Hello all!
Long time.
So, I've been working on something for a while, building on the work of Quevy (thanks!). It's an Excel spreadsheet which calculates how the percentage of city, road and farm sides and cloister tiles changes according to which expansions you're playing with. There's a story behind making this, which I'll tell you because it helps explains what it does. If you just want to read about what it does, scroll down to the next paragraph.
In the rules for the Monasteries expansion, it says that if playing with the base game you should remove the six cloister tiles in order to prevent having too many cloisters. I got to wondering how the ratio of cloisters to other tiles changed as you added expansions. I did a little work a while ago, looking at the numbers of cloisters in each expansion. That satisfied me for a while, until I started looking at fan expansions. I was very keen on the Family Feud expansion (Thanks to Frédérick Renaud) but my concern was that adding those tiles would give me too many city tiles compared to everything else. I then wondered how many extra roads I should add to balance it out (perhaps from the Wells expansion, thanks to Meepleater) So I took the tile percentages from each expansion (calculated by Quevy) and made a spreadsheet which adds up the sides of city, road and field of the expansions you are playing with, and calculates the percentage of each. It then gives you the difference between that percentage and the percentage of each side type in the base game (if we take the base game to be the 'ideal' side percentages), and tells you how many tiles to add in order to balance out the ratios. It also does this with cloisters, although cloisters are measured in tiles instead of sides (obviously), and tells you how many cloisters you need to add if you are low, or how many other tiles to add if you have too many. Cloisters are also measured in numbers of tiles instead of percentages.
So, using the spreadsheet, you can enter the expansions you are using and it will calculate the percentage of city, road, field and cloister tiles you have. It will also calculate how many of each you should have in order to keep the ratios equal to that of the base game, and tell you have many tiles to add in order to get that. You can then enter how many city, road, field and cloister tiles you are adding and the numbers will recalculate. You will never get it spot on, but less than 1% difference is pretty good. There are spaces to enter your own expansions and they will then function the same as the others. There are a few further notes on the document itself.
I hope you find this useful, I enjoy playing around with the different expansions and seeing how the ratios change. I also use it to calculate (as I mentioned) how many copies of the Wells expansions to use to balance the Family Feud expansion. It anyone has any feedback or any other functions you think would be useful, please let me know and I will try to incorporate them! The sheet is locked to prevent accidental changing of values. You can un-protect it, but remember if you edit a formula it will no longer work!
Thanks all!
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June 30, 2017, 02:28:32 AM