by Ghorro
MScrivner wrote:
Eclipse is almost TOO elegant. Everything is so refined and boiled down to its core that the thing missing is a metagame. There is almost no (as in some but very very little) room for tabletalk, negotiation, deal making or backstabbing in Eclipse.
Our group, one that regularly plays Eclipse, found Eclipse to be just the opposite of your view. We found that once everyone knows how to play Eclipse, being competent at managing the economy, the victor is almost entirely driven by this metagame you define: tabletalk and negotiation, deal breaking and backstabbing. So much so that many of us, including me, dislike this part of the game when it's played without alliances, a variant added in the expansion. I find that my strategic decisions mean almost nothing compared to how I negotiate with the other players, something I am not fond of.
In Eclipse, if you can convince other players to leave you alone, or to attack or disrupt someone else, you do much better. As long as your economy is fairly decent it's really this simple.
With the Alliance rules from the Rise of the Ancients Eclipse expansion the negotiation aspect of the game is amplified infinitely, to where the players who win the game are almost always decided by the alliances they are in. If you are in a dominant alliance you almost always win. This can devolve if you're playing with dynamically formed alliances, where some players are left out and easily crushed by mega-alliances, leaving these solo players no chance at all at competing. I feel Eclipse with Alliances is most fair when it's begun with two or three equally sized fixed alliances. That way no one is left stranded or ganged-up on without the aid from an ally.
I dislike when games are decided by extraneous influences, such as non-mechanical strategies. The game takes second fiddle to debating who wins.