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Play your first city, receiving your 3 MCR bonus. Save only six cards or less, so that you start with at least 22 MCR. Commerical district can also be nice to get when you’re playing with the Corporate Era.Īnd if you’re placing your cities on tiles with plant bonuses, you’ll get greenery tiles, while if you place them on steel or titanium, you’ll get more card plays–make sure they’re strategic.īest opening move for Tharsis Republic.
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That said, if you get the city cards, play them–especially the ones with the VP bonuses. So there is absolutely no reason to wait for those uncommon city cards–which also usually cost energy to play, so that they end up being way more expensive than standard project cities (see my previous post, “Thoughts on Terraforming Mars “). Remember that every time you play a city as a standard project you get 3 MCR back due to your ability, and a +TWO MCR production boost (one for the standard +1 MCR production boost for playing a city as a standard project, and +1 for Tharsis Republic’s second special ability). If other players are not playing cities because they don’t want you to have too much MCR production in the early and mid-game, then YOU throw down as many cities as you can, until they get scared into producting them, for fear of losing spots on the board (only about 13-18 in a game, depending on the board and certain cards that allow adjacent cities). While Tharsis Republic is a card that players should definitely play to its strengths, players often forget just what that is: CITIES. As Tharsis Republic gets lost in its off-board game of stockpiling cards, another player can easily take a strategic win. Tharsis Republic often forgets that the game is about victory points, and not MCR. Every player that chooses Tharsis Republic gets so invested in their money game that they play about a dozen cards or more that didn’t give them very much in game benefits, simply because they had the money to do so. That said, Tharsis Republic has a massive disadvantage: ego.
#Terraforming mars strategy free#
(Aphrodite will get 30 MCR for all 15 steps on the Venus track, and Interplanetary Cinematics will probably get less than that for its event cards, compared to a free city (25), 3 MCR back for placing it, and a +1 MCR production worth 10 or more depending on the number of generations). When you consider that two of the weaker cards, Interplanetary Cinematics and Aphrodite, have a game length benefit worth less than what Tharsis Republic gets IN ITS FIRST TURN, you know that this is the corporation of choice.
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Tharsis Republic is one of the two most powerful cards in the game, and it is the card with the most hubris (see “ Terraforming Mars : Hubris in TM and Winning with Inventrix,” which lies about halfway down in my previous Game Night column), bar none. Additionally, we have not played Venus Next nearly as many times as the basic game with and withour corporate era, so my notes on Venus Next are sparser. In Venus Next, I have played Manutech and Celestic only, but have observed the others in play. I still have not played Thorsgate or Interplanetary Cinematics in the starting set, so my recommendations for those corporations are from observing other players. Here are some strategic notes to playing each Terraforming Mars corporation, with Venus Next corporations included, but not Prelude, which I only received today. As I mentioned in a previous post, “ Thoughts on Terraforming Mars,” each Terraforming Mars corporation is so distinct that you could play each corporation as if it was a different game, using their special ability as an overarching rule to govern your decisions from generation to generation.
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