The Military

I’ve heard a few times that people ‘win with the military strategy’, and I always smile to myself, because in my mind, there isn’t a military strategy. As I see it, there are two ways to get down worlds – pay for them with cards (less applicable discounts), or conquer them with military. In my head, military is a discount with a double edged sword, in that it has to all work, or it doesn’t work at all.

There are only three sources of Victory points: Developments, Worlds and Consumption. Everything else (Exploration, Trading and Production) is just a means to those ends, which I touched in my previous essay “Rethinking the Phases” ( http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/328862).

Since worlds give VPs, both intrinsically and over time through consumption, having a ‘military strategy’ just means you’ve committed to the use of Military Force to obtain your worlds, versus paying for them. ‘Going military’ isn’t so much a strategy to me as simply a means to an end. When it works, it can work well, but when it doesn’t work, some players over commit and don’t allow themselves to recover, because they think that you either ‘do’ the military strategy or ‘do not’. There is a middle ground because military is just one of two ways to get worlds into you tableau. You don’t need to forgo peaceful settlements when using military force, or vice versa.

There are three types of commitment when it comes to military might, and which you choose should depend on the cards you see in your hand and the roles selected (or likely to be selected) by your opponents. Each commitment level comes with its own risks and rewards.

The three commitment levels are:
Peaceful: No ability to conquer military worlds –due to a 0-1 standing military or allowing yourself to drop to negative military might.
Partial: You have a small military force and can conquer a majority of the military worlds, depending upon how much you commit to gaining military power. The high-defense worlds are out of your reach and you have no intention of being able to reach them. This is typified by a military strength between 2 and 4.
Full: Most or all of your tableau provides military strength or contains worlds which are conquered by military strength. You have pushed up into the high scoring worlds with a defense of 5 or higher. There is no reason to intentionally go beyond a military value of 7 unless you have New Galactic Order (which gets 1 bonus point per point of non-specialized military value at the end of the game), but it may happen just as a matter of course due to the accumulation of military value from worlds played.

So what makes you fall into a commitment level for military strength? The two biggest factors are home world and the first 10 or so cards you see, which includes your starting hand and the first big draw or two. Put simply, if you haven’t seen the cards you need to mount a full military commitment in the first 10-15% of the deck, you need to switch gears to a partial military commitment.

Let’s look at some specific cards to see what we find. If you look at the cards that provide military value and bin them into categories, you see interesting trends that must be understood if military strength is going to be a part of your plans to place worlds.




The first bin is ‘Cards Which Take Away General Military’. There are four of them, and each subtracts 1 from your general military. Two of these are windfalls (Refugee World (novelty) and Empath World (genes)) and would be unlikely to be played by someone focusing on amassing military might. The next two are the synergistic pair of the Contact Specialist and the Pan-Galactic League, which work well together; ironically, the PGL gives bonus points for military worlds! This tends to make it come out later in the game, after your conquering is over, or if your military strength is sufficient for PGL to not affect your settling abilities. Contact Specialist and PGL are almost deserving of their own article, so we’ll save further discussion of them for later. For now, they kill military value and someone focusing on Military won’t need the services of the Contact Specialist.




The next bin is Specialized Military, and we have four cards that give that. Alpha Centauri is a home world and works only against Rare Earth worlds. That +1 is sufficient to conquer two of the three military Rare Earth Worlds (both windfalls). With one additional military strength (obtainable from developments or two of the peacefully settled brown worlds), the final brown military world can be conquered. Alpha Centauri’s specialized military is of very limited use because of this.

Two cards (Alien Rosetta Stone World and Alien Tech Institute) provide Alien military, and both together plus another two military strength from anywhere else is sufficient to conquer all military alien worlds. If the cards come up in the perfect order, it’s possible to conquer only Alien worlds with no other source of military with these two cards because all but one of the alien military worlds come with military strength. Getting all of the cards in the perfect order is not an easy task.

The last specialized military is anti-Rebel, with the Galactic Imperium providing a whopping +4. This means that four of the seven rebel cards are conquerable with only this card, and the remaining three can be conquered with +1, +2 or +3 additional military, two of which could be provided by Rebel worlds. Again that depends upon getting the right cards in the right order.




Military Developments offer a way to increase your standing military regardless of any specialty direction (Rare, Alien or Rebel) you may be pursuing.

