by gszaszko
Greetings!My wife and I tried this 2p variant this weekend (she especially appreciates co-op style games) and, by-and-large, the game plays out quite nicely this way and we certainly felt pressure to clear the board of ancients by the end of turn 8 and into turn 9 (be sure to upgrade your drives!!).
The one thing I noticed is that playing this as co-op eliminates some key decisions and components that I think would make the game better if they were addressed:
Discovery/Reputation tiles:
There is no incentive to take the victory points on the backside of discovery tiles and you, essentially, remove reputation tiles earned from combat from the game. If there was an exchange rate of non-tech track/system victory points to resources, an extra action, colony ship, etc. it may create additional choices and complexity in the game. I think we would need to make the game more difficult through 1 of your two variants to offset the advantage to the players but it would bring back some flavor of the game.
Tech Tiles:
Because the tech tile draw is random, some technologies come up that are utterly useless in a co-op game (e.g. monolith, neutron bombs...) and it's endlessly frustrating to have them over-represented on the board where in a normal game you might be able to adjust your strategy to the available technology. Perhaps exchanging victory points to remove one tech and draw a random separate tech to replace it (at any time) might create some additional use of VPs in a co-op game.
Alliances/Diplomatic Relationships:
Something needs to be done to account for alliances and/or diplomatic relationships. The diplomatic relations exchange of an ambassador and gaining a production resource seems overly powerful. There's no incentive not to meet up as soon as possible in the game, exchange ambassadors and earn that resource for as many turns as possible. It seems too powerful and I think that advantage should be removed. However, I think borrowing from the RotA alliance rules that players can move through each others' territories (but not allowing shared combat) would be a better balance and prevent half the board being locked out from the other player (in case ancients are spread too far across the board or is badly weakened after a battle).
Races:
This is a large one and I'm not sure there's any good answer but some races' advantages are largely useless in a co-op game (Lyra shrines, Draco ancient co-habitation, etc.) and, except to make co-op more challenging seem like they're removed from consideration by default. I'd hate to always play Orion, Mechanema, or other fleet-focused races by default. Again, no pat answer but something to consider.
Just some thoughts on how to bring the two-player experience a little bit closer to the full game and perhaps balance it a bit more.
Thanks!