本帖最后由 carshall 于 2012-1-10 15:37 编辑
A couple of these items are those that I mentioned above: the way that the tiles you explore seem to force you down specific paths and the way that missiles warp the game. Both of these are part of the overall problem I have with the game which is the ease in which a player can be eliminated from any chance of winning through decisions that are both not their own and are difficult for them to influence.
Being forcefully connected to a militarly dominant opponent during the early game, discovering a poor combination of tiles during exploration, or being the person that just happens to be the target of the player with the missiles before their empire is ripped apart by the other players and the galaxy descends into general chaos, or being hit by a string of bad luck during a single fight can all lead to a player to be knocked out of contention for the win. Now, none of these thing are garaunteed losses, but being subject to one could very well be sufficient to put a player into an unrecoverable position barring some extreme luck in the other direction or an amazing amount of negotiation skills. This is not to say the game does not reward skill, as in our local plays we have seen the same players winning again and again, it just makes the game fragile to a degree that exceeds my comfort level.
The battles themselves are not very interesting either, as they are essentially decided in one gigantic round of missile shots, rather than a constant tactical back-and-forth where players have to decide when it is appropriate to continue fighting and when they appropriate time is to flee, and where a wide variety of different technologies offer different possibilities and dangers. The presence of missiles destroys some of the technological ecosystem, not in a way that breaks the game or makes them auto-win, because in my experience they do not, but they do seem to warp the game in ways that no other technology does and in a way that I ultimately find to be unpleasent.
Eclipse could have been one of the best game.
But it is far too random. Why for hell should we draw a random map, take our technologies randomly and even drawing a random number of victory points after winning a combat...
The problem is that, when all the tiles are drawn, if you are unlucky, you can be blocked almost forever. It's in that kind of game when the losers play 5 minutes while some can play during 20 minutes... just boring.