Expedition Force gives a +1 military value and also +1 view on explore actions. That +1 boost may not seem like a lot, but the conquerable worlds are denser at values less than 4, and +1 is enough to give the home worlds with starting military a significant boost. The +1 view is a boon on explore actions, which are typically called earlier in the game by someone focusing on military, preparing their hand before going on a settling spree.

Space Marines gives a +2, which easily boosts the home worlds which start with military value or get one which started without a military force access to 13 of the 23 military worlds available.

New Galactic Order gives the same boost as Space Marines but comes with the additional incentive to continue amassing military strength above 7, which is the highest practical value without having the NGO in your tableau.

Drop Ships is expensive, but the +3 it gives will open up nearly all military worlds to the home worlds with a standing military, or put a home world without starting military soundly into the arms race.

Finally, New Military Tactics is a temporary boost of military strength, usually used to conquer an otherwise unreachable defense value. A less seen use of this is to get a single low defense world into play for a player not focusing on military strength. This is most likely due to the tableau tempo lost when discarding New Military Tactics (or Colony Ship for that matter). A player focusing on military strength will, as you see, not have many points from consumption. Every point lost in tableau tempo is potential points for someone turning the Produce/Consume crank.




Peacefully Settled Worlds Providing Military Strength is our next bin, and we’ve already touched on them. Epsilon Eridani is a home world with decent consumption (a rarity we’ll touch on in a bit) and the other two are Rare Earth related, but could also be used in a tableau taking advantage of Diversified Economy (an unlikely situation if focusing on military unless support cards are played to produce on windfalls).




Military Strength breeds military strength, and the above cards show that soundly. If new Sparta were to get these cards in this order, they could settle four times in a row, each time increasing their military by one. Again, the threshold nature of military strength means that if you get these cards in the reverse order, they will take much longer to get out, if that’s even possible. This is the double edged sword we spoke about earlier, where the order of discovery can significantly change the choices made.




Finally, there are three worlds that provide two or more military strength. New Sparta is a home world, and the other two are both Alien cards. Most of the time, if you’ve got enough to conquer one of these, you have enough to conquer the other, so it’s not uncommon for the temporary military provided by New Military Tactics to be made permanent through one of these worlds.

So what have we seen so far? We’ve looked at every card that provides military strength, but what else do they provide? I’m afraid it’s best summed up as ‘not much’.
One card produces on Alien Windfalls.
One card (a home world) consumes nicely for a VP and a card.
There are three grey worlds (two are home worlds!), two producers and five windfalls which will provide one time goods. That’s it! There are almost no powers on phases I, II and IV. So far we’ve seen only one development with an explore component (Expedition Force for +1 view) and one world (Epsilon Eridani, a start world) that can consume.

Now that we’ve explored how to get military strength, let’s check in on the worlds which are conquerable. We’re going to repeat some cards (namely those which provide military strength), but you’ll see why in a minute. We’ll bin these by the type of good the world provides.




The Novelty military worlds provide military (which we’ve already seen) or cards in phase IV through trading or consumption. The trade values sell from the windfalls at values higher than normal, and they stack with the blue trade bonuses, as seen in my article “The Race for the Galaxy Blues” ( http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/333484). New Survivalists is a small income source, or provides a good which can be consumed elsewhere (but we really haven’t seen much ‘elsewhere’ to consume it).




Rare Earth Military worlds provide windfall goods or standard production. Runaway Robots has the chance to produce income, which it will in conjunction with one of the three cards (plus the produce action) which can generate the needed good.




Genes Military worlds trend towards being defense two or less, making them very desirable early income generators. Of course, they aren’t providing much of anything else. Note that the VPs for the one defense are zero, versus the rest being worth two. At the high end, we get some additional military value or some actual production and a boost to the explore phase.




Alien Military cards offer either a very easily conquered trade good (better than the equivalent genes worlds with the same defense and VP!) or some increased military power, ending with the Lost Alien Battle Fleet’s drop-ship-rivaling +3 military.




Lastly, the Grey Military worlds offer a little bit of consumption and production, but are generally provide either a bit of extra military strength or have the highest intrinsic VPs in the game. Outlaw World and Rebel Underground will provide VPs and cards, which boost their value a bit, but the high value worlds provide nothing extra, which means that their intrinsic value isn’t going to budge.

