Hate
Alert
Resource
Control
Type
Power of Animosity
Destroys Friendships to Gain Power
After any arrival, use this power to gain a boon for each leader with no sponsors.
If a leader you are not sponsoring suffers casualties, use this power to generate animosity between a losing leader and one of their sponsors. That leader gains one of your marks matching that sponsor’s color and cannot commission that alien for the remainder of the match.
Legacy: During rally, each leader must destroy a committed ship for each alien they invite.
The Hate have learned to channel negative emotions into a devastating force. In pursuit of such power, they have mastered the art of turning longstanding friendships into blood feuds. By flowing dark energies through the hearts of their enemies, they’ll make sure we all can’t get along.
Any: Arrival
Any: Encounter
Mandatory
Wild Flare
As a leader, after any arrival where you have no sponsors, you may discharge this flare to draft three pods.
Leader: Arrival
Super Flare
As a bystander, after arrival, you may discharge this flare to destroy one committed ship from each actor.
Bystander: Arrival
Modifications
- Changed from the power of ‘rage’ to ‘animosity’ to better fit the dual nature of the power. Hate wants everyone to hate everyone to get the most out of its power. Its weakness is teamwork.
- Power received a complete overhaul. The original Hate scraps one pod at the start of its own turn, forcing everyone else to either scrap one pod of the same type or let Hate snipe three of their ships. It’s an invader-only power that’s meant to be one big event as opposed to many smaller ones. However, I find the big event to be underwhelming. It’s difficult to control since Hate has no means to determine what other aliens are holding, hard to defend against since it requires drafting specific pods that Hate drafts, and it generally only serves to prolong the game by sniping bases. I modified it to something much more experimental, a power designed to dissuade and prevent sponsors in general.
- Changed the wild flare to reflect the power. The original ravages a pod from the opponent’s cache, resulting in a potential auto-win. My version lets the user draft three pods if they have no supporters, allowing them to turn a disadvantage into an advantage.
- Changed the super flare to reflect the power as well, allowing Hate to manipulate the ship count slightly and make supporters commit more to get around Hate’s animosity.
- Hate’s legacy requires aliens to destroy one of their committed ships for each alien they want to invite, making it much more difficult to invite sponsors. In most circumstances, aliens can only invite 3 sponsors at most.
Tips
- As Hate, avoid sponsoring aliens if you need some pods. When both sides invite sponsors, you can guarantee some animosity will be generated unless they negotiate.
- The surest way to defeat Hate is to negotiate, as Hate cannot do anything if a successful deal is made. No one loses, so no one is forced to gain any Hate marks.
- The more animosity Hate generates, the more powerful it becomes. If every alien loses the ability to commission every other alien, only Hate can obtain a shared victory.
- Commissioning Hate as a sponsor prevents it from using its power on your side. This aspect can be utilized to protect your ability to commission in the future.
Development Notes
- One of the aspects that makes this power so difficult to design is that it needs to thematically and mechanically oppose the still-to-release Love from the Dominion Galaxy. Love has an support/resource focus, so it makes sense that Hate would have an anti-support/destroy focus.
- For this power to work effectively without having to remember past information, it has to have special marks for each alien color, so that each alien knows which other alien they currently cannot commission. Hate can make another alien hate itself, but it has little reason to do so unless paired against an alien like Grudge.
- I wanted Hate’s power to be “indiscriminate”. One thing I like about the original power is how it targets everyone equally as opposed to playing favorites. Refusing to play nice with others makes a great bit of theming for Hate’s power to work around.
- At its core, the rule I want Hate to break is “gains power from leaders acting without sponsors.” Hate directly opposes Love, the alien that wants to see everyone participate in the encounter. Hate is at its strongest when everyone hates each other and no one invites anyone. It just needs to create an incentive to cause such a thing to happen, as otherwise aliens will counter this simply by inviting sponsors.
- Considered an incentive where Hate plays pods from its cache for each supporter that joins the encounter, as long as Hate is not participating as an actor. If Hate’s “rage” is bigger than either fleet, Hate gets a base and both sides lose. This power is effectively the same as the rework to Demon, which explores the idea in a more interesting manner.
- Hate can make Love hate someone, and Love can make Hate love someone.
- There’s an interesting thematic bonus in regards to this alien that you can stop Hate from turning you against your friends by inviting Hate to your side. I think it’s evocative of the Jungian idea that you have to embrace your darker side to gain true control over yourself. Those who fight against Hate by rejecting it entirely have a much tougher time dealing with it, since a belief system that simply opposes hatred will invariably become one of hatred, as they are opposing what they perceive as evil, which is the primary function of hatred.
- I specifically specified that Hate’s power requires suffering casualties since Love’s group hug counters it. It also means that Observer counters Hate, since Observer makes its leader’s ships impervious. Pacifist and Squee can also work against Hate, since they win peacefully, as well as powers like Diplomat and Empath, which force negotiation. Thematically, these are fitting aliens to counter Hate, aliens which are more patient and contemplative.