Ran some tests of the basic "fly ships between planets and purchase trade goos" mechanic.
Learned the following:
1) Initial planet layout has to ensure that all goods produced are consumed. This led to deploying 1/2 the planets, then deploying the other 1/2 so that sources of goods had appropriate sinks. Take away: will need a way to identify pairs of planets to deploy together at setup.
2) Market dice work well, provided the game has enough turns to get a large number of rolls to "smooth out" the statistics.
3) Accrual of money is *slow*. Currently, market dice generate prices from 1-3 TU. Players buy goods for, on average, 2 TU. Starting vessels carry up to 3 cargo, though it's hard to transport goods "sunward" carrying more than 2. Bottom line: it takes an average of 2 turns to traverse the solar system spaceward, and 3-4 turns traveling sunward. Players make 2-3 TU profit traveling spaceward, and 1-2 TU sunward. Assuming a trip "down" and "back", players make about 4 TU profit over the course of 5-6 turns. It seems like it should take tens or hundreds of TU to purchase a new ship, but that would take too long. Not sure how to manage this.
4) Managing upgrades: while the base mechanic is fun, it's not sufficient for a full game. I had planned to add upgrades to the game, allowing the player to improve his fleet over time. Managing one ship is hard enough, though, so I'm not sure how to implement upgrades. One thought: allow players to purchase "upgrade" cards which they play in front of them. These contain additional abilities players can activate by allocating engine dice to them. This way, players keep a single ship, rather than building a fleet, but have an easy-understood representation of their ship's current abilities.
