De Excidio and Testing Heavier Games
Heavy games occupy a kind of weird space in the larger boardgaming hobby. On one hand, I think a lot of folks are enchanted by the intricacies of all the various systems working together. Heavy games can also be transporting, really allowing you to feel immersed in the fiction/history in a way that can be difficult for lighter games. I know that I was personally drawn to the hobby by heavier games, and continue to seek out opportunities to play them.
At the same time, heavy games also tend to have a well-deserved reputation for being excessive and self-indulgent. Speaking again from personal experience, I spent 3 hours last weekend trying to get through a single turn of GMT's Downfall. I have spent considerable time trying to read through and understand Vital Lacerda's Inventions well enough to pull it out at a game night. Is Inventions really so much better than Innovation to justify the play time and rules complexity? (I don't know, it might be, but I haven't gotten Inventions to the table)
To make an analogy, I enjoy the extended cut of Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring much more than Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings (which is basically a Fellowship movie) despite Jackson's movie running almost an hour longer. I did not enjoy Jackson's The Hobbit Trilogy (running 8 hr, 52 min, according to Wikipedia) compared to the Rankin/Bass Hobbit movie (running 1 hr 17 minutes), despite Jackson being able to tell a more complex story. You can do more with more time, but you need to be respectful of the audience and understand your limitations as an author and what you're trying to say with your project.
Designing Heavy Games
Game designers value elegance and simplicity as a consequence of experience. There is less room for heavy games, they're expensive (both in terms of time and materials) to make, harder to test, and it's very easy to add weight to a game but much harder to reduce complexity without compromising the experience. As a result, I strongly advise working on things in the dread "light to middle weight euro" space or even lighter as a first project (see my post here on this exact subject).
However, sometimes you have an idea you can't shake, and the footprint is big enough that it needs to be a 5-7 minute (or longer) Prog composition about a mouse who lost his left glove as opposed to a 3 minute love song. These are things that I've learned that are helping me -
Make sure there's juice Before you make all 300 cards and 2 player boards (even digitally) make sure that the core of your system is interesting. Mark Rosewater has talked extensively about how Magic can be fun with french-vanilla creatures and simple effects. Make sure your game core is solid before you start adding more. De Excidio borrows extensively from Dune: Imperium, so at the start, I know the system has worked before and yields interesting experiences.
Cut and test slices It will be difficult for you to find testers for the whole experience, and because of the way games work, it can be difficult to find the element that's breaking the experience when people are going through a 3-4 hour experience. Instead, see if you can test openings, or end-games, or other semi-fixed positions as a way to isolate what's underperforming. Quite a few GMT games have several start positions as a way to give players a taste of the longer experience while focusing on the elements that make the game good. I've been testing the first few turns of De Exicido as a way to make sure the on-ramp to the game is smooth and enjoyable. Once I feel that's been nailed down, I'm going to try testing end-game scenarios and make sure the fun continues through the end.
Make it worth the squeeze One of my testers (the admirable jonathanbovee.bsky.social) after the last test of De Excidio said "this is a perfectly fine game sphere, but I really want to experience the bumps and wiggles" (paraphrased). Make sure that if you're promising a big, complex experience that you're delivering on it. Make sure your game supports enough of a complex vocabulary to say something worth saying with the time your players are giving it! The worst experience I've had testing one of my games was after several tests of A Crystal Ship (a game that is very likely to never see the light of day), I realized that I was packing about 1.5 hours of game into a 3 hour box, and players were disengaging.
So far, I've gotten a very positive response with De Excidio, so I'm going to keep plugging away and hoping that I've developed enough as a designer to land the plane successfully. Good luck on your designs!