay. This is the window, Joe, not the fun, Joe, okay? I would say to, I mean, on that point, I generally, you know, we always say like if you're learning the game, or if you're with a group of people learning the game, don't steer them away from any faction. Ever, let them play to their hearts content. Mahawk is the one faction I genuinely would give pause to. It's not good for a learning game because they're going to like, mislearn a few key components of the game. Yeah. It's probably just not worth it for the first game. If somebody told me that they played Twilight Imperium Prophecy of King's Edition one time and they didn't like it and then I asked them, oh, so what faction did you play as? And they say, I played as the Mahawk and I thought it was a bit much. I would say, that's your fault. I would say actually, you have no idea if you like Twilight Imperium or not, you're going to have to start over from nothing, okay? And then I would hand him a pamphlet for my podcast. Let's finish this problem section. The last problem, which is not really that big of a deal, there's no solve for this. It's just like, it's just I wanted to mention it. It's a bummer. The faction tech, our bad, the faction unit, the Crimson Legionnaire one, is mostly bad. It's not as bad. I mean, you just get it. And yeah, sure, it gets you some money every once in a while and everybody in the preerata likes to just think forever about how what you could do with disability. Don't fall for it. Don't think about it. Throw them away. Just don't, the thing about Mahawk that I learned is you just got a lot off pieces of it and just not even look at it. I don't care. If you are watching me stream a game of Mahawk and one of my Crimson Legionnaires dies and I don't take a commodity, don't even tell me. Not. Okay? I'm trying to focus on what matters and that one don't. Okay? It just doesn't. All right? There we go. Everybody gets a one. The fix for that last problem is just ignore it. Okay? Don't worry about it. Okay. Well, so then we've listed our problems then. I think a lot of the rest of these sections are going to be talking about these things in how we kind of solve those problems. Yeah. First and foremost, and just to reassure people because this is a slightly different order than we've normally talked about things, we will get to strategy cards and early game and stuff what we're trying. I think we're trying to set up kind of a foundation first before we get into like, all right, let's talk about specific things that you do on specific terms and in specific phases. So let's talk about tech on the front end here. What are we using tech to accomplish? Yeah. So here was the big realization for me in watching other people play Mahawk. Because I think when we did the first guide like a hundred episodes ago, I think I thought their tech path was very complex. I don't even remember what I said and I'm not going to look it up. Okay? I just think whatever I was stuck on was too complicated. Okay? It's really simple and you know, you're welcome to our show. Space Cat's Blue Tech. But you just get blue tech. I'm sorry. Yeah. Those ones where I can say, well, because of the faction tech and because of what you start with, we're going to do things a little bit differently. No, this is, it's very straightforward. But within that, what we are making room for is there are like little minor divergences, right? But the point is they're not paths, right? War Sun is the end goal of a path, right? So then you would have a red tech path. Blue Tech is our path. And it's very easy to find little things along the way, I think is the idea. So sticking to the blue tech, you know, foundations is good. But I do think this is a faction, especially because Biosystems, like we're already looking out for tech skip planets and we like that just to like have more money or whatever. But there are some other uses for tech. that we can have. So let's break them down by like, dependent on what skips we have, what are we doing with our stuff? Yeah. So the first path I want to talk about is just my no skip path, which this is bad, this is actually worse than it would be for most factions. For economic reasons, we want to have a skip available, and we would like to even use it in the early game if we can. We can't always because of tech timing, but so here's your no skip path. It's, you know, anti-mass or DET, intergraph drive, and then look, now we qualify for both Dred 2 or Carrier 2, which is just the standard fleet. It's just regular, all meat and potatoes, twilight and perium. That's the thing that I realize about Mahawk. It is straightforward in the tech department. Everything else is not straightforward. Supplements that are good for this tech path. Sling relay is great. We already have bio stums, and we have a single space stock at home with three resources on the planet. So we have a little bit of a production bottleneck. It's not the worst. There's definitely worse. So I wouldn't say in every single game of Mahawk, you absolutely need another space stock. I'm not going to say that. If you end up picking up Sling relay, I feel like we can just, we can kind of turn and burn a lot of stuff out of that one dock, and it works fine. Fleet logistics, a lot of interesting ways to incorporate fleet logistics into a late game plan with Mahawk. I know there's a lot of people screaming, fleet logistics doesn't combo with the commander. Yeah, that's true. But you know what it does combo with? An addiction, which is a pretty potent combination to be able to do benediction into another regular action. It also does combo with the commander just in the less interesting way. Like you can do, you can do a tactical action and then immediately remove the token. Your second actual commander, the point is the commander, if it's the first action, then you've ended your turn. You can't do fleet logistics. But as long as you just like decide, you know, the whole point is you can't surprise everybody by, oh, I remove this token move, but guess what? Hey, everybody knew you were going to remove that token anyways. Your whole fleet is sitting there. They knew you were doing that. So it doesn't matter. Just move the stuff there and then remove the token and it's fine. And then you can do it next action. Absolutely. And of course, if we qualify for for fleet logistics, it means we could also get lightweight if we do need that. Now, Mahawk, as compared to most factions, is a little less lightweight dependent. Yeah. We can just bust through with many command token. Right. That's always an option to just a bust on through. They just smash and then continue smashing until we are at our destination, whereas lightweight was a little bit like, oh, I sneaked. I sneaked past. We're we do not have to sneak, but if you're looking to save time and save money, lightweight will, you know, still be good. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Okay. I'm sorry, blue tech crew. Yeah. Let's talk about the skips though. Actually, I'm going to talk about red skip first because red skip is our most fun. Red skip slice helps us get cruiser to round one. If all of the little timing things works, works out. And if we do get cruiser to round one, we can we have we've got five influence at home. Yep. All we need is a single trade good in order to do custodians round one, which ain't bad. Yeah. However, I know that a lot of people really, really like the fact that Mahawk can get custodians around one. A lot of people love that. And I just want to say that maybe they're really good and you don't always have to get custodians around one in order for them to be good. Right. Just say it. Plastic is good too. And like honestly, for Mahawk, I would say the order for me is plastic, tech, and then custodians. So I got to be having a pretty good day to feel like, oh, custodians definitely need to happen. I think that's the big takeaway for me in thinking about Mahawk has been the plastic focus. And like the idea that you're talking about this sort of baseline standard, cheap blue path of just like get these couple things and then be done with it is especially the idea. Like you said, Hunter, you can just smash through people. So you don't need to over invest in tech to get lightweight. If you just have so much more plastic than everyone, you just fight them over and over again and move through all of their stuff. So it's just like just actually have the units on the board and you're going to be fine. If you try to get squirrely with tech, I think that's like what was weird last time it was we were trying to think of goofy things that could happen with mehawked in their various interesting tech pads, but none of them are as good as just I can move my plastic as many times as I want. So that stuff better be as good as I can possibly make it. And there's nothing better plastic wise than first off having the money to dedicate to it. And second, it being dreads and carriers full of fighters. Yep. It's true. It's true. I really I really want to stress that plastic is a pretty big deal for mehawked especially in the early game when we're economically at our weakest point. So yeah, I think that's a good priority window to have. Now I'm not saying that you didn't have a really awesome game the other day. That's awesome. And I believe you like I like seriously, it does work out for you sometimes, but in the abstract, yeah. And sometimes the money works out to like you can get plastic angostoting. You know, like sometimes you just took trade and everybody gave you money and it's like, yeah, let's do it all. Why not? And so there's nothing wrong with that. But it's like, if you're stretching yourself thin, just to pull off the custodians thing and it's going to like actually destroy your around to, yeah, maybe reconsider that idea. Yeah. And look at your neighbors, of course, if you're thinking about custodians. Okay. That was enough. I think cold water we put on that. Let's talk about blue skip, which is my favorite. Woohoo. Blue skip rules. And actually for all of you that want something interesting, if you want a little spice in your tea, if you want to just some milk and honey in there, let's talk about blue skip. Blue skip allows you to get a gravity drive first. Okay. We're skipping the boring text. We're not getting dark energy trap. Okay. With that blue skip, now we already can get to dread to and carrier to. Yeah. That's what we could do. For some fun, we could throw in a little AI dev. What does AI dev do? Well, it would allow us to get space stock to. It would allow us to get. Crimson Legionnaire 2, if we wanted, if there was some sort of reason to do that. If we were dared, if we were dared to do it, maybe we get a hold of a red skip and with our biosims, now all of a sudden, we are going all the way into war son 2. That's all we need now is a red skip plan in addition to our blue skip. And we throw AI dev in it feels like we can kind of go any direction. Okay. We qualify now for pds to. We don't even need to use AI dev to get it, but whatever. It literally kind of just opens up the rest of the world. Now, what I want to get AI dev without the blue skip now, I just don't that's too much tech to tell you to get. But I did try this out for one of my games. I did feel like it was quite potent. I felt like literally unit upgrade wise, I could go whatever direction I felt like at minimal cost to myself. You weren't committing to something. You could just make the choice you needed to make for the round because AI dev just put everything on your plate basically. Exactly. It made it also worth it because AI dev is going to save you money. And this is the thing I love about AI dev is you get it. And then you're like, okay, I might use this to skip to et cetera thing or I might just save my mind, might just get my money back. You know what I mean? Like if you already have unit upgrades, it's very easy to just be like, all right, well, my money's at least I didn't lose any money in investing in AI dev. Right. And depending on, you know, what secret you get, what victory objective you end up having to go after, it can really, it can really save your neck or at least makes you feel like I can kind of go anywhere with this. I could get weird. I could get goofy. But the only space stock to is not the worst idea to throw into a path like this. I mean, you have the one space stock, especially if you're winning, you might