by Tankra
Been lurking this thread for a while and I'm pretty interested, so I'll add my 2 cents.Phil Fleischmann wrote:
We've never fully clarified what the difference is between a special system and a power.
The way I understand the difference is that:
1) Systems exist alongside aliens, and under this variant a player will possess not only a distinct alien but also a distinct special system.
2) Systems operate on a different level and therefore cannot be "zapped." They also cannot be removed by lack of colonies or otherwise. They essentially cannot be taken away.
3) Systems need to be able to coexist with any of the aliens printed by FFG, and thus need to possess characteristics that do not conflict or copy any of the aliens already printed.
A fourth, optional difference also exists in the form that Bill is presenting it: systems necessarily add tokens that supplement and/or replace the existing planet tokens, thus making this into a fully-fledged marketable expansion that actually requires a purchase, rather than just being a new rulebook.
Balance is also probably more important for special systems than it is for aliens because the powers can never be taken away, whereas normal CE is balanced by players being scared of certain aliens and therefore hindering them.
Phil Fleischmann wrote:
Why bother? Why not just make them all as new aliens? If you want to call them something special, you can still call them "systems" if you like.
I propose increased replay value as a reason to want to have special systems. The game itself already has a very large amount of replay value, but adding special systems just brings it to crazy levels of replayability.
I mean, the base game without expansions offers 1225 (50 choose 2) alien interactions. The minimum number of 5 player games you need to play to see them all is therefore around 136 (there are 9 distinct alien interactions in a 5 player game). I've neglected powers that make you see more aliens like Reincarnator and Precursor Seed, but it must drive the number much lower. It's actually quite low, given that I've played around 50 games of CE ever since I've gotten it. As you near 136, you no doubt grow much more bored of the game, given that your imagination can pretty much fill in the blanks on the interactions you haven't yet seen.
One expansion increases that number to 268 5-player games, two gives you 445 and three expansions gives you a total of 666 games. This is already pretty good replayability. However, if my math is correct, adding 20 new systems to the base game and the three expansions increases the number of distinct alien-system/alien-system interactions to almost 2.5 million, which means you need to play a minimum of roughly 250k games before you see them all. Incidentally, it also means that the odds of even having one identical alien-system/alien-system interaction in two separate games is very, very low.
That means that from a purely probabilistic point of view, coming out with 20 new systems instead of 20 new aliens adds a whole steaming bunch more replayability to your game. Pretty good reason to bother with them, imo. That is, if you can get them to be both balanced and fun.