I'm fairly new to the game, but have tried all the various combinations of expansions multiple times at this point. My experience thus far has been that Agora is just horribly balanced and I'm curious if the public opinion is the same.
The conspiracy cards vary by miles in terms of power level. Some games you're receiving practically useless garbage and other games you're claiming an absurdly strong science token like Strategy or Economy on turn 3. Some of these conspiracy effects are stronger than the activation reward for entire wonders and arguably stronger than most of the pantheon cards. It doesn't sit well with me that these cards are both extremely RNG heavy and hidden information as well. This is in contrast to Pantheon wherein the cards are all public information for both players and each player has access to every card.
The Senate portion of the game is very clunky in my opinion. The whole mechanic of placing and moving influence cubes feels awkward and restrictive.
The balance of the Senate passives are also completely out of wack. Some of them can snowball you ridiculously, such as the +2 blue for Senate and +2 gold when selling passives. If you simply happen to get even just slightly unlucky your opponent can easily snowball these passives for the entire game.
The mechanic also feels parasitic. While you have win conditions such as war and science, you rarely have to care too much about them until Age 2 or very often not until Age 3. Meanwhile if your opponent lands a couple good Senate seats you could be completely railed by this mechanic just a couple turns into Age 1.
Agora to me feels like it introduced significantly more RNG, stronger snowball mechanics, and made it all available too early on compared to the other mechanics present in Vanilla or Pantheon. However again, I'm interested in hearing what other people have to say. I'd be happy to have my mind changed as that would mean there'd be more content in this game for me to enjoy.
The conspiracy cards vary by miles in terms of power level. Some games you're receiving practically useless garbage and other games you're claiming an absurdly strong science token like Strategy or Economy on turn 3. Some of these conspiracy effects are stronger than the activation reward for entire wonders and arguably stronger than most of the pantheon cards. It doesn't sit well with me that these cards are both extremely RNG heavy and hidden information as well. This is in contrast to Pantheon wherein the cards are all public information for both players and each player has access to every card.
The Senate portion of the game is very clunky in my opinion. The whole mechanic of placing and moving influence cubes feels awkward and restrictive.
The balance of the Senate passives are also completely out of wack. Some of them can snowball you ridiculously, such as the +2 blue for Senate and +2 gold when selling passives. If you simply happen to get even just slightly unlucky your opponent can easily snowball these passives for the entire game.
The mechanic also feels parasitic. While you have win conditions such as war and science, you rarely have to care too much about them until Age 2 or very often not until Age 3. Meanwhile if your opponent lands a couple good Senate seats you could be completely railed by this mechanic just a couple turns into Age 1.
Agora to me feels like it introduced significantly more RNG, stronger snowball mechanics, and made it all available too early on compared to the other mechanics present in Vanilla or Pantheon. However again, I'm interested in hearing what other people have to say. I'd be happy to have my mind changed as that would mean there'd be more content in this game for me to enjoy.