want to have space stock to in order to just like really throw everything down on your home system. Yeah. I will say what's funny about all this is blue skip gives you kind of the most opportunities. It is technically the worst for your bio stems like round one kind of stuff like the blue skip planets are traditionally the lowest about, you know, you got your for hall, you're barely using for hall for anything in an early round scenario, although it would be, I mean, I guess it'd be maybe your custodians unlock whatever, but then you're not doing cruiser to it's funny that blue skip is the like the one flip side to that where the other skips are all better economically that you're mostly just using them for the economics. And then the blue skip is like, well, but actually I'm using this one for the tech this time because it's significantly more useful in that regard. Yeah, but it still makes sense because if I pick up, you know, let's say I have politics and I do end up, you know, like my favorite Mahawked round like start would not be a red skip start. It would actually be a blue skip start where I have politics and I just take custodians at the top of round two like a normal fact. Exactly. Because in that situation, I probably did get enough plastic in order to, you know, like make all of this work and not feel like I'm so stretched then. Yeah. Okay. What are we doing with the yellow skip? Yellow skip is fun. We basically do the same tech that I've been describing this kind of blue path. But our supplements are a little more interesting. We can get transit diodes and throw that into this path. Transit diodes is very useful because starlancers are very useful. So being able to move our mech to whatever planet that we so desire. You know, every single round is absolutely worthwhile. And also technically it's something we could buy us stems if we got into a real desperate situation and we need to move them again. Right. some weird reason, right? And then green skip? - No. Green skip, no. Just go blue as if you don't have any skips and hope that green skip is giving you enough economic bonus to be worthwhile. I think having biosims, biosims, by the way, I think is actually the best green tech you could start with. - Right. - And the rest of the green tech, if you have biosims, makes no sense to me. - Yeah. - Oh, right. - You're literally stepping on your own toes to do anything with it. You could green skip to hyper, but honestly, you don't even have a command counter problem. So like, don't just go, just start working on that blue tech path. It's gonna do more for you in the late games. - It's true. - The three extra command tokens you'll have earned throughout the game. Okay, so tech feels laid down, especially in this case, very simple blue stuff. We wanna talk a little bit about sort of the economics of this faction. We used to have sort of like a trade/meda section, but we're sort of just wrapping that up into, we'll talk trading, but we'll also talk about just like other money economics, other needs, other stuff that we need. So let's talk first about kind of trading in this economics section. - Yeah, so first we're gonna start with a little part I wanna call, what are we selling? Because it's a, you know, we got Resident Evil 4 remake coming out, so that feels like a joke that's funny again. So with the agent, that's something we can sell. That's something people like to talk about selling all the time. It's a complicated sell. Zippelin was hanging out in our pre-erata and likes to specifically mention that if you're going to sell the agent, you need to talk about it in the strategy phase because you need to give the other players a heads up that they will get access to your agent, meaning that they will get to double move somewhere. They will get to remove one of their command counters and basically do, you know, kind of a bad version of the warfare primer. Actually, it's a good version. You didn't even have to take warfare. So never mind. It's the best version of the warfare primer. Yeah, but it's complicated. You can't really just sell it to someone like all willy-nilly without really thinking about it. Unless you see an opportunity where you're like, hey, if I use my agent on you, blah, blah, blah right there. But it's very, it's also timing dependent. They have to play their strategy card if like the right moment in order for it to work out well for them. So you got to come to market. And to be honest, I've kind of cooled on the idea of really thinking about selling this agent. I think you kind of burn your brain a little bit thinking about all the aspects of trying to get it sold. I'm also unsure of what is even a good price for it. A lot of the time what you're allowing someone to do is pretty much insane. It will probably help them literally score a point. So a lot of people I would say, you know, I kind of think of it for most of the time when I'm playing Mahawk is just like, you know, it's cool that I have this command token advantage. I will continue to use that. I will try and use it in a way that is not beneficial to the other players. I will remove it. Yeah. Here's this token you have over this one destroyer. I will remove that. Thank you. Who cares? You'll get no use out of that for me, sir. So I try and work it that way. And then, you know, if I'm playing with somebody like Jolnar or like a con, someone that can afford who actually compensate me for this gift, this wonderful gift, then sure. I'll try and play ball. I'll try and figure out if there's some sort of deal we can work out. Yeah. But also to your point above, those are two factions. It's like, do they need the boat floating that way? Do they need the help? Do the con and Jolnar need that help? I don't know. Well, I just know that they can afford to or me to float alongside. Right. Is what I'm saying. You charge them the actual rec was an amount. Whereas the other factions are never paying you enough for what it's worth. Whereas the Hakkan, it's like, oh, you'll actually give me six bucks for this maybe because it costs you that much, but it's no skin off your back or whatever. Right. Right. The second component we can talk about selling, which we've already talked about a little bit, is the promissory note. It's similar to the agent in that we really got to pedal it. It's not going to sell itself. We really got to work on it. See the opening. See the moment where it, you know, it's probably best sold in the agenda phase. Exactly. End of the agenda phase. Where you can point at the map and say, hey, you buy this from me right now. I will, you'll get to activate this and so and so won't be able to activate you. Sure. Look for that. Look for that sell. And to be honest, with that sell, I'm a cheap date. I don't care. I'm probably just going to give it away for quite cheap. Unless obviously I, unless it's preventing me from activating a place I want to, in my case, I'm not selling it. But, you know, it's there. A lot of the times again, it's similar to the agent. A lot of the times it's not going to be worth thinking about. Just don't waste a lot of brain power on it. You know, you've got other brain power to dedicate to very complicated maneuvers. Yeah. And then the other thing, you know, we're a three commodity faction. That's where we're reiterating here. We're not, you know, we're not making big bucks every round. We're going to take that X minus one. We're going to get two trade goods and we'll be happy about it. Right. Hopefully no one ever makes you do an X minus two. That will be messed up. I probably would just try and not do that. Yeah. There's also the silliness of, you know, not in round one. But in some of your later rounds, you might have crimson legionaire stuff end up with the weird bonus commodities. So you have to think about trade timing versus like what's already on, like sometimes you got to do that funky thing where you get deals done right before trade actually pops just so you're not killing commodities. Let's talk about what are we buying? What are you buying? So this is just just some vague ideas. This is not going to be all encompassing of all the different things that you would want to buy. Yeah. We've talked like everyone else. We're going to want cash trying to get them trade goods. We specifically need at least one trade good most of the time in order to make it so that we can spend our home system on two command counters, which is the ideal situation there because we have five influence. We don't have six. We'd like to have six, right? Research agreement for agent is I think a really good deal and probably the most common agent deal I'm down to do outside of one other that is, you know, more obvious. But I also don't know for sure that Jolnar always takes it though. Well, a lot of situations with Jolnar doesn't really care about like they end up following warfare and they have enough infantry and they're not, you know, they're not sometimes the timing is weird though because they do just start with two infantry. So like sometimes you can squeeze it in there, right? It's at times possible because the money's not going to line up for them in a cleaner way. So might as well move my two infantry and then move them again or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It feels like a natural deal to me. There's, we should talk about the Isarl agent swap. This is where you're playing in a game with Isarl, meaning you can use your agent on Isarl. Isarl can use their agent on you. This is, you know, really good. There's no downside. There's no downside. If you are a Isarl and you don't want to do this, that's on you. I don't know what your problem is. You should be saying yes to this. This is the best deal in town. I would argue that it's, they're both factions that kind of have like the same issue of like great, powerful faction. Kind of a weird start. A little bit goofy on the start. Right. And this just completely fixes it for you. I mean, you want to play in a game with Isarl, absolutely. Yeah. On that note, Stads had a really fun preerot. This is very sort of heady. This is like broader stuff. It's not really a specific strategy. Stads had some random thoughts about Mahawk and Isarl. And you know, we've all heard that Mahawk and Isarl are great together because they can use their agents on each other. But I wonder if there's a deeper reason they work well together as factions. Mahawk seems to really thrive in a chaotic game where there's lots of warring conflict and violence. Not only does this rocket up the price of their agent and promissory, but it also makes it easier for them to pick up tokens and gives them room to develop their slightly awkward tech path, which maybe we're arguing is not that awkward, but I don't think it's that awkward now. Anyways, plus, while Mahawk isn't poor per se, it's also by no means a rich faction and will generally do better if everyone else is poorer and having a bad day. On the flip side, if you're playing against Mahawk, keeping the table calm and harmonious will take a lot of the sting out of the gene sorcerers. Rizsarl is the exact opposite. They thrive in a quiet, boat floating game with minimal violence, while Isarl can fight if push comes to shove they'll run out of combat action cards real quick in a protracted war and turn back into a pumpkin. They callmer game where Isarl can build up a perfectly curated hand of 20 action cards, mayjion everyone to have tons of information and get past their production problems, they'll hit their curve and have a great chance at winning in the end games. So if both Isarl and Mahawk are in-game and scratching each other's back, the rest of the table is a bit stuck. If they speed up the game's tempo with more cooperative play, they'll make a monster out of Isarl. But if they start slinging mud around, Mahawk will become a monster. I imagine it can be quite a predicament. Yeah, so absolutely buy into that, take control of the table and decide what the tempo will be. My friends, just destroy your buddies all up and down the street. I've seen some chatter about what to do with Commander stuff and how quickly we care about rushing for that. So I'm interested in Hunter how willing you are to wheel and deal with people to get that Commander unlocked as fast as possible. I don't care about getting it unlocked before round three and all of the games that I've played I feel like it's just been a very easy breezy. All