After a long half a year wait, I had the chance to defend my title in Twilight Imperium 4th edition and employ some new strategies I've wanted to add to my multiplayer heuristics. It was a bloody slugfest, and I never recovered from an early, critical error during my development, but I nevertheless tested how far I could exert a projection of power with no basis whatsoever.

Our group is ritualistic in our approach to TI. In the week leading up to the game, we have a lottery to carve out faction options for each player, which are only locked in once your home sector is uncovered during the building of the galaxy. That preceding week is a whirlwind of speculations and theory crafting among pockets of our group on who will bring what faction. The game begins long before we build the galaxy and strategies are fleshed out for the many possible options of neighbors and their factions. I entered this phase of the game with two front runners. I was dealt The Yin Brotherhood, The Naalu Collective, The Mentak Coalition, and The Argent Flight. My dialog tree well simple: If the The Emirates of Hacan are picked and trade flows freely throughout the galaxy, I make my boldest play as The Mentak and extort as much as I can from a careful string of neighbor-rich systems. If I was allowed to lock in last, I planned for The Naalu in their true fashion to boldly act first with an attempt for an Imperial play. Where I settled was the birds, wedged in between The Vuil'Raith Cabal and The Mahact Gene-Sorcerers. I wasn't happy with this, especially since the other side was a more modest waiting game between The Naaz-Rokha Alliance and The Yssaril Tribes. The real wildcard were The Ghosts of Creuss who had carefully made a web of wormholes spanning most of the galaxy.

My plan as The Flight was simple: command the board through voting power and create a union with my dinosaur neighbors. The first round was a whirlwind that played near-perfectly into my goals. Mechatol Rex was claimed, a speech was made, and the votes began as the table then witnessed how strong I could be with a meager 7 votes projecting to 19 votes across the first two agendas. I misplayed the sequencing for claiming my systems, not used to my factions funky fleet setup. This put me behind by a tech for the entire game and behind on my fleet's capital ships for too long when these were critical for early scoring. In spite of this, the votes were flowing early and my powers could be flexed while I assembled a swarm of destroyers.

The Cabal were fantastic neighbors. We carved out a deep alliance and their home system was left wide open to me the entire game so I never felt threatened by their run. They controlled Mechatol and commanded a powerful fleet to push into other home systems, while I set up a network of PDS cannons on Malice, the true center of the swiss cheese galaxy The Ghosts created. I began leveraging my cannons as a tax for safe passage, selectively firing only when the tax wasn't favorable enough to me. An early show of this force was enough to instill fear and I was allowed free movement through the galaxy to take systems for objectives. My systems were unoccupied for most of the game, but never taken in spite of that. It felt good, even if I was playing so far behind the pack. The votes were ultimately lackluster, and a better future play will be claiming politics more consistently. My the end of the game, I was projecting 17 votes into 29 during the agenda phase, and the impact of buying my vote was fun but not as beneficial as it could be from a better standing.

All said and done, I wanted to test heuristics surrounding early force projection. They proved helpful in giving me an image of strength far greater than my lack of scored objectives conveyed. Claiming a strong early blind vote and then a strong counteroffensive where an invasion force was wiped out by a single PDS and infantry with no ships in the sky can go a long way to giving you a strong social standing in the table meta, but ultimately tighter play in the opening and better fundamentals would have served me so much more.