First pass at… creating general rules and components
Now that I’d been through every role in detail, it was important to start to balance everything. I spent the next couple of weeks developing materials and creating spreadsheets. Here’s a quick summary of the things I did:
Map creation - Used the existing map to create my own version. I specifically wanted to change the ocean spacings to make it more balanced to move fleets around.
Tech tree balancing - Plugged all the technologies into an Excel sheet and mapped out their costs. I did some math to see how balanced the artifact costs were. I also added some columns to work out what the effects of all these techs might do. E.g. if you developed all the technologies that affected money gain, how much would you save each turn?
Tech tree design - I created a digital version of my tech tree from my sticky-note version
Bought components - I bought all the poker chips I thought I’d need, something to represent money, map playing pieces and some other things.
Nations starting stats - I used Excel to list the nations and all the variables for starting e.g. income level, PR level, interceptor count, starting techs, unit strengths, etc. Naturally that involved rigging up an Income and PR track as a placeholder.
Human role actions - I had nothing to go on to build the income and PR tracks. I knew I wanted them both but I had no idea where to start. I decided to list every Human role and every ability and list how they affect each of the measurables eg. how much they cost, if they had a PR effect, if they helped artifact gathering etc. I then estimated how much they might spend on turn 1 to do everything they would want to do and did the same for turn 4. That gave me a pretty good idea of what my income track might look like. Of course, I did this knowing that it’s all subject to change based on role balancing but it’s a good starting point.
Alien role actions - Actually I did this before the Human role actions, after I read through everything the aliens could do and I decided to distill everything down to make it easier to understand. It was after that exercise that I realized how useful it’d be for balancing Human money generation and repeated it there.
There were probably other things that I did during this “phase” but this is the gist of it.