right, I'll pick up the two right now. As long as you're willing to wait for round three, round one and two, you probably don't even really have gas in the tank in order to do it. And to be honest, I can't even really think of that many commanders. that are so good that I need to have them before round three. - Yeah. - So that aspect of it I don't really care about. I don't think you're getting two in round one or two, so you're not actually unlocking your commander. I feel like the only way I would think, oh, I need to wheel and deal in order to get this commander unlocked is if it's one that first of all is not gonna be easy for me to get, but also it like I could kind of build a strategy around it, like maybe a gomsecus, like if there's specifically something I can do here, that is particularly nasty, but only if I have gomsecus, maybe I would deal with the Sardak in order to kind of like rig it to make it happen. - But all that's even predicated on like how quick they're these other players unlocking their own, like you only have the commander in the state that it is in. So it's like, what does this matter? Anyway, you know, a Sardak, yeah, this plan sounds great, but also if Sardak's having an awkward game, then it's the plan doesn't matter anyways, 'cause they might not unlock gomsecus till round three. So yeah, to me, it seems like the kind of thing where everyone's just getting settled round one or two. Sometimes you have K out at games, but Mahox doesn't need to be like flexing heat that early. Round three, you start pushing into other people's stuff and you will like you're saying, you'll just naturally get tokens, like you'll just need to go, it might not even be like under bad terms. It might be one of those like, "Hey, can I take this planet from you?" blah, blah, blah, blah, we're working out a deal. Hey, if you just leave an infantry there, I'll just get my token and then I don't have to come actually fight you for it. Like, there'll be completely harmonious ways that are a part of your natural progression that allow you to get this thing unlocked before you actually have any need for it anyways. - Yeah, it's not Necro. We don't actually have to kill anything. We just need to win the combat. I mean, if you just pick off someone's destroyer or even just let them retreat, then whatever, you did a good job. You know, if I don't have the plastic available, and I send like a cruiser at a destroyer, I would maybe give a trade good in order to get the retreat locked down, you know, so that I can ensure that that destroyer doesn't get any ideas, you know? - Right, right. - But that's about as far as I go, as far as trading for the commander or for other, like having that edict access. - Well, and furthermore, what do you need this commander ability? Like, isn't this commander ability sort of like a hand of a sorrow action cards where it's like, save them puppies for the last round? - Yep. - And do maximum damage. It's like, you almost don't need this commander in lock until round five anyways. I mean, there's sometimes uses in round four there's little things that can come up, but it is not like a necessity until round five. - There can definitely be some weird control objectives that could come out on, you know, and then in round three, you make some sort of late round three play for like a planet that no one figured you were actually going to get, but hey, guess what? I already have it unlocked. Let's go. - Right. - Kind of deal. That definitely comes up, but yeah, by and large, you're not overly relying on the commander until we get to the late game. Let's talk about as far as economy stuff. Well, I just want to reiterate, we sort of already said this in other sections, but we really want to focus on bio-stims fixing our economic problems. And that's kind of critical for, I would say, round two and round three. We want to be in a slice where there is some sort of good target for it. So sometimes that means that maybe that target is in the equidistant and your buddy already took it and you have to kind of say like, you know what, actually, I kind of need this. And you can't really do anything about it. So let's maybe, let's deal, but you just kind of say it up in, you know, with air quotes kind of ambiguous. I played this game with ROI's the other day, where ROI's was just like, let's make an ambiguous deal later. And that was just like normal to ROI's to do that. And so we just kind of did that all game. I would just feel like, yeah, you know what? Let's do this right now. I'm going to get something and end in the future, ambiguous deal. ambiguous deal, open ended, ambiguous open ended deal. Just figure it out later. Go beyond a non-binding deal. Because you haven't even decided what is non-binding about the deal. There just is a scratch back. Let's lock this in, but not where we know what it is. Let's just get it on paper. But what is it? Oh, I don't know. And it works in the inverse too, because you can feel betrayed about anything later. If R-wise does absolutely-- Absolutely. --anything even slightly mean to you later. It's like, wait, you said you were going to be nice to me at some point. And now you're being mean. Well, yeah. And I had to adjust to that play style, because originally, it actually caught me very awkward. I always get very annoyed when I misunderstand what someone's saying, or I think we have a deal. But actually, it has a completely different context to it. So yeah, I completely did not get it at first, and then had to sync up with it. And last thing to note with economics where we move on to strategy cards round one is exploration. I really love the situation where you get ex-get planets with attachments on them. So hopefully you find those yourself. But also, if you don't yourself, maybe look at your buddy's size, maybe they got one with some stuff on it. Maybe you want to get that. Because it adds up. Really fast. You'd be surprised by how quickly, just using someone else's planet twice in a row actually improves your economy. Like a lot, a lot. It is worth it. Not that it's worth getting scan link for, though. You're not really going that far. But there is the clever thing of your buddy has big lore. You can take big lore. And in the same moment, refresh big lore. Because bio-stims is at the end of the turn, you took big lore, and then you get to use it next turn or whatever. So yeah, I agree. It's less about get the tech skips and more about keep an eye on where those tech skips ended up. Yeah. I mean, I would say this. If I had to pick up-- the problem is when do you commit to scan link? A lot of the factions that I like to say, oh, you could throw in a scan link. It's because late game, I can kind of see it. Whereas late game, I feel like a Mahak's late game is kind of more focused on cruising and bruising. And less like, oh, let's just pick up a few more little treats here and there to kind of help us get across the finish line. But I would maybe put scan link as some sort of mid-tier tech to possibly be considered, but not fully devoted to it. And one of those ones where the agenda phase techs are coming out. We're sort of spilling techs out of the canister than maybe it's an exit tech. Absolutely. OK, let's get into the meat of it then. We've talked broadly about a lot of things, but it's time to get specific about good actions you can take as a healthy Mahak's player. Let's talk round one and what we like to see in terms of strategy cards. Running through the list, how do we feel about leadership? Well, leadership is kind of interesting because it's-- I feel like it's kind of a late in the order pick. And we happen to be a bit of a Diplo friend. We kind of are ones that like the Diplo. We have an awkward home system for that first round. We want money. However we can get it, I don't care what happens to-- I don't even care if I give away custodians as Mahak. Mahak, I have no problem coming into the first round and being like, well, hey, maybe I'll have to do a stage two. We'll get to the victory points part. Oh, we're pretty good at stage two. I don't know. I don't mind gunning for that kind of tempo from the beginning of the game. So I do not care what happens. I just want Diplo to be in the mix. Does that mean I have to take it myself? No, but I will, if I have to. And that means I will take it over leadership. Now, if I'm certain that Diplo is being picked, and I'm like fifth pick, and leadership is available to me over something, trade has been picked. Technology has been picked. Yeah, blah, blah, blah, yada yada. Yeah, sure. I'll take leadership over like something like construction. Yeah, I feel like Mahak to sort of define by this nature of their agent makes so many strategy card conversations weirder for them. So where we're going to get into this more, but a bunch of these strategy cards, because you just set it in both leadership and sort of Diplo at the same time, which is like, you could take it, or you could hope somebody else takes it. And I feel like that's like really standard for them. And where there's only like two strategy cards, they like to have specifically in their hand. And everything else is like, I don't know. We'll make it work somehow. Yeah, it's true. You have a lot of versatility as Mahak. But you're least versatile at the beginning of the game. Right. And I realize some people might be listening to me thinking, like, oh, no, no, I mean, leadership's good, yeah. Tokens are always good. But yeah, to remember, we start ahead on tokens. Every single game we have, re-intactics, doing strategy, but then, uh oh, we've got another one on our agent. Right. Like in the situation you're talking about, we are the only faction where Diplo, Tech, and Warfare can all three get taken. And as long as the timings aren't stupid, we can just do all three. There's no thought to it at all. We do three secondaries if we want to. Ooh, sounds like Christmas in here, buddy. Let's do it. Okay, let's talk about the next card, which of course is Diplo. I just said, me like you. Yeah. Do I want to take it? No. Do I maybe have to take it? Yes. That is fine. I'm not upset about it. Yeah. It's okay. I'll save even more tokens if I take it. Right. Now I'm just worried about doing secondary warfare, secondary attack. Maybe I use the agent to follow politics, probably not. I probably use the agent to follow tech or warfare. And then guess what? I'm extra token going into the future. That sounds just dandy. We want those resources. We want, and you know what? You know what? It's awesome if we had like, I don't know, a co-injullier. We used Diplo on it. We get tokens and we have resources to do tech. We've got everything. That's what I want. I just want everything. I don't even care about custodians. Leave custodians. Take whoever takes custodians takes custodians. I just want to tack in lots of plastic round one. Yeah. Sounds fantastic to me. Yeah. You mentioned earlier some talk about politics, almost specifically in a blue skip Got gravity drive. Now it's gonna be okay world. Is that the sort of only situation where you like politics? Yeah, I think like gravity drive cruiser to or like for some reason we just get close to or I don't know We got a flank speed or something. Yeah, or I guess you wouldn't know that yeah I think a politics take round one for Mahawk is it's a little bit strange because I have to feel pretty confident that I'm gonna Have a shot at custodians. Yeah, but in a world where I have a shot at custodians is a world where maybe like too many other people Love a shot and it just happens around one anyway, so I would hate to take politics and then kind of be left with deadly squat So I'm kind of getting to a point where I don't really like my my hawk with politics. There's too many reasons It could maybe not go good for you and me no like you that yeah I had a game recently that wasn't a Mahawk thing, but it was a game I was commentating and politics went to like six pick and I guess like That's the world where it makes sense. It's like well There's everything else gone and my mind as well sit here and fix my round two I guess, but that's so rare that you know, that's not really what we're talking about. Okay, well, so I noticed an issue every time we say Me like you to dip low we have an issue with the construction. So yeah, how do you feel? Yeah, we're just kind of like I just feel like we're not doing bad enough With our production