We’re still missing consumption, and this is the plague that infests a pure military strategy. Military focus requires that you continually discover the means to conquer the worlds which you draw. If either half of that equation runs dry, you’re forced to jumpstart the process by exploring (which will benefit your opponents) or Producing on a single windfall (which will benefit your consuming opponents) in an effort to generate new choices.

Of course, we don’t have that much to consume either. Only five of the worlds we’ve looked at are producers, and only two of the cards have any form of consumption for victory points on them. This puts a pure military strategy in the hole and unable to leech off of an opponents Produce/Consume cycle, while they, especially if there’s a card income component to their crank, are easily able to leech off of any builds (developments or worlds) which you call. Consider also a player who has set up a modest military force (say strength 2 or 3 from a single development). This will fuel their own ability to generate windfall goods and trade or consume them through their engine.

I mentioned in the beginning of this article that worlds give VP value both intrinsically, and over time as their goods are consumed for VP chips. But without the means to produce on the windfalls or consume those goods for VP chips, most Military worlds we’ve explored so far are only worth their intrinsic value, and will not contribute to creation of additional score through VP chips. Other support cards, first to cause production on the windfalls, and second to consume those goods, are necessary if a player focused on military might wants to effectively leech off of opponents’ actions. Most of these options come from outside the card set explored so far, and should not be quickly dismissed by someone concentrating on military, assuming they desire to set up a leeching situation. Of course, doing so costs slots in your tableau and requires the income and choice to get those cards down. All of this infringes on the classic ‘Military Strategy’.

So, is there a valid “Military Strategy”? I leave that to you to decide. There are certainly well-established paths which use mostly cards explored in this article, such as Rebel Worlds, Alien Worlds and the general “Settle/Trade” cycle which a player focused on Military Strength will fall into (with the occasional development thrown in or leeched for additional military strength or for one of the many applicable major developments). Does this constitute a coherent strategy though? It’s a way to get out worlds, that’s for sure. I personally believe there are enough gaps in a pure military strategy to encourage the play of some of the support cards, reducing the advantage which opponents gain when turning their economic crank. Without some form of production to back up a pure military strategy, it’s too easy to get stalled or get edged out by an opponent amassing a VP chip collection.

The actions a player focusing on Military Strength will be normally calling are:
I: Explore, often at +5, in order to find the next world to conquer, or a supporting development. Early in the game, the focus is on getting the item not present, be it military strength or targets. Later, the focus will be on filling in gaps if the card drawing stalls from the sale of windfall goods. Remember, giving away one card isn’t as bad as giving away four goods to a player who is focusing on Consumption.

II: Developments are required early on to establish a standing military, or increase the one the player started with. Other developments are useful support to keep the basic actions of Settle/Trade coming in as uninterruptible a stream as possible. In the later stages of the game, have developments ready to play when an opponent calls this action, so you can keep the pressure on for tableau tempo.

III: Settling seems like the primary action to be taken by someone with high Military Strength, but they should really only be calling this role towards the end of the game. Players focusing on a Produce/Consume engine need to establish their worlds early, and will have little reason to call Settle in the later stages. When focusing on Military Strength, drafting off of those early Settle Actions and selling off the free windfall goods will provide early income. Later, when Settling benefits you more than others is when to call this role yourself.

IV: Consumption. Unless you’ve got some pretty awesome support cards, the only version of the Consumption phase to call is Trade (IV/$). Since most of the worlds available to you don’t’ produce, the goods on those windfalls are only going to be there once, and you are better served turned those goods into income.

V: Producing may help you in the early stages when you need income, and your choices are to produce on a high valued windfall and sell it the following turn or Explore. Exploration gives other players cards while Production gives other players goods. In the early game, a Good probably isn’t too much to give away, in the later game, your one good to their four or five (and ability to consume for 6 or more points!) is too much to give away.

Based on this, get an early windfall good of high value and use it for income, Producing on it if necessary before doing so helps other players too much. By this time, the level of commitment you have will be established, and you’ll have seen the early 10-15 cards that determine your course of action for the remainder of the game. As the game progresses, favor Exploration to fill in any gaps in your income generation (or generate income other ways based on my article “Getting Cards” ( http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/328706)). Develop early to establish your Military Strength and then leech off of other players’ Develop actions towards the end to get supporting powers into play. Above all, fill out your tableau quickly to lower the opportunities for opponents to generate additional VPs through Consumption.