Solo play - Master Gardener unfair advantage?

[damadfish]

Played quite a few solo games, the master gardener / bot will frequently receive a flower segment worth 5 flowers (eg 5 purple flowers). I've never seen this available to players, we get up to 3 flowers on a segment.

Is this supposed to happen? I've lost many objective cards as i've seen that the bot has say a total of 5, so cannot reach the objective of 10 - so i'll prioritise a different play and then suddenly the bot claims the objective because they have one of these 5 flower segments

[cigma]

Is this supposed to happen?

How comes you doubt this?

To be more precise, the Master Gardener is favoured not only by getting some 5 flower spots, but also by randomly getting workers, houses, mills and coins. If you want, you may call this unfair. But is it really? Given that the Master Gardener is playing "blindly", not able to adapt to the awards available and your strategy, they have to be stronger as you in some ways.

But unfair or not, for me it's more interesting to ask: Does the game provide a satisfying solo mode? And for me, it does. After all, they are the Master, so they are supposed to be strong! I like the challenge, and beating the Master Gardener from time to time just feels great

[Doctor Neo Cortex]

Is this supposed to happen?

Well, yeah. The automa has such cards in his stock, and the players can't get such tiles.

It's an other discussion if is it unfair or not. The BGA stats from the last 1000 games shows that in solo games the automa finishes 223.82 points in avarage. The player avarage score (in all game modes) from the last 1000 games is 175.9 points. Of course, we must note that because of the different objectives in each game, this statistic is noisy.
However, it can be seen that the automata gives such a challange for most of the players, and yes, sometimes it can be unlucky and impossible to collect an objective before him. I couldn't win against him yet either, and believe me, I tried.

At the end of the day, for me the only thing that matters that the game is fun, I prefere it with real players, but the solo mode is fun too. If the solo mode would be too easy then that would be the problem. In my oppinion it's fair as it is.

- Developer

[damadfish]

Is this supposed to happen?

How comes you doubt this?

I've never played or seen the physical game, there is nothing in the solo rules about the master gardener receiving different tiles, and the game is in beta so they are expecting bugs.

I don't think its an unreasonable thing to query bearing all that in mind?

[Doctor Neo Cortex]

I've never played or seen the physical game, there is nothing in the solo rules about the master gardener receiving different tiles, and the game is in beta so they are expecting bugs.

Well, that's true and I see your point, but as a developer I wouldn't add solo cards if they weren't part of the game already. I would have to remove them anyway. So I can confirm that the cards appearing during solo mode are all part of the physical game as well.