Space Empires 4x: All Good Things p500

Actually, I find the combat doctrines too limited. I championned for a more detailed system in which you could establish a priority order for each of your groups, but to no avail.

I don't know if you tried the expansions, but they add a lot of variety and uncertainty to the base game (as you now need to find out what Empire Advantage the opponent has, and which alien techs he may have found).

Anyway, the expansion is almost upon us (updated to: art in art and final development).

its definitely coming along, i'll believe "almost upon us" when i see it though

So, I got our first 2 v 2 played. Some cool things (for our group) was that some of our house rules made it there (Fighter 2+ making them better vs point defense, cost reduction for fighter 2, our regular 3 row of deep space setup with allies side by side...).

We tried the randomized home system setup, but it was a bit cumbersome (it is hard to explain, but basically, you pick some of the starting tiles randomly WHILE making sure they are the same for each player).

We played with the crew cards. They slightly unbalance the game, but not as much as resource cards, so we found them cool, even if a bit whacky (in that some offer mild benefits, while other can make some ships much stronger).

The setup cards were a great additions (you draw 2 game changing rules at the start of the game) to add variety to the games, and make the best path less obvious.

We tried the new empires, but as we set them across each other, it ended up just being fighters vs fighters + point defense scouts.
The randomized large ships abilities are cool , though.

We didn't attack any of the new alien defenders/special opponents (space stations, ...).

Among the new Empire advantages, I was disappointed by master of the gates (way too inconvenient to setup), but the empire starting with a titan is rather cool, as not many can afford to turtle as much!

The salvagers didn't make much out of their ability and got roughly 20 CP our of it, BUT it discouraged scouting.

The robotic empire advantage paying half maintenance is good, but doesn't change the playstyle much.

We played without the "buildings".
We played with the new techs, but built none of the new toys (cyber armor, starbases and defense satellite networks).

In the end, I lost the game to my ally and myself when I tried to make use of the warp gates, to move my fleet so that we'd double box the left opponent, right before the right one jumped through the asteroids with a group of 6 raiders led by a navigator (allowing one group to ignore asteroids). The raiders each carried one infantry (as the rule card made all Raiders raider X, but also made scanner 1 give scanner 2).

With not much to defend my core, and our fleet crippled (as my ally's fighters got chewed by the enemy point defense, and my own battle cruisers losing to the reinforcing fighters after clearing most of the point defense ships), and not enough to counter the raiders (especially since they were move 3 fast and my fleet was just move 2), we gave up.

Overall, I like the additions a lot, but we are not sure about which ones we'll keep.

I like this game, I've played it on BGA (see upthread). Can't imagine playing it enough to really appreciate all the modules in it so hats off to you and your crew.

Actually, the expansion helps shake the games a little. I played 100 games on BGA but stopped because they would get too samey.
We also played 100 or so games live and on vassal.

The expansions really help keep things fresh as the match ups lead to very different strategies, but you typically discover the actual match up pretty late in the game.

Yeah, we played 3-4 2p games on BGA and I could see where the expansions would help shake it up.

I've definitely had a few moments where I thought about going out and getting the whole game while it is momentarily all available.