I had another recent test of the game. I've been making some major changes to the core rules, which were helpful but more's still needed. I've changed the endgame points to discourage players from stockpiling money and troops at endgame, and added a cap of 16 to the number of followers you can have at the end of a turn.
The game had five players, and advanced fairly well. The eventual winner, Stefano, did still win via a stockpiling tactic, pooling hoplites and then throwing down a card that essentially converted each of them into 2vp. Cards that do that sort of conversion I think need a cap on their use, maybe converting a maximum of five followers at a time or similar.
The other tricky element - one I've been wrestling with through the design process - is death. I want a player character dying to be a major setback for them - currently they lose half of their money, followers, and prestige. This is proving to be too much however, especially at the end of the game where players often get frustrated at losing so many of their hard-won victory points and where death can knock a player back way out to the back of the pack. I need to make a softer death system, but I'm not yet sure how - I don't want it to be so soft that people have free rein to stab each other all over the place, and the killing player still needs to actually decently gain stuff from doing so, but the current system led to a couple of players getting quite visibly uptight at the table - both the person who got killed, and the person who was assassinating them who decided to have a frustrated rant about how assassination was her only good option...!
I think maybe I need to increase people's options as well - more abilities that allow the player to move around the city between the building and card phase would be a useful possibility to ensure players get more chances to use the cards they get dealt, as most cards require players to be in a specific part of the city.
