UNDER CONSTRUCTION
i am currently using this as a stream of consciousness as I make a deck. Comments most welcome.
Hopefully this will result in some useful general guidelines to help people make better decks.
Goal
the goal is to create a deck that when played will generate 15 pomts faster than your opponent's deck.
To achieve this we can brek it downinto 3 sub-goals:
- Generate points fast
- Defend against your opponent taking points or resources away from you.
- Aggressively take points away from your opponents or slow him down.
Let's look at these 3 sub-goals in order, to find the most efficient way of achieving them, At the end we'll need to determine the relative importance (i.e. number of cards allocated) to each one.
Generate points fast
There are many way to generate victory points. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages.
- Efficiency or number of resources it takes to generate is an obvious metric but not the only one.
- Points have a defense cost: e.g. 0 for cities and settlemenets, potentially high for buildings.
- Some victory points are more produtive than others: e.g. settlements produce resources, cities give extra building slots.
- Finally, related to efficiency, some victory points have pre-conditions or dependencies that must be met. e.g. University requires an abbey or library.
In summary the criteria we will use to evaluate a victory point are: efficiency, defensability and productivity, dependencies.
Let's go through and evaluate the different ways of making points.
Settlements
Settlemesnts:
- cost: HIGH> require a road so cost 3 + 4 = w7 resources.
- defensibility: HIGH. Settlements cannot be taken away , no defense is needed.
Cities
City/settlement expansions: Buildings
Trade Advantage
Strength Advantage
Region expansions
residences
The question is how do we generate our 15 points. What is the optimal mix of approaches that will allow us to win
Resource Generation
There is obviously a close correlation between resource generation and points, so we also will be looking at different ways to generate resources also.
Guiding Principles
- this is not a friendly game, the best players will hit you hard and fast and you need to do the same. The idea is to never let your opponent have the resources to grow..
- this is a griowth race