Titans of Ul, 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 going to be doing a deep dive on the titans of wool now the titans rule are one of the new factions brought in by the new expansion the prophecy of kings to twilight imperium uh and they are in my opinion the most interesting of all the new factions so i decided i wanted to do a deep dive on them so the titans of ool are a living machine race that were created or engineered by the mayhacked jean sorcerers way back before they lost the galaxy to the lazax so when they were losing and retreating they put a bunch of them into hibernation to wait for their return now that they've returned they woke them up but the titans of wool their programming has evolved during their time in hibernation and they no longer need to obey the mayhacked gene sorcerers so they are going out and doing their own thing now they're they have thrown off the uh the yoke that the mayhaps had on them and have become their own people and they're spreading around the galaxy and waking up other members of their species that they are finding uh and they again and they have their own goals and agendas so the the titans are living machines that never stop growing so the truly ancient members of the race are absolutely titanic hence titans uh the normal members of the race are more human-sized but there are members of the race that they are finding that are literally the size of battleships i mean they're absolutely enormous skyscraper tall and there's a lot of cool thematic stuff in here where uh other units are actually meant to represent larger versions of the titans so let's start with what you get when you choose to play the titans of ool so to begin with of course you start with their homeworld which is elysium elysium is a pretty decent home world it has a very high resource value of four and a very low influence value of one uh but that high resource value actually makes it quite valuable to start with you start with a planet that can throw out four resources so your first build action in the first round is not gonna be bad at all you're gonna you're gonna manage to get some good units built with those four resources so now you're starting fleets for the titans of wool is a bit strange until you understand some of the differences with them which i'm going to explain in a minute uh so you start with one dreadnought two cruisers a space dock like everyone does two fighters and three ground troops now the three ground troops when the uh generally speaking out of these units seems like the only one with carrying capacity is the drill knot seems strange especially since it can only carry one except that they have a special cruiser on their sheet they have the saturn engine now the saturn engine is cost 2 combat 7 movement 2 capacity 1 the main difference between it and a normal cruiser is that capacity one which usually you have to wait to get a cruiser 2 to get capacity one on your cruisers they start with it with their basic cruisers so because of that with the two saturn engine ones as your cruisers and the one dreadnought you can carry all three of those ground troops and immediately start colonizing in three separate planets now these guys are not a top tier colonizer with only three ground troops to start colonizing with but they can do an interesting thing where they can spread out and colonize three one planet systems or you know leave one of those ships in a in a two planet system for two two rounds and fully colonize it while the other ships move further into towards the center of the galaxy towards makatol rex so there are no slouches when it comes to colonization now i already explained uh one of the main differences of their starting units is the saturn engine one uh i did it a little ahead of when i normally do it in these rocking twilight imperium videos because it very much pertains to the starting fleet so i figure why not do what the other of their two different starting units is which is instead of a pds they get a hell titan one so hel titan one is supposed to be one of the titans of wool that is quite old and is enormous these are gigantic sized titans that have a gun that can reach into space and basically act as a pds slash ground force on the planet they're on so instead of acting like a a normal pds where it's just a structure this is both a structure and a ground force which is a very interesting thing because they will qualify as either for certain card effects or objectives now the hell titan one it counts again counts as a structure and a ground force cannot be transported it gives a planetary shield like normal uh planetary defense systems pds's do it has a space candidate of six it has uh sustained damage for its use as a ground force it has production of one this is amazing you can produce units off of these pdss and it has a combat of seven this is fantastic it's a better ground troop mixed with a pds really awesome the saturn engine one and the hell titan one are both absolutely fantastic so the next thing i want to talk about is i want to talk about the special abilities on the card of the titans of all they have three pterogenesis awaken and coalescence so pterogenesis is after you explore a planet that does not have a sleeper token you may place one or move one sleeper token to that planet now you get a handful of these sleeper tokens these are meant to represent sleeping uh gigantic titans of all on particular planets that you're trying to rediscover and awaken that have been sleeping for thousands of years so when you explore a planet which is any planet that you in the with the expansion the way the exploration rules work is that any planet you go to colonize that you're not taking away from an enemy player you can explore so to start with the first few systems you go out and you're going to get to send ships into three different systems if you want you're going to be able to throw down three of these right away now on its own well what does that do what it does is what the next ability they have is the next ability is awaken awaken after you activate a system that contains one or more of your sleeper tokens you may replace each of those tokens with a pdfs from your reinforcements now this is amazing so you go in you activate them you get the tokens if you activate that system again in the future now you get to get a free pds on those planets um this can be fantastic because just leaving these tokens in places uh can be