How's everyone feeling about Thunder's Edge?
Overall I think it's a lot of cool stuff that will eventually improve the game, but right now the Expansion Rule book is very thin for how many new mechanics that have been added.
Nowhere are ocean cards defined. They're formatted like planet cards, so one would assume you use them like planet cards, and thus count as planets. But that would be very strong as that would let you count planets you're coexisting on twice.
But if they aren't planet cards, they're very undefined.
Same is true for Crimson Rebellion Breaches. It seems very weird for an alternative way to make tiles adjacent is only defined on a faction sheet.
Overall I think the new content is great, and Twilight Fall looks very fun. I'm excited to try it, but I wish the new rule books were as through as the old rulebooks.
Played a 6P game on Saturday with all five new factions and Keleres. It was a lot of fun!
Firmament/Obsidian and Crimson Rebellion feel a bit undercooked, but the rest of the factions are great! Ral Nel and new Keleres both feel very well balanced relative to existing factions, Deepwrought is insane(ly fun), and Last Bastion is very much a snowball faction that starts weak but needs to be dealt with early or it gets very scary.
I also played a game Saturday but it was 5 new factions plus Xxcha.
I played Deepwrought in my game on Saturday and I found them pretty underwhelming. Part of my problem was I personally have a reputation of spectacular betrayals and ruthless tactics in the last round for game wins. So noone wanted to give me rope to murder them with.
Due to a failure of the rulebook to clarify ocean cards, unlike space stations, I figured since they're planet cards they count as planets. Which means you get to double count the first 5 planets you coexist on, which makes planet control objectives trivially easy.
I do agree that Crimson Rebellion feels a bit underbaked, but most of those issues again come down to a lack of defined rules.
Last Bastion and Ral Nel feel great. I disagree that Firmament/Obsidian is underbaked. They can score an unlimited amount of other people's secret objectives in a single round and have a commander, agent, and mech built around facilitating that.
I think the biggest underbaked Mechanic is the new Entropic Scar. Muatt can discard a strategy token for War Sun II? Insane. The Obsidian can still get its faction techs for strategy tokens? Also gross. Zero reason to not go blue route for Fighter II, or Red for Destroyer II. Naalu get Nueroglaive for a strategy token, unreasonable. Naz-Roka Pre-fab archeologies round 1? Talk about max value.