Star token to generate points

[Tantali]

Yes this suggestion will be controversial, but hear me out.

The game has always been quite exponential, and taking a starred region, recruiting there, rinse repeat, has always been the straightforward engine. Everyone needs to go for this strategy, and the one who lags behind at the start is most likely doomed to lose.

My suggestion is to give players a trade off choice between recruiting and points, and not simply giving them both. While simultaneously not making the game too slow.

Introduce a new command token which allows you to start letting your star region producing points (by putting some marker akin to a coin on the region). You only need to play this token once in order for that region to remain gathering points till the end of the game. This makes it so players going for the full recruit can be counteracted by players going for the early point generation, and vice versa.

This is still a draft suggestion, which can be fine tuned with rules like if you take over a region which produces points, you instantly gain an additional point, etc.

[317070]

Well, I kind of disagree with it being straight forward.

It is indeed a recruit/move. But it is hard to estimate how many recruits before you make a move. Especially since funds also plays a role, and the earlier you get other stars/regions the better.

So, I am not convinced we need something there. I still need to decide between the move and the recruit on a case-by-case basis. And even then it is not straightforward, because it usually contains a rock-paper-scissors with one or more opponents.

So I think you add a little complexity, but I don't see which is the problem you are solving?

[Tantali]

I think it adds more variety in strategies and reduces the problem of the most likely winner already being determined in the first few turns. Once you manage to get ahead by taking a starred city, that city is feeding you points and troops and only increases your lead. You could say you don't perceive this in our games, but I'm pretty sure that new or less experienced players will have this problem a lot more. Everything in this game is exponential, which results in perceiving that a player being ahead is impossible to counter or catch up to. Making the whole duration of the game a negative experience for the losing side.

I'm pretty sure that during all of our test plays, every time that I've lost, I felt I was losing the entire game. Every time that I've won, I felt I was winning the entire game. Maybe one or two games were the exception. This should be the other way around for having a fun game experience.

So I'm trying to find ways to change this, and make the beginning of the game less important in the end-game, or at the very least making it appear to be less of an end-game deciding factor.

I'll flesh out the star token idea a bit more so you can get a feel for it. Every strategic region starts with no star on it. At most one star can be on it (maybe multiple?). Using a star token puts a star on the strategic region. Only star tokens generate points during the point phase. Strategic regions by themselves don't generate points. Maybe simply playing the star token also gives you a single point, but at the end of the turn so it can be stolen. Maybe this one-time point is only gained on non-strategic, or maybe any land region. Maybe at the cost of that regions income, ... When taking over a region with a star, similarly to coins you can keep or burn the star (maybe still gaining a point for it).

Practical examples of star token:

• first turn play star token on starred region instead of recruit, playing a recruit on another region
• when taking over a new strategic region, you'll need to choose to play the star token, given other players the chance to get a lead in recruit and attack you. Or choose to play the recruit, but give up your point income till a next turn.
• players getting a head start and taking new strategic regions need to go through the effort to play the star token. Players lagging behind a bit can later on take over such a strategic region and start generating points without wasting a turn playing the star token.

The rules for this star token are quite flexible, and above explanation was only a suggestion. If you can think of rules to improve the idea, please do so.

[nymanjens]

@Tantali I agree with your problem statement. However, I think messing with the points is unlikely to change much. If I think back to the "problematic" games you described (winning team increases lead steadily until victory), the winning team almost always has military dominance. The dominant team will be the first to have too many starred regions for its recruit tokens and the first to be able to steal away point-generating regions. --> Not much would change IMO

Alternative suggestion (not thought trough): Redistribute the max-coin-count on the board: Less coins on strategic regions, more on the others. It doesn't change the exponential character of the curve but I think it may slow down growth (although I actually like fast growth, hmm...)

[Tantali]

Still willing to work out this idea a bit more, but I'll wait till we've seen some other changes that might fix this problem in another way.

[nymanjens]

Closing this as there is:

1. too much text
2. 317070 and I am not convinced

@Tantali: Please open a new bug if/when you think we should reconsider this.