The human resistance and how you score

The Human Resistance

  Directive: Invasion! comes with a deck of cards that represent what the human resistance is doing at the start of each turn. These cards affect everyone in the game and are almost always negative. One turn the humans might steal weapons from your troops, lowering their attack value, or maybe they will bomb an outpost thus removing it from play, or just maybe they will get on board the mother ship and try to disable the engines. 

In the long run the human resistance are much more than an annoyance, with all their effects temporary. However a clever alien can use these attacks to their advantage, swooping into his opponent when they are weak and vulnerable. 

Ally and Oppress 

If you read the last entry you know one of the actions you can take is called Ally or Oppress. When you take that action you choose how you are going to deal with the human resistance.

If you Ally with them you will get to choose a specific resistance card that will affect all players EXCEPT you. This card gets shuffled into the resistance deck to show up at a later time. Humans are, after all, a bit unpredictable. Each alien has access to 3 of these cards.

If you Oppress the humans they immediately try to rise up against you and you flip another Resistance card. This new card take immediate effect and DOES NOT replace the old one. So if the first player Oppresses there will be 2 penalties on the field, if the second player Oppresses as well then there will be 3 currently active.

Oppressing the humans is a gamble, as you are still affected by it as well. Maybe the next card will weaken troops, discouraging an attack, or maybe it will reduce defenses so you can strike. The risk is up to you, but there is a second important reason you would want to Oppress.

Tracker Board

Prototype, not final

This is the tracker board, it keeps track of current resistance cards in play, when you gain upgrades and additional power, and turns left in the game. A game of Directive: Invasion! lasts until 11 resistance cards have been played for any reason. So while one card is drawn at the beginning of every round that doesn't mean the game lasts 11 rounds...

When you Oppress the humans you draw a new Resistance card, thus reducing the total number of rounds in the game. You can use this to try to gain upgrades quicker, or to try to force the game to end before your opponents can recover. Just remember that every player can do this, quickly turning 11 rounds into 5.

Scoring

Prototype, not final

You score Victory Points (VP) in Directive by following, well, directives. Each directive gives points for each instance it's completed, so you get 3 VP for each Uplift, 2 VP for each destroyed city, etc. This means that it's very easy to earn VP, as a Troop on a Monument is worth 8 VP (3 for Uplift + 5 for Protect) and an Outpost in a river can be worth 10 points (3 for Colonize + 7 hex long Harvest).

The problem is that you do not actually score any of these VP until the game is over.

• In the first few turns you might control a high points water source only to have your opponent build an Outpost down river, blocking you from most of the points. 
• You might have three troops sitting in cities, but in attack range of an opponent on a monument. Do you leave the city, hoping you can kill the lone troop on a high value spot, or do you play it safe?
• Each Troop killed in battle earns you a VP and removes Uplift VP from them.

Earning VP is easy, keeping that VP is the hard part.

Specialty

On the back of  each directive card is a Specialty that modifies one of the directives. Each Specialty is different and kept secret from the other players until the game is over.

You Specialty gives you a new way to gain VP no one else has access to. Examples include the Uplift Specialty being able to harvest cities as if they were water or forest, or the Colonize Specialty gaining bonus points as long as their outposts are spread apart. 

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Once the game is over you score all the directives and specialties, and see which alien species has conquered earth!

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Kinda big one today. Probably could have split it up. ... Eh, too late now.

Is there a specific part of Directive: Invasion! or The Robotic Age: Mars you want me to talk about? Let me know in the comments and I'll make it next week's post.