by petercox
If the knowledge tiles are more powerful, that only gives an advantage to the player who a) realizes that, and b) puts the effort into placing ships so they go first and can grab those tiles.
That's partly true, but a lucky draw and roll does the same thing. Plus, if one element becomes obviously too powerful, it makes the game about 'who gets that thing first', which to me is not an especially interesting game.
I like the nuance of multiple equally viable paths. To me that's the intended spirit of the game, not getting in first position to grab the most powerful tiles.
If you reduce the number of goods tiles you might also need to bump the per-tile VPs back up to four, otherwise the warehouse building becomes less valuable, which also weakens the four-points-per-warehouse knowledge tile, etc. If the goods are worth four points I think you could halve the number of goods without breaking the game, I think.
Very good point, yes, it will need to be bumped to 4 points. I'll make a quick edit in above post.
Still, having played a lot of two player games, I don't think there's a problem.
It's not usually a problem, but I just had a couple games in a row where I got lucky draws/rolls and managed to easily snag both of 15 and 25 knowledge tiles. It's not insurmountable, and won't happen every time but it did feel VERY unbalanced.
If you go back and look at the mechanics of the game logically, it's easy to identify why that imbalance is there. Maybe people feel that the 4 player game is imbalanced AGAINST shipping, and the 5, 15, 25 tiles are underpowered there. It can't really be both ways though.