by arkayn
Creamsteak wrote:
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.
I played something similar to what you suggest with a few changes (mostly because I didn't have your post in front of me when I set it up, so I just went with what seemed right to me).
- 4 Ancient Homeworlds and my own home sector set up. I left the 6th position (directly across from me) blank. I suppose I could always set up another race's home sector in that position, though I didn't have any extra ancient cruisers the way I set it up, so I'd have to figure something out.
- Ancient Homeworlds start with 2 Ancient Cruisers each. Galactic Center starts with the GCDS and Ancient Dreadnaught. (If I had played with a 6th homeworld, I suppose I could set the closest homeworlds to 1 Cruiser and 1 or 2 Interceptors, the next two with 2 Cruisers, and the farthest with 2 Cruisers and 2 Interceptors or something like that.)
- Like you, I played with all of the ancients plus some random tiles for rings 1 and 2, with no ring 3 tiles.
- From the research numbers for 2p, I subtracted 2 from the start and 1 from the per-round number. I also drew two developments (both were VP-based, so I pretty much ignored them).
- Play to take all the ancients and the Galactic Center, then count up points (failing to take out the ancients = failure, various point totals = degree of victory). I managed to do so (though I didn't have a disk left to control the center, so I'm not sure it counted, though with the discovery, that extra 6 points would have been nice... probably should have skipped controlling the 4th homeworld, which I also defeated on turn 9) - I believe my final score was 52 points. I don't know if that's good or bad.
I chose to play the Orions, figuring it'd be nice to have a scaled-down difficulty for the first run-through. Though I didn't draw any weapon technologies until turn 8, so that was a little annoying (pinging through ancients with just Ion Cannons - luckily I got Improved Hulls and Positron Computers, or it would have been brutal). A shortage of money early was kind of tough, though. I've never played Orions before, so I'm assuming that's something they always have to deal with.