Nice little change to the Macron power. Having each ship count as two for the sake of comensation and rewards will allows some great cycling of cards, especially when you have to throw down an N in the face of the Virus or similar situation.

I agree. Previous generations of Macron had almost no reason to ally with the defense, while now there's actually some motivation. Although I'm not sure I like Macron taking a compensation of 10 for playing an N at home.

It's not the change that I would have made, but I do agree that there probably needed to be a change. I changed Macron in my own set because it was a serious target for base-pick-offs and other single token effects- and again, the Macron was almost never allying with defense.

Are there other tweaks and revisions posted? Any playtesters on the forum that can fill us in on some details

i've never played cosmic encounter before, but I'm very excited to start playing once the FFG games version is released.

that being said, I have a question on macron's power. can he still bring as many ships as he want's on defense? and since i've never played before, why in the old version would he not want to ally with the defense? thanks for any answers.

@ The Warp: Do you think Macron ships count as "4" when dealing with tech research as well? Or do ships more count as research "tokens"?

Because the Macron does not want to lose any ships off of home planets inorder to have a high base defence (4 = 16), Macron players would never contribute. Also because they could only again 1 ship or card back it was not reall worth the loss. Now a Macron player might ally with 1 ship inorder to draw 2 extra cards as a reward.

spazard1 said:

As the offensive player or an ally, Macron can only ever bring one ship (second sentence on the card); as a defensive player, he is allowed to use as many of his ships as are present on the planet.

As for your second question, it's depressing for some players to ally with the defense and then receive only a single card as a reward. Meanwhile, other defensive allies are collecting as many as four. It gets old after a while (I don't have a huge problem with Macron personally, although some players loathe this power).

The defensive rewards issue always seemed like an uncalled for complaint, but since Asassin / Shadow effectively makes Macron a non-entity, and there may be more powers that affect individual ships for all I know, I'd say it's certainly a worthwhile change.