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Tactical Tuesday -- Week 05

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kothmann:

--- Quote from: unclewill on October 06, 2021, 08:10:08 AM ---Option A does have merit, but for me the current state of play requires Red to either claim a farm invasion opportunity (to secure the likely big farm) or ensure the big city scores for them whether completed or not and whoever else is involved.

--- End quote ---
Yeah, I think that's right.  So E or H2.


--- Quote ---I’d be interested to hear how the play through turns out.

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The situation given is Red's 4th turn.  I decided to self-play test until each player had made 7 turns, figuring that would give a decent sense of how things were evolving.  I played each of E and H2 ten times, alternating options, and saving a screen-shot at the end.  Here is the folder with images of the final positions (file names indicate option and game number):
Week05 Option Comparison.

In Option E, I made it Red's highest priority to merge with the Black and Yellow city, but that only had happened 5 times in 10 attempts.  Most of the time things were pretty messy in the west, as expected.  I kind of hate the aesthetics of the landscape when Red takes Option E.   :(

In Option H2, the Black and Yellow city had completed once as a shared city, and seemed likely to complete more than half the time. This took longer than I expected, but still the fear that it would happen without E is totally confirmed.  My conjecture that it would often be taken by one player was optimistic--it seemed most likely to be shared.

Both Gray (Green in JCZ) and Black were able to join the farm a total of 15 out of 20 games.  Not much difference between the options.  Red seemed more likely to retain control or share control of the farm with H2, as expected.  But it isn't clear how valuable the farm would be, having only 2 or 3 completed cities in all games at the point I stopped.  I think it tended to have better potential for more cities with H2.

One more interesting observation is that there isn't really a great place to put a FFFF cloister in Option E, but [-2;-1] is a good spot in H2.  That happened fairly often, and I think those games were usually pretty good for Red.  I suppose awareness of where a cloister might go, even if placed by an opponent, is a good thing to be thinking about?

If you look at Option E, game 8, Yellow and Gray (Green) managed to cooperate and build a 12-point city in the east.  It contained no CCCx tiles.  I think those tiles are poison in multi-player games!  Unless you play then to merge two cities, they make it very difficult to complete a city, particularly if you have opponents trying to block even a little bit.

And getting greedy to take all the points in a shared city might not be your best option, because then the opponent will try to re-invade, and you might both get stuck with 2+ meeples in an unfinished mess instead of both grabbing 8-12 points and getting the meeple back.

My overall conclusions:

* I was wrong.  Option E was better.  You have to stop the big city.
* Make sure your opponents perceive you to be vindictive, so they won't get greedy when you are sharing a medium-sized city.  >:D

--- Quote ---JCZ rocks.

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Yes, really great for this sort of experimentation.  I hope to try online games soon...

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