Barony of Letnev, Grokking Twilight Imperium

[Music] home hello again gamers welcome back for another episode of rocking twilight imperium i'm the board game captain and today i'm gonna be doing a deep dive on strategies i would use with the barony of lat nev now i want to thank one of my viewers adrian melodzik i hope i'm pronouncing your name correctly who commented on one of my videos to let me know that the barony of latino was his favorite faction so i'm going to be covering the barony of vladinev for adrian today now before we get too into this i do want to say that i've got a ton of links in the description down below for you to check out at your leisure there's a link to my patreon if you're in a position who would like to help out the channel as well as a link to boardgamecaptain.com which is a great hub for all things board game captain and if you want to get some board game captain merch some cool gamer gear there's a link to my teespring store you could get mugs and t-shirts etc all right so the barony of latinev old aristocratic militaristic um aliens who have the best fleets that money can buy literally so these guys pump funds into improving their war effort they're all about you know just like getting as much money as they can achieving as much status as they can and using their money to make sure that their their militaries are the biggest and the best uh these are definitely a very aggressive faction and i'm gonna run you through everything they start with uh as well as how i would recommend using them and what technologies i would recommend getting with them of course so the first thing i want to start with is what you start with when you choose to play the barony of latino now their home system has two planets which are arc prime and ren terra now arc prime has four resources zero influence and rentera has two resources one influence which means while their influence is very low for their starting system with only a one they have one of the largest absolute largest starting resources of any faction in the game six is crazy good that's a lot of resources so the barony of latinev are going to have a lot of spending power even before you colonize any other planets the first uh fleet that you build uh will be sizable because you have six resources to spend on it that is pretty awesome so the next thing i want to talk about is the faction abilities for the barony of retinov so their first faction ability is munitions reserve now munitions reserve says at the start of each round of space combat you may spend two trade goods very important trade goods not resources you have to get trade goods to do this and then you may re-roll any number of your dice during that comment now this is what i was talking about when i said they have the best fleets that money can buy literally so the thing is you can pump money into your fleets to make them re-roll misses this is huge so you want large fleets with lots of dice to roll because the more you have the more you're going to get a use out of this ability so one big part of of the strategy i recommend for the barrier of barony of latino is working really hard to very quickly get war sons also you're going to want to get out your flagship pretty quickly as well because you're going to want to be able to have large fleets with large pools of dice to roll against your opponent now the second ability helps you to have those large fleets and that is armada the maximum number of non-fighter ships you can have in each system is equal to two more than the number of tokens in your fleet pool so that means starting with a fleet pool of three you can have five ships in a given fleet which is a lot on the other hand you could reorganize your tokens to reduce the number of tokens you have there to move more into either your tactical or strategy area early game that also could be a very viable option since you don't need to have as many tokens in your fleet supply to maintain the same size fleets as your opponents and later if you have the same number of tokens as your opponents and you arrange them the same way you're always going to be able to have larger fleets than them larger fleets means more dice means better use out of the munitions reserves ability which is really really awesome next i want to talk about the starting fleet for the barony of latinx so the barony of latin f starts with a very decent starting fleet they have a carrier they have a dreadnought they have a destroyer they have of course a space stock because every every faction starts with a space stock and then they have three ground troops and one fighter now this is not a top tier colonizer fleet but it is a very decent colonizing fleet because you can take the carrier with it with two of those three ground troops and the fighter and maybe the destroyer to help protect it and go off and colonize a two planet system while then at the during the same round you could take the dreadnought with the other ground troop to go colonize a one planet system which is really not bad at all uh and dreadnoughts obviously are very decent with the barony flatness because of a lot of the abilities i'm going to be talking about that they have the next thing i want to talk about is the flagship for the barony of latinev now the flagship for the barony of latinev is the arc secundus now the arc secundus cross eight has a combat of five with two attacks which makes it combat wise equal offensively to two dreadnoughts and those two attacks chain nicely with the munitions reservability because if you have this ship in one of your uh fleets that is attacking and you spend the two two trade goods that's two chances to hit on fives or better and if either of them miss you can re-roll them lots of dice lots of chances to get successes then next it's got a movement of one and a capacity of three both of that is pretty standard for a flagship it has sustained damage also pretty standard it has a bombardment of five three shots which means uh wow this is like a super dreadnought right here um this means that while bombarding your arc secundus is equal in power to three dreadnoughts in that system that is crazy and then it has the abilities other players units in this system lose planetary shield this is huge planetary shield is a great defensive ability and there's a lot of technologies that can chain with planetary shield to make it even better for instance the mag and defense grid being that they can cause your opponent to not have any planetary