Warrior
Alert
Combat
Type
Power of Mastery
Gains Experience from Combat
As a leader, during combat, use this power to add 1 might to your fleet for each point of “experience.”
As a leader, after combat, gain 2 marks as experience. If you lose the combat, gain 2 additional experience.
Legacy: During combat, each leader adds 4 might to their fleet for each of their planets without a home base.
Losing is a fact of life, and those who can learn from it will obtain tremendous strength. The Warriors are a race that know how to learn from defeat, as well as victory, and they will continue to learn until defeat wants nothing more to do with them.
Leader: Combat
Mandatory
Wild Flare
As the defender, during upkeep, you may discharge this flare to immediately start an invasion in the previous invader’s home system. Normal play order continues after this encounter.
Defender: Upkeep
Super Flare
As a sponsor, after combat, you may discharge this flare to use your power as if you were the leader.
Sponsor: Combat
Modifications
- Increased the rate of gaining experience from 1/2 to 2/4, adopting the same rate from CEO.
- Altered the power to be combat-only. Thematically, doesn’t make sense that negotiation gives Warrior combat prowess. The experience gain rate also helps to offset this limitation.
- Warrior’s legacy applies the “battle scars” of combat to a fleet’s might, making aliens more powerful the closer they are to defeat. With 1 base remaining, aliens gain +20 might each combat, which can be extremely useful when defending against aliens that still have 4 or 5 home bases. Combat powers become less effective, but they can help offset this advantage with their own. Original Cosmic has no legacies.
Tips
- Warrior favors long, drawn-out CEs. The more time passes, the more experience Warrior can gain.
- Warrior’s experience cannot be lost once gained, and its combat potency cannot be zapped, only the gaining of more.
- If Warrior gets disconnected, all experience gained will be lost, so Warrior needs to be careful about losing too much on defense.
- Negotiating is less valuable for Warrior, as Warrior doesn’t gain experience from it, regardless of how it goes. However, Warrior does gain experience from a massacre, a retreat, or a standoff, so playing Ns to gain compensation can be a valuable strategy for easy experience points. Warrior can also use its power to threaten a negotiation.
- Warrior only gains experience as a leader (unless Super), but its power lets it solo most encounters.
Development Notes
- The forcefulness of Warrior’s power is thrown off rather horrendously by the later-released Industrialist, another combat power which gains “experience” much faster, albeit only when losing. With vanilla Warrior gaining 2 experience from a loss, it takes two losses just for it to pass the Human test. Industrialist can double that from a single loss with an 08 pod. While the powers don’t need to be equally strong in order to coexist, I cannot allow one to be an effective subset of the other. Warrior has the design space of slowly gaining experience that effectively cannot be removed. It’s important that other aliens don’t exist to be “this but better.”
- When opposed by Anti-Matter or Loser, Warrior’s mandatory nature makes it naturally weak in the late-game. In such circumstances, Warrior prefers a short CE so it has less time to gain experience or even encounter those aliens.