capacity at home for construction to be warranted Obviously structure objective they'd come out. Yeah, and obviously take it of course obviously obviously obviously and you have that weird goofy benefit Although that's again, it's a secondary thing when construction is when when construction happens you can like get yours unlocked But like especially round one that's not a consideration because the only place you're putting that space talk is somewhere That's gonna be locked down anyways. So yeah, I don't Diplo seems about infinitely better Yeah, yeah, I definitely I definitely think I would take dip love before Trade is our next one trades the best. Yeah, it's always the best right? It's definitely the best for mahawk And it can open you up to so many Beautiful little Christmas land experiences. It's stable you take trade and you're like this is gonna go well But it might go amazing It's at least gonna go well. Yeah, there's no way it's gonna go bad right and I love that aspect of trade We do have a trade ship we have a cruiser. So there's no weirdness here. Sure. There's nothing really to figure out We just you know, we just play it straight forward We're probably gonna get tech and Plastic in this scenario and I like that trade is also Ignoring the trade ship trade can also be the guaranteed trade good to then take custodians if it's comfortable and trade is The extra money to protect your plastic behind you still build plastic and you took custodians you did it all You just like had a lot of money That's the world where you get people to send plastic maybe towards you That's the trickier part of that strategy, but like yeah trade seems like the way you do literally anything you want to do Yeah Next is warfare It can set you up for custodians round one and in some weird cases So I don't want to discount that yeah, but overall I don't know I mean, I never really like warfare so it feels weird every week that we do one of these episodes and I'm like Warfare is bad sure because it's just like I don't know I always say that for so it's bad for every faction. Well, then why do people take it? I don't know Okay, I do not know well the thing you're talking about setting up for custodians round one It's the blue skip set up for custodians round one right you blue skip you get that back you get carrier to you've moved out You lift the token and then that carrier or dread the dread could be what takes you to mechital And then your carriers there to fill out the rest of your slice. It's a very comfortable way It's if anything less awkward than the cruiser to I always think about the cruiser two solution for custodians when I'm like Commentating mahogg game and then I completely forget that the blue skip is almost better. It's almost definitive Better is gonna go farther. Yeah, but yeah, you're gonna need the warfare thing for that. So I don't know Yeah, last is tech Um, I feel like the one thing that that is really frustrating about mahogg is like sometimes the tech timing can be not so good for you And I hate that feeling of starting a mahogg game of being like okay I better go to my tech skip planet and then Refresh it and I'm like oh no, but then I don't have enough money for tech if it pops, but I have the planet I don't know what to do. Yeah, I hate that feeling So you are a little bit scared of tech timing and guess what you won't be if you're the one that has it Also saves you four resources. I don't know. I guess that's okay. It seems like Probably not as good as trade, but still pretty good. Yeah, it's a great second pick I I think the biggest thing is that saving a four bucks is actually great because again, you're a three commodity faction You're you're probably you're maybe getting money, right? Like your your commodities have the potential to get refreshed kind of in any situation And controlling that tech window and saving the four bucks because the four bucks is really awkward for you otherwise right? Like eat with our normal home system We're not guaranteed to do the second area tech if we if the timing is awkward We're not just talking about like the timing is awkward because we moved our stuff out first It's like the timing can be awkward because literally if it like pops second action We we probably don't even have the money for it period. So yeah having tech in our hands means we are guaranteed using our five Influence at home on leadership instead or whatever or I mean, maybe not guaranteed You know, sometimes that still just desperately needs to be plastic But yeah, I think that timing thing is actually a pretty big deal Which is why it is like first-picked trade your second pick tech why not just do it It's it's a it's a great obvious thing to just sort of make you around long comfortable Right, right um and then imperial uh, we'll just continue and and say no Not gonna make an argument for it today. We keep leaving it. We leave it in the script. Yeah, it's there as if it exists But it's never going to someday Someday I just finished a four-month-long alliance a sink game where I'm pretty sure I was the one with imperial round one And it did end up being a game where I as nomad got four bonus points Four mechatal points is what I got within the first three rounds and I'll tell you this much That does not mean you win in fact No, otherwise an eye were the team funny. Um, otherwise gets two mentions of this episode Rwise an eye going into what could have been a final round were the only alliance that absolutely had no chance of winning Despite me having four bonus points everyone else was on better terms So let that be a lesson to you never imperial not even once. I love that. I love that Okay, next thing we want to talk well. Let's get into the mid game. Let's get into the nitty gritty the high level stuff Beginners go at a leave get out of here Well actually, but this is maybe useful information I mean I mean I'll right beginners come back in okay get back in here all right I hope you didn't you hope you didn't take me too seriously when I said that because otherwise you wouldn't have heard me say to get back in here All right Um, we're gonna talk about some mid game stuff. We're gonna talk about positioning Which is one of our new segments. It's a little bit It's a little unclear what positioning means you'll the mid game is pretty unclear So let's let's let's lead with that the mid game and the late game sections of these guides has always been I don't know we sort of just mean it, you know when we say mid game. We're just kind of like it's like the mid game We're just talking about the mid game man. I don't know right. You know that part. That's like after the beginnings Before like it's over yeah, that part. Yeah, you know that part. It's like three to six hours It's like it's like no hunter. It's like five to nine hours in most Yeah, you're right actually the whole thing. We are in tournament season right now um So we haven't already talked about how round three when we want to unlock that commander and I want to say it again I mean it. Let's let's unlock that commander. Okay. Let's get it unlocked And if we're gonna unlock it that means we need you know some stronger ships on our borders Near especially ships that are used by other factions to do dt Those are like ideal You know to be honest a lot of times I don't end up getting dt because I like want to Encourage others to come get the frontier tokens near my systems and therefore it's just super easy To unlock that commander. It's just great Make sure that you don't get obsessed with thinking about benediction through the midgame and then forget to like do The normal stuff right I guarantee you you will not know exactly what you should use benediction on You just won't yeah, you just do not we're not using benediction as some big 4d chess thing where we think about exactly where the best place for all of our ships is gonna be and we're watching their ships to get in exactly the right place Benediction is the thing where you're suddenly like wait those two fleets are next to each other. I got nothing else to do this turn Yeah, and that's it you just off to the races Yeah, I mean, I think you can imagine like I don't think I've had a single game with mahawk where I have like clicked into exactly what I wanted to Benedict yeah And then just like did it it you consider so many different game plans right And just I would just say I'm not trying to be super fancy here Wait till you see that stage - wait till you get to round five to decide like what is the best use case for benediction What's so good about it? We'll get to it whenever we start talking about win slaying Is it can be used negatively and it can be used positively? Yeah, it has two different charges. It's everything It's everything, it's everything all at once. It's positively charged, it's negatively charged, okay? It's got it, it's got it. And the other thing about positioning I wanna say is make sure you lock down some movement solutions. Now, what do I mean by movement solutions? Well, in the tech part, you remember when I said blue? Like, how always do? Like, we always do here, that blue. Maybe if you don't do that for some reason, let's say your opponents won't take tech. I had a game recently where my opponents wouldn't take tech. Well, what do I do? I think that Mahawk could just try to stack command tokens. It's super like shut everything down. We're not, no more spending all willy-nilly. I want a giant stack of tokens, so that if for some reason, I have to move all the way across the map with my one movement fleet. Well, maybe I can sort of do it, okay? Be prepared to have to do that. Because a lot of the time, that's kinda how it works with Mahawk, is like, you sort of have infinite possibilities if you have infinite command tokens. But you don't have infinite command tokens, you have 16. So try to get as many of those out of your bag as possible. I compare this in my mind to Hakkan. Hakkan is sort of like an opposite of Mahawk to me, which is to say, Hakkan is just swimming in cash and you just like end up with just so much plastic. And then you're just sort of like, I can kind of just like do whatever with this, but actually my whole strategy is just predicated on quantum data hub node anyways. Like whatever's gonna happen, it's gonna happen with that. Whereas Mahawk is like, I don't have the solutions innately in me. But if I can get the money, if I can become the economic powerhouse, I can achieve anything. Like I can put my mind in anything. I do not have the benefits, but I can use them for anything. Whereas Hakkan is like, I have all the benefits and I do not know what to do with it. There's no use for any of this plastic to go anywhere. Whereas Mahawk is like, I will make my destiny. - Yeah, yeah. I would say like Hakkan is like a sports car, like a Lamborghini and Mahawk is kind of built for tough. Like it's a big truck. It's got diesel, you know? And the thing about diesel is it chug. So you gotta have a lot of diesel, you know? It's a big engine and it choose up, it choose up the gas, okay? - It's choosin' on a choo-choo. - It munches it on down. - Okay. - That's why the Mahawk's look like cars. They just look like tough cars. They kind of just look like a pool of gasoline with a face. It's kind of what they look like. All right, let's talk about agendas. - Oh. - Okay, we never make time to talk about agendas. Let's start talking about agendas. We look through the entire agenda deck. - Whoa. - We throughout a couple special notifications for the Mahawk. So the first three, I wanna talk about three in a row, okay? Keep up with me here. I wanna talk about fleet regulations. I wanna talk about armed forces standardization. And I wanna talk about clandestine operations. For free, I'm gonna, we're not gonna read 'em out. In total, okay? Fleet regulations is the one where it limits your fleet pool down to four, right? - Yep. - Armed forces, and I mean that outcome of it, I'm not talking about every outcome of it. Armed forces standardization is the elect player where you kinda go down to three, three, two, as far as your command tokens, like at the beginning of the game, which obviously that only matters if Mahawk is losing command tokens, not gaining, if you're gaining 'em, then whatever. We don't have anything to talk about. And then clandestine operations, which is the one where you have to take two command tokens off your sheet or one out of your