Exploration Game Test Sep 11 2024

[Jubal]

Did a test with trickthegiant playing as the Lexihad and myself playing the Verwynn.

The scenario was "extraction", requiring the players to pick up robot bodies from a central crashed ship. That in turn played hugely to the Lexihad's strengths. I just started with a knight and a polymath, and no crew, whereas the Lexihad's big prophet-explorer squad turned out to be a huge benefit. Even though I got there first, there was no way I could take on the Lexihad's superior numbers.

Possible fixes:

• Verwynn polymaths should maybe start with a guard.
• For one-shot games it might make sense for players to choose their crew after the planet and objectives are revealed: if I'd had more troops it would've evened the score a bit.
• For extraction scenarios, multiplying how many robot bodies can be carried by numbers of crew is really helpful to factions with a lot of regular crewmen. Might need to change it so only one can be carried per adventurer at a time, though I don't know how I'd explain that from a game logic POV.
• Verwynn knights are underpowered right now: hard to stop combat being a simple numbers game because more dice better, and their 2d6 is weaker than having a +d6 from an extra crewman.

Other than that it was a fun test, we explored an open but rugged landscape, there was a high-defense native sapient species living in high tech pods who were, whilst highly defensive homebodies, nonetheless very curious about the newcomers and tricks converted some of them. Two earthquakes triggered on the map, wrecking one of the pod-villages and in the second case killing two adventurers in the last turn of the game.