r0gershrubber wrote:
I really appreciate that players can see all of the technologies at once, whereas in SMC you have to flip through a deck of cards. I don't think that the interconnectedness is a big deal because it will mostly be an issue in the first game, and I don't think a Civ game CAN have a tech tree that is fully grasped in the first game.
Also, SMC and COC both have effective prerequisites for Wonders; what were you trying to point out here?
Which prerequisites do you mean in SMC? The quite large amount of production it takes? Other than that the Wonders in SMC don't require you to have anything, you just get "discount" if you have specific technologies. In CoC you flip the Wonder Cards and then see what resources you'll need PLUS which technologies you are required to have before you are able to build that wonder.
r0gershrubber wrote:
I have two big issues with SMC's victory conditions: (1) It strongly encourages focused play strategies, effectively limiting the viability of mixed play styles and making the game strategies become rote, and (2) the victory types are not well balanced, at least prior to the expansion. I also don't think the different play strategies reduces the "bash the leader" syndrome: each player is assessed by how close they are to being able to fulfill their victory condition. Add in the fact that your civilization in SMC strongly encourages a narrow range of victory types and the result is a game that is needlessly constraining.
I also don't like the idea that players can wait until the last turn to cash in a lot of objective cards: I think limiting the number of objective cards that can be scored each status phase OR requiring the cards to be scored when it is possible would be a reasonable variant.
I think that any but the culture victory condition in the base game has a fair share of winning. If you want to succeed by going for the cultural victory, I'd agree that you need the expansion. (I've seen all types of victory happen) I wouldn't even say that pursuing one victory trail narrows down your gameplay. It'd be deadly to focus on a single trail, but as with most games it sets you in the position which paths to choose, among these which one to pull for most strongly and which one(s) to neglect. Because usually if you want to do everything, it's not going to work. For me, it's hard to bash the leader in SMC because in most cases it was really hard to see who the leader is since in most sessions so far it was more than one player in a promising position.
Considering your suggestion, I don't know where to go yet. If I'd change anything I'd probably go for the mandatory scoring since we only had 3 respectively 4 goals achieved anyhow.But for our next session I'll still go with the rules as intended by the designer. It was such a tight game and after rereading over the tech tree, I'm itching to play it again and maybe go for a completely different approach.