uh shields in the system you're invading if your opponent had the magnum defense grid it now basically counts like they don't which is really awesome uh it's a great way using this flagship to invade a key planet uh this ability is great for making sure your opponent can't use certain tricks to make their defenders far more valuable than they would be normally in addition it has another ability which this is rare for flagships to have two abilities but it does and it says at the start of each space combat round repair this ship um yeah that's fantastic so that means you can use the sustained damage and it gets order repaired at the start of the next round that's really awesome great for absorbing damage with the arc secundus fantastic ship now next i would like to talk about the agent commander hero and mech abilities for the barony of latin so their agent is this count on len now at the start of a space combat round you may exhaust this card to choose one ship in the active system that ship rolls one additional die during this combat round so obviously you're going to use this during key comm it's important ones uh that you really need to win so if you've got your arc secundus there or a dreadnought there or even uh later in the game when you get the worst sun out a worse sun there once you get the worst on tack getting an extra die that has a good chance of of hitting and then using your munitions reserve can be really awesome so imagine the arc second is now having three dice that hit on fives are better and any that miss you can because you spent the two trade goods you can reroll them and again fives are better you have a darn good chance of hitting with all three of those shops that could be really amazing and later when you get the war sun out um using this count on one of your war sons combined with the munitions reserves means you're gonna have four attacks hitting on threes or better with three rolls if they misses you're almost guaranteed to hit four times which is insane next i want to talk about the commander now the commander is rear admiral farron now the first thing i want to talk about is that this is one commander that is one of the easiest to get out early game for any faction and that is because their unlock requirement is have five non-fighter ships in one system you start with the ability to have five non-fighter ships in one system so now you're probably not going to do it round one though you could if you literally left your your starting fleet in your home system and just did a build action you could you're probably not going to do that unless you have managed to grab the warfare uh strategy card in the first round if you grab the warfare strategy card it might be worthwhile because then you could you could build there immediately unlock it use the warfare to remove that token and then split up the fleets and move out into multiple areas and actually colonize a lot of systems but if you weren't able to grab the warfare in the first round you might not do it in the first round but then you would definitely be able to get it in the second round and unlocking the real rear admiral farin gives you the ability that after one of your units uses sustained damage you may gain one trade good now you may be able to see there's a pattern for me here that sustained damage is a really useful ability for the barony of latin they like to pay for the big ships the ships with sustained damage dreadnoughts your flagship war sons uh all of these are gonna be really really great for the barony of latina and in point of fact their starting fleet of course starts with a dreadnought next i want to talk about their hero now the hero before you unlock them is called dark talon triella void revenant and you of course unlock them by having three scored objectives just like all heroes once they are unlocked they are dark matter affinity void transference and as an action you place this card near the game board the number of fighter ships you can have in systems is not limited by laws or by the number of command tokens in your fleet pool during this game round at the end of the game round purge this card so this is fantastic when you really need to take mac at all racks you got to take it your opponent may be in danger of winning the game you need to take it from them so you can take the lead you can suddenly move a giant fleet from multiple areas adjacent to mechatol racks in convergent on mechatrol racks with tons of ships tons of ground troops and just take it by brute force pay the two trade goods with your munitions reserves get all those re-rolls yes if you if you don't lose over a certain number of ships whatever your current fleet supply is at the end of the round you will be forced to remove some of them from the board but this is like when you really must take mechatrol racks this is an ability to do it so this ability could definitely be game-winning uh because of if you have already built up multiple huge fleets uh and your opponent has lots of tricks to help try to make them less valuable when you attack just having an enormous fleet with lots of rerolls is going to do it for you next i want to talk about the mech the dun lane reaper now the dunlin reaper is a two class six combat sustain damage mac as per all the max and it has a deployability so it's deployability is at the start of a round of ground combat you may spend two resources to replace one of your infantry in that combat with a mech which means uh basically it allows you to purchase this mac outside of the production phase so you can produce a bunch of ground troops and big ships and then later you can as you get into ground combat you can slowly upgrade those ground troops to max instead which is pretty awesome um it's not the best ability for a mech but it's quite decent and you know macs are great and also you want to have you know powerful invasion fleets so slowly upgrading your ground troops to max is going to be good for you it's going to definitely work out now the barony of letniv start with two basic technologies not the best starting technologies but with all the other awesome stuff that they give i really don't think it would have been fair if they also gave them some like level two or level three text to start with right away so these are some very basic texts with no prerequisites normally and they are plasma scoring and anti-mass deflectors so plasma scoring of course is the one where it says when one or more of your units use