u/OhThatsALotOfTeeth

Our group has tried a decent chunk of Galactic Events, and liked Minor Factions enough to expand it out into a stronger variant we call Major Factions where each extra faction gets their full starting units during setup, with each unit treated as its fully upgraded version.

To balance this out, the first player to take a faction's entire system gains trade goods equal to the factions commodities and can choose a single one of their faction technologies and treat it as a faction technology for themselves (they may research it as normal or get it via entropic scar, but don't gain it immediately). When placing infantry for this setup, they are divided as evenly as possible among home system planets, with uneven numbers favoring the highest combined resource and influence value planets.

We've done a few iterations of this, including riskier versions where the factions are placed in the first ring, one where the factions are not placed until activation would move a player's units into or through them, and one that combined both of those.

Aside from that, we're working on a version called Hungry Fracture, based partially on Age of Exploration. Instead of expanding the normal board, it is centered on the Fracture and allows some systems in the game to be moved over into the Fracture, replaced by anomalies or empty space in the normal board.

Like, it makes sense thematically for the factions who get it, and I'm fine with that, but Thunder's Edge was also a perfect time to update existing factions with tech, agents, unit upgrades, or even factions abilities that would care about it.

It wouldn't make sense for everyone, but it feels like a big miss thematically that neither the Empyrean nor the Hacan picked up anything relating to it, given the former's status as observers, and the latter's love of just peacefully trading with everyone.

I can see it being a difficult balance issue to work with, but the extremely limited implementation of this potentially very broad mechanic makes it feel more like a prototype mechanic for a future edition of Twilight Imperium, and less like something that belongs in the current edition, to me.

Asking mostly cuz my group has been really happy with how Warfare has changed, despite us not thinking it really needed an update. Overall, we've appreciated how the secondary update adds new dimensions for faction who rely on units other than space docks for production.

Pretty much title, but also curious about considerations like "Faction X becomes more competitive because they now never have to worry about Faxtion Y"

If the answer is yes, am I treated as having activated that system because I used the ability, even if I have not placed a token?