awesome because when you see an enemy coming you can be like okay i need to do something there i'm gonna activate it i'm gonna move some ships in and i get a free pdf and your pds also again counts as a souped-up ground force in addition to being a pds which is really pretty freaking cool now the third ability is really just to give a clean answer to what happens where if you activate a system that you have left one of these tokens on that your opponent took over and put ground troops on that that area uh well what do you do what what happens so the third ability is coalescence if your flagship or your awakened faction ability places your units into a same space area or onto the same planet as in other players units your units must participate in a combat during the space combat or ground combat steps so that cleans it up and tells you what exactly would happen in those those unusual situations where that might happen because maybe you leave one of these on a planet and then your opponent takes that planet how do you deal with that circumstance now in regard to the flagship how that uh works into this the flagship for the titans of ool is the orinos now the oronos is a eight cost flagship it has two attacks with a seven which makes it uh a fairly average combat uh uh flagship still pretty good it has the combat capabilities of two cruisers it's not bad it's got a movement of one pretty standard capacity of three pretty standard sustained damage oh that's you know pretty standard for most flagships but it has an amazing deployability deploy after you activate a system that contains one or more of your pdss you may replace one of those pdss with this unit so in other words if you activate a system that you've already got a pds in you can get the oranos out for free this is normally an eight cost ship it's fairly powerful and it's got three capacity and you can get this out without spending any resources at all um because you could you could have gotten uh you could have also gotten those pdss out through your abilities and then through your abilities turn one of them into a flagship all of that can be done literally just based on your natural abilities which is really really cool i like this idea a lot the next thing i want to talk about is the agent commander hero and mac uh these these are all really great i don't know if you can tell but i really like this faction so the asian ability uh the agent is tellurian the protector when a hit is produced against a unit you may exhaust this card to cancel that hit so once per round you may just ignore a single hit so if someone does a card that causes a hit or if there's a real key combat going on you can ignore one hit um it's not the greatest agent ability in the game but it is really decent and situationally can be amazing because it could turn a losing battle into a winning battle by saying you know what yeah no that hit doesn't happen and that's pretty great now the commander ability the commander is the commander is tungstantis the gardener and his ability is unlocked when you have five structures on the game board now here's where the fact that those pds count as both ground troops and structures really comes into play so you've got six possible pdss if you can get five of them out pretty quickly you can get this this this card out and fast and that's really great uh because his ability is also really great so his ability is when one or more of your units use production you may gain one trade good yeah so you're gonna have pdss all over the place that each have a production of one every time you activate a system with a pdfs in it you're gonna be like oh okay you know what i'm gonna spend one and throw out two ground troops or or you know spend one and throw out a destroyer something cheap you're just gonna do a quick little single unit production or maybe if it's in a key spot you might be like you know what i'm going to spend four and throw out a dreadnought maybe i want to throw something bigger out there but every time you do it you get a free trade good back for use in future purchases really awesome ability you're going to want to get those structures out as quickly as possible keeping in mind that your space stock is also a structure you can very quickly get enough structures out to unlock tungstantis and get his ability his abilities really cool now the final ability uh for the hero here the hero is all the protector elysium's core and of course now he is unlocked when you have scored three objectives just like all hero abilities and then he becomes geoform awakening now this is a very interesting hero ability this is a very unique and different hero ability the vast majority of hero abilities have this one giant effect and then are removed from the game theirs doesn't they have a continuing effect that is really cool and helps you for the rest of the game so you're going to want to get this guy out as quick as possible because the more of the game he's in effect the more amazing he is so here's what he does uh basically fyi storyline wise he is the oldest and largest of all of the titans of wool so once you get him woken up uh as an action uh you can ready elysium which of course is your main planet and then attach this card to it its resource values and its influence value are both increased by three which that means you wind up with seven resources and four influence on your homeworld which once he's unlocked that turns this into i'm pretty sure the best home world in the game that's insane and also you gain uh a space cannon on that planet that has a space cannon five times three ability so you roll five or better to hit three shots so you also gain what is probably the best space cannon in the game because again this is the largest most powerful of all the titans of all that wakes up on elysium um okay so this is not a single awesome game-winning effect but the quicker you can get this guy out the more amazing he is having seven resources on your home world or possibly for influence and having a super powerful space can to deter invasion fleets coming towards your home world is really really awesome uh and it's also awesome that the hero ability is something that lasts that is so different from everybody else's hero abilities it's not something that's a one-off and goes away it lasts the rest of the game very cool so the next thing i want to talk about are the starting technologies so the titans of will start with two technologies they