TTSR - first playtest

Had my first open playtest today for Tonight the Stars Revolt!  It went about as well as could be expected, by which I mean the players liked the theme and the overall structure of it, and gave me lots and lots and lots of feedback on things to improve for next time.  My biggest concern was the combat system, which is currently pretty flat and really was just a placeholder for initial testing anyway.  Players agreed that it wasn't great, gave me some suggestions for other games to look at for ideas, and that was as far as that went so it's pretty much all "TBD" at the moment.  My initial idea is to add randomization on top of the combat stats for the different ships, but I'll check out the other suggested games before I really get to work on anything.

Ooh, maybe cards for special maneuvers in combat.  And the aliens would get something similar, with more cards added or removed from that deck based on what players do.  Actually, maybe that idea should add onto (or completely replace?) the current AI system as a whole.  This will need further consideration...

Yeah, the enemy AI system, that was my other main focus.  In principle it worked well - they liked the setup with the three different decks of cards and with the players' actions determining which deck the aliens would draw from, and they used that as part of the strategizing on their turns, which was exactly one of my design goals for the game.  But it actually worked too well in that regard, and the aliens wound up being very passive in this playthrough, which is the opposite of how it should go (and very different from what I got in my last solo test, but then I was also playing it pretty differently from how the other people were today - which of course is part of why testing with a group is so important).  So whatever I do to revise the AI system, it will need to be a lot more aggressive overall.

Those are the main things I'll be focusing on for the next round(s) of revisions.  Other things that came up today were giving players more control over what tech upgrades they get (maybe even have whole tech trees?) and having more ways for them to interact meaningfully with each other.  I definitely do want to address both of those, but for right now they feel like lower priority compared to combat and enemy AI, so they're going to have to wait for a bit.