Eclipse, Rise of the Ancients.

As I mentioned in the last blog post, Eclipse is amazing. Lots of replay. The expansion, Rise of the Ancients, came out last December...right as I was leaving for a wintery Iowa Christmas.

It felt like a tough proposition - Eclipse, a 4-hour game, during a week of family gathering...most games are short stints where people can jump out and jump in, depending if they need to wrap presents, go shopping, help cook, etc. It was played nearly every day, sometimes twice. Let's talk about the expansion!

Sometimes expansions to board games change the strategies of the base game so much, that there can be a huge disconnect. Or rules changes, that break up poorly thought-out play balance issues. Fortunately, RotA exists primarily to add more content. New races, more discovery tiles, more hexes, some variants, and the ability to play up to 9. Maybe a little bit of anti-missile mechanics, but minor.

The expansion adds 3 unique aliens, as well as the "humans" of the expansion...basically the other side of each alien card. I'll try to limit myself to just the facts...followed by some tips.

Alien Overview
The Enlightened of Lyra (aka, the Shriners) - they get points for building and holding shrines at the end of the game. There are mini-rewards for building clusters of shrines, but one of the coolest parts is being able to spend unused colony ships to re-roll combat dice.

The Exiles (Orbitals of Death) - skip star bases...your orbitals are your starbases. Sadly, no combat speed and only 3 upgrade spaces mean that they won't be half as cool. To make up for this, you start with a rare cloaking technology - they have to block your ship with 2 of theirs...which means pinning you is a lot harder.

The Rho Indi Syndicate are chancers. They have faster combat speeds like the Orion Hegemony, and they have a built-in -1 shield which doesn't take up space. They lose out with Dreadnoughts - can't build them. They start with star bases and Gauss Shield, but it's unlikely they'll waste another precious ship space on their small ships for Gauss. They raid and pillage the best though - 4 ship activations every time, instead of the 2 for the other aliens (or 3 for humans).

The Magellans are the generic race of the expansion - maybe the best alien race to play. Their ships and actions are stock (except for Influence, which is slightly worse). You can turn unused colony ships into any resource; ship part (and spent) discovery tiles are worth 1 VP for you, instead of nothing; you get a free discovery tile the first time you get 4 discoveries in the same row; and you start with the 6-Energy Fusion Source. Amazing.

Tips & Strategy
The Shriners and the Exiles are tough to love. Both encourage defensive turtling strategies, which is extremely tough to pull off. Offense has its advantages in Eclipse - being able to decide where and when something is going to happen is huge. Losing the shrines or orbitals means a loss of VP and/or production, making those systems especially valuable for those folks trying to thwart you.

The Rho NEED combat, hopefully every round. If they find it, it's a pleasant game in the top finishers. If they can't find combat, they are in last place. With all of that movement capability, it pays off to have a fleet that can move. If you can move 4 ships into every battle, with just one influence disc, it gives you incredibly flexible tactics. After awhile, with a hefty armada, you can bring in a swarm of ships into each major combat (minimizing your losses).

The Magellans have some benefits that really encourage a scout/bankrupt style for the Tier 3 hexes. Ideally, every Tier 3 hex you explore has a discovery tile on it. The return is pretty good...if you discard it, you'll get a VP in addition to the perk. How does this play out? Explore 4-5 times in the first several rounds, with the expectation of not keeping any of them beyond your home planet at the end of the round due to planned bankruptcy. You get to use your colony ships for materials or science. Seriously, this is an easy thing to do. You sacrifice one, maybe two turns of the 9 that you get to explore Tier 3. Everyone else is losing discs to settling hexes, making modest inroads on a developed economy.

Other races can do the same Tier 3 sweep, but Magellans pay off a bit better with their resource-generating colony ships and VP for discarded discoveries. To counter the sweep, explore around those players, and limit their turns 3-5 expansions to their bad Tier 3 areas. Their economy is going to be dicey, depending on what discovery tiles they get. Because they aren't settling, they will have more discs handy...difficult to attack, but more likely to not get first pick of technologies. You can also try to counter their sweep of Tier 3's, by doing the same thing. Tough to pull off as well, but if they aren't hitting Tier 3 hexes with discovery tiles...it is probably richer for you.

I probably have at least a couple more discussions about the game. Maybe next time, I'll even cover design. ;)