Ok, let me try to write some sort of post-Mortem, don’t have much time, so it will be sloppy:
Overall, I think we were all way too nice in this game. The only way to overcome a player getting ahead seems to be playing dirty, but I think the complexity of the game along with our more-or-less gentlemanly attitude made the game be much more two sided than it should have been. Also, once a player really gets going, the options to interfere diminish greatly, so all this interaction/backstabbing has to happen from the get go to keep things tidy.
Luck also helps a lot. That early M factory was incredible.
So, whay I did and why:
For at least half of the game I was basically trying to figure out things on the fly. I think the fact that most of us (except Grunden, maybe) were noobs made the early auctions really weird. In a way, I think so many idea turns can be a very bad idea, since it can make it too easy to grab an early colonist or an early GW thruster. It was good we ended early, I think.
Then, I can’t remember whether I got the M GW thruster or the M factory earlier, but definitely it seems players have to try as hard as possible to avoid somebody else get a powerful thruster early on. Grabbing those claims in mars and denying Grunden the elevator was probably the first move that really put me ahead.
And speaking of the Space elevator, that’s probably the best venture available. No extra WT, but the ability to boost and decommission in such a convenient spot saves whole turns.
Anyway, once I got my big thruster, I was for the longest time dumbfounded as to how to proceed. Getting glory seemed like a good idea, but in retrospect, while I probably denied some VP to other players, it wasn’t that big of a deal and I lost too many turns. It seems to me, after getting a GW thruster the next step has to be promoting that thruster to stop needing to refuel. But I didn’t realize it and I spend many, many turns colonizing the inner solar system without realizing the mobile factory benefits. Namely, once you have a mobile factory you can industrialize by crazy (i you have a GW thruster probably it’s about one factory each two turns) and factories weight very, very little, so moving them in your thruster once built is way more efficient than building them on site.
Also, I was trying to get to be the emancipator, since the emancipator is very OP in the current rules (basically, it holds the keys to many easy to get futures). I think our lack of political fighting and election calling was also because of our inexperience. My feeling is that you should never allow one player to remain in power for long, specially when purple cards start to appear and emancipation becomes feasible. But Grunden read me perfectly and took the emancipation.
So it was around when I started trying to play for maybe winning, and I realized what could do this with my mobile factories that I made two huge mistakes reading the rules. First, I didn’t realize that by winning an election I could have claimed an early future (I think I could have won an election just by playing my cards well, by pretending it didn’t really matter). Also, I read the original rules regarding Future stars (when you place cubes on the stars) and not the rules we were using (when you placed claim disks). Basically, a cube on a future star is worth 14VP tops, while a cube on a TNO factory is worth 11VP at least. Thus, with this wrong reading of the rules, I though futures were useless and that I’d rather colonize TNO. So I set my long term strategy into migration. Since it was unlikely the 4 futures would be claimed in the 16 or so turns I foresaw this strategy panning out, at least without me claiming any future.
So, those two mistakes, plus me being some turns behind due to the stupid glory hoarding, along with Grunden’s focused playstyle basically meant Grunden had all the options to take the game (I figured this by the time I left the Pluto system after industrializing).
The change on plans was to try to take futures fast, to get those VP and avoiding Grunden to come near TNO (since I had the D thruster in my hand, it would be a slow strategy for him to follow). Grunden didn’t seem to be reacting to me or trying to compete for TNO labs, and as I kept industrializing my VP projections gave me the victory, specially so once I claimed that second future star.
However, before I could claim that future, there was an election cycle we would go through (an election cycle where I had to put the politics in anarchy to claim my future star) and Grunden could use that anarchy to build a factory and decommission his colony, thus ending the deadlock and catching me on VPs even without getting into TNO (those 5VPs for being in power at the end are huge). Luckily for me, he didn’t take the opportunity, and I knew I would claim the last future before the next election cycle, so once we were out of the blue sector I was pretty sure the game was over.
After that, I think I made only one mistake: claiming that second Venture that gave me just 3VP + 1VP for a mobile factory without attached claim, versus the 12VP that factory would have been worth had I preserved the claim. I think it was a reasonable bet (it was a 5/6 probability of Shimizu getting that future star. Overall, I lost 6VP versus not having claimed that venture and keeping the factory. But even with the mistake, by my projections I was ok as long as Grunden didn’t get too many science factories (the D future before my freighter future was not possible, I think). And Grunden couldn’t because he had a colony.
Basically, my take on the game is that’s it’s a game about denying other players the option to advance as much as a game of advancing yourself. Auctions are as important, if not more, than playing the board, and denying somebody a card (like I denied UN the D-Thruster) can be a game winning move. Of course, having the foresight to be able to look at what other players might want to do and figuring out an strategy for yourself is pretty crazy given the possibility space we have here.
I also think the game not having enough countermeasures for a runaway leader other than being faster than him hurts the second half of the game. I can understand why the game lost steam towards the end, with it being basically a competition between two player. While that can be frustrating in an in-person game, it can be more so in a game played at this rythm. Thankfully it seems the end-game has been heavily reworked on that third edition that will ship to my home sometime next year :P
Right now I’m crazy with work, but in a month or two, when we get final third edition rules, I would totally be up for another game.