fleet pool. And that's either way, if it's four or against, it's gonna be relevant to this. Because fleet pool agendas are kinda no good for us. We don't really like 'em. We don't wanna have limits on our ability to do edict and imperia, and we definitely don't wanna lose stuff because we've got predictive already to kinda shift things around. Anytime we lose tokens, that's diesel that we ain't got in the truck tank no more, okay? And I also have a relevant erota that I wanna read. And I actually think this one, as opposed to some of the other erota, is this isn't gonna come up that often just when these agendas are in play, but I actually found myself kinda confused by this. So here's the question. If you're the Mahawk player, what happens when an agenda tells you to remove one of your command tokens from your fleet pool and return it to your reinforcements? You only have tokens from other players in your fleet pool. Well, the answer is of course you're required to remove the other player's tokens and return it to their player reinforcements. Okay, fine, that's pretty straightforward. But what about if fleet regulations is in play and Mahawk already has four tokens in fleet, can they add another one and discard their old one via edict or can they not add one after a combat win because of the can-off in fleet regulations? And of course the answer is the Mahawk player can add a fifth token and choose to return one of their reinforcements from their fleet pool afterwards so you can cycle. They can cycle them out. You're adding a fifth and then removing so that you go back down to four. That's how they handle it. It makes sense. The regulations is still bad. I wanna clarify that, it's still bad, but it's not game-ending as you can maybe read it to be from the beginning. You're not trapped in it or whatever. Yeah, all of these are just awkward because I do think sort of the prevailing advice is get your own tokens out of there. If anything, your own tokens being in your fleet pool are still not that your promissory note is very good, your tokens in your fleet pool are making that thing worse because if you don't have tokens in your fleet pool, then you are not affected by your own promissory note and you can definitely give it away to anybody, willy nilly and let them use the power to thwart other players. But it's uncomfortable when you're also thwarting yourself because your tokens are in your fleet pool and thus affected by your promissory note. That's like a tiny consideration, but I do think you, every Mahawk game I see the players at some point try to get all of their tokens out of fleet pool and are reliant on their opponent's fleet pool. Yeah, the other thing though is like, you start with predictive, you'll always have that. But if you do leave some in your fleet pool, you can get them out pretty easily. I don't know, I find that I'm kind of moving my tokens around on my sheet all the time as Mahawk basically. Well, especially if you're gearing up for an end game thing where you know your mech is gonna come into play when you know Star Lancers are gonna factor. Right, I need, it's sort of like the fires of the gashly thing of like I got a plan for an extra fleet supply 'cause I know I'm gonna lose one in the process of these requisite things. Right, let's talk about some other nasty agendas. I think the obvious one on the topic of Star Lancers, Articles of War is the one where if it goes for, you can lose your mech's printed abilities and this is about the worst mech in the game for that to happen to. Yeah, hate it, I don't wanna see this one. Really bad, we do not want to lose Star Lancer. It is a key for locking up the win. Now what's funny about Star Lancer is if you're not locking up a win, it's basically irrelevant. I mean, or just very conditionally relevant, which is why I say, I never wanna see Articles of War 'cause I wanna plan to win every game, okay? (laughing) Next up is a really goofy one, but we were, we, Hunter and I together were talking about whether or not Minister of War is like especially relevant to a Mahawk game. And Hunter, you came up with what you believe is the prevailing strategy for Minister of War. Hit me, well. So, the Minister of War allows a player to, they activate a system and then they play Minister of War and they like remove the token and they get to take another action. They get to activate twice. I feel like if I'm a hawk, I maybe would argue, although I don't think I would be successful in arguing it, but I just wanna throw it out there as an idea. In a game, maybe sometime, if you're playing as a hawk, you could say something like, hey, so I can already do this sort of, but slower. So just give it to me, because you already had to worry about me sort of doing this. So now it won't really be that different. And when you do that, let me know how it goes. (laughing) - This is, what a stupid game we play where these are the kinds of negotiations we have to have, like listen, it's not that bad if you just give it to make, just do it, just do it, okay, shut up. - Yeah, I don't think there's any, it doesn't boost Mahawk in any meaningful way, and it just means they have less people to worry about. The last one, that's just a minor mention, but it's colonial redistribution and swords to plow shares, these are the agendas that make you lose infantry on a planet, and it's important to note that those do say destroy, you destroy infantry, and when Mahawk destroys infantry, that's money. So, you love these agendas, 'cause everyone always loves these agendas, 'cause they give money, but guess what, you're earning, you got time and a half pay on these two. - Yeah, it's pretty cool. Source of plowshares in particular, can cause you to make a lot of money. Crazy money's good, we like money, we need it for getting every single one of our tokens out of our bag and keeping them there forever, for the entire game. (laughing) Oh yeah, there you go. Those are the agendas, that's all we came up with as far as special Mahawk considerations, if you want more general agendas stuff, well we've done that, go check out that episode. It was pretty good. We read through every single thing in the deck, okay? We probably mentioned, maybe we even mentioned what we just said. - Yeah. - That's what I don't even understand how the show works. - I never know anything we've said. It's time for late game stuff, and the late game we are here to focus on objectives. So we haven't talked explicitly about like, what are the objectives? Mahawk is good and bad at. So what do we like to see and what gives us trouble? - I think we're really good with, control objectives, especially in the later part of the game. And the early part of the game were not so great at it, but we just have so much flexibility because of the commander to just kind of be like, you know what, actually, I'm gonna go get this one. Yeah. Or we kind of stall around everybody, our neighbor passes and we're like, you know, I activated this over here, I think I'm gonna go here now. And I'm gonna have that. And that's actually my last industrial. So there you go. You can kind of do that. You can also, you can always negotiate. You could always, you know, do a try. And to me honest, you can even use your abilities as leverage and sort of say like, hey, so I wanna score this control objective. How do maybe you do a different objective? Like maybe you do your tech objective you have already qualified for. And maybe you let me do this and it's not a big deal because I could just do this anyways. So how about that? How about I'm giving, I'm trying to be nice about it. Blah blah blah, yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. You know that kind of dirty, twilight, and period stuff that we do like to do. But what's cool though is you could also use your agent to help like essentially someone else score a control objective in exchange for you scoring one now or something like that. So I do like that. Actually one thing that I think is kind of the main point here for control objectives is you could help someone else score one that you can't yet in the early game before you even have your commander. And then in round two, you just sort of ask them to leave something behind so you can get an easy - Edict out of it. - And we're about to talk about economic objectives. I do think it's a clever way to afford economic objectives you otherwise may have had minor difficulties with, right? You get a little bit of extra cash for the agent and you just go ahead and get them, you know, you spend it on the spend date resources while you let the other person do a control objective. They actually didn't feel like they had hope in doing. You know, we're talking around too. People are kind of isolated to their slices but you offer someone an alternative and say, listen, you can get here. I can give you access to here, but I need to score on the flip side of it and economic or like we've said a few times, you don't have like big in a economic advantages. The best you got is maybe a textbook is on a planet that's useful for that specific economic objective which is not particularly common. - Yeah, yeah, economic advantages or economic objectives I should say. We're kind of in the middle here. We do have a five-influenced home system so that ain't nothing. - Right. - And it is gonna be useful if tokens come out or if influence come out. But yeah, I really think for this to work, you gotta pick a good slice. Mahawk needs a good slice. All right, to say, I just think that's how it works. I think they have to have a good slice. They're not the type of faction that can just let any slice. They're not Hacon. They can't just be like, oh, I'll just take whatever, you know, and I'll make work. They're like kind of on the opposite side of that without being a bad faction. - Right, that's the idea is they do poorly in poor situations, whereas a thing like Hacon, Jelnar, they do not do poorly in poor situations. But the difference is Mahawk rises almost even higher in the good situations. A great slice for Hacon kind of barely changes their situation. They had the money they had. They're gonna be fine all the way through. But Mahawk gets boosted significantly more with that money. They are able to accomplish more with all of that money. - It's almost as if for Hacon, a good slice is sort of a win-more situation. - Right. - You know what I mean? Mahawk is just a win. - Yeah, and that's all we want. - Right. - The one things that settle right into the win. - How do we feel about tech objectives? - Well, we start with two techs, so you'd think we'd feel good. But we don't, 'cause it happens to be a green and yellow tech. - It's like an L1Z1X problem, I guess. - Yeah, it's a little weird. I would try, like if two tech and two colors comes out like right away, I am not getting too green to yellow. I'm gonna figure out to do something else. I would rather have my stuff online than just rush for scoring. Hopefully the other one is scoreable and we do that. - Yeah. - If it's both tech that come out, maybe we just don't score around one and we bank on the idea that we can do a stage two. We're pretty good at stage two, all right? It's not the worst idea to be like, okay, I select my worst available tempo because you know what, if you keep speaker control, you can probably pull it out. