by Jico
JonthVanha wrote:
How about an Expansion which makes the transition to medieval times?
That would make the game longer, and fundamentally change the sort of 'rising action' curve, for lack of a better term. Games like this and Eclipse are carefully balanced with their finite number of turns in mind.
In Eclipse, for example, if you played an extra couple of turns, everyone would have the time to fill out their tech trees, becoming less distinct civilizations. The choices that players made to customize their civilizations suddenly carry less weight, once people start converging on some single super civilization. While I've only read the rules for CoC, I expect it operates similarly.
While you can just add more powerful stuff to the end of the tech tree to continue the rising action, such a change would have far-reaching effects back through balance of the entire game. Essentially, the value of all of the prerequisites for these new techs would be revalued as a result of the relative expected values of the new endgame techs. Therefore, to do it right, the designer would likely have to rebalance much of the tech tree.
While I would buy any expansion Christian makes for this game on faith, I would be more optimistic about the prospects of a new game that reimplements the major mechanics of this game in a different context. That's how 7 Wonders should have handled things, in my opinion, rather than unbalancing its sublime design with the Leaders expansion.