Babylon

[Lukov]

Babylon is the biggest wildcard there is, followed by Olympia.

Most people prefer B side because it is less prone to hate drafting. Side A forces you into chaining 1 green, which is the easiest strat to block. B side allows for all plays, including a high resource strat most people ignore. However you are forced into a green play if you want to utilize your second stage.

Normally the last two cards of a stage are garbage - they passed through all other players and they did not get them. But your best bet is to be prepared to build them both. I personally best utilize a strategy with lots of resource cards and supplement with green or red depending on the situation.

I cannot pinpoint a decisive coherent strategy because your success is entirely dictated by the last 2 cards you get in a stage. You can (at best) try to take cards suggestively and predict what cards will be left for you in 5 or less players games where a set you have played will come back to you, but that is it.

[ifasoldt]

Babylon night side is by far my favorite wonder in the game. I think my 1st place rate with in is probably 60% at least no matter the player count. I actually think it's overpowered, specifically the first wonder. Prioritize building it round 1 and then you get an extra card for the rest of the game. And it's not just the extra card, it's also the ability to play last every single round which allows you to avoid wasting turns. For example, save a red card as the "extra" card and then if you need to, you can play it to win red cards vs your neighbor. If you don't need it, build a wonder instead and thus save yourself a turn. The science wildcard is also super powerful-- I tend to try to stack a single science token, but there's flexibility.

I routinely score high 60s, low 70s with this wonder.

[bueno09]

In the night side you need to balance a lot of things to be consistent with babylon
Not letting the oponents win military too cheaply is important and dont overpay for Green (you dont need all of them most of time)
Having resources is good and 3rd era is crucial as you must understand the delta of points between Green cards for you vs using other cards and leaving useless Green cards for your opponents

[Ratincage27]

I never play the day side and believe its expected value at the start of the game is always worse than the night side.

Ithink playing Babylon Night well, compared to other wonders, is less dependent on sound strategy (i.e., general principles that are consistent game to game) and more dependent on tactics (i.e., in the moment decisions adapting your plan based on the draw amd what your opponents are doing). So, it's harder to give general advice. But I noticed 3 paterns that are consistent across my SUCESSFUL Babylon games.

- i go light on resource cards and rely heavily on chains
- I dont sacrifice other valuable cards to build the first stage of my wounder in Age I. (Related to first point)
- i always get at least 10 points from a full science set
I avoid the inefficient mid zone of 4-5 cards going to science points. 18 points off 5 science cards is rarely efficient enough. 3 cards on science cards isn't super rare for my succesfull games but, far more often i play 6+ cards going to science

Connecting these three points, the fact that i usally need to play 9 cards on science and red combined, means i cant take many resource cards and accept that it will be difficult to build cards requiring ore and timber unless i have the chain.

This advice is most applicable to three player games.

[losbrugno]

In the night side you need to balance a lot of things to be consistent with babylon
Not letting the oponents win military too cheaply is important and dont overpay for Green (you dont need all of them most of time)
Having resources is good and 3rd era is crucial as you must understand the delta of points between Green cards for you vs using other cards and leaving useless Green cards for your opponents

I think this message correctly sums up what overall a decent Babylon game should look like. I will refer strictly to 3 players format, which is the current arena format. First of all, I never go Babylon a, like never, not even to try it once, I find it worst in every aspect: it's very resource dependant, and double wood can get contested very easily, and this 10 points extra on the wonder usually are less value overall than what you would get with 1st stage b side; also you are forced to play resources so you can get points, like a worse Giza. On the other hand, Babylon b I think it's extremely versatile and arguably top 3 wonders in 3p. You can go full green, full brown-reds, full blue, like there are so many ways to play it out well so I'll just give my 3 best insights:
1. Play grey cards, like even if Hali or ephesos are on the board, play press or bottle or both, you need this resources so badly with Babylon, and also it's potential gold flowing to you age 3;
2. Read the room, it's crucial to punish other for not playing certain points, like nobody is going reds and you hop on it, or Hali is playing the waiting game with you and you just snatch his compass;
3. Don't force your game into yellow stuff, it's often just bad. You need cash to play yellow and Babylon doesn't excel on this (bad lighthouse, bad arena, bad haven) so you will rely a lot on vineyard, instead play browns and let others pay you.

