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Stellar Conquest
Oct. 9th, 2005 06:37 pmTalked housemate into playing Stellar Conquest last night. This is effectively the Avalon Hill board game version of Master of Orion; no idea if the two are actually connected. It did a good job of holding my attention for eight hours. Almost certainly wanted more than two players.
The game is divided into groups of four "action" turns and one "accounting" turn (my terms, not theirs). I think the big problem with the game is the sheer amount of accounting nitpicking you need to do: I spent about 80% of the accounting turns just trying to figure out the optimal way to move colonists around. Because, see, you can get some number of free colonists for shipping people off-world, and people are good. But you need to pay money for these extra ships, but not colonists, and there suddenly gets to be this horrible arithmetic nightmare. The other consequence of this is that even during the "action" turns you wind up with at least two little stacks of colonists per world, each going somewhere different, and you hope you remembered to send colonists everywhere so that one planet doesn't turn up sad.
I think the game must have been reasonably balanced, and my strategy was off. (Hint: don't buy tech you're not going to use. Hint: think about grabbing mineral-rich worlds early, since 80+ production per turn is worth more than the 4 people you don't get; 1 person == 1 production usually.) Death Stars, in particular, looked "too expensive" to me until they started eating through my fleets and planets.
This is probably worth another try...with four people...on a particularly detail-oriented day...with lots of scratch paper. Or maybe automation.
The game is divided into groups of four "action" turns and one "accounting" turn (my terms, not theirs). I think the big problem with the game is the sheer amount of accounting nitpicking you need to do: I spent about 80% of the accounting turns just trying to figure out the optimal way to move colonists around. Because, see, you can get some number of free colonists for shipping people off-world, and people are good. But you need to pay money for these extra ships, but not colonists, and there suddenly gets to be this horrible arithmetic nightmare. The other consequence of this is that even during the "action" turns you wind up with at least two little stacks of colonists per world, each going somewhere different, and you hope you remembered to send colonists everywhere so that one planet doesn't turn up sad.
I think the game must have been reasonably balanced, and my strategy was off. (Hint: don't buy tech you're not going to use. Hint: think about grabbing mineral-rich worlds early, since 80+ production per turn is worth more than the 4 people you don't get; 1 person == 1 production usually.) Death Stars, in particular, looked "too expensive" to me until they started eating through my fleets and planets.
This is probably worth another try...with four people...on a particularly detail-oriented day...with lots of scratch paper. Or maybe automation.
