Love this game, but man do I suck. Any advice?

[IllusionKnight]

Usually get high 100's-very low 200's in games. I don't think I'm particularly good at this game nor do I really know the best strats especially ion comparison to other engine building games such as Terraforming Mars: Ares Expedition.

As a couple of examples, is it good to focus on rows/columns of the same plant type (including potential future cards) to reap benefits, particularly if you don't know if you will get the cards that benefit that strat.

How important is it to focus your strategy on your starting three cards? Similarly is it the best strat to try and rush/hyper-focus on all 4 objectives?

Is it also better to focus on one-colour compared to your opponent (blue; red; yellow) and get the most benefits from picking that type or going relatively equal on all three main colours?

Similarly is getting soil always the best thing early game?

Thanks

[turtler7]

Focus on the 4 objectives and finishing your grid first. The points from the objective board is very efficient.

Focus on playing cards as often as possible. Not only do most objectives simply require a volume of cards played making fast cheap cards easier to hit them, but low cost cards have the highest VP/cost ratio they just take up the action opportunity as their "balancing" feature.

Green benefits are the most powerful since they will go off often and reliably. All the other colors are conditionally great. I often try to match the non-green color an opponent prefers since they will still pick it fairly often and I can feed off them rather than pick my own best color. I want to pick green as my personal action as often as possible to get the card volume advantage, thus the goal advantage, and the efficiency advantage.

There are a set of brown cards that cost 9 and have 10 VP on them with an adjacency/diagonal condition that "gain 5 VP per X type in the right place."
I suspect these might be a mistake having a 10 VP flat on them as your expected value for their adjacency condition is 10 even played fairly late with minimal opportunity to finish it out. But 30 points potential for 9 cost and with 20 as the expected minimum value(especially since you just wont play it if you think it will be less), these become the most important cards in the game not to throw away if you get an opportunity to incorporate them into your tableau.

[Meeplelowda]

I just look at the pretty pictures and expect to get dunked on. I still enjoy it even when I completely focus on the wrong goals and end up way behind. I also have this ridiculous habit of reversing the "in this row" goals and placing things in columns instead.

I do wish it weren't simply a Zerg rush to complete your tableau. It would be nice if you could, for example, build a sprout engine to compete with that as an alternate strategy. It's nice when a game truly has different paths to victory.

[holographic hippo]

I do wish you could create an engine that has a little more potency as most times it's just incremental diverse gains. There should be a way to hit a critical mass of some kind of synergy. So far I can't say I've ever felt like I've achieved anything like that, and don't know if it's even possible.

The real issue is the race to achieve (most) the Fauna objectives forces planting to be the right decision basically any time you are able. I've been thinking that the issue could be improved by removing some of the Fauna objectives, maybe that way games can be a little more open and experimental.

2 Fauna + 2 shared Ecosystem + 1 personal Ecosystem

or

2 Fauna + 2 shared Ecosystem + 2 personal Ecosystem

I have the physical game but have yet to play it so I am tempted to test it that way unless there is are custom rules options on BGA.

[IllusionKnight]

Focus on the 4 objectives and finishing your grid first. The points from the objective board is very efficient.

Focus on playing cards as often as possible. Not only do most objectives simply require a volume of cards played making fast cheap cards easier to hit them, but low cost cards have the highest VP/cost ratio they just take up the action opportunity as their "balancing" feature.

Green benefits are the most powerful since they will go off often and reliably. All the other colors are conditionally great. I often try to match the non-green color an opponent prefers since they will still pick it fairly often and I can feed off them rather than pick my own best color. I want to pick green as my personal action as often as possible to get the card volume advantage, thus the goal advantage, and the efficiency advantage.

There are a set of brown cards that cost 9 and have 10 VP on them with an adjacency/diagonal condition that "gain 5 VP per X type in the right place."
I suspect these might be a mistake having a 10 VP flat on them as your expected value for their adjacency condition is 10 even played fairly late with minimal opportunity to finish it out. But 30 points potential for 9 cost and with 20 as the expected minimum value(especially since you just wont play it if you think it will be less), these become the most important cards in the game not to throw away if you get an opportunity to incorporate them into your tableau.

I didn't think about those brown cards you mentioned, matching up colours with your oppo's makes a lot of sense. I should have thought about that. I was in the Space Base zone where it's best to go different type of cards than your oppo. Thanks 4 tips.

Btw do the 4 types of fauna often match certain colours (such as blue or red) or biomes? The only thing I noticed was that mushrooms (or was it bushes) often had ice type but it may have just been a coincidence.