Last call, but that's just my play style, 1 don't always force 1st stage age 1, especially if that would means to pay Hali or ephesos, like I don't wanna give them free cash, it's too much important for age 2, also you rarely have a decent double pick at the end of age 2, and lastly supposing you already played 1 stone age 1, depending on the board you can expect to play uncontested double stone, for acqueduct, walls and that triple stone guild.

[losbrugno]

This is exactly what I was talking about

https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=794264545

Thanks if you'll take your time to watch it

[Ratincage27]

This is exactly what I was talking about

https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=794264545

Thanks if you'll take your time to watch it

This game was very well played. You capitalized each time your opponent made a mistake and the choice with 5 cards in R-III to bury the green guild was brilliant. Stray thoughts with unlimited time to think through the choices (you're a slightly better player than me):

• The way you played is an example of why it's sometimes a good idea to violate your first guideline, "take grey cards even if. . ." You passed on a grey card three times in Round I and were correct to do so (in my assessment)
• Good room read with your 2nd selected card of R-I to see that Hali didn't seem to be going for greens (your 2nd guideline) and that you should pivot to doing so
• Also in line with your second guildine, for your 5th selected card of R-I you adjusted to Rhodes passing on reds a couple times by taking a red. As it turned out with the shuffle, this paid off well in Round 3 in forcing Rhodes to take a military they did not want to need but I slightly lean against the adjustment to some redworking out the best on average, as you were no longer is a good position to get efficient military points given Hali going aggresive towards red and Rhodes almost always needing to play red to win
• Great example of your third guidline in the last choice of R-1 to discard for gold rather than taking the East Trading Post
• However with your last choice of R-II, I don't think you needed to covet gold anymore and I lean toward building the 2nd stage of your wonder rather than discarding for 3 gold. . .I'd feel locked-in to a heavy green strategy at this point
• In summary, while your guidlines served you well overal, I think you adhearded to your 2nd and 3rd guidline a bit too tightly (i.e., could have been more flixible) and correctly, I think, violated guidline 1 rather substantially. This furthers my belief that ideal play of Babylon requires frequent tactical deviations from general strategy and pre-game strategy is less useful for Babylon (as opposed to good Babylon in-game tactics) than other wonders.

[swibat]

In the night side you need to balance a lot of things to be consistent with babylon
Not letting the oponents win military too cheaply is important and dont overpay for Green (you dont need all of them most of time)
Having resources is good and 3rd era is crucial as you must understand the delta of points between Green cards for you vs using other cards and leaving useless Green cards for your opponents

I think this message correctly sums up what overall a decent Babylon game should look like. I will refer strictly to 3 players format, which is the current arena format. First of all, I never go Babylon a, like never, not even to try it once, I find it worst in every aspect: it's very resource dependant, and double wood can get contested very easily, and this 10 points extra on the wonder usually are less value overall than what you would get with 1st stage b side; also you are forced to play resources so you can get points, like a worse Giza. On the other hand, Babylon b I think it's extremely versatile and arguably top 3 wonders in 3p. You can go full green, full brown-reds, full blue, like there are so many ways to play it out well so I'll just give my 3 best insights:
1. Play grey cards, like even if Hali or ephesos are on the board, play press or bottle or both, you need this resources so badly with Babylon, and also it's potential gold flowing to you age 3;
2. Read the room, it's crucial to punish other for not playing certain points, like nobody is going reds and you hop on it, or Hali is playing the waiting game with you and you just snatch his compass;
3. Don't force your game into yellow stuff, it's often just bad. You need cash to play yellow and Babylon doesn't excel on this (bad lighthouse, bad arena, bad haven) so you will rely a lot on vineyard, instead play browns and let others pay you.

Last call, but that's just my play style, 1 don't always force 1st stage age 1, especially if that would means to pay Hali or ephesos, like I don't wanna give them free cash, it's too much important for age 2, also you rarely have a decent double pick at the end of age 2, and lastly supposing you already played 1 stone age 1, depending on the board you can expect to play uncontested double stone, for acqueduct, walls and that triple stone guild.

