If you aren’t careful, you can blunder into a Pyrrhic victory – i.e. You might think you can fight a two-front war, but the rules make it difficult for one player to get stronger than two players combined. You can’t get too cocky in this game because you can quickly switch from “being a top player who’s winning a war” to “being the beleaguered has-been who’s losing a war” if a second or third player decides to attack you. It also illustrates the fact that two weak players are stronger than one strong one. The problem of overreach is a direct result of the game rules about ship production – it’s difficult to produce a lot of ships, and difficult to replenish them after they are destroyed in combat. In terms of stars under his control, he was the top player for a while, but the wars depleted his ship-count. I saw one strong player get involved in a two-front war. One interesting pitfall I saw in my game is “Overreach”. Add in the fact that communication between players is secret, and it creates a lot potential for treachery. For example, two weak players who are allies are actually more powerful than a strong player. This means you need to work with other players. If the first player moves in and attacks, he’ll be able to take-over the second player’s territory, but then he’ll have twice as much territory to control and he’ll be down to 50 ships (which would make him the weakest player in the game with a large valuable territory – making him vulnerable to attack from other players). For example, in the game I’m currently in (about five day into the game), the strongest player has 150 ships and the weakest player has 100. The outcome of these rules are that players have a hard time getting a large ship advantage over other players. If you have no immediate enemies, you can expand a little better and go a little heavier on economy (to build up more money to buy other stuff later). It became apparent that the best strategy was a mixture of improving your economy, industry, and science. (There are two modifiers to this: defending players have a combat advantage, technology can improve your combat ability.) For example, if you have 100 ships attacking 10 ships, both sides will lose 10 ships in combat. In other words, you don’t get an advantage by having an overwhelming number of ships. * In combat, the power of your fleet increases geometrically with the number of ships. In short: there isn’t any complicated technology tree. You start out at “level 1” for each technology. There are four types of technology in the game: range (how far your ships move without landing in a star system), speed (how fast your ships move), weapons (the attack power of your ships), and scanners (how far your star systems can detect enemy ships). * For each point of science, your empire produces 6 research points per day. You can think of them as “armies” in the game of Risk.) Also, there aren’t different kinds of ships in the game. If you want ships, you have to build your industry. (You don’t produce ships directly with money. * For each point of industry, your star produces 2 ships per day. * For each point of economy, your empire earns $10 per day. * Each star has an economy, industry, and science level (which can range from 0 to infinity). * You begin the game with 60 ships and four stars (your home star being the most important). I should explain the rules in order to illustrate what I mean. They’ve setup the game so that it’s really hard to get a large advantage over other players in the game. You start out in a universe with seven other players and try to take over the universe. If I had to give a one sentence description of the game, it would be “The game of Risk in space.” I’ve heard about it before, and it’s generally gotten good reviews. I playing a game called “Neptune’s Pride” recently.
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