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[dedindahed]

Today's installment of what we did wrong...

Major one is that goods tokens ARE a hard limit, and a player may never buy more than half of the existing supply.
(exception you may always fill your fuel tank)

You can buy more upgrades than you can install, but can only install the limit on the ship card.  You can install/unistall purchased upgardes while on space stations. You can sell upgrades to other players.

Tied move ratings in battle act simultaneously.

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Ship card icons do not give battle cards, only captain and improvements.

You may absorb all the damage from a single hit with an improvement, turn it facedown and reduce structure by the improvement's structure value.

The hard limit on goods tokens does not apply when mining ore.

[xorsyst]

My playtesting notes:

I think there is a good games struggling to get out of some of the rules complexity here.  If I was involved in playtesting, I think I'd offer the following suggestions:

1. Simplify combat a lot.  It's fun, but very random, dangerous, and gives downtime to most players.
1a: Reduce to single attack/defense score, and remove support
1b: Allow only 1 card per round
1c: Reduce power of some cards

2. Simplify victory conditions.  In this game, you get seemingly random amounts of reputation for things.  I'd recommend a straightforward 5-missions victory.  To counter this:
2a: Have rewards (cash/goods) for succesful hyperspace
2b: Allow stealing of goods/cash from other players on succesful combat.
2c: Still have reputation for determining card reactions, but make it a straight swingometer.  All missions should have an effect one way or the other.
2d: Add missions for things like hyperspace, attacking players/pirates, etc.

[dedindahed]

Another thing that we didn't really cover is that players can form agreements or leagues where they take their turns together, moving together and only drawing one set of hyperspace/docking/pirate cards etc.

It does seem like there are 2 viable ways to play the game,

As exists it's a straightup VP race, which does seem to limit the usefulness of trade and some of the feel of elite.

A variant that extends game time a bit might get more out of some of the available options.

There are missions that involve attacking pirates/players.
You can loot goods/improvements/fuel from destroyed player ships.

Some variants from the rulebook
Suport cards may be used as their effect, or to add +1 to any attack
(many seemed of little use)
Each player gets one mission card, which does not replenish, and remaining missions go face up and available to all, and do replenish.

Next expansion changes combat system, and adds planetside actions.

[dedindahed]

The event I won with should have been me vs the nest and the ship at the same time, one deck vs two decks.

A suggestion that makes a lot of sense is players pre-build their combat decks when it's not their turn, leave it face down till needed, possibly leave the one card of choice till an actual conflict.

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