Babylon day side has its moments, they are just rare. Sometimes you can just take advantage of the brown war around it. Sometimes their position is ideal to steal one symbol to another green player, especially the tablet, sometimes the compass, especially against Halicarnassos. With all due respect to your very high level, I feel like your advice is very solid, but kind of rigid. I especially disagree with the fact that baby night's power is always better than 10 straight points. It depends! Against good opponents, the 2 or 3 extra cards are just bad a lot of the times. Against age II hide-happy wonders like Olympia (who is also a good trading opportunity for baby day with the starting clay), you are fragile.

I personally like creative gameplay, especially with unlucky starting hands. Here is a very strange, very unusual baby day win I had some months ago, something I think would not have been possible against such opponents with the night side :

https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=765256808

Of course, it's not something that can be easily reproduced. Like I said, Baby day moments are rare.

Here is an old video from wonderful plays (a channel I can't recommand enough, however now inactive)

https://youtu.be/lLTdpuUmexY?si=99TGgk-zmnsp0ljE

And we could talk about many other strategies.

[losbrugno]

This is exactly what I was talking about

https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=794264545

Thanks if you'll take your time to watch it

This game was very well played. You capitalized each time your opponent made a mistake and the choice with 5 cards in R-III to bury the green guild was brilliant. Stray thoughts with unlimited time to think through the choices (you're a slightly better player than me):

• The way you played is an example of why it's sometimes a good idea to violate your first guideline, "take grey cards even if. . ." You passed on a grey card three times in Round I and were correct to do so (in my assessment)
• Good room read with your 2nd selected card of R-I to see that Hali didn't seem to be going for greens (your 2nd guideline) and that you should pivot to doing so
• Also in line with your second guildine, for your 5th selected card of R-I you adjusted to Rhodes passing on reds a couple times by taking a red. As it turned out with the shuffle, this paid off well in Round 3 in forcing Rhodes to take a military they did not want to need but I slightly lean against the adjustment to some redworking out the best on average, as you were no longer is a good position to get efficient military points given Hali going aggresive towards red and Rhodes almost always needing to play red to win
• Great example of your third guidline in the last choice of R-1 to discard for gold rather than taking the East Trading Post
• However with your last choice of R-II, I don't think you needed to covet gold anymore and I lean toward building the 2nd stage of your wonder rather than discarding for 3 gold. . .I'd feel locked-in to a heavy green strategy at this point
• In summary, while your guidlines served you well overal, I think you adhearded to your 2nd and 3rd guidline a bit too tightly (i.e., could have been more flixible) and correctly, I think, violated guidline 1 rather substantially. This furthers my belief that ideal play of Babylon requires frequent tactical deviations from general strategy and pre-game strategy is less useful for Babylon (as opposed to good Babylon in-game tactics) than other wonders.

Let me just quickly clarify some of your reads from my perspective:

I slightly lean against the adjustment to some redworking out the best on average, as you were no longer is a good position to get efficient military points given Hali going aggresive towards red and Rhodes almost always needing to play red to win

I was not planning to go heavy reds, but here you need to consider a couple of things like rhodos playing a side, it's so easy to punish it for neglecting to play red age 1 so that's why i did it, also you want to play red there not because you wanna win reds, but because other must be aware that if they play the hiding green game with you, they are passing you reds, and with so you just created yourself an emergency exit (speaking about flexibility)

However with your last choice of R-II, I don't think you needed to covet gold anymore and I lean toward building the 2nd stage of your wonder rather than discarding for 3 gold. . .I'd feel locked-in to a heavy green strategy at this point

You absolutely need cash there, with this play you have the cash to pay double ore for an hypothetical scientist guild, which to me would mean to simply just win the game.
Also, if I build stage there, I can't hide philosophers anymore, so that's why I almost never build stages so aggressively.

The way you played is an example of why it's sometimes a good idea to violate your first guideline, "take grey cards even if. . ." You passed on a grey card three times in Round I and were correct to do so

Lastly, after me picking press age 1 and rhodos picking bottle, it was almost a guaranteed free grey pick age 2 because nobody was interested anymore in picking grey resources, and that's exactly what happened when I played forum, but in that situation it was better than cloth in my opinion, just for a more consistent age 3.

[RookieGamer29]

Answering a bit late but Babylon is less efficient for science than allikarnas and alexandria who provides 2 of the 3 science ressources.
so it's much more flexible than people think I guess, you can adapt to the opponents strategies and in most cases you dont have to build all the stages.