There are three spaces on the board which essentially allow you to acquire resources every turn for the rest of the game. Early on these spaces are awesome and you should almost always pick one of them if you can. Later on they're a little worse but still pretty good since there are ways to score points based on how much infrastructure you have. I'll discuss those in more detail when we go over scoring but for now it's just important to know that the infrastructure spaces start very powerful and remain strong over the course of the game. The three infrastructure spaces are agriculture, population, and tools.
Agriculture is the most straightforward and most intrinsically powerful of the three. You spend 1 guy now and you get to move your marker on the farm track up one space permanently. At the end of each turn you have to pay 1 food per guy you have. Farms knock one off of that cost so if you have 5 guys and 5 farms you actually don't pay any food at all. Since a food is essentially worth 2 points each you're spending one guy now for 2 points a turn for the rest of the game. The guy's action is worth 3.5 points so as long as there's even one more turn left in the game this is a positive action. The only caveat here is food is only used for eating so if you end the game with a lot of extra food they don't count for anything. This means you generally don't want to end up with as many farms as people since then you can't eat food and any food you do pick up is wasted. Ideally you want to end the game with 0 food left.
Population is relatively straightforward and has the potential to be the most powerful of all. You spend 2 guys now in the 'love shack' space and get an extra guy permanently. You start the game with 5 in play and have a hard cap of 10 over the course of the game. Note you don't get to take an action with the guy this turn but you do have to feed them at the end of the turn. (Stupid children and their insistence on being fed.) As such, the cost of going to this space is 9 points. (You give up rolling with 2 guys - 3.5 each. You also spend an extra 2 feeding the kid.) The long-term gain is you get an extra 3.5 points each turn by rolling a die with the new guy, but you have to feed him 2 points. So the net gain is 1.5 points. This is worse than agriculture by 5.5 points right now and .5 points every turn, so if you have a choice between the two then agriculture tends to be better. On the other hand if you're sucking up the 10 point penalty for not feeding your guys at the end of the turn then population is awesome. It costs 10 points regardless of how many people you don't feed, so the extra guys have no added cost and are just an extra 3.5 a turn. Since you aren't feeding then the agriculture is worth nothing. (There is a whole strategy around this which we'll flesh out in more detail later. For now just know that getting more population is key to the starvation plan.)
Tools are the hardest to work out a value for and are my personal favourite infrastructure item. The first tool you pick up sits on your board ready to be used. Then any time you roll dice to pick up resources you can 'tap' your tool to add 1 to the roll. So if you roll 2 dice on gold and they total 5 you'd get nothing at all. But if you had a tool to tap you'd instead get a full gold. Once a tool is tapped you can't use it again that turn but they all untap at the start of your next turn so you can boost one roll every turn for the rest of the game. Your second tool gets you another 1 tool so you can add 2 to one roll or 1 to two rolls. The third tool is the same as the first two. After that you no longer get extra tools but you instead upgrade existing tools to add more to a roll. So if you've acquired 4 tools you'll have a 2, a 1, and a 1. You can use them on the same roll or on different ones if you're making lots of rolls in a turn.
How much are tools worth? This is a tricky question and depends on both how many tools you have and how many things you're trying to pick up. At the simplest, assume you have 1 tool and roll 1 die on 1 resource. Then the tool is worth 1 point on average. (1/6th of the time it's worth gold or 6 points. 5/6th of the time it's worth nothing. This averages out to one point. Or if you're rolling on food, 1/2 the time it's worth 2 and 1/2 it's worth nothing.) But what if you roll a die on gold and then one on food? Well, then 1/6 it's worth 6 and 5/6*1/2 it's worth 2. So it's worth 1.83 points. In general the more different things you roll on the more chances you have to proc your tool which is awesome.
The problem though, as we discovered in the last post, is spreading out your guys is actually bad for the value of your guys. That first guy on gold is only worth 1 point himself. The first guy on food is worth 2. So with 2 guys and 1 tool you can either get 4.83 points by splitting them or 5.5 points by stacking them both on gold. (1 point for first guy on gold, 3.5 for second guy on gold, 1 for the tool.) We can make the tool worth more by splitting but our overall EV goes up by stacking.
Consider what happens if you have 4 tools, though. 2 guys on gold with 4 tools is worth a total of 8.5. But split them between gold and food and they're worth 10.3 total. It's even better with 5 tools, since then you can guarantee at most 1 pip wastage across your rolls and tools. 2 guys on gold with 5 tools is 9.5. 1 on gold and 1 on food with 5 tools is 11.5 points.
The way to minimize the random swings in the game is to stock up on tools. You'll roll some 1s and some 6s over the course of the game, and your goal is to minimize the number of wasted pips. (Roll 5 on gold with no tools and you've wasted 5 pips. Roll 6 on gold with 5 tools and you've still wasted 5 pips.) But by having enough tools to make your gold roll become "just in" and by also rolling on food you can guarantee at most 1 pip wastage. (Due to the way tools build up this isn't always true. With 6 tools, for example, an odd roll on gold and an odd roll on food is 2 pip wasteage since you can only ever add 2 to the rolls. This makes the 6th tool not very good, but you still need it to get up to 7 tools.)
There's two ways to look at it. Either the extra value gained from these tools gets counted on the tools and you need to devalue guys or the tools just smooth out your guys and push them closer to being worth their theoretical 3.5 points and tools are just worth 1. I find it easier to take the second stance when I'm thinking as I play the game, but I recognize that the first 5 tools are really critical. I hate rolling on gold without having the 5 tools, so I place a premium on picking up early tools. Having lots of tools makes everything else smoother. You can afford to throw just 1 guy on gold then and know you're guaranteed to get it when you need it. Put other guys on other spots and you can still use the tools when you roll 'lucky' with your one guy on gold. I've played games where people keep rolling their eyes and lamenting how lucky my rolls are since I always get just in on most of my rolls. What they fail to realize is I get to do this because of how many tools I have. That's what tools do!
I still take agriculture over tools first pick (if you don't then you have to dedicate a lot of guys to food every turn and just get to do less stuff) but I take tools over population until I have at least 5 tools even if the people are potentially more powerful in general. I like the smoothing affect of tools.
2 comments:
I think the way you're evaluating tools and extra people is flawed. Tools and harvesting has an interaction table that is fairly complicated and difficult to really emulate the value of tools.
First off, tools do more then simply fixing the standard deviation of the dice rolls. They also actively add one to the total rolls, so on average tools should add +1. In reality though tools add far more depending on the # of different resources you are harvesting.
Let's say you are harvesting each resource (5 types) and further simplify by assuming that their modular value is random (not true!). Then a tool has 1/6 chance of making a gold (rolling 5), 5/6*1/5=1/6 of making a stone (rolling 4), etc for all of the different resources. So that tool is in fact increasing your average expected value by 1/6*(6+5+4+3+2)=20/6.
However, if you only mine at 1 place, then your expectation is a mere 1 point. So clearly tools have a far greater effect when you a wider variety of sites to be harvested.
The biggest advantage of tools is that when harvesting, you minimize the risk of splitting up your guys but to truly maximize the return from your tools, you need to place yourself in the situation where you are harvesting a 3+ resources.
So the problem is that more people increases the value of your tools, and more tools, increases the value of people. As such, I am not convinced that agriculture is the best slot of the 3. Agriculture has the disability that it also diminishes the value of a number of cards. So I think the 3 abilities are far closer to equal value then you think.
How many turns is your typical game? Because your population vs tool decision should be tools unless there are 18 more turns left (-9 points + 0.5 X number of turns)... which I think is longer than most games though I have not played in ages.
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