{"id":4141,"date":"2012-02-15T13:35:37","date_gmt":"2012-02-15T18:35:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4141"},"modified":"2014-03-11T18:18:06","modified_gmt":"2014-03-11T22:18:06","slug":"eclipse-raising-the-bar-for-the-4x-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4141","title":{"rendered":"Eclipse: raising the bar for the 4X game"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a big fan of the game genre called &#8220;4X&#8221; &#8211; &#8220;explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.&#8221;. I&#8217;ve been playing these ever since the ur-progenitor of the genre in the 1980s, <cite>Empire<\/cite>, and I actually still maintain an open-source C version of that game.  <cite>Civilization<\/cite> is my favorite computer game ever, and by what I hear of it <cite>Master of Orion<\/cite> &#8211; the game &#8220;4X&#8221; was coined to describe &#8211; would have hooked me even harder if I&#8217;d known of it when it came out.  <\/p>\n<p>I particularly like SF-themed 4X games. I have previously posted a <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=3297\">favorable review<\/a> of <cite>Twilight Imperium<\/cite> (hereafter &#8220;TI&#8221;), a big sprawling epic of a contending-galactic-empires 4X game. But now I write to report on a game that effectively makes TI obsolete &#8211; a new design called <cite>Eclipse<\/cite> which I think is going to permanently raise the quality bar in 4X games.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>When you unpack the components for <cite>Eclipse<\/cite>, you&#8217;re going to immediately get the impression that it&#8217;s <cite>Twilight Imperium<\/cite> lite.  Hexagonal starsystem tiles for variable board layout &#8211; check. Plastic ship models in different sizes &#8211; check. Playing mats, describing human and alien species one per &#8211; check.  This impression is not exactly wrong, but the differences turn out to be more important than the similarities.<\/p>\n<p>One difference is that the game doesn&#8217;t start with all the board tiles down.  Instead, player homeworlds are arranged in a broken ring with unexplored space between and around them. Unlike TI, which has exploration only as a bolted-on afterthought with the Distant Suns option, exploration is central to this game and one of the ways to win is to explore more aggressively and successfully than your neighbors.<\/p>\n<p>Another difference is that instead of a huge pile of available ships you have only a relatively small handful.  Interestingly, this actually encourages combat, because losing your fleet-in-being isn&#8217;t a catastrophe that will take you half the rest of the game to recover from.<\/p>\n<p>But the most important difference is not local to one aspect of the game, it&#8217;s a global fact about the style of the entire game.  <cite>Eclipse<\/cite> is as tightly constructed and carefully interconnected as a Swiss watch.  By contrast, TI is a huge sprawling pile of game mechanics that make terrific thematic sense but don&#8217;t integrate all that well and in some cases are only half-realized (hello, politics subgame, I&#8217;m looking at you!).<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s an example of what I mean by tight construction.  Your player mat has a track with disc-shaped pieces on it.  You have to expend one of these temporarily (getting it back at the end of the round) to take a game action such as moving ships performing research, etc.  You have to expend one of these <em>permanently<\/em> to control a solar system. This matters because the track beneath the pieces has numbers on it representing the upkeep cost for your empire; as you take actions and seize systems, it rises. If at the end of a round you can&#8217;t cover that upkeep from your money reserve, you have to give up solar systems (taking back disks to cover numbers) until you can.<\/p>\n<p>That one mechanic (somewhat reminiscent of the resource market in <cite>Power Grid<\/cite>) creates a delicate multi-way tradeoff between seizing territory, taking actions, and building a money reserve that you can use to finance a late-game surge. Because it does so with very little state, you can reason about your option tree more quickly and effectively than in a game with heavier mechanics.  This nets out as faster turns and shorter overall playing time; where a 6-player game of TI can easily take 8 or 9 hours, I&#8217;ve seen a 5-player game with mostly newbies take about 5 hours and a following 6-player game take about 4:30.  After another play or two I expect my group will get down to the designer&#8217;s estimate of a half hour per player.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the the people in both games had previous experience playing TI with each other, and after the first game the consensus was already becoming clear; this game pretty much <em>obsoletes<\/em> TI.  You give up some thematic chrome; the real draw in TI&#8217;s sprawling elaborateness is the way it ticket-punches every trope from battlestars to the Galactic Council in a loving tribute to all those classic space operas you read as a kid.<\/p>\n<p>What you get in return is a <em>much better game<\/em> &#8211; tighter, faster-playing, less vulnerable to runaway-leader effects, packing just as much tactical and strategic depth and multiple paths to victory but with much lower total complexity overhead. <cite>Eclipse<\/cite> is <em>elegant<\/em> in the way a mathematical theorem can be elegant &#8211; minimal premises worked to a powerful and satisfying conclusion.<\/p>\n<p>I learned this morning that Eclipse, though only released in 2011, has shot up through BoardgameGeek&#8217;s game rankings to make #7 in the top ten. I&#8217;m not even a little surprised, and expect that game designers will be studying it as an innovative example for years to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a big fan of the game genre called &#8220;4X&#8221; &#8211; &#8220;explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.&#8221;. I&#8217;ve been playing these ever since the ur-progenitor of the genre in the 1980s, Empire, and I actually still maintain an open-source C version of that game. Civilization is my favorite computer game ever, and by what I hear&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4141\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Eclipse: raising the bar for the 4X game<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4141"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5417,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4141\/revisions\/5417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}