start with the scan link drone network and the anti-mass deflectors so the scan link drone network is when you activate a system you may explore one planet in that system that contains one or more of your units so this allows you to explore planets that you already have taken control normally you wouldn't be able to do that so this is is one way to get multiple of your pdss on a single planet up near the front line close to the enemy territory uh because you can get multiple tokens on them and then activate that system and turn them all into pds which is a really cool thing to do now the other one anti-mass deflectors is your ships can move into and through asteroid fields and when other players units use space cannon against your units they get a negative one to their die result so this is a pretty decent one getting to move through asteroid fields is nice but also the negative one to enemy space cannon uh shots is really nice and characterful for a faction that has the best space cannons in the game so it is a really cool starting one plus of course these give you lots of great uh having two cards really helps work towards prerequisites of other cards in the game so now there are a lot of texts that i would like to recommend for the titan civil uh specifically i definitely want to recommend their two unit upgrades but also i want to recommend all the unit upgrades because you want to definitely get lots of units upgraded for the titans of wool uh but what general tax do i recommend for them there are quite a few and i know you're not going to be able to get all these out in one game uh so you're going to have to pick and choose which ones are going to work for you but all of these are going to be tax that work very well for the titans of wool so to start with the first tech i want to throw out there that i think is a no-brainer for me and is probably one that everybody should go for is the ai development algorithm ai development algorithm when you research a unit upgrade technology you may exhaust this car to ignore anyone prerequisite when one or more of your units use production you may exhaust this card to reduce the combined cost of the produced units by the number of unit upgrades you own so both of their faction specific tacks are unit upgrades you're gonna want unit upgrades lots of unit upgrades with this are is gonna be amazing it's gonna be an incredibly awesome thing first off it helps you get those unit upgrades because you get to ignore one of the prerequisites that's really great because a lot of the unit upgrades have lots of prerequisites of different colors you may not have all of those because you may be ignoring some of the the general technologies to to preferably get lots of the unit upgrades out but then in addition whenever you use production being able to reduce the cost of production by the number of unit upgrades you have out is going to be amazing in getting these giant fleets out on the board highly recommend ai development algorithm now towards the same sort of effect i'm also going to recommend starwing tools because while ai development algorithm can work for one giant production you do have to exhaust it to do it and of course sorrowing tools just you know when one or more of your units use production reduce the combined cost of the production of those units by one uh this can really help you with those lots of productions that you're going to be doing from all of your your special pdss the hell titan ones around the board to be able to get your free uh trade goods back from tungstantis so i do highly recommend sorrowing tools these two are my my biggest recommends now i've got a few others i want to recommend i know you're probably not going to get all these out because other than these two you're going to focus a lot in probably on unit upgrades but some of these are could be really cool if you have the opportunity to get them especially once you have enough resources and you can grab technology and you can get two tacks at once maybe you get a unit upgrade and one of these so plasma scoring is really cool when one or more of your units use bombardment or space cannon one of those units may roll an additional die you're going to have space cannons everywhere that can be amazing for all of those space cannons the mag and defense grid is is one where it says you may exhaust this card at the start of a round of ground combat on a planet that contains one or more of your units that have a planetary shield your opponent cannot make rolls during this round of combat every planet that has one of those pdss on it and they're going to be all over the place is going to have a planetary shield this makes your first round of ground combat when someone tries to invade you there really one-sided which is pretty awesome the last one i want to throw out that i think is really great is the graviton laser system you may exhaust this card before one or more of your units use space cannon hits produced by those units must be assigned to non-fighter ships if able so this really helps you to do damage to invading fleets to their big ships before they attack you again especially because this faction is going to be so uh pds heavy so many of those um big space cannons everywhere you're gonna want to upgrade them now again i threw a lot of techs out you're not gonna get all of those out in one game but whichever ones you know you can get out these might be really cool they're gonna be really fun to try to get some of these out so the next thing i want to talk about is in addition to the regular upgrades that you're going to want to get for lots of your different units you have the two faction specific unit upgrades that are going to be really awesome they are of course the saturn engine 2 and the hell titan 2. so the hell titan ii is of course the upgrade to hell titan one it is your even more super pds so uh the unit again is treated as both a structure and a ground force it cannot be transported you may use this unit space cannon against ships that are adjacent to this unit system so just like the normal uh pds2 you upgrade the range of your uh space cabin which is really cool now i should note that this has a prerequisite of one yellow and one red you start with a yellow tech with your scandaling drone network and if you get that uh like i said before the ai development algorithm which is a really good starting red tech you already have the prerequisites to be able to get this so