by Creamsteak
I'm experimenting with a much simpler practice setup. It's more of just a "drill" to try to increase my speed of play and try some races I havn't played much out.Player starts at galactic north (tier 2).
The nearest two homeworlds get ancient homeworld tiles and a cruiser.
The GCDS and two ancient interceptors go in the galactic center.
The next two homeworlds get ancient cruisers with two interceptors a piece.
The final homeworld gets an ancient dreadnought with two remaining ancient cruisers.
I stack the deck with all the tiles with at least one alien in tier 1 and 2. I add just enough random other tiles so that I can't "run out" of tier 1 or 2 tiles, and shuffle.
There are no tier 3 tiles.
I play through the games nine rounds as normal, halving the research tiles for a two-player game.
The goal would be to take all the ancients and the GCDS out, but I've not yet been successful. Right now I'm happy to get the four ancient homeworlds down. It would probably be much easier if I played an aggressive race, but I need more practice as some of the others right now. It would probably be much more solvable if I included all the tech, but as it stands its very easy to get into a very difficult/losing position while racing to get everything. It was fun the first time around at least, since the play is fairly fast and I was trying to build and maintain two fleets on opposite sides of the galaxy to hopefully "finish" on time.
Since I'm not trying for VPs, I also take the bonus side of any discovery tile, which adds up. If I manage to finish I might try for score the next time around.