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Structures, we specifically earlier said we don't really like construction kind of in any context. - Yeah. - And you haven't even pushed for a forward dock very much. So I do not like our odds on structure objectives. - Yeah, I think they're like the worst category of objectives for us and that we just don't really have a reason to be excited about them. It is cool Matt that you were mentioning that like, we could use the agent to follow construction and then actually use the space dock that we built that round on the secondary. That's pretty nice. So that's like kind of our boon there, but in a vacuum, I might not even build a single structure if I didn't have to, you know what I mean? As Mahak, so I don't know. It just, it kind of depends on the situation. I think I would rather see them earlier rather than later 'cause I'd rather be able to kind of plan into it instead of be surprised and realize that like, oh, now I have to pivot or something or hope to beg the person with JR to give me a structure that I need, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Before we talk about stage two's, I think we wanted to open up a chance to sort of talk about any special mentioned secret objectives that Mahak is either better or worse at. So, I mean, we've talked about control objectives. So the action phase, fighty, I think in our objective episode, like 100 episodes ago, we called them battle objectives. This seems like a battle faction. This seems like we've been making a case for battle. - Yeah, and I think they do a really good job of like, surprising the other players with scoring their action phase secrets. I am very like open to the idea that most of the action phase secrets are at least conceptually doable for Mahak, which is I think a very good sign. There's not a single one that I'm like, well, that's gonna be basically impossible to pivot to. Remember, our strength is flexibility, even something weird, like around four leads to dust and we have no PDS and we don't have PDS too yet, could maybe work out for us, which is kind of saying a lot. I mean, that's like the worst situation I can imagine, but because of our kit, that might not be a death sentence. Even a situation where we have a single PDS too, because of our commander, we get multiple tries. If we have ships around, so yeah, that's something. What else I think is stupid about it that is an interesting thing that Mahak can do and I've seen this play a few times is, sometimes you have your support buddy, right? You got your support swap hanging out and that's the only viable place you can do some of these things. It's the only place I can do the brave, the void, right? - Yeah. - Well, Ben Addiction is hilarious. 'Cause Ben Addiction is like, well, my support part is in the void unless I decide someone else crushes them inside the void and now there's a new fleet in the void and now that's my void to go brave or whatever. - Or do it yourself. - Yeah. - Use Ben Addiction to do it. - To avoid, yeah, exactly. You can just move in because it's not a tactical action. You just move your fleet into the void and you never lose the support for the throne. - Yeah. Now that's the meanest way to do it, but I don't know. I'll do it. - Certainly possible. - Yeah. - That was really me. I don't think they're gonna be mad about it. They must kneel. - Yeah. It does come. - It does come slightly at a cost because there's a whole, we have an issue with, we'll call them friends. We don't have friends. What does that mean when we don't have friends? - Well, yeah, so it just means like, when it comes to Betraya friend, which is actually like a very, I would say a pretty easy action phase, not the easiest, but like definitely like on the easier side because everybody has an alliance, right? And they can just kind of be like, "Well, you want my alliance, whatever." Or "Can I have yours?" - Yeah. - It's crappy. Can I have it? Generally, the only friend we have in a game is probably our support partner. We don't have an alliance ourselves. We can't even get alliances from other people. That's actually the important part. I want to keep Betraya friend correct instead of messing it up. It's so easy to do. You need to have their stuff in your play area and then attack them. So we literally can't get an alliance and there are what? I mean, there's like a five. - Yeah, there's, I mean, you can get Hakon's trade, Convoys, Mentex promise of protection, Imperians, two notes. And then the really weird ones are Nalus, gift of the pressions on the turn you have in play, but let's be real. Nalus not giving that out and definitely not to Mahawk. That's ridiculous. The other one though is Terraform. If you can sum out, hey, I mean, I don't think a horrible trade is an agent on Titans Round 1 to make them do really slick maneuvers in exchange for Terraform. And then guess what? - That's what Terraform on a planet. Once it's attached, that's in your play area. That's a reliant. We don't talk about Terraform enough and how it's the best Betraya friend because you don't lose it when you attack them. You can just attack Titans over and over again. If you lose the combat or they retreat, they have skilled retreat or whatever. It doesn't matter. You can try again. That's a huge deal and it's especially important because Mahawk has very few other options. - Yeah, yeah, that is pretty cool. The other secret that we never want to see obviously is the Faction Tech secret. That's garbage. I would rather lose and satisfy the secrets requirement. Because like I said, beginning of the episode, we are on protest. We are protesting Dane. And not researching genetic recombination until there is an omega for it. Dane, you are on watch. - Let's talk about stage two. - Yeah, stage two. So I actually think we're really good at 'em. I think we're like the best at them. Now we're not Joel Narr, but a lot of the really Iki difficult control objectives are very imaginable for a Mahawk player. Economy hopefully works out for us if we just have been squirreling away the stuff that we need. The control ones are so good. Rule-distant lands, a chief supremacy. These don't sound so far fetched to me at all. - They're already the sort of on and easier footing for a lot of factions. And Mahawk is the one where it's just like, y'all do your fancy footwork. Think you're gonna score a chief supremacy. I'll wait it out and then I'll just move all my stuff around. I'll build my flagship, I'll deactivate it, I'll move it, I'll deactivate it, and I'll park it on mechatol. We're done. - Yeah, it's really beautiful in that way. So yeah, I think a lot of them are very doable. Two and four colors, obviously no. - No, but three unit upgrades. Everyone can do that, so who cares? - Yep. - Yeah, it's kind of, I think the best shot at a lot of the more difficult stage two. So the really crazy controls. Obviously structures, Meh. - Meh. - Yeah. - I'm not really gonna happen. - No. - But yeah, I think they are, I think they're on the higher end of the stage two accomplishing factions. - Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we've locked up our objectives. We feel like we have some sort of path in sight, but there are other players in our way or perhaps we are the chief target. It's time to talk about win-slaying and what we do. I think this will be a common theme in these episodes, but it is especially prevalent in Mahawk. We've talked about benediction, we've talked about the commander, but Hunter, lay it all out for me. - I think Mahawk is the best win-slay faction in the game. - Yeah. - I think it is the, what makes them a top tier faction? What puts them in the top five in my personal book is how they win-slay. I think they are basically an artist at it on either end of it. They're good at being the bruiser, the win-slay leader because they have benediction. Benediction is such a great win-slay tool. You are third or fourth to win that position. I feel like you can kind of generally get people going as far as the carousel of win-slaying as long as you're willing to put benediction on the table or at least say you're gonna put benediction. - Yeah, you're a good rabble rouser. It's like, listen, we can achieve anything. I got benediction, I got tools in the kit. Let's all work together and you just lied everyone's face or tell a half truth or a whole truth. - Or tell a whole truth. It doesn't matter. - Maybe it's actually the truth. Maybe that it is actually how this is gonna work. In a situation where we're second to win, I love that. And we have no allies, nobody wants to help us out 'cause we're second to win. We can probably just get it done. (laughing) If all we have to do is win-slay one person, we can probably just do that. We don't actually need anyone's help, which is kind of crazy. That is not normal for a faction to be able to reliably win-slay another faction. And I feel like in saying that, I don't imagine that there's a bunch of listeners being like, well, I don't know about that. This is like a safe thing to say. Like benediction can be used, in there's kind of a twofold way of using it. You can use it to clear somebody out, to move their ships out of their home system. Sure, you can use it to move your ships into an unexpected weird source after having moved them. You move your ships and then you benedict your own ships into some whatever system that you haven't activated now, and then they can move again. It's so flexible. And also you can use fleet logistics to very suddenly kind of spook people be like, you know what, it's time to do it right now. Benediction into that system and then move again and bam. Suddenly you've struck a system that is so wild as far as the possibility space for it, but there's no way that they were considering like all of the different ways you could have done it. Right. That's what I like about it is I think that, being on the other end, the other side of a Mahawk winning game and like trying to fight against it, you will burn out trying to come up with all the different ways that Mahawk could try to do this. Well, yeah, especially think about how wobbly so often your win is when you're in that first position as somebody else. Like I'm thinking of one of the most common things is just like I'm sitting on Imperial or I'm sitting on Mechatal with Imperial as long as it just gets to my turn, I pop Imperial. It's like Mahawk can just be like, all of your ships are no longer on Mechatal and then so and so can just invade the planet or what, like there's so many easy plans to just remove someone from Mechatal no big deal or remove you from that critical objective that you're gonna pop Imperial off of. You know, it's like Mahawk knows they're going before you, all they have to do is Benedict and you'll probably lose access to that and that might be your entire shot at a victory thrown out the window. And Mahawk is sitting on leadership and it's just gonna coast out the rest of the round. It's so true. And it really just comes down to two, like make sure that you have your tokens though. Yes, you really need those tokens. Yeah, you need to be prepped. You need to have tokens out and ready to go. There are people, there are high level players that suggest a type of Mahawk that is like a little more aggressive in the mid or early game than like what I'm like what we're suggesting in this guide. However, those people are crazy and they're much better at the game than you are. Okay, or me or any right. Okay, don't listen to them. Don't let them guide you down the wrong path. Sure. What I'm saying is get all the tokens out of the bag. Plop them on your sheet and then in round five, have a buffet of options. Have a buffet of various things that you can do. But, let's talk about, yeah. Let's talk about the flip side of it is the fact that you have made a case here. You have a whole section called the Winselaid Defense because you do have an easy to imagine scenario where Mahawk is leading the pack. And guess what? All we gotta do is make our opponents bonk their heads into each other and three stooges their way out the door. Yeah. So there's really two major aspects to this. Using benediction in a defensive stance being like, I'm the winner. I'm gonna use benediction at some point. Somewhere is so much fun. It's like the most fun. I think you can have in Twilight Imperial because you're finally just looking at the map and you're being like, this is an ability that I can use basically anywhere against my enemies. And they have to do so much to make it not workable. You have to clear the map. You have to everyone get out of every system. (laughing) No one can be near anything. And guess what? You can also just get near them and take up the space. You can just kinda sit there and just kinda move your fiddly pieces around in various goofy little stupid ways. And just, but my thing is here is this, try to keep benediction. Save it until the last critical moment that you can as far as playing it to mess up the other players. Because the idea of benediction is just as powerful as the actual ability itself. If everyone is trying to play around it, you basically already won. Yeah, they're gonna flub over themselves because benediction can mean anything and it's only the second you've used benediction early that then now you're known variable, right? The easiest thing to do to win sleigh, like any player is essentially some sort of warfare thing where you move everything really close to their home system