it's not that difficult now it has a on the ground it has a combat of six which is i mean that's equal to their factions max in addition it has of course a planetary shield the space cannon is upgraded to a space cannon five it has sustained damage as before and production as before so it's upgraded in a handful of ways and it is even more awesome than the hell titan one really great now the upgraded saturn engine 2 has the prerequisites of a green yellow and red again you start only with a yellow of those but again if you get the red uh then that red of the ai development algorithm can allow you to ignore the prerequisite for the green so right after getting that read of the ai development algorithm you can get the saturn engine 2 out so the saturn engine 2 gets sustained damage which is really awesome to have sustained damage on a cruiser and it also ups the combat from a seven to a six just like normal cruiser two does it helps to move from a two to a three again like the normal cruiser two and because it already started with a capacity of one it ups that to a capacity of two which is really really awesome so the next thing i want to talk about is the mac we didn't get to talk about the mac when we were talking about all of the agent commander and hero abilities so the mech is hecatoncheiris uh it has two costs combat six sustained damage just like all the mechs but it has a deployability when you would place a pds on a planet you may place one mech and one infantry on that planet instead so you can do a really cool thing if you're running out of pdss or if you have a planet that you put one of the tokens on and you don't want to put a pds there instead you can place a mac and a ground force there it's another really great way to quickly get some units on a planet without actually having to pay their costs and that is that is pretty awesome uh it is a definitely a really decent deployability a lot of the deployabilities all work uh synergistically with each other there's a lot of ways that they will combine and that is really really freaking awesome now the next thing i want to talk about i don't normally draw attention to this but i want to talk about the unique promissory note for this faction and it's because it is an awesome one and you can probably get a lot for it now the titans will only get two commodities so generally they don't have a lot of trade goods commodities to trade to other factions but this promissory note is amazing and could command a lot of funds or maybe some other promissory notes back from the other faction so when you give it to someone else as an action they can attach this card to a non-home system you control other than mechatrol rex its resource and influence values are each increased by one and it is treated as having all three planet traits cultural hazardous and industrial uh which is really really freaking cool uh this is a great card to trade off to somebody else to increase their resources uh you can definitely command a really decent trade for this promissory note which is why i want to draw attention to it because it's actually one of the best uh promissory notes i think i've ever seen okay so now let's talk about the strategy cards which ones do i recommend so to start with i think you should do a lot of technology with these guys technology is going to be definitely a big part about get um upgrading the uh capabilities of the titans of wool until you can get out lots of your upgraded units which are going to be even more awesome so definitely technology is going to be a big one but let's say someone else takes technology or you're playing a three-player game you can get a second of the strategy cards what are going to be some other ones you're going to want to go for early on so another one i'm going to say is construction and the reason is to get some of those pdss out if you can get a pds out you know first round you might also then be able to very quickly get your flagship out without even paying for it early second round and not in your home planet so it's already further out into the to the galaxy so that it can move out and and uh immediately begin joining up with your other fleets and colonizing and as it has a capacity of three if you can get some um ground troops over there you can send it out and immediately start colonizing multi-planet systems with oranos your flagship so i do think construction is gonna be a good one um all the other ones that are good for everybody else are generally good for the titans of oil as well uh they can benefit from warfare but not as well as a lot of other starting uh starting factions in the beginning of the game because of how they don't have multiple ground forces on sync on a single ship they're kind of spread out more so they're not really gonna go for warfare um they might go for imperial when there gets to be some uh value tokens on there so they can get some free trade goods and also get some extra secret objectives um later on of course they're gonna want imperial for scoring lots of points and trade for you know replenishing their commodities and doing some trades and getting some money and trading off uh terraform of course uh and then of course you know generally speaking diplomacy when you want to keep people from attacking your leadership when you really want to go first next time and want to get yourself some extra tokens uh that you have already spent on doing a lot of moving out and colonizing so uh generally speaking there's a fair number of these that work fairly well for them but to start with i think construction and technology are going to be the big ones for early game for the titans of all depending on how your strategy is going there are some sometimes where you're going to want to do technology as your main one you're going for and there's actually going to be sometimes you're going to want to do construction early on depending on what secret objectives you get and speaking of which let's talk about secret objectives i think are really good for the titans of which ones were great to start with or to find either using the primary or secondary ability of the imperial card so there are a ton there are a ton of secret objectives that work really well for the titans of wool i've grabbed a number of them here to go through i'm going to run through them pretty quickly so the first one i want to talk about is establish a perimeter uh have four pds units on the game board yeah this is going to