Eclipse: Second Dawn for the Galaxy Final Thoughts

hey everybody final thoughts time for eclipse and let's talk about it because there is a lot of game here this thing is pretty big and i'm not just talking about how much table space it takes up but before i get into that i do want to throw in a quick plug which is to say that if you are interested in learning how to play eclipse i have a tutorial uh that is teaching exactly that over on my channel rtfm and there is a link to that in the description also for the rest of the month be putting out smaller videos that are going into things like a strategy and you know which ship sculpt i like the best anyway let's talk about uh how i feel about eclipse because there is a lot here and i think right off the bat i'm gonna say i like it i think this is a really good game i think it's a really smart design it is a space forex game but there is a focus on two things one there is combat and then there is resource management for me those two things are the the most important uh elements of the game you know obviously you do other things but those two things really are at the forefront and they're both important now you can focus a little bit more on one than the other but it really does help to be able to do both at least in some capacity but the way that you go about that for on both of those things is you know up to you and also it's kind of dependent on how the game shakes out you know there's a lot of different ways to increase your in resource production of most of the different resources you know like if you want to go science and technology if you can get the orbitals those are really good of course you need production in order to build the orbitals so maybe be looking for those but now if you want to fight uh you can build a lot of ships that is obviously a good way to do it or you can go the higher science route and instead try and make each ship that you build that much better if you go into a fight with someone who has you know six fighters but they're all basic and you have you know a cruiser or two but they have been really decked out it is still an even fight i also love how much fighting is encouraged in this game a lot of forex games you tend to turtle up for a good portion of the game and you only really get into a fight maybe halfway through maybe even farther than that this you want to fight early on both one you're going to fight npcs that's just going to happen because you're going to find these ancients around the galaxy but two it's a good idea to fight each other um partially just because you want to jockey for control of positions but also because getting in fights early is kind of important whenever you fight you draw tiles from the reputation bag and there are a limited number of high value tiles in here so drawing earlier makes it more likely that you're going to pick them up because you know you might draw three or four tiles but you only keep one so obviously if you see a four you're gonna keep the four and as the game goes on that bag becomes a little bit less it's less likely that you're going to draw a high value tile so getting fights early is a big deal i like that it encourages you to do that in a way that feels you know organic um and uh yeah so and yeah you can maybe uh you can go in with a lot of ships or you can try and strike uh early or maybe you can build up your forces and and make your forces better the options in this game are are vast because you always have to kind of react to the situation but you're always given just enough freedom to kind of play the game that you want to play now i will say that there is sometimes your play is very much not determined but influenced by your circumstances one of them being the faction that you play with now you can play as humans every faction board has another side which is just the human side and honestly that's not a bad way to play i think especially for your first game playing as humans is a good way to go they are effective because they've got a good starting setup and also they have decent like trade uh a good trade rate but in general like they're they're just not bad they're all the same but they're not bad and i think everyone playing as humans the first game is a great choice especially just to learn how to play the game but it's also not a bad choice just as you go like when like playing in later versions yeah you can play the different factions and some of them seem wildly different but some of them not that much for example the descendants of draco i was playing on the left here they completely change your play style because normally you want to fight all these ancients that are on the board but they don't they specifically want to protect them and that not only makes it so that you don't have to focus on military because you can expand without worrying about what you're going to come up with but also you end up uh like you end up getting a lot more of the board because of that um and your uh resource management can snowball pretty quickly but you don't have to do that i mean you're not gonna fight the the ancients but you know you can still build up your military you probably should but you don't have to now that is a huge shift from the main gameplay and also yeah you get points for having all the ancients on the board at the end of the game that's big the hydrant progress over here they're a little different from humans they kind of just feel like science humans you know they they have their thing which is advanced labs and and no one else has that at the start of the game so that's a big deal you also start with more science than anybody else and you can research twice which few not i don't know how many uh factions can do that not most of them so they're definitely focused on science and that is something that you should take into account when playing them but sometimes you just have to react to the situation at hand and that is one thing that was that i found pretty interesting which is that you there is a fair amount of luck involved in this game obviously you're rolling dice in combat that is you know luck based um obviously and you can mitigate that by building up better ships so they're rolling better dice they are you know uh hitting on you maybe fives or fours or threes depending on your computers you can also protect your your ships from your enemies dice but there is always going to be luck involved in that but i'm also talking about the luck of the planets or the systems that you flip and the technologies that come up if you're playing the hydrogen progress and you keep flipping up sectors that have tough enemies you know double ancient systems and or not any uh any science planets that's gonna change things for you um you wanna focus on times but if that's just not the way that you can do it then that's going to be difficult now there's always going to be some science on the board and you're never going to see no science planets so you will be able to go that route but it also might mean that you know you want to get the orbital technology if you can't but hey maybe the orbital tech doesn't even come up i played a game where orbitals never came up they just were never available because that's that's pretty randomized um but you know sometimes that's that's how it is you just kind of have to react and roll with the punches on that um and it's definitely possible to do it can be a little difficult sometimes but you know you generally have the option to like i said play the way that you want to play it does require a shift in strategy though this is not really a game that you can go in knowing what you're going to do