Ceaseless wrote: ↑01 June 2025, 15:54
From your posts, I suspect you have a different train of thought. You look at your birds and determine that good birds do good things and bad birds don't. So you keep the good birds and get rid of the bad birds. Your defintion of a good bird vs bad bird may differ a bit from mine, but the real divide isn't about where we rank the individual bird.
you are mostly correct, and this stems from several factors:
1) a LOT of wingspan plays with my family or friends, with expansions, where getting out of the early game is less difficult, and it's somewhat less important to keep marginal birds in the starting hand.
2) A lot of games played on the app with BOT players to fill the non-human player spots, (again, with expansions), which leads me to have a lot of "favorite" and "hated" birds.
Generally speaking, I prefer to play high value birds whenever I can and avoid playing birds that I deem lousy or overpriced.
But, above all, I want to play every game optimally with the information I have, and to win as much as possible, so, I am trying to adjust.
To be clear, I agree with your strategy of "2 in the forest one in the wetland, worry about the grassland later". In my ideal game, I have 2 in the forest and 2 in the wetland before I have anything in the grassland. I want to avoid having to pay a resource to draw 2 cards or gain 2 food, as quickly as possible.
So, I wouldn't say there is actually any real divide. I am just a bit picky about my second forest bird. I'm still early in my Wingspan path here. I have played 22 games. Going forward, maybe my style of play will fizzle, or maybe it will catapult me to a 500+ rating. Who knows? Thus far, I am 6-1 against strong players. It's a small sample size. I don't even know whether I will make it to 50 plays. This game, without expansions, is pretty low on my list in terms of "fun". I just wanted to see whether I could get to 300 Elo, and once I did and I was at 310, I figured, "Well, I can play a game with the filter set to strong or above, and even if I lose I'll still be at 300." I'm still getting accustomed to which birds I'll never see because they are EE birds. We got the EE expansion almost immediately after the base game, so to me, I think of EE + base as the "base game", just as most Terraforming Mars players consider the "base game" to include the corporate era deck. I think this game without any of the expansions is actually rather tedious. If someone told me with 100% certainty that we will never get any expansions here, I would probably stop playing altogether. But in the small hopes of getting expansions, I want to practice playing against strong players.
For what it's worth, I spent a lot of time thinking about whether to keep that Sparrow in my starting hand. At least 10 minutes. Maybe more.
It came down to,
"I think I can draw a good second bird in the forest, and I don't know whether I'll get a good grassland bird, and I see a specific sequence that allows me to get these 3 birds (Sparrow, Tern, and the forest bird) into play without unreasonable effort, so, I'll do it."
I may have made the wrong choices. I don't know. I am inclined, generally speaking, to take very seriously the advice of players with a high rating and a lot of games played, so please know that everything you say, I will examine very carefully.
