[Originally posted on my blog, which occasionally contains non-Race for the Galaxy content these days. -- Brian]

Continuing my "Race for the Galaxy Strategy Ruminations" I thought I'd look at the military strategy. New players quickly grok how powerful this is, but take a few games to figure out the more 'consumption-based' strategies. I feel this is why Military strategy is often perceived as "The way to win."

But it doesn't help that the most "rules intense" card is also also one of the powerful Anti-Military cards.

The Contact Specialist reduces your military rating by one, but also gives you the power to Pay for Military. Quoting from the rulebook:



So, what does this mean? Let's say you have a world with a defense of 3 -- The Pirate World (A novelty windfall world that gives $3 trade bonus when you sell its good). That's a dandy little world to conquer. If you don't have 3 military rating but have the Specialist, you can buy this world for a cost of two cards (A defense of 3, subtract 1, yields the cost. The cost does not include the Pirate World itself).

Seeing as how you can consume/trade next turn (for five+ cards!), that's a handy ability.

But not only does it help you, it puts a serious crimp on the military players ... a military strategy requires finding worlds to conquer. If you use the contact specialist, that's one less world ripe for the picking. The deck contains roughly 20% military worlds (23 cards out of 114). Quite a few small windfall worlds (like all the Uplift worlds) are dirt cheap with a contact specialist, and deprive the military specialist with a goods to fuel his conquests. Conquering worlds is "free," but you can't hope to keep drawing them with Settle rebates, and even a Spartan Fantasy will want to play a few developments (New Galactic Order if nothing else, but often Space Marines or even Drop Ships.)

Towards the endgame, a Contact Specialist reduces your dependency on drawing the perfect development -- you can play the big Rebel cards. Now the Rebel Homeworld is a 6 cost, 7 VP card, which is better than a random 6-cost development (although not as good as the perfect match for any given tableau). And again, the Spartans hate it when announce your alliance with the Rebels.

Now, the contact specialist does reduce your military rating by one. If you were never planning on conquering anyone, that's not much of a problem. But you can often "earn back" that military rating. There are four (non-alien) military worlds that boost military ratings. (One is New Sparta). If you get your military rating up a bit, then you can always conquer. Someone with a contact specialist and a mediocre military rating can conquer the easy targets and schmooze the big boys. As always, you can never combine military rating with paying for worlds.

But as the Pay for Military power indicates, you can combine discounts. So if you slap down Replicant Robots, you buy military worlds for Defense less three. Alpha Centauri's discount is minor, since only one military rare world has a cost greater than one!

Finally, the Contact Specialist loves the Pan-Galactic League (and vice versa). Not only does the PGL give you a 3VP bonus for the specialist, there are six military genes worlds (most of them with a defense of two). All are easy to purchase using the specialist, and the league will give you an extra card for each gene world during production (even non-producting windfalls!) and two extra VPs per world.

So if you've got a few games under your belt and wonder what you can do to stop the military onslaught, try using the Specialist.

So true, so true. I learned it the hard way.

During my last session, I had two Contact Specialists in my opening hand of 6. I discarded both of them, and by turn 3 I was kicking myself as I saw one Uplift world after another flow through my hand with no way to play them.

My Love:Skill ratio for this game is approaching infinity. I get whipped over and over, and I just want to shuffle up and play again.

Good point. It's easy to miss some subtle but powerful interactions between players.

But why does contact specialist not work with aliens? That just doesn't make sense.

a) because they're too alien? As in, more alien than the green dudes shown on the Specialist's card
b) because the aliens are dead?
c) just because.

A nice article, but I disagree with this point. I think it's probably a waste to use both contact specialist and have a mediocre military. There are two ways to go with military: have a mediocre military and put down free windfall worlds for the good, then take a more balanced strategy with the extra cards; or pump it up and put down big alien and rebel worlds. Contact specialist accomplishes something very similar to the first on its own (worlds may cost 1 card instead of 0 though), so getting a mediocre military is redundant. It's bad at the second, because it can't claim the big alien worlds, and because the cost reduction is less of the overall cost of the world. Getting a big military makes contact specialist redundant though, so this isn't really worth it either. I'll just ignore military entirely if I've got a contact specialist down.

Edit: For clarity.

Thematically, I always think of the alien worlds as being the remnants left behind by the vanished Alien Overlords referred to in passing on the back of the box - and talking just isn't going to cut it when they consider you the interstellar equivalent of bugs. You're just going to have to prove to them that they're no longer the big kids on the block...

Mechanically, it also ensures there's something left for the military player settle once you've taken all his rebel worlds

I think Brian's point was that you'll be building up your military by default by just purchasing certain military worlds. So it just gives you the added bonus of being able to get some military worlds completely free later on. You may be arguing that it's better to just ignore most military worlds altogether and focus on production worlds with more helpful/balanced powers, but his point was that placing the military worlds yourself really hurts a pure military player (especially if there're 2) because they'll have a harder time finding any that are left. Also it may just happen that you draw them in heaps yourself, so you may as well use them in that case. And even if you never get a military large enough to conquer the Rebel Homeworld, it's likely still worth paying for, with discounts.

By the way, nice article. I've only played 3 times so far, but the military route definitely seems the strongest amongst RftG newbies. I ignored Contact Specialist too until my last game, then saw how useful it can be. I think most people see the -1 penalty to military rating and quickly discard it before giving it a proper evaluation.

I also found Pirate World very useful. I even managed to add on to it with Spice World, Export Duties, and Expanding Colony. So with Trade: Consume it was a draw of 8 cards and Pirate World was reproducing every production phase thanks to the Expanding Colony.

So far, in my own play, it has been a huge "it depends". Mostly, it depends on the first 6 cards I get dealt and the first few explores. At that point, I may or may not have the "goods" to go military.

I've gotten great scores going down many paths, but I feel that trying to force a strategy as a pre-set goal is a very bad idea in this game.

Certainly, if I get a Contact Specialist in my opening hand, chances are very high I'd be building a stragtegy around it... it is one of a handful of uber-cards that are exceptionally useful.

The one thing I might add to this is that the Colony Ships can sometimes be an effective way of leveraging a Contact Specialist to put down a large Rebel World for free, particularly if you have development discounts and other players are calling develop often.

Plonk! That never occurred to me. Wow.