by Bear85
Hello,A strategy came to our gaming group pretty early on with Eclipse, and it seems to dominate most games, in that whoever does it best often wins. I'm sure it's nothing special, maybe people can discuss how they deal with it.
Basically the strategy is to deliberately go into deficit spending on your turn when you can, hit zero money, and use the cleanup phase to pull disks back from the board that you don't want. The ones you don't want is the other part of this strategy, those hexes with a what we call a 'present' (the 2 VP/random bonus). The empty hexes aside from the present are obviously best for this, but there are plenty of others too.
It gets to the point where if you can get 2 or 3 of those in a game, taking the bonus every time, while your opponent gets stuck with pulling ancients tiles, you get a big boost early, and just that edge can really tip the balance.
We thought about house ruling it so that you had to trade your other resources before pulling disks, but that might be too harsh and really destroy a player who needs to pull a disk in a time of urgent need, without destroying his other resource stocks.
Does anyone else find this dominates, or are we just having a run of bad luck with this dictating the gameplay? I'd love to hear any thoughts.
Thanks!