happen pretty quickly especially since you're going towards trying to get a lot of structures out to get tungstannis out um you're gonna do this this is this is gonna be one that works really well for the basic strategy of how to use the titans of wool uh the next one i have is turn their fleece to dust use a space cannon to destroy the last of a player's ships in a system now this is not going to be a gimme but you're going to have a lot of pdss around and once you upgrade them to level 2 and they're able to shoot into adjacent systems sometimes you're going to have enemy fleets accidentally moving to choke points where they're able to be hit from multiple neighboring systems by tons of pdss and this may happen uh so this is this is one that you're not going to get completed early but you might get completed later just because of the nature of this faction the next one is produce in mass have units with a combined production value of at least eight in a single system so now with this one you start with a production value of six in your home system and remember each pds can give you plus one production so this is a reason if you got this as one of your starting secret objectives then you might want to go for construction right away because you could very quickly throw a pds down on elysium and then later get another pds and that's eight that on your home system you could have eight production in your home system and complete that secret objective the next one is occupy the fringe have nine or more ground forces on a planet that does not contain one of your space stocks so this is one that you're not going to be able to get quickly but because of the fact that you can produce units with your pdss and you can use them to start producing ground troops and the pds itself counts as a ground troop once you produce eight ground troops on that planet plus the pds that's nine about mid game you could be able to get this out there especially if you have two pds's on one planet i could also be really good if you were also going towards the uh the produce and mass and you threw some pdss down on your home system planet uh because you have a huge amount of production on your home systems you could throw out a ton of ground troops there the next one is adapt new strategies own two faction technologies you're gonna want these unit upgrades that's a that's a given so at some point you're going to achieve that if you get that goal the next one is mecca magnetize the military have one mac on each of four planets so now you can get mechs out on planets very quickly because of the fact that the mechs can be deployed along with the ground force instead of pds's via your abilities any time you would make a pds on a planet you can instead put a mech and a ground force this you can you put them out with construction and you can put them out with your discovering of the tokens and then later activating that system so if you get that one you can very easily do that with the titans of wool as well and the final one i want to draw attention to is hoard raw materials control planets that have a combined resource value of at least 12. now remember elysium starts with a resource value of four and if you get your hero ability unlocked it goes all the way up to a seven from a seven to a twelve is only five more resources yeah that would be a really easy one to get for the titans of wool these guys are very versatile and actually work really well with a lot of the hidden objectives so the titans of wool are very interesting they have certain abilities that work very different from other factions for instance their their ability for their hero which becomes a constant ability that just thoroughly improves your home planet uh for the rest of the game rather than being a one-off ability uh they also have some really cool abilities for getting to get out for these free pds's slash big ground forces that they have and also can turn one of those into their flagship they have a lot of ways to get units out without spending money and then they have ways to get extra money these guys are gonna have huge fleets and huge numbers of fleets and they're to be militarily probably one of the most powerful factions in the game if you're playing with them just because of sheer numbers of ships you're going to have out there because of all these tricks to get them out either for reduced costs or for no cost in some cases and these guys are going to be really awesome and then on top of that your area of space is going to be incredibly well defended with these super pds's slash awesome ground forces that are going to really really well defend key points that you need to defend in your area and when you get the upgrade on elysium your home system is going to be incredibly well defended as well i think the titans of wool seem like a really cool faction with a lot of versatility in their play style and a lot of interesting things that they can do this is of all of the factions in the new expansion the prophecy of kings expansion the titans of wool are the one that i am most emphatically interested in playing i haven't gotten to try them out yet and i can't wait to do so they look freaking awesome uh this is one that i definitely um definitely need to get to the table let me know if you think i missed anything 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 this video a like share it on all forms of social media if you haven't already please subscribe to the board game captain that's captain spelled k on youtube and if you have a request for whichever faction you think i should cover next in my series of grocking twilight imperium feel free to comment down below and until next time game on hi did you hear i was recording and you were like i have to go interrupt daddy's recording gotta go into rocks is that what's going on here now you know what you're doing is that what you're doing yeah you're being so silly yeah what's going on what's going on what is it what you looking at what you looking at what you doing you crazy hey hey it's all good why don't you go upstairs i'll be up when i'm done recording and i'll play with you okay okay okay go ahead go play with your toys

Channel: The Board Game Kaptain

Views: 1,104

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, titans, titans of ul, ul, living machines, robots, mechanical, pds, space cannon

Id: _ZcPMDuj8Ss

Length: 33min 4sec (1984 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021