From: bmac@astro.ucla.edu (Bruce Alan Macintosh)
Subject: Re:  Stellar Conquest and space empire games (was Re: SF Games)

> Web and Starship (Westend Games) 

It's an interesting attempt to create a three-player game that's fair for
all three players and has players with radically different abilities;
very ambitous. Basically, the primitive-but-expanding Terrans are 
caught in between two much older, much larger empires.  The catch is that
the two empires have radically differnt technologies. One uses 
faster-than-light starships, very deadly in space combat but only able
to carry a few ground troops. The other uses insterstellar teleportation
gateways that can transport an effectively unlimited number of troops
but have to be carried to a planet by slower-than-light probes. Once the 
probe arrives you can pour a nearly unlimited number of troops, colonists,
or whatever through the gateway. However, the probes are somewhat easy to 
shoot down. The result is that the two empires can't fight each other 
effecitvely - one can always dominate space but never land enough troops to
take a world, and the other can never get a probe into a defended system.
The terrans can use both technologies - albeit initially at a very primitive
(short-ranged) level - so both sides want to ally with the terrans to be 
able to beat the other. The terrans want to expand and build up their 
technology and economic base.

There are some nice touches. Like Imperium, what appears on the board is a 
part of amuch larger empire; the alien players can call on off-board reinforcement
at a penalty in victory points. This also means that neither can get kcked
completely out of the game. If Terra is occupied by one side or the
other it still gets some slow buildup of secret rebel forces, so they
can't be knocked out of the game either.

One *very* nice touch, from a realism standpoint, is that when a war starts
the game goes from year-long economic turns (in which faster-than-light
ships have unlimited movement inside your empire and limited movement
for exploring new systems) into combat turns where there isn't time for
building new forces and movement is limited by ship's speed (and the STL
probes don't move at all.) This is very nice - it solves the disconnect
between the timescales you want in an economic game (years, to build up
colonies and ships) and in a war (weeks or days). A soimilar mechanism
is in Pax Britannica - it's a brilliant idea.

From playing it twice (both as the Terrans) my main point is that the other
players have to be agressive in stomping moderately on the Terrans - if 
they let the earthling weasels develop to tech levels comparable to their own
the terrans can become nearly unbeatable. A terran player who's even
moderately cleverer than the other two will usuallly win.

Bruce