Bugsclarification andromedasedge

Smoother gameplay vs. hidden information

Please bear in mind that there is already a table option to "skip escalation turn of players without a ship in range" and to "skip diplomacy turn of the player without a diplomacy card". It can be turned off for more strategic and uncertain play.

Skipping Alliance Base actions

This was discussed at length with the publisher, designer and on AE community Discord.

It is entirely impossible in the digital implementation to satisfy all the conditions:

- that the alliance base is mandatory
- to not allow taking back your turn after hidden info is revealed
- to keep the game flexibility regarding making wild combos with tactics and other anytime actions

Take this example in mind: You launch the transporter at the Development Office. Use the tactics to move the transporter to a nearby planet. Use the Development Office to build development on that planet (with the transporter that initially triggered the action).

At the table, you can discuss and allow or disallow certain moves, or give some penalty if players lock themselves on Alliance Base without the option to make the action. This can be done ad hoc, potentially sparking a major argument. However, implementation doesn't have this flexibility, so we need to settle on acceptable behaviour.

We cannot, in a general case, analyse if playing some element can, in theory, make the action possible, so we either dumb down the game and make the mandatory action immediate without the possibility to play other effects, or let players explore their possibilities and possibly lock them in the mandatory action.

For this reason, we agreed that in digital implementation, the action would be skippable if it were impossible to do "as-is". This can be misused, but we decided that this is acceptable and the best solution. Implementation will never check possible future paths and will allow the player to skip even if they are missing one ice and have a moon to abandon for one. This example is straightforward, but where do you stop?

We did investigate the possibility of punishing players who locked themselves in by either moving the ship to the scrapyard or losing VPs. Still, both the publisher and the designer decided against it.