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QUESTION:Since I assisted Jim in creating the Expert Rules, I thought I'd comment a
bit on this thread.
First off, people are free to play with whatever house rules they wish. Please
don't interpret my comments below as trying to "force" you to play under some
set of official rules. This extends to tournaments as well. While we will use
the expert rules in tournaments we run, I've certainly attended conventions
where someone there ran an Outpost Tournament using their own variant. Great!
The Expert rules have been in play for 3 years now and in substantially the
same form for the last two years (ver. 1.31 and 1.32). They seem to work in
the sense that Jim and I have both observed many, many games and group playing
styles and no dominant strategy (such as Robots and Titanium in the basic game)
has emerged (although individual groups sometimes end up with one due to "group
think").
Some players have commented that Research factories costing 30, Labs costing 80
and Research cards not counting towards your hand limit makes building Research
factories too powerful. Perhaps. However, neither Jim nor I observe
strategies organized around building lots of research factories winning even a
third of the games. If we characterize strategies as Titanium, Research, New
Chemicals, Water and Mixed, where in the first four at least 50% of your
operating factories on the N-1 game turn are of the stated type (use the N-1
turn instead of the last game turn to avoid edge effects of building factories
solely for VPs on the final game turn), and Mixed are the rest of the games,
then we see roughly (since I have not kept accurate game statistics) the
following:
Win %
Rules Used Water Titanium Research New Chem Mixed
Basic Game <5% 65+% <5% 25% 5%
BG w/ rbt rule, etc. 10% 40% <5% 30% 15+%
Expert Game ~0% 25% 10% 25% 40%
These numbers will differ a fair amount depending on how many players are
involved. For example, in games with 7+ (where there is a good chance that
a scientist will come out early), growing aggressively, acquiring an expensive
nodule plus a warehouse and then saving to have 90+ credits at the 1st Phase
Break, buying a scientist and then building New Chem factories is quite potent.
There are a number of players in LA who are very good at this and I would say
that the percentage of New Chem wins in that group is much higher (50%+).
Now it is true that a substantial portion of the mixed strategies involve a
mixture of water, research and new chem (although others include water and
titanium or water and new chem or water and research). But, overall, we just
don't see building Research factories as dominating the game.
Some players don't like the fact that it is almost impossible to win with just
Water, Ore, an Orbital Lab and the 3 top cards in the Expert Game. I got to be
quite good at this in the short-lived Advanced Game (Basic Game with robot
restrictions and a few other changes). One of Jim's explicit design goals with
the Expert Rules was to eliminate this -- he felt that the game should force
players to find new production strategies, not just run with what you start the
game with (Ore and Water). (Also for this reason, no Ore Mega-card will ever
be put into the game as some have suggested.)
Others have complained that there is no "unlimited" production strategy. This
is incorrect. A nodule, robots and a Lab effectively give one an unlimited
production strategy. Typically, we are talking 2 ore, 4 water and 12 research
factories at game end (factoring in the extra factories one can operate with
robots for the manned top 3 cards in the end game). This yields 40 VPs plus a
Moon Base and Planetary Cruiser to make 75. What is different is that this
effectively unlimited production strategy is not cheap (3 upgrade cards are
needed and two of them are not available initially). This avoids the flaw in
the basic game where only two upgrade cards (Heavy Equipment and Robots) were
needed to get to unlimited production and one of them (Heavy Equipment) allowed
greater production density (Titanium) while waiting for the Phase to change
and Robots to come out.
The Expert Game currently places a real premium on reacting to what other
players are doing in the game rather than just racing along a single strategy
(which is why the mixed category represents so many wins). Some players find
this decreased emphasis on rival production strategies removes some of the
charm of the game. I have some sympathy with this position. Thus, one of the
few proposed changes I find interesting is bumping the cost of a research
factory to 35 but adding a very attractive research mega-card worth 60 (not the
58 is should yield). I predict that with this change, the number of Titanium
and Research wins would increase 5-10%, New Chem wins would increase slightly
and Mixed wins would drop 15% or so. I would be interested in hearing from
players who try out this proposed change.
In general, we are happy with the current Expert Rules. It does take some time
to get used to if you have played the older rules. Most of the resistance to
them seems to come from the players who won extensively under the old rules and
who have trouble adapting or from players who are troubled at a theorectical
level by the face value domination of Titanium by Research (what is not
apparent is the *speed* difference of the Titanium production route due to
Heavy Equipment being present in the first group of cards). Since I often
win with Heavy Equipment/Titanium in the Expert Game (in part by carefully
managing game *tempo*), I can certainly testify that Research doesn't dominate
Titanium in actual play.
ANSWER: I agree, Outpost seems to be easily mutable. I.E., it is very easy for
players to make changes to the game without seriously affecting game
balance. One of the important facets of this is the ability of the
players themselves to make changes to the game. Since there isn't any
map in Outpost, it is very easy to make changes (unlike 1830). Replay
value is another facet of a game. I.E. after playing it 100 times, will
I ever want to play it again. Clearly, the more easily mutable a game is,
the more replay value the game has. Not that a game which has poor
mutability and low replay value cannot be good. Take Britannia for
example. But it is good to have those qualities in a game and Outpost
certainly is very mutable. I don't know how much replay value Outpost is
going to have.
BTW, if someone, who has played the basic game extensively but hasn't
really played the Expert game much, talks in a general way about research
being very powerful. That person is talking about the popular stategy of
buying a bunch of Data Libraries early, getting a Scientist (or Lab) and
building lots of New Chemical factories. Building alot of research
factories made no sense in the basic game. I mention this because, in
a recent post, I used this terminology. I shall be more precise in the
future.
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