I (purple) played a round of Beyond the Sun on BGA with 3 “localish” friends the other day. 2 (orange, blue) of them didn’t know the game yet. Red has played a few times. We produced the wildest tech tree ever:
I messed up early in the game in resource production because I decided to “experiment” and started with “Narrow Beam Lasers” which I rarely do. And so I couldn’t do a lot of research (I somehow made it to a level 4 tech despite that but barely). The other players decided most of the tech in the tree and chose to go with LOTS of “jump” tech. And there was jumping like I have rarely seen and ships… so many ships. In the end everyone was scrambling for the 2 spots that allowed colonization. It was definitely weird.
One person (orange) wanted to use “Android Destroyers” but ended up not using the UI correctly and didn’t get to do their jumps somehow and that cost them a valuable turn and so they moped for the rest of the game. And I must say not having the ability (on BGA) to go back on something that is a technical error can be debilitating in a game as tight as BtS.
I also notice a marked difference when playing with people from the forums vs my local friends. The locals play a lot more take that moves just to piss off another player. “Gain points for myself or block someone? What should I choose? Clearly, I should block someone.”
PS: The extra achievements were all level 2 tech and the weird one with control 6 matching locations.