Curating Milty draft

[u/Daglicht]

I have some questions for the fellow Milty drafters. Having organized a few real life sessions with a preceding Milty draft, I was wondering if anyone else ever 'curates' the draft a bit, or if everyone mostly just sticks with the default options and whatever it first generates.

So my first question: how does your group handle slice generation? I tend to be picky about the slices it generates, mostly because we only play two or three times a year. I feel like the game is more fun when the equidistants are interesting and all the slices are at least worth considering (no supernovas on the way to MR, and not low in both resources and influence). So I keep regenerating seven slices until I'm happy with the result, and this has been fine so far. I haven't tried messing with the generations options yet, like minimum or maximum inf/res per slice.

And my second question: how does your group pick the factions that are in play? I have so far excluded Nekro and Mahact (because there are still some relatively inexperienced players) and Winnu (anti-fun), but let the tool pick nine randomly from the rest. However, I'm considering to lower the number to seven factions, to make the choice a bit more relevant. It tends to be the last choice people make now, but maybe that's because we don't know much about faction balance yet. Additionally, I thought it might be fun to put seven factions in the pot that we haven't played with yet, but I'm afraid to put too much personal bias into the selection (what I want to play, instead of what might be fun for the group). Any thoughts?

[u/5ubtilo]

I don't get this excluding things because people are new. You learn a lot by engaging with unknown things. Yes, you will make mistakes. Then do you play with people that have no or little prior experience with boardgames or videogames? I feel like most people that have some decent experience in these areas get the basics in ti pretty fast.

[u/Daglicht → u/5ubtilo]

I agree that it's not the disaster people make it out to be; if a player told me they wanted to play Mahact because they seem cool, I'd of course let them, while also warning them for the complexity. I'm also in the 'PoK from the first session'-camp, especially if it's only one or two new players.

That being said, and building on your own argument: Nekro and Mahact deviate strongly from 'the basics in TI'. A first or second time player could see Nekro copying tech and Mahact doing... Mahact things, and be confused about basic rules, which are themselves still somewhat unintuitive at that stage. Not to mention that both are late game powerhouses if not kept in check, which I don't think is a fun dynamic for newer players.

Finally, I'm happy to announce that I plan to include both Nekro and Mahact in the upcoming draft, along with some other powerful factions. I think it'll be a lot of fun to see the table dynamics around them :)

[u/domigol]

I never exclude factions and i do curate slices if there is ever any slice that is way to op compared to the others. And i do reroll factions if i ever get industrex and saar in the same draft, but that's just our table concenuss. One thing i change is that i have 8 slices and 10 factions so that they are even and symetrical on my screen but that's just me beeing special like that 🤣 -edit fat finger typo

[u/alucardu → u/domigol]

With so many choices I would always pick speaker first though.

[u/ThisTooShallPass_]

This gives the stronger faction an edge. I think the draft needs bad slices. Want a good faction? Ok, you are risking ending up with a bad slice then. Picking a good slice or speaker first? Might end up with a bad faction. If everything is good, it's not a very interesting draft imo(even for newbies)

[u/Mortensen]

I play every month-ish. In terms of slices I used to manually tweak the generated slices to fix balance issues, but now I almost always hand build all the slices which is both really fun to do and super rewarding when the game turns out well.

And for factions, we usually just do totally random (although I exclude factions that were in the last game). But we also sometimes do a faction pool build thing where each player nominates 2/3 factions, then we all get 5 votes for and 5 votes against any factions in the pool (can spread the votes) and then the final 7-9 (depending on how generous I feel) that got the most positive votes are the faction pool – I normally only do this for one of my groups who don't play very often so everyone is more likely to get a faction they enjoy.

[u/Daglicht → u/Mortensen]

Do you have any methods or rules-of-thumb for building your maps? Which tool do you use to hand-build the slices? And do you then simply enter the slices by hand in the Milty-tool? I have always loved building maps and layouts, so I'm interested in your approach!

I also like the idea of simply leaving out the factions that were in last game, so that most factions will be in a game eventually. Building a pool together seems complicated, but is something I might consider in the future when we have seen most factions in action.

