Sunday, August 14, 2011

EmDo Expansion - second thoughts

I've posted about my thoughts for the Exotic Expansion I'm working on for Eminent Domain. I really like parts of what I have so far, but I'm not 100% happy with it yet. In addition, the expansion does not address the 2 biggest things that players seem to really want to see addressed...

1. People want the different resource types to mean more.
2. People want the different fighter tokens to mean more.

So lately I've been thinking about holding off on the new "Exotic" planet type, and instead adding some of the things I've had in mind to address those 2 main questions people have been asking. The expansion will still feature additional Role cards to support 5 players, and additional technology cards as well.

Resource types

Currently, the resource type is based on the planet type, so there is no difference between Iron and Silicon except that Iron comes from Metallic planets and Silicon comes from Advanced planets. There's a little bit of subtlety to that - it means that inherently Iron is a little harder to come by, since fewer Metallic planets have resource slots than Advanced planets do. That distinction does not really matter in game terms though.

There exist 3 tech cards in the base game that refer to resource types:

Genetic Engineering: +1vp for each TYPE of resource you produce this turn
Diverse Markets: +1vp for each TYPE of resource you trade this turn
Specialization: Choose a resource type. +1vp for each resource of that type you trade this turn.

I have some plans for another future expansion to use Agendas, some of which would refer to particular resource types - such as an Agenda making Water worth 2vp apiece instead of 1.

Lately I've been thinking about more things I could do with resources. The obvious thing is to make cards that cost resources...

* Planets which require expenditure of resources to flip over
* Tech cards which require expenditure of resources to purchase (or to play)
* Cards/Actions that allow you to trade resources in for something other than Influence (VP)

Fighter tokens

Many people see the 3 sizes of fighter tokens and immediately want to assign denominations to them - which is fine. However when they see that the rulebook does not do that, they immediately ask why not. Well, there IS a reason for that. Ever since it was known that we would have 3 different fighter token shapes I thought it would be cool to one day make the medium ships "Destroyers" and the large ships "Dreadnaughts," each with their own meaning.

I'm currently thinking of adding some of these types of cards to the first expansion, in lieu of the Exotic planets with the new icons I was playing around with.

No comments: