Germans are so good at making words for things that need words I don’t know why we don’t just use their whole language. @yashima please give us the correct word for a build-engine-plus-fighting game.
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Absolutely, and yet due to the other issues namely us dying from cold or hunger we haven’t taken it out of the shelf for over a year. But it won’t be leaving the collection either.
We like our compound words for complex issues but we do not usually have a ton of different words for similar things that need nuance. The concept of a Thesaurus was unknown to me until I started learning English. So each language has different strengths which is why loanwords are a decent solution 
The Build-Engine-plus-Fighting game? Maschinenbau Wettkampf Spiel. We actually use engine-building as an English loanword to describe the genre. Maschinenbau is en engineering discpline and not a good translation at all
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Sorry to snip most of the thought, but this is again pertinent to Xia both for commentary and as a bit of a heads-up since it ties into one of the game’s quirks. Namely, exploration is pretty wild and embraces the wildness rather than do anything to mitigate it. Again, this isn’t going to sit right with some folks. The tile stack does seem pretty well tuned, but you absolutely will reveal huge expanses of space, clusters of planets, ridiculous hazard fields, etc. Probability simply won’t produce a lovely, balanced map, like, ever.
However, I think it works really well here, since there isn’t a single over-arching goal for players to pursue. Xia is just a race for VP (FP) at the end of the day, but the structure of its missions and events, and the freedom afforded to players means it’s a game about ruthless opportunism rather than one of grand designs.
It’s (yet) another contentious feature of Xia, but I think it’s pretty neat that they embraced the chaotic nature of random exploration and all the issues it can present, not by mitigation or structured draws, but with its action economy and mission/avatar flexibility. Luck shits on everyone constantly in the game, but there’s always a way to eke out a few extra credits/fame, and the player that hustles best is going to win every time (most of some of the time).
I feel like I’ve simultaneously rambled and not made my point, but in short: Xia has ALL of the stuff you don’t like about exploration in these types of games, does nothing at all to address them [directly], but manages to work just the same. I think it’s also another pretty key example of why Xia doesn’t fit the same mould as Eclipse/TI.
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Sorry for the double, but after that meandering wall I figured a text break was worthwhile.
Xia and Feudum are two games in my collection that come from sort of “renegade” designers; basically a couple of unknowns coming out of nowhere with stupidly grand first designs, clearly no editors on hand, standing firm to their vision and, in more than a few cases, explicitly bucking modern design trends. In short, they’re weird games with issues that have seriously impassioned fans (and detractors). Cult favourites, basically.
Hopefully I’m finding those weird, in-between points that help identify where Xia sits within the “grand space opera”… space. It’s one of those games that’s so hard to recommend without caveats since you can easily see a fan of the genre really loving or hating it.
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I really like XIA, but I think this might be more in line with your specifications. And it appears to be in-stock.
https://www.gmtgames.com/p-762-space-empires-4th-printing.aspx
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I haven’t read everyone’s responses here, so my apologies if I’m covering turf that’s already been covered. But:
As somebody who owns… almost every, if not every “Big Space Game” (Star Trek Ascendancy, Forbidden Stars, Outer Rim, Xia, Space Empires 4X, Red Alert, Dune, Rex, Dune Imperium, Empires of the Void I and II, Eclipse, Eclipse 2nd Dawn, Twilight Imperium 1st-4th Edition, etc…) and many of the smaller space games (Quantum, Ascending Empires, Talon, Android, Ironclad, Space Hulk, etc…), I have thoughts. And the first of which is that my thoughts aren’t probably that useful, since I love this genre with the passion of a thousand suns.
That’s not to say I own everything. It’s impossible unless you have infinite money, and even then you wouldn’t have time to play all of them.
That stated, Eclipse is pretty good. I found it disappointing compared to TI3, which was its contemporary at the time, but it did a few things better than TI3 (tech trees, in particular, and exploration, which TI3 had a module to do but it was clunky and not particularly satisfying). And then TI4 came out and it was everything I wanted (and continue to want) in a space-opera-in-a-box.
Xia is a sandbox game, and a pretty good one at that. The exploration elements are very swingy, but the game itself is pretty good aside from a few key problems (the big one is the runaway-winner issue, where it can be very, very difficult to pull up after one player starts doing really well… the easy solution to that is that if you’re getting your teeth kicked in, maybe it’s time to call it). I also don’t like that not all paths to victory are equally viable in each game (the Merchant method relies really, really heavily on finding the right planets and/or resource fields early), and there is a lot of fiddly steps between each turn (worse with higher player counts, since there is always
The Pirate, The Merchant, and The Cops that have to be activated and moved, plus some board elements).
Now, I own, but haven’t played Eclipse 2nd, but I suspect it will be pretty good at the same things the original did well (exploration, neutral enemies you can beat up, interesting asymmetric races that aren’t a pain to learn, and of course that gorgeous/brilliant tech tree/ship upgrade system) and struggle in the same places as well (no meaningful diplomacy or trade, and player elimination being a very real, very present threat). I also expect TI4 will continue to be better with 3-6 players and Eclipse 2nd will probably be better with 2, but I doubt I would ever personally play Eclipse with 2… and I think Star Trek Ascendancy does exploration way, way better than Eclipse, which is a statement of some weight since Eclipse does exploration really well.
