by PBeakley
So I wrote my little ROTA review after my first play with the rules. We left a couple things out that time, notably alliances (overlooked the "max 2 per alliance" rule) and the Magellans, who seemed kind of meh compared to the rest of the new races.We got to play another Eclipse game this week, this time with alliances and not one but two Magellan players. We also started experimenting with more careful exploration, tossing tiles that we didn't feel supported our long game.
The game started out pretty sedate. I was one of the two Magellans, so I felt like lots of exploration would be good so we could leverage their nice Discovery trick. Drew a lot of dud tiles early on, didn't really build the map out much or find good discovery tiles. Clockwise from me was the Hegemony, playing surprisingly sedate given some nice aggro tricks baked into the race. Let's see...third was Mechanema, played by the guy who acknowledges he's the worst player at cooking up good ship plans. Then the other Magellan player, then the Exiles.
The early/midgame for my Magellans was stellar: they're my new favorite race! Being able to flip colony ships for resources is nice all game long, and especially midgame when you've pretty much scoped out the whole galaxy. I allied with the Hegemony, hoping to leverage their nice aggro fleet, but that guy ended up with his fleet waaaaay out in the third ring and equipped with crappy factory engines.
The other Magellans hooked up with Mechanema, which was interesting because of the criss-crossing diplomats. Hegemony and Mechanema had each other's diplomats so they couldn't/wouldn't mess with each other despite our alliances, so that left me carrying all the military baggage of being able to fight both halves of the other alliance without fear of the Traitor card.
Meanwhile, the Exiles are quietly off doing their own thing, building out their orbitals and quickly escalating to second place. They had diplomats placed with both Magellans, so no real interest or ability to get militarily adventurous in either direction. Really a pretty sweet spot for the guy locked out of alliances.
One of the new things we saw this game was a deep unwillingless to take the Traitor card. I think it clicked over a game or two ago that that 3-point swing can lose a game for you, so nobody really wanted in on that. I welcome this development, since I feel like many of my Eclipse players still think about the game in the Twilight Imperium mold: make deals and break them at will since they have no real teeth. This doesn't sit well with me so I much prefer Eclipse's solution: breaking a deal is gonna hurt, so make sure it's worth it.
The Mechanema/Magellan alliance ended up winning handily. I overextended, like I usually do, and the other Magellans withdrew their empire and backfilled with Orbitals. My ally and I tried to raid a few exposed systems at their edge but failed at every turn due to inferior ship plans and a little bad luck with the dice. Exiles, appropriately out there on their own, came in a pretty close second.
I really liked how the Alliances added a whole new level of texture and complexity to the game, especially as they interact with diplomats embedded with opposed Alliances. Really, really like the Magellans as well.
We saw a lot of rare techs show up, and those had a very potent impact on the game. Cheapie rares like Tractor Beams helped the Magellans reach their free Discovery token early. Cloaking devices suddenly made our defensive pickets very porous. But once again, the Warp Generator did not make an appearance! It was on the table, two systems showed up with warp symbols, but nobody wanted to take that next step.
We had a couple Hives show up as well, but these are now my all-time favorite systems to draw. They're veep farms! Why go looking for a fight when a fight might come to you? It's not like they're ever actually scary enough to really cause you trouble.