This game needs a sabotage option.
Needs? Certainly not. Might be an interesting option in an expansion, but in general I find sabotage is a risky inclusion in games like this. It can quite quickly kill the fun for some people.
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It needs better balanced phases.
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Maybe. We already discussed a potential change to Production, which I have since tried out and that seems to work well. Overall, phases seem to be used pretty often and I haven't seen any major imbalances in them.
It needs HIGHLY nerfed trading between players.
How so?
It needs way more depth.
Not quite certain what you're referring to by depth, unless that's just a lead in to the next bit. Not arguing, just not sure what you mean specifically by depth.
It needs many more strategies (and ways to gain VP) other than science and building/production one (and maybe the prison one).
There are quite a few strategies as far as VP goes. You have VP chits from Science/Colonial Center. You have Buildings. You have Colonists as potential VP cost. This is sufficient, because it is how you MIX those ways to gain and lose VP that is important. Race for the Galaxy is no different, at the core. You gain VP through what you own and what you gain using production chains. Knowing which direction to go and when to try to end the game are key there as they are here. Race for the Galaxy has more randomness because of the cards, but that's a different issue.
It needs many more buildings, and scrap and major rebalance of many existing ones.
I agree it needs more buildings, and I have plans for them. But I need to balance out the core game before I can do that. Adding too much at once makes a mess that can't be balanced easily at all.
What advantage does terraformer have over two advanced factories, for example? It needs one less phase to build and requires two colonists, at the cost of taking up way more space and costing more resources.
Terraformer is a game ender. The fact that it takes up so much space is actually an Advantage, especially since you can surprise your opponents with it if they aren't paying attention.
Complexes need buff.
Possibly. Although they do have some advantages that aren't readily apparent, since they can be partially staffed if needed.
Warehouses are useless.
Completely disagree. While people haven't been making use of them here, I've seen them used extensively in the table top games. I even won my last game because I had a warehouse and could save up a bit for a large turn that ended up being decisive.
Market is even worse.
Also disagree here. Markets are cheap, provide VP AND a place for unskilled colonists, and can be used to provide a quick cash infusion during production if needed.
Trade needs to be completely overhauled.
It may need to be tweaked, but so far in my games it has done exactly what I want and expect it to do.
I see no way for contracts to ever be useful, TBH.
That may be a balance issue for 6 player games. In 3 and 4 player games they have been used
extensively due to resource shortages.
The 1-wealth gaps between all buy/sell values are stupid and force people to trade in 0.5 IOUs.
And yet that is only an issue with player trading, which you say you want nerfed. Something to be considered, but it hasn't been an issue at all in the table top version so far.
The gaps between tiers are bullshit. Rare Goods costs 2 more than Rare Raw, which costs 5? Nnnope.
Not sure what your issue is here.
Changing trading environment only when one of the player trades is stupid. This removes all planning for emergencies and allows everyone to just stock up on whatever is expensive at the moment and sell at the next trade phase.
The change is mostly a mechanical step for the table top game. It needs a trigger for when to change it, and it needs to not change too often because of the time it takes to physically change the trade set-up. It also benefits people who want to do a hoarding strategy with warehouses, rather than forcing everyone to be reactive with a low-warehouse strategy.
Players who fell behing need a way to catch up. Otherwise they'll just lose interest in playing.
A catch-up mechanic is one I've been looking at, although it's murkier to do because there is no really simple way to track how everyone is doing at a given time. Then again, Distant Colony is very much a player dependent game that has very little luck to it. Being able to carefully plan your builds and pick your phases based on your read of the other players is
supposed to be important, and skill is an integral part of this type of game.
Most of all, I really dislike the way you used phases. In RFTG (of which they are a quite obvious ripoff, what with being almost completely identical to theirs with an importation of colonization from Puerto Rico and deletion of Consume), they were used more or less equally. Here, survey is a dump stat, play bonuses are either throwaway or indispensable with nothing in between and so on. In short, IMO this game needs a major overhaul.
First off, while some of the names are similar they're actually pretty different because the underlying mechanics are different. RFTG has card drawing (income), two separate build phases (Developments and Planets), two 'consuption' phases (one for Cards, one for VP), and a separate Production phase. Distant Colony has Survey (income), Colonization (Colonist resources), Build (limited to buildings), Production (which does both Production and Consumption of goods as an overall chain), Trade (Of both Wealth and Resources In and Out), and Organization (Colonist allocation).
So while I freely admit the idea of Phases chosen by players with a bonus for playing your picked phase is taken from RFTG, the implementation of that in this game is quite different.
As for the phases themselves, they may need some tweaking, but overall I'm happy with how they get used. Like in RFTG, phases are played by people because that is what they need done. It is very common in both games for a phase played to be useless or suboptimal for anyone not needing that action that turn. As they are now (with the Tweak to Production's bonus), Build is the only one I'm not quite happy with. I may switch that to allowing all Buildings to be staffed when built and having Build allow an additional building that turn, but I need to ponder it some more.
All that said I appreciate the feedback I've gotten so far. This forum game has been very enlightening, since I've been able to track all the interactions much closer than I can in the tabletop game. This do, of course, play very differently over the course of several months than they do in a single play session lasting a few hours.
The game is still very much in development and I'm not afraid to tweak things as needed. However, I've played quite a few sessions of this game outside of this forum and I can assure you that there is much more depth here than you realize. It just takes a few games for you to really appreciate all the options.
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Topic: Distant Colony - Boardgame - Game over! (Read 39197 times)