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Strategy Articles
You Can Have Your Principles
by Lucas Thompson, Designer
22nd July 2024
| "You can have your principles when you have a belly full. But hunger has a way with you, there's no telling what you're gonna do when the chips are down." |
| -The Fates, Gone, I'm Gone, Hadestown |
Vidiians in Star Trek: Voyager have a very interesting premise. They're set up in Phage (their first appearance) to be bad guys who, when pressed, aren't outright evil. We get a pretty substantial lore dump in that episode:
"We are gathering replacement organs and suitable bio-matter. It is the only way we have to fight the phage." - Dereth
"...it attacked our people over two millennia ago. It consumes our bodies, destroys our genetic codes and cellular structures... Our immuno-technology cannot keep up. The phage adapts. It resists all attempts to destroy it. Our society has been ravaged. Thousands die each day. There is no other way for us to survive... It must be impossible for you to understand how any civilized people could come to this. Before the phage began, we were known as educators and explorers, a people whose greatest achievements were artistic. I myself am a sculptor of note on my world. All I can say is that when your entire existence is at stake." - Motura
One of the goals of the Vidiian affiliation in Second Edition is to put the player in the Vidiian's shoes. You're a good solver early on, but what will you do late in the game when the chips are down and you want to win? Will you just harvest enough to survive, like Dereth and Motura? Will you approach the game like Danara Pel (Lifesigns), focusing on mitigating your late-game drawbacks and play a straight solver? Or will you throw morality to the wind like Sulan from Faces or Nadirum from Deadlock and harvest away? It's up to you!
A card like today's Downfallen Civilization could work with whichever strategy you pick, but it's likely to be most useful to a harvesting strategy. Vidiian battle cards (such as Culling Raid) get better later in the game, so a way to discard copies that you draw too early to be useful can be very vaulable. And then, late in the game, it can be used to cycle through what's left of your deck to find the other copies you haven't drawn yet. Solver decks tend to be smaller and tighter, so cycling through them is generally less valuable, but Downfallen Civilization can still help you draw into the cards you most want in order to make the most of your early turns.
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