Skip the intro if you’re “just” interested in what this thing actually is 
And if all you’re really looking for is a tech tree, I suggest this one.
Intro
Tech by Unit
So I bought Twilight Imperium 3rd Edition last week nearly two weeks ago (gee…), and got to play some … well, solitaire test games with 1v1 players that pretended not to know each other’s hands. The game shines more with every added player I’m told, but one is a bit few either way.
With a little game coming up somewhat soon with a couple of friends (you know who you are), I was going through the available resources to help them get into the not that easy rules, and have already collected tons of links, some of which are more or less the essentials:
- A nice graphical Order of Play Overview, very nice for at-a-glance knowledge of “what comes next now?”
- A wonderful Tech Tree, with some more rules (that we won’t need for the first game) on the 2nd page
- A Rules Cheatsheet, although I found this less useful for actual in-game reference
Tech by Unit Player Aid
What I didn’t find however was a way to find out which units have what techs available. So I went ahead and created a little piece of reference paper of my own:
The Tech by Unit Player Aid, currently version 1.3
Also see the FFG discussion thread, and it’s available on BoardGameGeek, too. So what it includes is:
- A short description with strategic and tactical pointers for each unit, to help complete newbies understand the purpose of the units
- Coordinates for Nephilim’s Tech Tree (the same as above), as without the actual tree it’s not that easy finding out what tech you have to research for obtaining which unit-specific upgrades
- The number of prerequisite tech researches for the shortest path (starting from nothing) to each tech, to make it easier to see which ones are obtainable earlier and which later
I hope this helps some people, old and new players alike
Version History
- 08-08-25 v1.0 Initial Release
- 08-08-25 v1.1 Some typos fixed, unit descriptions expanded
- 08-08-27 v1.2 Further typos fixed, added some cost efficiency ratings, added one tech to GF
- 08-09-07 v1.3 Added limits per unit, and copyright notice
October 12th, 2008 @ 17:33
Grosses Lob von meiner Seite fuer deinen Blog
Hoffentlich folgen noch weitere interessante Beitraege, ich bin auf jedenfall gespannt
Viele Gruesse, Simonius
October 13th, 2008 @ 12:03
Danke danke
Freue mich immer über Rückmeldungen! Und das Blog hab ich auch vor, noch ein Weilchen zu behalten 
April 13th, 2009 @ 7:55
Have to say this will be of great use to our initial dive into a full 6 player version!
Much better than passing the rulebook around for 15 minutes
May 9th, 2009 @ 11:23
Very well written post however, I would recommend that you turn the No Follow off in your comment section.
Keep up the good work.
May 9th, 2009 @ 15:25
Thanks for the suggestion, but I’m fairly happy just checking for spam once a day.
I think it’s a good thing to give and receive link juice, for people who come here because they read my blog posts and not because they heard “hey, there’s a nofollow blog”. They’re quite easy to keep apart.
I edited your comment and removed the link instead of deleting it, you’re an exception to the rule
May 9th, 2009 @ 15:43
Thanks for your reply…why does my previous post say “spam guy” ???
May 10th, 2009 @ 10:12
You’ll have to admit that you commented not with the purpose of adding to the discussion, but with the purpose of having a link to your pagerank checker site.
As far as I’m concerned, that is spam, sorry. But I removed the “spam guy” thing now
Or did you actually look for info on Twilight Imperium when you came here? In that case, I apologize, but suggest you write even more on topic in the future…
January 14th, 2012 @ 8:58
Nice sheet, but you have antimass deflectors yellow when they should be blue.