Ok. I am the first to go, it seems. As you all know by now, probably, I ended up in the Cursed Position as the middleman. Hereās my analysis of my situation:
First, it was probably doomed from the start, but as per the new game mechanics, it was impossible. Iāve won some games before as the middleman, with due help from allies who buoyed me up of course.
However, the new learning curve aside, I donāt see my position as anything less than impossible. Not doomed, as per player action, but impossible. The new pricing ensures that the infrastructure will take ample time to spiral out of control. What this does, perhaps intentionally, is create a new dependency on star resources, now that Terraforming Tech is no longer with us. Even then, with the new pricings, star count is inferior to star quality. This might be no bad thing, unless you end up with fewer good stars right off the bat, which happens frequently.
Suppose thereās a lack of expansion, as in my case and a few others. What this means is that there simply wonāt be more room for economic growth in the short term. If there is a war, that means even less, as funds must go into building ships for protection and retaliation. Now, that seems par for the course, but the returns from econ take time to manifest, and with pressure on from enemies with superior Banking and stars, there is only so much that can forestall the inevitable.
I had great allies, and perhaps in a game where tech can be traded cheaply, this would be different. In my case, though, the stars were very small, and while that could be overcome with Econ, it couldnāt be while war was afoot.
The new weapons tech advantage is nice for defenders, but it really just means prolonged conflict, which ensures a middle playerās demise if theyāre not positioned with allies right to engage the enemy. With this position, thatās usually the case, with the middle player blocking their comrades from getting elsewhere, or them being often unable to directly reach the aggressors.
This isnāt meant to be a rant, but again, an analysis of my experience. It was good, overall, but there needs to be work.
In short, the Infrastructure War is now next to merciless. If you get behind, thereās not much to be done. This leads into another issue: that the new economy essentially transforms this into a 24 cycle game. Instead of needing to be online only once a day, I personally find it necessary to be on ALL day, for purposes of adding econ sooner, because otherwise I will always get behind in production. After all, every hour lost is 3+ economy or so that wonāt be there afterward. This makes the infrastructure extremely powerful, sure, but also dangerously precious and fragile.
n war, thereās chance of losing precious infrastructure constantly. Ship and Science losses have always been easy to recoup, with econ being that one thing that was hard to get back. In the case of this 24 cycle game, if a player isnāt on all the time squeezing each hour they can afford from Econ, bigger games where fighting is very fierce, rather than stalled and centralized over one or two stars, as in my recent war, could easily result in irrecoverable loss.
The point isnāt how easy one can knock out another player, but how easily war-ravaged victors can catch up to leaders. The leader always runs away with the game, unless the pack drags them down. Now, the pack has even more difficulty because losing resources to the leader hurts them infinitely more than it used to.
Sorry, Iām not 100% on any of these theories, but such are my concerns. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.