bombardment or space cannon one of your units may re-roll one additional die now again your flagship has a bombardment of three so getting a re-roll in one of those is awesome and also you start with a dreadnought and you're gonna want to build a lot of dreadnoughts because you have a lot of other abilities that help you with sustained damage so combine this now allowing you to get a better use out of your bombardment which again a lot of your ships with sustained damage also have bombardment is really good actually for the barony flat knife the other attack is anti-mass deflectors your ships can move through asteroid fields and if another player uses space cannon shots against you they have to do a negative one to each of their die rolls decent starting tacks not the greatest but pretty decent however there are some really awesome tax that you can get with the barony of latin including their faction specific tax now one of their factions specific techs requires you to already have a yellow attack or of course using yellow technology specialty and the other one requires you to have two red tacks you do start with one red tech the plasma scoring but it would require you to either get one more or get a re a red technology specialty on a planet um either way you're not going to be able to get these right away so i'm going to talk about the general text first that i would recommend now you may not be able to get all of these uh but i'm going to talk about a bunch of different ones that i would possibly recommend uh to consider getting for the barony of latinav during your game in addition one thing i do think you should consider is specifically trying to get technologies that are going to help you get your war sun tech out as well as upgrading your dreadnought and maybe even some other uh ships because you're going to have a lot of upgraded units because you want your units to get better in their stats to be better at attacking to be faster in the case of the dreadnought to uh have a a incredible speed and better attack in the case of the cruiser uh there's you're going to want to get a lot of unit upgrades if you can so specifically i'm going to focus in on a lot of red techs uh one yellow and one green and the reason is getting all of these will allow you to get the vast majority of the possible unit upgrades though you may not get all of these during the game i i very much recommend getting at least two of the reds so you can get the uh and at least one of the yellows which would also allow you to then get your faction specific text and most of the really important unit upgrades that you're going to want so for the possible red technologies i'm going to recommend the first one is ai development algorithm which has no prerequisites so you can get this right away if you want when you research a unit upgrade technology you may exhaust this card to ignore any one prerequisite so right there that is pretty awesome especially when going for high prerequisite number unit upgrades like the worst syntax which you're really going to want to get now next it says when one or more of your units use production you may exhaust this car to reduce the combined cost of production uh produced units by the number of unit upgrade technologies that you own now again you're going to want to at least upgrade your war sun and your dreadnought if not more of your units whichever ones you are using so you're going to have a few of those so being able to do this once per round is also pretty awesome if you're not using it instead to try to get a unit upgrade now the next one i want to possibly recommend is geranium armor geranium armor has a prerequisite of two uh so you could possibly get it once you get the ai development algorithm out since you already have plasma scoring or if you could skip the ai development algorithm if you're not not as much of a fan of it as i am and it said go straight to this if you get a planet with a red technology specialty during each combat round after you assign hits to your units repair one of your damaged units that did not sustain use sustained damage during this combat round now this allows one of your dreadnoughts or war sons to all act almost kind of like your flagship while your flagship can do it every round this can only do it every other round because it can't be one that sustained the damage this round but it makes your big fleets of big ships that much more durable which is really awesome i highly recommend it it really plays into the theme of the bauerniere flat never them paying for the best quality fleets around and finally i want to recommend the assault cannon it is the the top tier red tack and it's really awesome and it says at the start of a space combat in a system that contains three or more of your non fighter ships your opponent must destroy one of his non-fighter ships you're going to have big fleets your fleets are going to be three or larger you're getting to uh for free just be like you have to destroy one of your ships before this combat starts is an amazing ability it is definitely really cool and it's gonna make your opponents start already at a disadvantage before you even start rolling in combat now i do want to recommend one yellow and one green tech but the uh both of these are not strictly necessary especially if you're able to get either a red yellow or green technology specialty so sorrowing tools though uh specifically because you do need one yellow tech to be able to get the one of the faction specific texts that you're going to want uh but that being said starling tools is one i recommend to every faction it's a fantastic attack it's one of my favorites in the game when one or more of your units use production reduce the combined cost of the produced units by one really awesome technology if you get that you'll be able to get your own um faction specific tech out and also if you get that you already have the one yellow prerequisite needed to get the war sun out on the other hand if you get a yellow technology specialty planet and then you're able to use that to get out your faction specific tech you might just ignore the sorrowing tools again because you're there are a lot of red techs and then also a lot of unit upgrades that you're going to want to be getting and you're not going to be able to get all of these in one game now the one green tech similarly i only recommend if if you can't get a green technology specialty because there are a lot of unit upgrades that require a green i