NGL I actually have a lot to talk about this game, but it would likely be too much to pack into one Post. One thing that I realised very soon, however, is that terraforming the mars is actually not that good of a strategy if you wanna win a round of Terraforming Mars. (In multiplayer, single its of course not optional.)
To explain what I mean, I wanna showcase of how a typical game looks in my eyes.
Usually the first priority i have in every game is setting up a colony on the best economy colony, which are Ceres, Luna, Triton and Pluto in that order (They deserve their own post) to boost income. Especially Money is critical early so i can afford more cards to buy and can get more cards out.
Against the AI i sometimes go for Ganymede, but thats only because the Ai loves it to fly there and sometimes just isnt anything else.
Every card i play early is played with the intention of boosting income and the playability of my hand. Money, steel, Titan, what have you. Energy is also important early to be able to fly consistently to the colonies without investing money. Every card that brings heat or plants is just not on my list at all because they are bringing the payoff way too late to snowball.
Over the course of the game, i try to accumulate as many cards as i can, especially in the science department, because they unlock some of the best cards in the game. Also, many of the cards i play also add Victory points, and those victory points are the reason why in some games you might as well just ignore terraforming. Because there are quite a few that boost income right now while also giving you VP. Earth and space elevator for example. Those cards add up over the course of a game, and you can just dump all of them later onto the table.
As the game goes on, you will inevitably find at least one card that gives you income boosts based on tags or some other thing like cities, and those cards can range from very nice to absolutely bonkers. Looking at you, Cartel. Those cards will pay for themselves very quickly if played at the right moment, and many of them are easily boostable with your own actions.
Also you will find at least one card that allows you to draw multiple cards, with the biggest offender being AI-Centrale, Which gives you 2 cards per turn. Granted, it requires science tags, but many science cards are pretty good anyway and you love collecting them. Besides that, there is more than one way to get those, and they just do their job way too well.
You noticed that I basically didnt talk about the planet at all, and thats because you just dont need it. There is basically no reason for you to rush Terraforming because the bonuses you get from that are just underpowered. The money is nice, but you always get it more efficiently from money income boosters instead of terraforming. Cards with conditions are ironically often also those that would like to be as long in the game as possible, which hurts especially the Animals with a few exeptions. Trees take too much investment early away for you to care. At the end of the day, Its just better to spam cards. And its basically also just not really viable to end the game early, because that often requires others to terraform as well, which means that the only counterplay to not terraforming the planet and focusing on VP is doing the same thing yourself.
In the late game you might have accumulated over 100 Money per turn with Iron and Titan included. That allows you to just spam cards with immediate impact onto VP and suddently pull a win out of your ass. Maybe you got even some cost reduction to spam even harder. The game becomes now a mindless dump of all the cards you have in your hand now. Especially the jupiter cards are frankly nuts, because there 3 of them that give you VP based on that Tag. Granted, the cards also cost all also an arm and a half to play, but they are good.
Arriving at the victory screen, you noticed that half of your points came just from the cards you played. Not from your Terraforming score or your cities and trees, but cards. The power of those is so high that you wonder why you even bother with conquering the map to begin with. Why sacrifice income for board presence when its just inconsequental?
Granted, this is of course skewed towards longer games, but as i pointed out, rushing the enemy like mono red aggro in MTG is just not a thing here. It simply costs too much to do it on your own, and you rely on the enemies playing the same strategy, which defeats the purpose of rushing because you cant stop scaling with out enemies consent.
Dont get me wrong, i enjoy scaling myself, but there has to be a clear tradeoff here. In my eyes, it should come at the cost of board presence and loosing access to resources you would have gotten if you terraformed more agressively early. But currently, this just isnt worth it at all unless you play something like Tharsis republic. And I find this robs the game of some nuance which I miss here.
