Eclipse: 2nd Dawn For The Galaxy Review

The Way To Empire

The aim of the Second Dawn of the Galaxy is simple, build up victory points by means of expanding your empire, researching technology and winning battles against NPC ships and player factions. After X rounds, the player with the most victory points is the winner. As a game, Eclipse can be quite overwhelming to look at, but it’s really a series of very simple actions and the truly complex aspect is the strategy required to win.

In terms of basic gameplay, over a series of several rounds players take it in turn to spend their actions doing one of a number of things:

• Exploration – You can place one of the deck of star system hex tiles from the stack onto the board. Finding new systems and taking them over is the key to expanding both your empire and your economy.
• Influence - You can add an influence token to a system next to one of your own. You can also remove a token from one of your systems if you think you might have overreached yourself.
• Research – You can spend some of your science points to research one of around 40-50 different technologies. These range from upgrades to your spaceships to economy upgrades and new structures that can be built across your systems. Which brings us to…
• Build – Spend some of your build points to add to your fleet or build a space station to improve your infrastructure. Later in the game you can build a monolith (a la 2001: A Space Odyssey) which gives a boost to your victory points.
• Upgrade – Once you’ve researched upgrades then you can use them to improve your ships. These might be improvements to weapons, engines, shields or a number of other aspects; all of which will improve your fleet’s chances when they get to grips with the enemy.
• Move – Exactly as you might think, you can move your ships a given number of systems (depending on their speed) to fortify your own space or invade others’.

See? Simple really! Every action is beautifully streamlined and designed to be completed with quickly and easily. But here’s the tricky part. With each action you take, you spend an influence token, and the more tokens you spend the more it costs to complete all these actions. But you’re also using these very same tokens to mark the star systems that you’re controlling, which means that the more systems you own, the fewer tokens you have for actions before they start getting reeeally expensive at which point you’d better hope that your economy is strong enough to cope with this level of spending and what’s this? Your opponents are expanding towards you and you need to upgrade your fleet but you absolutely need to place that economy cube or you’re looking at bankruptcy, so you’ll need to spend influence over there and… well… this is where the complexity comes in.

Because for every action you take there’s a double cost of influence and money which means that every decision you make needs to be geared towards a very clear goal. Are you going for tech? Great! Better hope that no one invades! Are you building towards a military victory? Better get those ship upgrades right or you’ll be very embarrassed when your armada collapses in the face of the enemy defence fleet.

This brings us neatly to the combat. Unlike its heftier cousin, Eclipse: Second Dawn of the Galaxy isn’t actually that combat heavy. That’s down to a few reasons.

Firstly, building ships is expensive in terms of both build points and actions. You don’t want (and can’t afford) to simply send off an expeditionary force if you’re not confident of victory because if you lose, it’s a long way back.

Secondly, and linked, the upgrade system means that it wouldn’t take much for that enemy cruiser to become spiky enough to deal with being outnumbered by becoming effectively unkillable. It wouldn’t take much for even a fighter to start posing a serious threat to cruisers and even dreadnoughts. That means that you need to at least keep pace in the interstellar arms race if you want to do any conquering later in the game.

Thirdly is the way combat works. A fairly simple initiative system means fast, light, but well armed ships get their shots in first and unless you have a well armoured fleet, you could be down by half your force before you even get to roll dice. That said, if you do go for the light option, you’d better hope the dice gods are smiling or you’ll simply fire everything and once the smoke clears you’ll be looking at an unscathed enemy ship just as it turns its guns on you.

This all means that in the games I’ve played, combat tends to be a late game rush as various players finally decide that now is the time to throw around those fleets that they’ve been building up since turn one.