i would recommend this one and that is psychoarchaeology you can use technology specialties on planets you control without exhausting them even if those planets are exhausted during the action phase you can exhaust planets you control that have a technology specialty to gain one trade now the reason this is really good is because you are going to want to get a lot of plants with technology specialties to be to help you get out all those unit upgrades because you're going to want the the most upgraded fleets if you can in addition uh when you're not using those planets for for resources around being able to use them to stockpile trade goods is great because remember you're going to want a stockpile of trade goods because spending two of them at the start of any combat allows you to re-roll all of the dice in that space combat and that is pretty freaking awesome finally i want to talk about the two faction specific technologies that are available to the barony of vladimir the first one is a yellowtack called l4 disruptors now this uh has one yellow prerequisite and it says during an invasion units cannot use space cannon against your units so this is this is awesome so again if you're invading a planet that has pds's you and you have your flagship there you're already negating the planetary shield if you get the l4 disruptors you're now negating the shots at your incoming ground troops that is really awesome you have totally neutralized a huge amount of the defense that a lot of opponents can get going to stop you from invading their planets the other of their faction-specific attacks is a red tech that requires you to have two other red techs and it is non-euclidean shielding and this definitely plays in to all of the sustained damage abilities that the baronev already has when one of your units use sustained damage cancel two hits instead of one so if you can get non-euclidean shielding as well as having geranium armor as well as having your flagship in that fleet and a couple of dreadnoughts this weed is gonna be darn near unkillable um it's it's crazy how unkillable that's gonna be then maybe you have a carrier in there with a bunch of fighters so after you've taken all the sustained damages if there's still even more damage to deal with you can put it on some of the fighters uh but then next round your flagship repairs for free and again your flagship exhausts to remove two hits not one and then on the following round you can use your geranium armor which allows you to repair one of your damaged units that didn't sustain damage this round uh again for free and your flagship again does it for free on that round as well and each time your flagship or your one of your dreadnoughts or a war son takes a sustained damage it removes two hits really really cool upgrade makes your your fleets unbelievably durable so now i want to talk about what strategy cards to go for so the first one i would want to recommend highly is warfare because like the trick i was talking about earlier if you can get warfare you can build your first action first turn of the first round in your home system you only have to build two capital ships there uh and again starting with six resources one of those is going to be another dreadnought um which is really awesome uh and getting those two new capital ships there will be enough to have five capital ships in one system and allow you to release your commander rear admiral farron who again says have five non-fighter ships in one system to unlock him which means you could get him unlocked on the first turn if you're able to get the warfare without even slowing you down because then you can play warfare to remove the command token from your home system and you have tons of ships that they can then move out and colonize so you basically with your six resources you can build a dreadnought you can build a destroyer and you can build a couple of more ground troops so you can throw a ground troop on that extra dreadnought along with one more on your carrier to then have three fleets in the first round to send out and colonize in three different systems uh warfare can be incredibly good for the barony of flatnev especially for how they can first turn and lock their commander really good first turn pick now if you're not able to get warfare or if you are able to get warfare but are only playing three players and are able to choose a extra strategy card what are some others to go for so technology is a really good one to go for because there are a lot of texts that really help the baron of lutniv and you want to get these technologies quickly so you can then later get their unit upgrades those are really good in addition some uh when you're a little later in the game technology is going to become more important than warfare for you uh also once you get spread out and you forget some other high resource planets construction is going to be good for getting some more space stocks out there in the galaxy closer to mechatoll rex uh in addition imperial of course is always good for scoring objectives as well as getting more secret objectives either with the primary or the secondary ability and leadership is good for getting to get the number one initiative card and also of course getting to replenish your command tokens which are going to be very important every once in a while you are going to need to grab leadership so you can uh replenish your tokens because you don't want to get too low you do want to maintain at least the starting number of tokens so you can have those very large fleets that you want so now what secret objectives do you want to go for when you're using either the primary or secondary ability of the imperial card which ones are really good for the baron of latino they have a bunch that work really well with them and i'm going to run through them right now so first destroy their greatest ship destroy another player's war sun or flagship so you're gonna have some really powerful very useful fleets especially if you've stockpiled some trade goods uh to be able to get those rerolls destroying another player's flagship or even warsong is going to be feasible for you next we have gather a mighty fleet have five dreadnoughts on the game board you're gonna have five droid outs on the game board pretty quickly because of how good anything with sustained damage works for this faction and the fact that dreadnoughts are the most affordable sustained damage ship you are going to want to get a lot of dreadnoughts