like adjacent to it and then you pull that token off and then you dive onto their home system, right? Mahawked as long as benediction is still on the board, you move that thing once and then all I have to do is just shove it. Like after you've used warfare, it's like push you backwards, you don't have the range anymore or whatever. Like you can literally wait for a person to come up to you and then you stick your hand out and put it on their forehead and they swing their little fists at you and can't reach you because you've just literally moved them too far away. But any moment where you take benediction off the table, you are now a known variable that they have to handle. Right. And also it frees them up to put more command tokens on the table because until you play benediction, anytime they put a command token in any system, even as supposedly worthless pointless system just install is a liability. That is a system that you could benedict their giant fleet into and now they are locked down regardless of whatever it is, whatever else it is that they're doing. The second part of the win slate defense is the really obvious one is star Lancers. Star Lancers is a beautiful gift to Mahawk's world and every day Mahawk should kiss every star Lancer right on the cheek, okay? They should love them. There should be no kneeling of star Lancers. If anything, you should be kneeling to your own star Lancers, get on it, okay? Make a big star Lancer and kneel to it yourself. All you gotta do is have one in your home system and maybe one on mechthal wrecks, if that's part of your whole thing, or maybe them all spread out to the various planets that you need to control. And then as everyone tries to attack you, you start giving them their command tokens back, okay, sure, that part sucks, they get their command token back. But they've now activated the system. There's only so much they can do that before it just kind of becomes pointless. Meanwhile, you're free to strike back. It's a very coordinated thing that the players have to do in order to bypass star Lancers. Think about how many games that you've played where the win slate carousel falls apart. Well, Mahawk needs two people to be on their best behavior in order for them to play around star Lancers. And I'm not saying it's impossible, just saying it's the level of discipline that a lot of people are not going to incorporate against you. And remember, if you have the first part too, you're tripling the amount of work. Like they have to just plan the star Lancers thing, the double activate move, then do it again. And they have to make sure nothing gets been addicted in the middle of that. It's a 14 step scenario. They literally have to invent a magic Christmas land to get through all of your defenses. That's how good it is. So I understand why the good players decide, actually it's okay to push early because as long as I know I'm going to have it, of the money. It's that idea that you see, I think, in like, you know, the, the heck mode players or the Euro morning crew where they kind of lean more into this, like, if I can just, like, get a critical mass of planets from my opponents, my economy will be so off the chain. And as long as I'm not silly about my objective scoring economy, like I just am reliably scoring, I can do aggressive maneuvers and just outpace you. I'd think Mahawk is like the ultimate version of that. As we've been saying, like, if I just, if I just got too much money, I do weigh more with that than anybody else is capable with, including on the preventing a win-slay of myself. So I could totally rush out to an early lead. I can risk my custodians around one. If it, if I have a reliable money-making plan for that mid-game or whatever, because you just know you can fall back on these tools, you just have to prep for them properly. Yeah. And the last thing I want to mention, as far as win-slay or late-game stuff in general, is always remember predictive. It is such a nifty way to sort of be like, I'm going to switch it up a little bit. Yeah. Or, oh, I got more tokens than you can on it on. You know, you can be such a little devil with predictive. And yeah, don't hesitate to use it. Don't hesitate to, in the last round, use it and then buy us them, sit back. Who knows what you're going to do? You little weirdo. You're unpredictable. That's the whole thing. It's hard to like, keep all the possibilities of Mahawk in your head. If you can just get to that point where you have the tempo and you have the win, yeah, I don't know. It's a lot to figure out. Stop in you. Yeah. Yeah. It is that, it's high-skill floor, but it's extremely high-skill ceiling. You got to be able to accomplish all these things. But so do your opponents. Your opponents have so much more to figure out on their end. And so it just, yeah, it ramps up the complexity of the entire game. And not everyone can handle it. I know I can't. I lose to Mahawk all the time these days. So I just lost to them yesterday in my alliance game. So it's tricky. A lot of times people will, and this is this in no way am I throwing shade at all. But I have seen multiple times players kind of give up on win slaying a Mahawk. Yeah. Because what happens is it's too complicated. It takes too much effort. And then players start saying things like, "Wow, I'm going to win slay this Mahawk." And then what for sure someone else wins because I've had to do this and then this and then this. They'll just be like, "You know what? Good game. You're already one." You know what I mean? Like I'm just going to give it to this person because why do I just want the next person in line to win? If I had to do all of these things, there's too many things to do. Yeah. Absolutely. It's rare. It's not always worth all of the work to make it happen for plenty of the factions at the board. You've added so many elements. The person has to be in a position to win themselves and they have to be able to get past your star lancer and they have to be able to get past your benediction. You see how it's just it just adds up to too many things to deal with. Yeah. It's like don't bother stopping Mahawk. It's not worth the trouble. That's almost like the slogan of Mahawk. Don't bother stopping me. It's too complicated. It's annoying. Just don't just slow just let me win and we'll just move on. I mean like there's a lot we all have a lot of life to live. You know? Yeah. We don't need to bother with all of this complicated win-slay Mahawk business. All right. Last last thing to talk about. Let's zoom out. Look at the whole game and one and at one time. The whole thing. Let's talk about what is the tempo? I mean, there's only really two to talk about with Mahawk. There'll be two for most everybody. There's pretty much with extra points and then without. Yeah. But we'll see how this section kind of maybe this section goes away because it's like just me saying the same thing every time. I don't know. First one. Let's talk about if you get custodians or extra points. This is this is fun. They're both fun for Mahawk. This one's kind of easy peasy, I would say. You score your stage once. You save action phase secret objectives for the last moment. We just play a cool, fun game. We prioritize that early game tempo and we just assume we're going to do well in the late game. We're not going to have to get a stage two with this tempo, especially if we get a support swap or I mean definitely if we get a support swap and play the speaker token game. Do not let the speaker token pass you after round one. Yes. This will not be that hard to accomplish because if you got custodians and you listen to everything else we've said today, you're having a good game. If anything, I would say in this tempo you brought up the support for the throne. I would push for that as early as you can because you're going to become an apparent threat very early in this kind of a game. If you know you're going to go for some sort of custodians thing, lock that support swap in ASAP. Let's talk about what it looks like if we don't get custodians. This is probably going to be, in my opinion, this is more common. For my play style, as Mahawk, I did not find it be worthwhile to get custodians every time I know there's players that probably get custodians a lot more than I do. They play a little more wild on playing, you know, I'm your Huckleberry. We're looking at a stage two. We're going to say stage two. We're going to be working on that. It's going to be around five, hopefully. We should prioritize score after the first round. We should prioritize scoring points every single round. We got to prioritize getting that support swap done. I would say be a little more Lucy Goosey with speaker control. If we didn't get custodians and we're not having some sort of excellent round one, we'll sort of sped past all of our limitations, then what we're going to be saying is, okay, this is going to be a game where we're going to be looking to score a stage two. So that means I got my scoring from here on out must be perfect. We must execute on everything. So that means can we prioritize speaker position? I think not. If you can, always do it. Either way, that's just something I think you can do speaker position shenanigans. Never pass on that. If you can't without throwing away your tempo, well, then yeah, whatever. That's how it is. The thing that you need to remember is everything we just said about win slang. It's going to be true. Don't think that you've lost just because you're going to be fourth to score in round five. Don't think that. You probably still have very much a shot. Keep playing. Pay attention to your abilities. Always keep in mind where the benediction could happen. But don't pull the trigger until it matters most. Yeah. And I even think the big thing too, you've remarked here that it's like, you know, we're talking about a scoreable stage two in round five. If it's not, it's probably incredibly possible for you to make sure it's not scoreable for anyone and you're pushing for the round six, right? Like sometimes the win slay is, let's make round six happen. And guess what? Mahawk is just fine at probably being in that right position. If we were in third or fourth spot, we can probably take politics in round five because we see, well, there's no other route, but I can win slay into round six and then win it there. Oh yeah. Mahawk player that's coming into round five up top being like, I'm going to try win slay multiple players. It's not, you know, it's not the easiest thing in the world to do, but for you, but you have the best kit for it. Yeah. There you go. Right. You have the most to lean on. Okay. I feel really good about that. Mahawk set up, especially I think people will be happy with it. I do think after the last time we just had so many questions still because we didn't know what I think we didn't know what tech looked like in POK. I think we had the question of maybe blue tech isn't best for like a year. We thought there was hope in AI Dev and all of that. And I think what we've come around to is the idea that it is still safe and because it's safe, the other things can sort of flourish where we were trying there was a period where we were trying to make non blue tech paths flourish and only a couple worked out in the end. Yeah. I mean, it's I don't know how to get around it. Y'all. Yeah. It does feel like we're a broken record for tech every single time that we talk about it. I still feel like it's worth talking about it. Yeah. I think it's worth exploring all of the situations where that's not the case. Yeah. That's why I always want to talk about supplemental tech in addition to a maybe predominantly blue tech path. Whenever we throw out supplemental techs, we mean it. Like those techs are good to throw into your general tech path. Yeah. But in an abstract way, a lot of times blue is really easy to recommend. Yeah. That's not going to be changing anytime soon. Right. That's right. I mean, hey, you know what? For all you freaks out there, I'll just give you this one. Okay. And we and Hunter, you don't get to contest it. I'm going to dive right into the run down after this. But hey, Mahawk has fun stuff with integrated economy, right? I can move into a place build on those new planets with my integrated economy and later lift those tokens and continue like literally the thing we described of moving forward slowly and steam rolling through someone integrated can