Settlers of Catan--contrarian play
Advice for intermediate Settlers of Catan players continues.
Like so many other games, Catan rewards contrarian play, that is, it provides disproportionate rewards for adopting different strategies and tactics from other players.
Here’s the basic idea. Everything you can choose to spend your resources on is worth victory points, in some fashion. Villages: 1 point. Cities: 1 point (that is, one more point than you already have for the village it replaces). Roads don’t just allow you to spread to build villages at new sites; they may earn you the longest road card—2 points for this distinction. Development cards: just under 20% provide a victory point directly; half contribute to amassing the largest army—2 points for that distinction. Since everything you buy may contribute to victory, the question isn’t whether you want these things. You want them all. The question is which provides the best cost-to-benefit ratio. And the cost for a given benefit often rises when your opponents pursue it.
There is no simple, fixed estimate of costs. They vary from game to game, and from turn to turn, according to the board layout, which resources you have on hand, which ones you can expect to get soon, and how much you’ll have to pay to get what you cannot collect yourself.
Two sources of points—the longest road and largest army—depend heavily on your fellow players’ behavior. If your opponents are slow to build roads, you can win the longest road, and the 2 points that go with it, for an investment of ten resources. Six, if you employ the road segments you have at the start of the game. Cheap. If your opponents never buy a card, the largest army is yours with only three knights, an investment possibly as low as six resources (nine for the cards, minus the three you steal in playing them), depending on what you draw. Also cheap. On the other extreme, if all your opponents buy cards whenever possible, you may have to amass six, seven, or even more knights. That’s a huge price to pay for 2 points, especially when you can’t count on keeping them as armies continue to grow. You’ll profit far more by ignoring knights entirely (and development cards generally) and investing elsewhere.
For both road and army, you profit most at either extreme. The situation you do not want to be in is one where you’re locked in a sort of bidding war for one of these bonuses with a single other player, shoveling more and more resources into hanging onto (or recovering) the bonus while the two players who aren’t involved cheerfully invest elsewhere. A bidding war is a suicide pact, disastrous for the loser, who gets nothing at all for his investment, but generally pretty bad for the winner, as well. This creates a game of “chicken”: at any given moment, the effort of getting just a little bit ahead is worth the cost, but in the long run, not worth it at all. If you’re smart, you’ll identify such a hazard early, and leave it alone. If your opponents are smart, you might be able to turn that hazard to your advantage. Buy a card or two early, or make an early move towards linking up a long road, and, if you can back up the threat with enough resource income to stay in a race, your rivals will probably avoid challenging you.
Probably. Don’t overestimate the folly of gamers, or the often counterintuitive behavior of a game of chicken. The mathematics of games theory compels players to enter suicide pacts from time to time, and you don’t want to be one of them.
A similar dilemma underlies the race for territory. Often, two or even three players will have access to a desirable location, or to a neighboring intersection which would render it off-limits. Whoever gets there first gets the prize; anyone who tries but fails wastes the resources spent toward it. Occasionally, two players will lay roads to the same intersection, and, because the hexagonal tiles allow only three roads to an intersection, only one of those players will be able to build a road exiting to fertile territory. The other wastes the resources spent on entering what has become a dead end. Again, you will want to identify such situations early, and either commit quickly and decisively, or not at all.
This is yet another reason why a working plan for victory, and ideally an estimate of your opponent’s plan as well, is important: it can help you decide whether to enter a game of chicken. If you really need the space, or the road card, or the knight card, to reach 10 points, you really have no choice, and should grab the bull by the horns. If your opponent really needs the space and you don’t, then he really has no choice, and you may as well back down, because he isn’t going to.