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I Forgot How Much Fun Playing in Person Is: Space Empires 4X Digital Talks About Better Ways to Teach New Players

Hi everyone, Brett Reichert here – I’m making the digital version of Space Empires 4X on Steam. (As a reminder up front: the digital version is now called Space Imperia 4X – give us a wishlist if you haven’t already!)

Two weekends ago I had the pleasure to attend GMT Games’ Warehouse Weekend, a four day board gaming event held twice a year. On Saturday, I ran a game of Space Empires 4X for 5 new players plus myself. We opted to play a 3v3 scenario – very tight on the regular board! – and added a few things from Close Encounters (expansion one) and All Good Things (expansion three).

I have worked on Space Imperia for almost four years now, and it has been at least two since I actually played the board game in person. I miss doing so! Teaching the game in physical form opened my eyes to better ways to portray the game – especially for new players.

We did a 3v3 match – this is made possible by All Good Things, which adds two ‘Alternate’ empires. I didn’t even know a 6 player scenario existed, so we gave it a go given the player count! I was the brown in the middle on the camera side of the board, as were my two teammates yellow and green. We played the ‘Blood Brothers’ alliance mode, where all players on one team take one turn together and may stack and participate in combat together. This ended up being an excellent way to run a large team game and once everyone understood the core game, we were moving along at a decent pace.

Managing Upgrades is Hard

For veterans of Space Empires 4X – and for players of the Space Imperia demo – you know that ships do not automatically receive new technology. They must spend an entire turn at a friendly shipyard and spend their hull size to upgrade to all the latest tech. I think this is a very rewarding way to play the game, and forces players to think about when to commit a force towards the enemy.

For new players of the board game, this is a very difficult thing to teach (and maintain!) while also teaching all the other aspects of the system. The game, of course, is a blend of simple systems that make for a highly replayable experience. Managing and understanding upgrades, however, is just too much for a new player to take in on their first game.

So, in digital form, I’m going to update the demo to have the ‘auto upgrade’ option available. And, for new players, I will default that to enabled.

Everyone expanded rather quickly, and we all started to realize just how close we were to the enemy. My alternate race had different scouts – they’re 2 attack, 0 defense, but they fire in D, so I decided to mass them after exploration in anticipation of combat.

Understanding Economic Consequences

In both digital and physical forms, the unknowns of player purchases are a critical aspect of the game. And, when the game finishes, it’s often helpful to discuss who built what and when with your opponents. This is especially helpful for new players to help them better understand tech and build paths. Right now, in digital form, there is a limited stats overview at the end – this is very much a v0 interface (and still has some bugs). A friend suggested a more detail-oriented version of that end view, including who built what and when, charts, stats, etc., and I think that would be a great add to help new players after their first game.

The orange player’s planets were much closer to his start, and he more or less stayed back at this point. Red and green were getting ready to skirmish, and yellow is poised to make some blue colonies have a bad day. My three ships at this point were 6 scouts with attack and defense 1 – an upside of the auto upgrade system.

Understanding Combat

Another observation from the in-person game was that teaching and experiencing the combat system are two different things. It wasn’t until we had a few definitive battles that new players started to fully understand how combat worked. When I compare this to a new player’s experience in Space Imperia, I imagine it’s probably very similar. Adding a more step-driven set of tutorials would help in that respect. I’m going to be adding 4-6 ‘mini tutorials’ as small gates towards how all the games’ systems work, with the culminating one being a small 3×3 map against a less furnished opponent – ‘destroy their homeland to win this tutorial’.

Yellow and I managed to pressure blue by the fourth round. My scouts successfully destroyed his colony with bombardment, while yellow was about to roll for bombardments (and had a reinforcement of cruisers coming from F2).

Next Fest – June 15-22

All of these insights will be very helpful for June Next Fest – this is a huge Steam event where players come to check out games that have not released yet. Space Imperia has an excellent opportunity to expose the game to lots of new players, and these micro adjustments should help teach new players a little better than the current format.

Brett

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