Devine Design wrote: ↑13 January 2024, 15:20
What a great opportunity. Thank you for your post. As for my first questions:
What were the most important factors in your case for reaching this skill level? I.e. watching replays, crunching numbers, just plain lots of games gaining experience, perhaps other reasons.
How do you find a balance in finding what's good to do for you and blocking the opponent from doing what's good for him?
0. What a great opportunity. - Sure, you are welcome
1. most important factors in my learning - I think it might have been these: a) finding out my preferred settings (all extensions); b) choosing the right strategy for those settings (go for meeples primarily, exchange skill secondarily + starvation); c) having strong mathematical thinking, especially probability and expected value concepts were always very intuitive for me (but for the needs of this game, it should quite easy to learn and "memorize" if you don't "count it"); d) finding out some "half-algorithm-half-intuition" how to estimate the expected value of each option on the board (which is very dependent on the stage of the game and which is quite hard to get - probably still iterating and doing some changes on the intuitive level); e) losing some games badly and learning from those; f) haven't watched many replays - but once I was among the best players, I analyzed every lose - not many learnings in the past few hundred games, but maybe: a) that the 10th meeple isn't that necessary to always go for it; b) use more often the "place all 7 places on the mammoth resource" not giving the opponent any chance for the strong reward and even not giving him the weaker reward; c) learning that fewer resources in the pool are sufficient to not get resource-controlled (see below) than what I used to think; d) go more often for paying extra (3 resources) on the 5th card for an additional extra card than I used to... Plus that all the opponents who have beat me in the last few hundred games played very, very similarly than I play and/or had extreme levels of luck.
2. balance in finding what's good for me and blocking opponent - a) with all the extensions, it's usually "what's good for me is good for opponent" - especially if the opponent is strong (which means using the same strategy as me of building many meeples quickly + starving them); b) resource control - you usually want to place meeples on good cards or good buildings before placing them to produce resources like wood and others. And by control I mean risking you (or the opponent) won't have how to pay for those cards or building (or the need to pay with expensive resources like gold instead of the cheap resources like wood) - To risk I might get controlled by the opponent, the possible reward needs to be very high; and if the opponent is too greedy, I often go for control myself. The beauty here is that once you start resource-controlling your opponent like this (e.g. she ends her turn with 0 resources), you can often keep this control for several rounds; c) I find it funny how some opponents place their meeple on a "green card" which they don't have the "pair card" yet even when it's more expensive than other green card which they already have the "pair card" and the two green cards have the same benefit or the more expensive one has weaker benefit. Considering I play always 2-player games and that usually the games end up on lack of cards, not lack of buildings, then all the green cards (not counting their extra benefits) give a little below 9 points expected value. Like specific example - the difference between 1+1 and 8^2+8^2 (64+64-2 = 126) is the same as 2^2+0 and 9^2+7^2 (81+49-4 = 126).
Hope this helps
