14 lines
5.3 KiB
Plaintext
14 lines
5.3 KiB
Plaintext
Eclipse: raising the bar for the 4X game
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<p>I’m a big fan of the game genre called “4X” – “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.”. I’ve been playing these ever since the ur-progenitor of the genre in the 1980s, <cite>Empire</cite>, and I actually still maintain an open-source C version of that game. <cite>Civilization</cite> is my favorite computer game ever, and by what I hear of it <cite>Master of Orion</cite> – the game “4X” was coined to describe – would have hooked me even harder if I’d known of it when it came out. </p>
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<p>I particularly like SF-themed 4X games. I have previously posted a <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3297">favorable review</a> of <cite>Twilight Imperium</cite> (hereafter “TI”), a big sprawling epic of a contending-galactic-empires 4X game. But now I write to report on a game that effectively makes TI obsolete – a new design called <cite>Eclipse</cite> which I think is going to permanently raise the quality bar in 4X games.</p>
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<p><span id="more-4141"></span></p>
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<p>When you unpack the components for <cite>Eclipse</cite>, you’re going to immediately get the impression that it’s <cite>Twilight Imperium</cite> lite. Hexagonal starsystem tiles for variable board layout – check. Plastic ship models in different sizes – check. Playing mats, describing human and alien species one per – check. This impression is not exactly wrong, but the differences turn out to be more important than the similarities.</p>
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<p>One difference is that the game doesn’t start with all the board tiles down. Instead, player homeworlds are arranged in a broken ring with unexplored space between and around them. Unlike TI, which has exploration only as a bolted-on afterthought with the Distant Suns option, exploration is central to this game and one of the ways to win is to explore more aggressively and successfully than your neighbors.</p>
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<p>Another difference is that instead of a huge pile of available ships you have only a relatively small handful. Interestingly, this actually encourages combat, because losing your fleet-in-being isn’t a catastrophe that will take you half the rest of the game to recover from.</p>
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<p>But the most important difference is not local to one aspect of the game, it’s a global fact about the style of the entire game. <cite>Eclipse</cite> is as tightly constructed and carefully interconnected as a Swiss watch. By contrast, TI is a huge sprawling pile of game mechanics that make terrific thematic sense but don’t integrate all that well and in some cases are only half-realized (hello, politics subgame, I’m looking at you!).</p>
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<p>Here’s an example of what I mean by tight construction. Your player mat has a track with disc-shaped pieces on it. You have to expend one of these temporarily (getting it back at the end of the round) to take a game action such as moving ships performing research, etc. You have to expend one of these <em>permanently</em> to control a solar system. This matters because the track beneath the pieces has numbers on it representing the upkeep cost for your empire; as you take actions and seize systems, it rises. If at the end of a round you can’t cover that upkeep from your money reserve, you have to give up solar systems (taking back disks to cover numbers) until you can.</p>
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<p>That one mechanic (somewhat reminiscent of the resource market in <cite>Power Grid</cite>) creates a delicate multi-way tradeoff between seizing territory, taking actions, and building a money reserve that you can use to finance a late-game surge. Because it does so with very little state, you can reason about your option tree more quickly and effectively than in a game with heavier mechanics. This nets out as faster turns and shorter overall playing time; where a 6-player game of TI can easily take 8 or 9 hours, I’ve seen a 5-player game with mostly newbies take about 5 hours and a following 6-player game take about 4:30. After another play or two I expect my group will get down to the designer’s estimate of a half hour per player.</p>
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<p>Most of the the people in both games had previous experience playing TI with each other, and after the first game the consensus was already becoming clear; this game pretty much <em>obsoletes</em> TI. You give up some thematic chrome; the real draw in TI’s sprawling elaborateness is the way it ticket-punches every trope from battlestars to the Galactic Council in a loving tribute to all those classic space operas you read as a kid.</p>
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<p>What you get in return is a <em>much better game</em> – tighter, faster-playing, less vulnerable to runaway-leader effects, packing just as much tactical and strategic depth and multiple paths to victory but with much lower total complexity overhead. <cite>Eclipse</cite> is <em>elegant</em> in the way a mathematical theorem can be elegant – minimal premises worked to a powerful and satisfying conclusion.</p>
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<p>I learned this morning that Eclipse, though only released in 2011, has shot up through BoardgameGeek’s game rankings to make #7 in the top ten. I’m not even a little surprised, and expect that game designers will be studying it as an innovative example for years to come.</p>
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