Shadowhal

A few more reflections on victory conditions seen elsewhere. A victory points condition. Seen in many board games but there are also video game examples. Settlers 7 is one example. Humankind another. Northgard's fame conditions is also similar. Their beauty is their flexibility. You can achieve dominance in more than one category and can shift your focus depending on how the game goes. The downside is theme. It can feel really artificial for one player to win because they achieved eno

If you are interested in victory conditions, here is an article with some interesting reflections: https://explorminate.co/seals-victory-in-age-of-wonders-3-mechanical-wonder/ A few of my own reflections on victory conditions, though they may apply more to full-on 4X games: 1. I'd want them to kick in/be achieveable reasonably soon after it's clear who has won. Some way of forcing the re

One problem that I sometimes had in Sins 1 was to quickly determine my opponent's fleets' strengths and weaknesses. It would take me a few moment to interpret how many of each ship type they had and what that meant for what I should counter them with, or whether I had the right fleet to counter them at the moment. I thought that a more visual display of the information would make those decisions easier. I mocked up an example of what I meant below. This chart should clearly and quickl

Thanks for the reflections. I definitely see the planet snipe brodar2012 described as tempting strategy - and a very frustrating one for defenders. Might be mitigated by maluses to using far jumps in combination with garrisons. But I also see how it would be difficult to balance between making it useful (and not just outright dumb in every occasion) and not overpowe

I think the occupation victory was a good idea in Sins 1 but also that it could be more balanced if it wasn't just one victory planet but a handful, scattered around the centre of the map. The blue print I have in mind here is Age of Wonders III's seals victory which had a few elements to make it exciting: As mentioned, it was typically a few map markers of interest (seals) that would generate victory points rather than just one. This would give all/most players a stake rather

As an optional extension of the idea, one could link phase jump range to anti-matter. That should introduce a risk-reward dynamic in that the farther you jump, the more depleted your reserves (and therefore combat ability) would be. And you may not have the means to return home. Such a change would require additional changes to other game play systems (not all ships have anti-matter. How to tell ships to leave enough anti-matter to retreat from a battle? what about anti-matter draining weapon

A controversial (and maybe silly) idea: now that we have rotating planets, could it make sense to have the strategic choke points determined by proximity rather than the (slightly arbitrary) phase lanes? What I mean is that each ship has a jump range around 1.5 - 2x the standard difference between planets in Sins thus far. And that ship can jump to any planet within that range. But not farther than that and it also bypass a planet if it

I remembered that I might still have dormant Stardock account so re-posting here, and with a few t