Re: Twilight Imperium 3 vs 4
They streamlined the tech tree so it’s a lot more intuitive to understand. They sort of streamlined some expansion elements from 3 and integrated them into 4. They simplified trade away from those silly contracts and just made it so you just produce tokens that are turned into trade goods when you give them to another player. Then they made controlling Mecatol Rex a little more important by having it be worth a VP every turn if you take Bureaucracy.
aaaaaand that’s about it for changes. I enjoyed it for 2 plays but I don’t think I’d be interested in any more. There still some big time balance issues with the races (Jol-Nar are still too good, Winnu are a bad joke you only take as a handicap, Sardak N’orr still stink). The tech tree arrangement still doesn’t make much sense balance wise. What really dampened me on it though are the tech based victory objectives. There’s too many of them and it makes the game too random. Game would be a lot better off without them.
And now that I think about it, the only reason it’s streamlined is that they threw out 80% of the expansion stuff. I gather all the bloat and fiddliness will be back once the expansions come out, same thing that happened to Eldritch Horror.