As for Xia, I like it, although it is swingy and relies on dice a bit too much for my tastes (and I’m always skeptical about a game where it sometimes makes more sense to suicide yourself to get back to a planet with a new ship rather than limp back because you ran out of fuel/power). I think Outer Rim has much stronger narrative chops, but it’s also much, much more “on rails” than Xia (there are literally only 2 paths through the galaxy), but it also hands NPC/neutral factions much better.
Oh, as an aside: Space Empires 4X is great as a wargame with 4X elements, and Forbidden Stars is really a knife-fight-in-a-phone-booth, but both work very well with 2 players, but the focus is on the combat, as opposed to the other 3X-options. Talon if you want a straight-up-fleet battle is good, Red Alert is great and clean and fast, and Quantum or Ascending Empires if you want your space game to be silly rather than strategic are both really solid.
I do not know if that helps or not!
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Oh yeah I should have mentioned Star Trek Ascendancy now that we’re branching out. It’s the first 4X game I’ve played where the exploration has actually felt meaningful. The other stuff is quite fun but that is lovely. First time I played, the Klingons bombarded their own homeworld to get it back from the invaders.
And I’m not at all a Star Trek fan.
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See and here I didn’t even know I was asking the question you answered 
If it was just me that tech tree from Eclipse is calling loudly. But mine Mitspieler might enjoy something less euro a bit more (also thx to some nice folks from around these parts I am really enjoying Beyond the Sun right now so tech tree cravings are somewhat satisfied).
I am mulling things over for a bit and it looks like this time it is a „try before buy“ kind of thing
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FYI, Talon can be integrated into Space Empires 4X as well (although Talon is not in-stock, but rather a P500 title right now). On the surface that seems like it should take days to finish a game, but it doesn’t appear to add a gargantuan amount of time per this AAR on BGG:
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Gosh, that sounds amazing… I would love to try that out (although, I will admit my own personal level of insanity would be a combined Star Wars Armada, Star Wars X-Wing, and Star Wars Legion tiered game that would be utterly immmmmppppoooossssssible to ever finish. Have your two fleets show up and slug it out: whoever wins gets a bonus or a penalty (for balance purposes) for the following land-the-troops X-Wing game, which leads to a balancing bonus/penalty for the followup Legion game… winner is whoever takes 2 of the three arenas, or maybe just whoever wins the final Legion game? Gods, I dunno, but just the thought of it makes me far too excited).
But yeah. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
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That seems like a weekend marathon worth of Star Wars gaming… Camping by the boards included
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Similar to what some friends and I wanted to try with Federation and Empire for the overall strategic arm of the game, and Star Fleet Battles for the tactics side of combat. Never got anywhere with it though. I think we were looking for an experience that F&E was not there to provide.
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There’s a general problem with this, I think: a lot of the battles generated by the high-level game just aren’t going to be terribly interesting to play out at the low level. I think you need in the interface rules some way of working out which ones are actually worth going to the table for.
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Going back to Ultra-Games like this, I always fancied what would happen with a game that focused so well on strategies for battles like the Total War series, combined with a Crusader Kings 2 that focused so well on the characters and politics/diplomacy etc… The problem, as usual, is time.
It is something that I am liking from Firefly, without getting too messy on the exploration, travelling etc… it gives depth enough to the missions through a simple enough system.
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Some of the BGG Firefly: the Game enthusiasts have looked into combining it with Firefly Adventures: Brigands & Browncoats, a cooperative skirmish game which you could in theory use to expand what the boardgame handles as a series of Misbehave cards. But (a) FFA isn’t really flexible enough without a lot of work designing scenarios, converting characters, and so on, and (b) it would make for a very long game.
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Possibly. Still, this was meant to be a grand campaign style game that would run over months. I think one of us had even printed out a F&E map on a plotter and planned to mount it on a wall or something. It was years ago, details are fuzzy. I’m sure we would have skipped obviously overmatched battles had we ever gotten that far.
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Mm, you say “these types of games”, but I think we might be looking at a classification issue. In my head, Xia probably doesn’t qualify as a “competitive game” - it sounds more like a sandboxy/“simulation”/“see what happens” game, so of course it has wildly different exploration results and punitive dice, etc. Competition and interaction with others takes a backseat to making the best of what the game throws at you.
In those kind of games, I have no problem with the kind of exploration you describe, or exploration in general.
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Yeah you’ve hit the nail on the head. By “these types of games”, I was (in my roundabout way) trying to place Xia outside of the typical 4x experience. As mentioned above it’s often looked at as a 3X game (or back to 4 if we adopt sandboX (and make no mistake it can and should get scrappy)), but I think that’s misleading, even if the X’s are all accounted for.
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