Follow me on Twitch at https://www.twitch.tv/marsexpert to catch me live streaming Terraforming Mars regularly.
Follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/mars_expert?t=dnhgpwAU91mJ34OcRNSXAQ&s=09 to get news, updates and more.
Please also check out my second channel, where I post Total War: Shogun 2 campaign series: Please also check out my second channel, where I post Total War: Shogun 2 campaign series: https://www.youtube.com/@IkkoManu
In this video series I go through all the base-game cards and rate them based on their strength and combo potential. Do you agree with my ratings? If not, let me know in the comments!
Rating Scheme:
S: gamebreakingly strong in most situations or never pass
A: gamebreakingly strong in some situations, very strong otherwise or cannot be passed sometimes
B: very strong in some situations, strong otherwise or avoid passing
C: strong in some situations, mediocre otherwise or avoid passing in some situations
D: mediocre in some situations, weak otherwise
F: complete garbage
All ratings so far can be found in this Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gzE-QwRTxsyb8T-B_y-VHu677-_wFnBUcYHz7I1k3cs/edit?usp=sharing
Intro: (0:00)
Sabotage – A: (0:16)
Satellites – C: (2:00)
Search for Life – C: (3:20)
Security Fleet – F: (4:51)
Shuttles – C: (7:01)
Outro: (8:40)
source
Security fleet is basically a 12 + 3MC card that also costs an extra titanium and "decreases" your titanium prod by 1.
28 MC worth of value for 1 point per turn. What a steal! S+ card!
I had question about Security fleet. For example the game will take 10 turns, I play Security fleet at 5 turn, as a result I will get 6 points for 33MC. Is it comparable with Large Convoy? It will bring a little bit less VP, but much more flexible (If you don't have any animal card and no one can not kill your fighter). Is it a good ratio 5.5MC for 1 VP?
So fun fact, I actually wrote up a 4-page essay about opportunity cost and Security Fleet to illustrate why it's bad.
As I was writing it, I did a bunch of math and the whole time I thought that SF cost 10 MC, only to find out that it was somehow WORSE than I thought at 12 MC.
Resources in the early game should be evaluated as being worth more than their face value, depreciating over time until the end of the game. Cards like Acquired Company, Mine, Sponsors and the like, played gen 1, have an RoI that makes each credit spent worth between 2-3 MC by the end of the game, so as a rule of thumb it's worth evaluating resources spent on Gen 1 as being twice their face value.
To that end, if you adjust the costs of Security Fleet to compensate for the appreciated value of resources over the course of the game, it ends up being something like 1.5x as expensive to run as it seems and suddenly that price per point starts looking really bad. Plus, it only takes one big space card to make use of a pile of titanium and cards like Large Convoy exist.
Never got around to publishing it, it's just sitting on my desktop, I really should get around to editing it.
Unrelated to the other comment, the biggest mistake people make when playing Satellites is holding on to the card too long when their hand is full of space tags. They think, if I just delay this a gen or 2, I can make it worth a little bit more and by the time Satellites does come down they're getting +5 or more MC but that's typically a mistake, in my opinion. Satellites is a perfectly reasonable card to play Gen 1-2 if you have 2-3 existing Space tags and unless you're waiting until the end of the game that's when you should play it, especially if you have some incidental titanium.
The problem is, however, that there are very few corps/preludes with space tags, so getting those space tags down can be quite difficult, and most of the cheap space tags are non-productive in nature. If you look at it through the lens of "this functionally adds 1 MC Prod to all those non-production space tag cards" that still doesn't suddenly make them proactively playable. You shouldn't be dropping a Trans-Neptune Probe or Lagrange Observatory just to chain into Satellites.
It's a card that looks good on paper, but the numbers just do not work out in its favor.
Satellite is more niche than good. More times it is correct to take it just to hatedraft it away from the oppo, however im usually happy playing it for +4mc, which still requires a bit more of a lean towards jovs. It does get significantly better with colonies though.
Space discount cards as a whole have gone down the more i play the game. That is both space station and shuttles are super mid.
❤
Here’s a fun question you: what’s the worst card in the entire game including Venus. Security Fleet has to be bottom 5 in my view but probably AAA. Tough to say what the best card in the game is.
I recently played security fleet gen 1 in a 4p tournament match against a 450 elo as MG and had a close win. I think it’s very situational. I believe I played lava flows to get 1 titanium bonus placement and then played and activated it gen 1. Otherwise yeah it’s not a very dank card but better than nothing for sure.