directly feed into that strategy. So if you really wanted to shirk our blue advice, go transit and go integrated and slow roll your way through your enemies. Why not? Have at it. That's that's your thing to do. How about this? Get two yellow skips and just put, just do integrated economy in round four after you already got all the blue tech. How about that? What about that? That sounds like we annihilate someone in the late game. Yeah. That's insane. Yeah, integrated is a nut slate game tech. And in these hands, that's pretty that's pretty cool. Hey, I want to thank our weird bears, big alcapacino, squeamish, emu, pawn, chadori, brass, bird, collouin, daryl, jim, jedi, carnal, john, necrodized twice, kindred spirit, Alice, Lord, raddington, emelchefsky, sunfax, absorricchi, m44, arway's, ryan, and spirit thing. And I want to thank our teensies sprouts, patience is a virtue. Ethan from cardboard crash course, ball, drick, totology is what it is. Frank G, reka, general, piz, my son is also named bore, uncle, baddie, sevant, and Vince, hunter. I got a beautiful home brew review for you right now. It's the home brew review. This one's brought to us by time thief. And here we go. I got a new, simpler space dock idea, sparked from Matt's recent comments. Throw out the plastic that comes with the game where we get rid of our old space docs Instead make three new pieces The three will be unique in that the first space doc the player starts with will have five Spires coming off the ring five spires indicating visually that it can produce five pieces of plastic The second space doc will have four spires and the third will have three spires if you research space doc two You flip over the space docs and they have seven six and five spires again Indicating their production capacity. It does not matter what planet is on also add to construction primary that you can redistribute where you want on which space space doc so you can have higher capacity in the front lines in the later rounds What do you think Hunter? We just get rid of all of this goofy production capacity shenanigans We get rid of all that ugly text on the space doc Unit area and we just say everyone's got the same kind of space docs and you put them where you want and they mean what you mean But you have some disparity in how well they work and you have to decide where you want those to end up This is the weird thing about space docs to me is I don't like the production capacity But it is interesting like I don't like that. It's complicated But it is an interesting decision point sometimes, but then is it? I don't know is it you just put it on the best planet in the system. It's not actually that interesting I just go back and forth on this it's interesting from a faction balance Perspect sure the fact that the factions have this kind of implied advantage It's not even really directly stated anywhere, right? It's just like well, guess what? I can produce this many units right and I'm just afraid of this solution because I feel like it nerfs Even some factions that I do do not deserve to be nerfed like for example baron Yeah, it's like one that would take a hit from this L onesy one X would take a hit from this right and I think that's I don't know That's kind of that's tough. I don't mean to be wishy-washy about it. No, I agree I'm I that was kind of eye-media reaction to this too is I like the direction the idea is going in But it's it's just barely lacking I think the biggest problem is honestly That production would require like to actually be a clean new thing. It's got to be like an overhaul like there's just no bandaid There's no bandaid to the production problem. It's too complicated and you have to drastically Change it to make it work or whatever like the game has to work around you have to change That like hundreds kind of remarking like the faction balance has to be considered in this new thing and I have to change your Maybe it's like you the the faction start indicates which of the space talks you start with and maybe it's maybe it's maybe it's not Five four three maybe it's like six five four and then you on the back of the faction sheet It's like bear any starts with the six because that's still supposed to be their thing L1 starts with the six That's supposed to be their thing but not as roca starts with the four or whatever that's supposed to be their thing Maybe maybe okay. Yeah, it's a slight addendum Bring up the bottom like bring up the weaker ones and maintain sort of where the stronger ones are at Yeah, and then maybe that would be fairest and then but I don't do people still This is what's kind of tricky about this is it kind of seems like you're still in a similar situation of It's not really that big of an improvement to Upgrade so much as just build another one. Yeah, you know, right? Yeah, I don't know I think you could like drastically change the numbers. I think that's the the mathiness of it is like yeah You could actually just really fiddle with the numbers here and get something really beautiful Especially if you were committed man if you were committed to just like they could be either or side You could have a faction where it's like hey, they start on the seven side actually you haven't upgraded it yet But you can just start on like the seven production capacity or something. I don't know It's almost like we need like a fun new shake up with the strategy cards. Yeah, perhaps are being a strategy card That allows us to just build out of our space talks And maybe even in a new interesting way a production card. Yeah, you know like the secondary of warfare is better than the primary of warfare Yeah, that's a weird contradiction. We used to have production that used to be number four. Yeah, before just was production I miss it. Oh Interesting. Okay, Hunter. I got another one from the mailbag for you. It's time for the agenda phase Bang bang bang gavel noise this one's from Sarah's and It's given an unlimited budget Where would you hold an in-person tournament finals? Oh wait unlimited budget and unlimited budget Get your ass to ma's Wow, I guess I'm not bleeping Okay, here was my answer for this one. It's less about the physical like geographical location and it's more about what are we what are the capabilities we are enabling and with the unlimited budget That's where the tournament finals take place on a Large poker table that is set up for streaming like World Series of poker style stuff where you've got like areas where cameras can see through and See what cards people have and those things have RFID tags on them that sync up to some sort of Daryl app where we just have a running like we can do the TTPG thing With an IRL table, you know what I mean? I want I want that table to exist and then I want a whole production studio around it So it doesn't it doesn't need to be anywhere. I you know, we fly people to wherever it can be in it can be in Northwest Arkansas It can be in New York it can be in Barbados. I don't care But I want a big studio with a big crew and lighting and this freaky table that just registers all of the information the same as tabletop playground I think with an unlimited budget and one another thing I would do Besides my first excellent suggestion would be to like sort of Sort of go to Darryl's house and kind of like I Mean like we talked to him about it, but like sort of like install Like sort of cyber in plants into Darryl's brain So that we could directly kind of next Darryl to what you're supposed to know what you're suggesting is we we Turn Darryl into him about it. We talked to Darryl first, but we allowed Darryl the opportunity to be the singularity With an unlimited budget we turn singular it we did we turn Darryl into an infinite coding machine that can Improve himself faster than humans are able to improve his own coding and sort of make like an ultimate Twilight Imperium thing except also All of society shuts down because Darryl is now sort of a supreme being and and far exceeds Any possible, you know speed at which our brains can move listen You say unlimited budget and I say cyber Darryl That's kind of where I'm at, you know, I just think that's kind of what makes the most sense I think I think Darryl would reluctantly agree, you know I think and we talked to him about it. It's your way time We talked about we talked to him about you can rate this podcast an awful podcast spotify wherever you listen to us Yes, awful podcast where I'm you listen to us and if you give us a five star rating Just tell us about cyber Darryl and all the things you think he'd be up to what is cyber Darryl do these days? Yeah, yeah, but like it make a little story look at the currently existing other ratings and can piggyback your story about Cyber Darryl off of where the last story left please Turn our reviews section into a series of five star reviews where you start a story a fiction about cyber Darryl I had when one review ends the next one picks up where the last adventure left off. That's exactly right That's a good use of our time It helps with our it helps with the algorithm sure I think I want to note This is a bit we regularly do on the show. I don't know how it impacts the algorithm I can't imagine it's actually good, but I don't it is I don't know a whole point of it is is you're doing us a solid because you're giving us a five star Thing but the algorithm care about what is said in that does the other than care? Okay, so tell me listen us trying to get five star reviews for our podcast is let's be fair to use the the parlance of Gen Z It's cringe, okay, but if we pair it with give us a five star review and then all Like contradict like what makes sense? Yeah, and don't recommend the podcast just confuse people that come after you Yeah, that's a good use of time Because it's like you're giving us a five star review But you also might be discouraging someone that doesn't know what the podcast is you know like that while we're on the topic Can y'all do that in the YouTube comments that'd be swell? I'd love for more comments on the YouTube that are just nonsense Just we stop having these actual YouTube comments Can we start having not YouTube comments be the YouTube comments? I'm really kind of tired of yeah, but you know what you could do is you could listen to the show and you know sometimes people have like Reactions to something they're hearing on the show right now. Yeah, you could just open up you to any YouTube video of ours And then type your reaction to the podcast you're listening Yeah, just into a comment of some video that's unrelated I tell you what the first person that does this I guarantee you I will include it as a rata in the next episode I get emails for every YouTube comment if you include podcast episode a rata in a random and I'm saying go anywhere I'm gonna - I don't care if it's a recent, it go deep. Find a deep one and give me a rata on this right now. Okay? On this episode, if you had an issue with something, we said in the Mahawk Guide, go find the 2018 holiday spectacular or whatever it is. I don't care. And tell me about your Mahawk thoughts, okay? All right. You can also go to our website for more information about our Patreon or Discord or our merchants. - Our website sucks. - Our website sucks. - You can go do it. You can email us at spacecats, peace, turtles, at gmail.com. And send us this Imperium Life Stories. However, this episode's gone long. I can tell you for sure I'm not doing a tournament game recap of the week, but that's because I am prepping a bonus episode for you because we are many weeks behind. There's like 25 tournament games I have to recap. So I'm doing a super bonus episode soon. Very soon. In the next week or two, I'm gonna get them all recorded and patched up and you're just gonna get that huge bonus episode. Thank you for everybody who commented. I asked you last week if you would be chill with this and everybody was like, chill with it. I prefer it. So that's what we're doing. Thank you. Thank you for permission. Awesome. Thank you. All praise be to cyberdarel. Praise be to cyberdarel. That'll be our new sign out for you. That's what we need to. I will need to cyberdarel. Won't you? Won't you need to cyberdarel? (upbeat music) Thank you for listening to Spacecats Peace Turtles. And thanks to Ben Prunty for the use of his music. You can find more at benpruntymusic.com and benprunty.bancamp.com. (upbeat music) PAX Magnifica, Bellum, Luriosum.