biwebof wrote: ↑14 July 2023, 03:10
I'd appreciate if some good players could share their insights.
I think the difference between a good player like me and a great player like Lumin is that I can draft good cards and execute a static gameplan, while a great player can draft synergistic cards and execute a gameplan based on their cards.
For me, Agricola is slightly boring, because my gameplan is pretty much the same every game: build early wood room, fight for growth. Maybe build another wood room, depending on how much wood injection is in the game, and if it looks like fencing will be a problem later.
I've seen Lumin pull off things like early farming, big mandoline, and 2 room lover, and how he makes it work is beyond me.
I think you've hit on a kind of key part of the path from intermediate to expert player. In almost every game there is kind of a default strategy or way to win. The path from becoming an average player to good is to learn how to execute this kind of main strategy. In Agricola, that is learning how to build a wood room, grow, feed efficiently, and when to focus on building and growing more or focus on farming and scoring vp.
The path from a good player to an expert though is figuring out when you can break those rules. When you're able to renovate to clay and then build rooms, when you can ignore the fight for growth and do farming stuff, then grow later, know when to sneak in some other cards, how to leverage certain things, etc.
Getting there isn't easy, and it's a bit paradoxical: to get better, you have to be willing to lose elo and play "worse" in the short run. The way to learn these things is to push your boundaries and comfort zones and try to make things work. You will fail. That is fine. As you play more niche cards and strategies, you'll pick up on what is and what isn't working, and why. These insights are gained, and over time you can begin to apply them and find yourself as a stronger player than you were before. The path then is to not care so much about rating for the short term, and just go experiment. Try to pull off some stuff you haven't before, commit your game to trying to make a certain card work.
I tend to draft high PWR cards, which tend to be those that assist with wood and plowing.
The "draft archetypes" I've loosely identified are as follows:
I don't really jive with the framework you've laid out, but if that's how you like to think about it, that's fine. Overall you've hit upon some of the more obvious combos that the base game in particular spoon feeds players, but combos in Agricola are a lot more nuanced than that. Furthermore you don't even really need to have cards that say or do exactly the same thing for them to be very synergistic. As long as you have cards that help you eke out more efficiency than just taking actions on the board you can put together a strong gameplan, even if you don't build some button on Grain Seeds.
As you correctly identify, most of these combos aren't that good anyhow. They tend to rely on one or two key cards being worthwhile, and then adding on to that can work. But if you try to make your game around Manservant and Groom, or Cattle Feeder and Seed Seller, you'll find yourself losing a lot.
As such, I think you're correct to mostly approach drafts with taking strong flexible cards early, and then build around those. If you happen to start with Assistant Tiller, then by all means take more Day Laborer cards. But generally don't first pick something like Water Worker hoping you're going to find some big day laborer combo that will let you win. In particular you want to try to figure out what the cards in the draft mean for the texture of the game--is there a lot of wood? Plows? Food? etc. Trying to understand what the draft and game will then be rick or poor in helps in what cards and strategies in the game you should be pursuing. Knowing what cards are likely going to come back to you in the draft is also important, as you can sometimes pick a card expecting another to come back and set yourself up for a strong synergy (or block it from someone else, although in 4p games I hesitate to commit too much draft capital to blocking others).
Early Farming:
To farm early without cards, you need to spend an action on farmland, an action on grain seeds, and an action on grain utilization. The "payoff" is that your grain utilization action gets you TWO grain seeds for the price of one action, at the cost of taking up your field until stage 4. This sets you way behind on the growth queue.
I'm not saying that this is what a farming strategy involves, but I'm trying to give a picture of how bad it is without card support. I think the card support has to be very good (young farmer gets you a grain and a sow action) to make up for it. Even with an opener like cultivator/cesspit, I often find myself letting the fields sit idle while I fight for growth. (You could say I use it as a setup for a growth strategy, the trickle of clay and boar solving the food problem growth strats have.)
However, I know that better players than I can and have made sowing strategies work. What are your secrets?
I think early sowing games are relatively rare, and not too worth focusing on. You're correct though that many games you can set up strong payoffs while not caring solely about fighting for growth, and instead you aim to just build your room and grow when it becomes your turn. These strategies particularly pay off in late growth games when getting a head start on farming things is useful when everyone is so grow constrained.
You are correct that to make early sowing strategies work you need quite a bit of support, because otherwise it eats up far too many actions. For that reason, personally, I tend to prefer early fencing/breeding strategies as a way to get ahead on food and farming, since there are more games you can get away with worrying about setting up breeding early.
You also don't even all that often need to breed or sow early to set up your game though. Just getting key strong cards out and find yourself creating efficiencies later can be good. I mostly find myself fighting to grow first when my hand doesn't have anything else to pursue, otherwise it is nice to get some key cards down. (With a caution on not being too care free, you still need to be ready to build and grow pretty quickly, you can't let others grow too fast or you'll lose. For example it is fine to grow 4th if you have compensation, but it's a lot harder to win if you're growing like 5th and someone else got to grow 1st and 3rd overall because you werne't careful).
One of the other main reasons I advice not to worry too much about early sow games is that grain is kind of annoying as a food source, because not only does it take a lot of actions to get in the ground and multiplying, but you then have to find ways to bake it. Needing to take an action to bake sucks, so on top of needing cards that help produce grain/fields/sow actions to make early sow games work, you also need to find extra bake actions. It is hard to find early vegetable cards, but sowing those early can work a little better since they are a little easier to turn in to food (since a hearth also lets you eat animals, so you're not entirely reliant on just the vegetables to feed).
Anyhow, I guess my main advice then is to just keep exploring the game and trying things. Also if you're not aware, players like Lumin do have a youtube and twitch channel where they stream some of their games (I also do). You may find those videos useful learning tools to see what experts are thinking/seeing during a draft and during the game, and how they execute their gameplans.
Agricola is a very hard game to learn how to be an expert, but well worth the effort. If you get great at Agricola, you'll generally become better at most games, because there are so many lessons in Agricola between strategy, tempo, tactics, drafting, predicting/prioritizing, etc.