Made some updates to Tonight the Stars Revolt based on the playtest a couple weeks ago. Biggest thing is that combat is based on dice now instead of flat numbers. Besides just generally making combat more unpredictable (and hopefully more exciting as a result), this is giving me another tool to work with for interesting options over the course of the game - the dice have a couple of "special" sides that normally don't do anything, but can have different effects depending on tech upgrades that you might get over the course of the game. And of course the aliens will be able to take advantage of those as well, though that will likely be single-turn effects based on the AI cards rather than permanent upgrades like with player tech.
The other big change was making the aliens more aggressive. In my test a couple of weeks ago they mostly just sat there and let the players shoot them, so the new rule I put in was that all alien ships move after each player turn, or attack if they are already in the same space as player ships. And wow did this turn out to be too much. I ran a solo test just now to see how the updates worked out, and the result with this one was that it felt like an overwhelming Zerg rush before the humans even had a chance to get ready. Granted, this could be mitigated to some extent by letting players start with more ships on the board, and by making the board itself bigger so it takes longer for ships to reach each other (I probably will do this eventually, but it's a lower-priority change right now). But even so, it felt like a lot of extra work to move every alien ship every turn, it made the AI cards feel a lot less important, and I didn't love the feeling when, through a combination of horde tactics and bad dice luck, the aliens had wiped out two out of three human fleets by the end of two rounds. So I'm going to be scaling this one back for next time - maybe just automatic movement at the beginning of the aliens' turn, before revealing AI cards, rather than after every single player turn. Hopefully that strikes the right balance.
But despite all that it still feels like this game is moving in the right direction overall. I don't know if I'll have it ready for any of the usual design competitions when it's time for them (I'm already missing Cardboard Edison as we speak) but I'm feeling pretty good about what I might be bringing with me to PAX Unplugged next year.
ADDENDUM: and after another day of thinking about how to use those dice, I have now changed the system for tech upgrades, with some common ones that anyone can buy and also some unique ones for each player. Hopefully they're relatively balanced against each other. Now I need to update some of the AI cards like I mentioned earlier, and then we'll see how the next playtest goes...