out next we have make an example of their world use bombardment to destroy the last of a player's ground forces on a planet now with the fact that you're gonna have a ton of dreadnoughts and they all have bombardment five plus the fact that you have the your flagship which has bombardment five three shots which is huge you are going to possibly wipe out some uh planets ground forces when they only have a couple on there before you even invade so this is definitely a very doable uh objective to get next we have mechanized the military have one mac on each of four planets again you've got this cool deployability where at the start of a round of ground comet you can spend two resources to replace one of your inventory with uh a mac um that is really awesome and that can really help you get this going build a mac uh back on your on on arc prime where you're probably going to have your space stock because it'll have the highest production in your starting system and then also slowly build uh get some more and other other fleets until you have uh one mech each on four different planets next we have demonstrate your power have three or more non-fighter ships in the active system at the end of combat again you're gonna have some of the biggest fleets on the board uh having three or more non-fighter ships in a in a system you activate is not going to be difficult for you then we have occupy the seat of the empire destroy control mechatrol racks and have three or more ships in that system yeah and like i already said while using your hero ability you're very likely going to take mechatrol rex if you were not already the first player to do so next we have horde raw materials control planets that have a combined resource value of at least 12 you start with a resource value of six in your home system alone this is awesome you are halfway there you you know there are a lot of factions that this card works very well for i think this card works very very well for any faction that starts with at least four resource value in their home system but having six resource value in your home system means this is probably best for the battery of latino out of any faction in the game next we have master of laws of physics on four technologies of the same color so as i already said you start with one red tech there's a faction red tech you're gonna wanna get and there's three other possible red techs you might wanna get uh even if you don't get one of those you're gonna have four red text this is gonna be an easy one to achieve then we have unveiled flagship win a space combat and a system that contains your flagship you cannot score this objective if your flagship is destroyed i've already talked about how awesome your flagship is and how great it's gonna help you uh win combat that's going to be an easy one to achieve achieve once you have your flagship out and have it in your main invasion fleet and lastly we have adapt new strategies own two faction technologies and again their two faction technologies are awesome so barony of letnev you're gonna want to be political with some people aggressive with others you just don't want to have enemies all around you and you're going to want to do some trades with people uh so you're going to need to be political with at least one of the other players on the board hopefully one that shares a large border with you so you can do some trades to get some trade goods you want trade goods you want to stockpile trade goods so that other people are afraid to attack you because they're worried about all those re-rolls you're gonna get to have and the fact that you're very likely to win a combat if they attack you on the other hand when you do attack your opponent you want those trade goods to be able to spend to guarantee or nearly guarantee a win in those space combats and also uh do some amazing bombardments of the planet before dropping troops and you have a combinations of abilities that allow you to ignore both planetary shields and pds fire when dropping troops so that then you can take those planets in question these guys uh really play in a way where they want to stockpile money and then use it to build the biggest most powerful fleets in the in the galaxy the best fleets that money can buy and then just take the galaxy by brute force that is what they are all about uh so the one of the big things to keep an eye on is never let your stockpile of trade goods get too low because you always want to have enough that it's at least a deterrent to other factions to attack you once you've taken mechatrol rex that's not going to really work as a deterrent anymore because people are really going to want to take it back from you so you're going to want to have a big stockpile then to use to defend that system and also once you've taken mechatrol rex if you want to be able to hold it for a full round if you have a bunch of people gunning for you again their hero ability is really great at making you have a giant fleet there uh that will work during the entire game round where you do not have to worry about your fleet supply for how many ships you can have in that system which in this case would be mechatrol rex barony of latinev are a very easy faction to learn they're not super complex in their abilities but they are super awesome and they're super fun to play uh i thoroughly think that you would enjoy them if you give them a try if you like playing aggressively and getting into a lot of combats specifically so there you have it did i miss anything with the barony of latinif if i did feel free to put it in the comments down below and if you enjoyed this episode of rocking twilight imperium and you'd like to see me do more like it be sure to give it a like share it on all forms of social media and if you haven't already please subscribe to the board game captain that's captain spell the k on youtube and until next time game on

Channel: The Board Game Kaptain

Views: 2,179

Keywords: Dane Beltrami, Corey Konieczka, Christian T. Petersen, board game, gaming, game, table top, dice, cards, Twilight Imperium, 4th ed, 4th edition, fourth edition, 4x, 4 ex, expand, explore, exploit, exterminate, war, economics, politics, Fantasy Flight Games, Science Fiction, space, area control, board game kaptain, prophecy of kings, grok, grokking, groking, strategy, how to play, deep dive, technologies, barony, letnev, aristocratic, aliens

Id: 7Nh-dX6ryyA

Length: 31min 52sec (1912 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021