by alepsycho
I played a session of Eclipse with the expansion saturday in 3 and for the 3rd time when the Rho Syndicate plays in the hands of different players, they won, so we all agreed that this race is a little bit unbalanced for a 3 players' game.They are very battle driven and they make pillaging in battles, their shield printed outside the Blueprint of all ships make it very encouraging for battling basic ancient ships since the beginning of the game.
I don't really think their impossibility of building Dreadnoughts is really bad, it forces them to build cheaper ships in quantity, even they being more expensive than the same ships from other races, but even the cruisers can be great ships for battle with proper ship parts in their blueprints, specialy when there are four of them moving around with their incredible 4 movements with one action.
All of this added to their incredible Trade Rate 3:2 from money to any resource, the formula is simple: invest your game in winning money (pillaging, advanced economy, draw hexes with money planets) and participate in battles since the beginning of the game, invade everyone else even when in great distances (rho have 4 moves with a single action).
In 3 players the Rho always won with a great advantage of points, so we stopped using this race in a 3 player game.
In 4 players the things go a little bit different because they have a great move capacity, but the hexes are more disputted since everyone is closer and there are more races, and there is diplomacy and alliances (the Rho are encouraged to betray diplomacies so refusing a Rho diplomacy is a good option of trying to stop their gain of money, etc.