Feedback on Interplanetary Spaceships

Hello all! Thank you for playtesting this expansion I designed. I have based it off of the Shipping Expansion that I have designed for Terra Mystica that has been playtested many times and will enter a mass playtest phase sometime in 2019 for physical publishing in 2020. In that expansion you have to build a Shipyard that produces ships, but here I have moved it to two additional tech tracks and a free starting tech tile.

Since this is an alpha version much tweaking to the values will be done. Please test all types of strategies to find BROKEN STUFF. This means that some of you are going to race on the Spaceships and some of you are going to do the bare minimum with Spaceships. PLEASE try to work together at the beginning of the game. Use the chat to discuss what looks like good or bad things and have a few people trying to do the best new strategy and someone else do the best old strategy.

Initial Concerns to Test

1. Is it too strong to have spaceships at the start of the game for all factions? Do we need to make L1 of Trade Volume instead of L0 the point at which you start gaining spaceship income?

2. With the addition of 2 tech tracks and 3 tech tiles more Knowledge and Tech Tile earning potential has to be included to scale it up. Is the amount of K and TT too much or too little? Does the extra standard tech tiles on the Trade Bonus track make you feel like you have to rush up it?

3. Is the Knowledge track now too weak? Does it need to be scaled up to +3K for L2, +4K for L3, and +5K for L4 to match the earning potential from the Trade Bonus track?

4. Is the Income Track now too weak?

5. Is the Trade Bonus track too strong?

6. Is the Trade Volume track too strong?

7. Has too much Navigation potential for placing mines and gaiaformers been included?

8. Feedback on the Booster tiles?

9. Feedback on the new Standard Tech tiles?

10. Feedback on the new Advanced Tech tiles?

11. Feedback on the Highest Culture Final Scoring?

12. Feedback on the new Power and QIC actions?

13. Do you feel that you have to race up the Trade Volume and Trade Bonus tracks first thing? Are you left behind if you don't?

14. Other Feedback?

Just read over the rules, and I think they are missing information about what the Advanced Spaceship does. I'm curious to try this out.

@watno The Advanced Spaceship is just a 4th spaceship with a Green/Grey Federation.

I feel like the "1k for each planet with a trade token" is a good counterweight against opponents that abuse trade.

I would remove either the 1o or 1q from L4 of the trade bonus track as 1q is always better than 1o (and it'd leave space to add an icon for the tech tile gain).

@coyotte508 said in Feedback on Interplanetary Spaceships:

I feel like the "1k for each planet with a trade token" is a good counterweight against opponents that abuse trade.

I would remove either the 1o or 1q from L4 of the trade bonus track as 1q is always better than 1o (and it'd leave space to add an icon for the tech tile gain).

This is true and the better solution is removing the QIC. I know that with more standard tech tiles to choose from they are diluted. It's possible that this is OK or that we'd still need to add more ways to get them into the game. This is why I have added 1 one tech tile bonuses. I am leaning towards having two bonus standard tech tiles randomized each game for 8 different tracks and just on L3.

Then one game could have a L3 bonus standard tech tile on Terraforming and Trade Volume while another game would have a L3 bonus tech tile on Knowledge and Gaiaforming.

My friends and I are new to the site, so I only have a couple games under my belt.

Having said that, after only a few games it sure seems like the K track is now too weak. Knowledge is so much easier to come by, it just doesn't ever seem worth it to prioritize that track. You could scale the rewards up, as you suggest, or you could give K bonuses at certain steps.

The additional power actions seem like a pretty big buff to Taklons. That might be OK though, as I don't think anybody was worried about their balance before. At any rate I dropped a 268 in a 2-player game which was about 65 points higher than my previous 2-player best with Taklons. Not sure how much you think the expansion inflates scores, but that seemed like a lot to me, especially for a first try with the expansion.

Anyways thanks so much for including us. Will continue to provide feedback as we play more.

@Semioteric Thank you for your feedback. There's an upgrade of the spaceships expansion coming up, with a lot of changes, including a better knowledge track.

We have currently played/playing 3 spaceship games and the overall first impression is positive. Here are my 2cents:

• Overall trade feels like a nice addition
• Trading offers nice turn sequencing choices surrounding the power wheel of your opponents
• The choice between gaining a token or charging, when someones trades with you, is interesting.
• It's not that the knowledge track is too weak (it's on par with the other original tracks), but it's trade that feels too powerful. Getting 2K per trade feels like too much as a base rate.
• The ship track is really strong, I don't think it needs an additional bonus at step 4 (the extra step on either int or nav tracks)
• The fact that the federation token of the advanced ship can be flipped is very powerful. The only other track that does this is the terra track. But the ship track generates (science) income making it a good early track to go up. The combination of the ship track being a good early and having a flippable federation token at the top feels too powerful.
• Really like the fact you can only place ships on mines, it has a nice interaction with upgrading buildings.
• Getting tech tiles from the trade track steps does not feel right to me personally, especially for advanced tech tiles. For most factions it takes planning (upgrading in correct rounds) or high resources (4Q) to get (advanced) tech tiles. Getting tech tiles so 'cheap' did not feel like an improvement to the game.
• In our first game we had an interesting misinterpretation of the rules: some of us thought that each planet could only hold 1 trade token (instead of 1 trade token per color). This brought forward super interesting placement and sequencing decisions. Not sure if this would work for the game, but during rounds 1 and 2 it was really fun for us until we found out we had been playing it wrong.
• Top of trade track is super powerful, as the track supports itself (tech tiles providing additional steps) it takes very little investment to get there. If the tiles align it provides ~similar resources as the eco track.
• Havn't played with all the boosters and advanced tiles to know enough about them yet. So far they all look super interesting though. I really like that they appear to mostly fall into the "situationally powerful" category.
• The '2vp per trade' tech tile felt incredibly strong in comparison to other basic vp earning tiles. Compared to the '3vp per gaia' it appears much stronger at less of an investment/risk.
• You can go up to top ship and top trade track by the end of round 2 (with a single federation). It feels really powerful to gain 8k and 4q per turn for 4 rounds. And while doing so you also gain an additional 2 tech tiles and an extra step on int or nav. This is a "going tall" strategy and typically this can be blocked by "going wide" strategies taking all the good planets. However the ships (and bonus q's) give you reach to further sectors.
• The trade final scoring is simply won by whoever gets to the top ship track first. It's a bit weird that the race for first place from that point is over (in our games that would be in round 2 or 3).
• I liked the idea of the culture final scoring, but that will be very hard to track outside of a digital platform.

My apologies if this comes across as negative, it's not meant to be. I really enjoy the spaceship expansion and the games so far have been fun. I feel that most of balance issues come from the fact that a basic unupgraded trade action provides 2k. This makes everyone race up ships, and everything that's related to the ships escalates because of it.

@cneessen Thanks for the feedback.

There is a major update on the spaceships scheduled (James provided the changes) but with everything I don't know when the site's going to be updated with it.

@cneessen agree, thanks for the nice write-up

@coyotte508 can't seem to find it but is there a changelist available on the forum?

@Sjepetok Here: https://github.com/donkeytech/gaia-engine/issues/206

thank you for the replies and sharing the planned changes to spaceships @coyotte508

We also encountered an issue where one player (with advanced spaceships) was able to trade 21 times. From what I understand from the rules, you only have 15 normal + 5 wild trade tokens.