from turn one and just going forward and doing that things will change as you're playing and you will have to react not only to the board state but also what your your opponents are doing and that uh like that is something you have to keep in mind now some people won't like the the randomness in this i don't mind it um i personally think that it keeps the variability up from game to game very high you know i know that when i play this game it's not going to feel like the last game that i played uh because i'm just going to come up with against different circumstances and so maybe i'll be able to do that thing that i kind of wanted to do from the beginning or maybe i'll have to you know serpentine i gotta you gotta duck and move you know uh bob and weave the other boxing metaphors i don't know but you know what i'm saying so so there's a lot of variation uh from game to game and uh now i was playing a two-player game in the run-through admittedly that is not my favorite way to play i personally think that four is kind of the sweet spot uh this game goes two to six six is a lot of players and the more players you have the more the longer this game goes it is a long game it's not aggressively long like some games uh and you know maybe you want that maybe you don't uh this is but it is regardless going to be an evening kind of game this is a couple hours minimum um unless you're i guess very skilled with this and you know exactly what you're doing you go really fast but most players it's going to be a few hours um and you play i think four players is a good mix of yeah it's a good evening game you're gonna play a few hours but uh it doesn't go too long but also you still have the opportunity to do a bit of diplomacy um two and three player games you don't get to do the diplomacy mechanic which honestly depending on your play style might not even come up i played a four player game no one traded uh ambassadors in the entire game maybe that was a good strategy i don't know i won the game so it worked out for me but uh it could have been that you know that wasn't the right choice but uh it is an option that you have with a four-player game two players what i do like about it is that you have the option or you have the freedom to really expand and make the galaxy on your side what you want it to be before you end up meeting your opponent that might end up meaning that the opponent has you know just gotten a better shake of things and is a little bit stronger when they eventually run into you but at the very least you have been given the freedom to build your empire you're not like rushed into combat right away which you can be in a higher player count game so it provides different experiences personally like i said i like it a four player i think two player i think it's just a little bit too much freedom but i do like how it uh it doesn't it stops you from going like way uh it stops from having too much freedom um like two too much and the way they do that is by limiting the amount of uh the sector threes um that you can do they're only five in a stack for a two-player game and in a four-player game there's like 15 or something like that i don't remember the exact number but it's it's more than 10 to be sure and so everyone's got the opportunity to expand their backyard a little bit more uh which also great if you want to go in more of a turtling kind of strategy um you can go back you can build or not orbitals you can go to monoliths which didn't come up in the run-through but they are these uh big you know obelisk looking guys that just sit on a planet and if you can control that planet at the end of the game hey that's worth three points that's a big deal so there's there's a lot of different ways it can go and the player count absolutely changes the the feel of the game um now another thing that oh yeah like i said it's a long game but one thing that i really like is that later turns are not unbelievably longer than early turns because of how the initiation of the initiative the influence system works later turns become more expensive and so in some games you have it where you know like you're only able to do two things in the first round and it takes 15 minutes and then by the time you get to the fifth round uh everyone can do a thousand things and it takes an hour that's not really what happens here because you have to match your expansion with economic growth that means that you are limited in how much you can do you can always just keep putting out disks but then the bill's going to come due and you will have to pay for that and that's you know a big deal bankruptcy is possible in this game it is possible to completely remove yourself from the game if you cannot pay your debt now that's extremely unlikely but it is a thing that can happen so you have to keep an eye on it um so yeah there are some harsh penalties if you if you play poorly but it's more likely that you're going to just have to manage your resources and keep a close eye on it and so i do like that you know you you have to focus on that thing but and there are consequences but you're you're not likely to just completely lose it unless you play pretty badly but there but you do have to keep an eye on you can't just endlessly expand and expect no consequences now uh a couple of you watching this may know that i am somewhat known for covering twilight imperium and eclipse is often lauded as the euro ti um i have opinions on whether or not that comparison is at all useful um whether it's appropriate or not i'm actually going to have another video up i believe next week which is going to go in depth on this specific topic so i don't want to talk too much about that here um that's going to be over on on my channel on rtfm but yes i i will be absolutely diving into the differences between eclipse and twilight imperium and what i will say on the baseline is just that i think they are very different games uh on the surface yes they seem similar but the experience is completely different and so i think it is you know absolutely possible that you can have room for both of these games on your shelf um but uh that's you know that also leaves room for people to have a preference you can yeah you can like one or the other and it doesn't mean that you think that it is just a universally better game that's just how you feel you like that style of game are you like this style game they're very different you know it's yet you can literally compare apples and oranges i prefer oranges to apples but uh they're not the same fruit so uh that is uh all i'm gonna say about that on uh on that subject for now again having a full video on that later um but that i think gives you a pretty good idea of my final thoughts for eclipse it is a great game it is a euro it is uh a lot of resource management but it's also combat and it's not one or the other you do definitely have to focus on both there is some random chance to it but there's also a lot of mitigation and it's something that you can make strategies for but you also need to keep your eye on the board state because things are constantly changing um so that is uh those are my final thoughts for eclipse and uh tell me how you feel about the game in the comments below if you uh have played it or not um either way thank you so much for watching and i will see you folks next time bye

Channel: Rahdo

Views: 4,864

Rating: 4.7446809 out of 5

Keywords: board games, boardgames, radho, baord game, baordgames, rahdo, baord games, baordgame, boardgame, board game, game, rhado, linktousergallery, geekusername:rahdo

Id: 0cvo0kaV34E

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021