[u/Mortensen → u/Daglicht]

I build the slices directly in my milty tool of choice: https://tidraft.com/draft/prechoice (get it to generate some first and then just remove all the hexes and start building from there). I have a few general house rules in my mind while doing them but nothing written down or particularly fancy - mainly around max/min number of slices, having a certain numnber with mecatol blocked, not giving the highest resource and influence slice a legendary, making sure there's sufficient wormholes and they're not all the same, trying to make sure 2 of the same anomaly type can't end up next to each other (i.e. if i have an asteroid in an equidistant, i can't have one next to mecatol or to the right of someone's home system) etc.

It also helps that I have Uncharted Space (the fan made expansion) that has a boat load more system tiles so it gives me more flexibility.

[u/ZookeepergameWeak122]

We've been doing similar in my groups TI surgery Milty. I think slices can be wildly variable with the draft and with lots of newer players it can be harder to know how to work with that.

I don't think you need to exclude factions, just make sure people understand what they're getting into. That said, there are enough that leaving 3 out of the pool doesn't really impact choice. I personally would prefer more rather than fewer factions, as there are still a bunch I've never played and want to, but we only play a handful of games a year so don't get many opportunities.

Neither of your questions seem like an issue to me though. They let you play the game without unbalancing it, so go for it if it works for your group.

[u/Daglicht → u/ZookeepergameWeak122]

Good point that more factions in the draft gives people more freedom to play what they like (which is probably not the same as what I like). Perhaps only including 7 factions is a bit restrictve.

[u/Mortensen → u/Daglicht]

I'm not the person you're responding to, but one thing I've noticed after dozens of milty drafts is the more factions you have in the pool, the higher likelihood that people will leave faction choice to last. If I'm not worried about which faction I get as there are loads of good options why would I pick anything other than slice or speaker on my first choice? So it simply benefits the people earlier in the draft more.

[u/Daglicht → u/Mortensen]

This is exactly the balance I'm trying to strike. At 9 factions available, almost everyone picked a slice first, which is why I consider lowering the number. How many do you usually include, and does it change the dynamic substantially? I suppose the power level differential of the included factions also plays an important role. I.e. Jol-Nar and Titans might be picked if the other 7 choices are middling. Of course, this only applies if the group has an idea of relative power levels between factions, and I don't think we're quite there yet.

[u/Mortensen → u/Daglicht]

7 is my general rule for slices and factions. I only do more factions if I'm playing with my irregular group and we don't want to be left with a faction we really don't want to play at our annual game.

It does change the dynamic sufficiently and makes the draft far less predictable as people have to actually make hard choices rather than just go slice first and know it'll be fine as they'll at worst still have 4 factions to choose between (if you do 9 factions in the pool)

[u/Positive_Luck909]

I created my own Milty-variant system that incorporates a few custom rules to the draft. Slice generation I just let it go pure random most of the time. 2 red tiles 3 blue tiles, optimals be damned

It's totally fine. Having said that my rules include a tg bid system that allows people to pay to draft a slice first. This system makes imbalanced choices a little more fair. But even without it, I don't think it matters, as the game should self balance anyway. Someone has a strong start compared to everyone else? Then make them galactic threat until the balance of power is restored.

[u/sirisegrimm]

Usually the slices are somewhat balanced, but id always check and reroll if one is extra terrible.

With TE tech skips are even more important and i dont know if theres an option to force skips.

Extra wormhole and legendaries option is always good .

Player count +2 on options is good for average players, +1 for regular players and +0 for tournament style play

Faction pool is very table dependant, choose whatever you feel like. With the first expansion we just forced all tje new ones in for example.

[u/Hydroguy17]

For in person play, building the map normally is king.

It lets you start playing the game before you even start playing the game.

Plus I would wager it’s faster than trying to match tiles to a printout, unless someone has them physically built out ahead of time as well. Even then, you still have the analysis paralysis of picking. Granted, any time savings either way is going to be small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.

As for factions, most of my IRL players like to experiment with new factions so we just pick something we haven’t used before from the pile. We tend to let newer players go first and steer them toward beginner friendly options.

If we did want to randomize things, maybe associate each faction with a number, put them in a hat to determine those available and draft from that, or do the hat again to assign them.

[u/cdj18862]

I like Nucleus over Milty from a map generation perspective.

Then I like 7 factions in the pool with a ban phase first. Makes the choice more relevant, but nobody is "stuck" even going last to pick a faction, but they have the option to eliminate a faction that they know they don't want to play so that it definitely still feels like a choice.