EDIT : Some parts of this first post is somewhat outdated; I don't completely agree with everything. Still kind of relevant if you are discovering this expansion, though. It was the beginning of my thought process, so I decided to not modify it.
Hi there, I'm a huge fan of the 7w collection (I have all, including "duel for middle earth") and I'm pretty enthousiastic about the recent Edifice add-on here. I didn't find any real strategical discussion about it yet, so I figured why not launch it myself ! To all solid/decent players (like me) of even top tier players (not me at all) : I would be very grateful of finding your ideas here. I really miss the Wonderful Plays videos from youtube. For now, I will make some loose commentaries out of my short experience at all player counts.
Important caveat : none of what I right below is a certainty to me yet, and I would be glad to be proven wrong. We need meta ! For the record, I won't compare with other expansions (hot take, to me Edifice is the best of all, feel free to insult me) or with Great Projects from old Babel (which I don't know enough about). Feel free to do so, though. Without further ado, let's start ! I hope my english skills are not too bad, please forgive me if you find me painful to read.
- All day sides are now reinforced becauses of their cheap costs and solid benchmarks (1 stage per age generally). Most notable examples are Rhodes and Babylone (and Rome but you reverse day/night, if Leaders is one day on the website), because 2 stages only is a serious handicap now. There are, of course, exceptions. Gizah night ? Maybe but it's so expensive. The possibility to build a stage without participating, and still participate in all ages, might be compensated by the high cost. I really don't know.
- Carthage is fun, flexible, and not too strong. Night side feels riskier and unstable, but can be very strong, especially with neighbors like Rhodes or Ephesos, with a very easy and competitive first stage. I love it, but for now I struggle with it. Need to figure out a lot of things. Day side is basically choosing between a weak Ephesos and a weak Rhodes, with some weak Gizah characteristics. Still more solid with the projects, though. There is also a lot to be said about its addition in the base game, as in the current arena setting, but I still need training.
- Ur is very weird. Day side is interesting, and also pretty flexible. The stone cost is, as always, a down side for early game, but the rest is reasonable and compatible with both red (ore and wood early on) and green (strong papyrus) strategies. The middle stage can be aggressive (bet on a future success), defensive (protection against a likely failure) or solid (past/likely/garanted success with a useful reward). The choice between the tokens can actually be challenging. A good side overall. Night side, absolute trash. It has the unique property of doing LITTERALY NOTHING in some scenarios (if you're too late basically). Way too vulnerable to other player's choices, especially at 4 players (more on that later). If you only build it for protection against penalties, it still feels sooooooo weak for the cost. Even below the worst Olympia night possible. However, even in the best case scenario where everyone is interested in all the projects, I don't know how you can justify trading 10 straight points for 2 additionnal projects rewards in most situations. At home, I advise a solid boost with at least 2pts/1pt like Halicarnassos (which would still be strong without them btw, please just give your points to Ur, mr Hali). Online, if you join a game with the choice (and you should hope so in every case), just take day, period. If not and you have night, just ragequit or do some kingslaying, I know people do that sometimes. More reasonably, The best I can think of is to just not build the wonder AT ALL (always an option) and try to be red/blue, maybe with some green splash, because wood is one of the best starting ressources for all that. You have at least wood. Not much (and garanted exclusion or penalty for the projects with this "strategy"), but not nothing.
- Money changes a lot, here, dynamically. Its value is most of the time increased because some very important projects are so expensive. Discarding cards is way more often a good choice, especially when the opportunity cost is the lowest : early age 1. For the same reason, dual browns are a bit weakened (if you take 2, or even 3 at 6p, you are pretty much out of some age 1 projects, which is not a big deal, sometimes, but still, be careful) and tavern is now a top tier card (at 5/6 players, it's very accessible : there are 2 of these little heroes !). With the "points for ressource cards" projects, if you are not interested, tavern is an absolute protection : you can loose THAT yellow card without actually loosing anything ! Very fun.
- Science is severely weakened, which is a very good news for beginners/average players. There are close to no green projects (agora with the scientists guild being the only thing that comes to mind) and it's the only colour with that problem (for good reasons though : projects are designed to benefit almost everyone, when generally only 1 or 2 players benefit from science). Plus, when you rush for science, you often starve for gold. If you're not Ephesos/Rhodes/Carthage with their extra gold or Hali with their brutal incentive to throw some good cards, a pure green strat without a tavern backup is even riskier than before. You won't be paid for your greys until age 3, remember.
- Projects are not perfectly balanced, to say the least. It's not bad news because everyone is in the same boat. I won't make any tier list here (partly because I can't remember the english names for them, partly from lack of xp, partly because collective rewards feel hard to classify, doing different things to different situations) but there are only 5 for each age, so it's not too demanding to analyse and there is a lot to discover. I'll say one thing though : be very mindful before deciding to participate. Sometimes it is necessary (at least for protection, for instance if your only blue is aqueduct then the blue penalty from age 2 is worse than the default one, and there are more subtle examples probably), sometimes it's useless or even harmful. Ask yourself if you can take the penalty (even the -2 from age 1 is sometimes very acceptable) and more importantly to whom the reward is best. Might be a very good move to let wasteful opponents loose their money in the void and take the hit (in which case you should of course prepare for it). Funny side effect : lots of potential for 3p games with low scores for everyone. I find it amusing.
Okay, now let's get a bit mathematical. Let's talk about player counts.
Let us define ER, the "exclusion ratio". If P is the number of players and T the amount of tokens, then ER := 100*(P-T)/T (bear with me here, I'm getting somewhere). Assuming everyone wants to and can participate, but no one does it at the same turn (absurd at 7p but who cares about 7p right), which is restrictive but not rare in principle, then ER mesures the amount of excluded people (hence the name) compared to the amount of rewarded players. Before T was designed, theoretically, you could fall to 0% with as many tokens as players, and 100% (resp. more) with T being half of P (resp. less than half). Both are of course not desirable : projects should in theory benefit the quick majority and exclude the slow minority. To me the best ratio is 50% (One third of the players excluded from a successful and not simultaneous build). The devs seem to agree with me because they kept ER the closest possible to 50% at every player count (feel free to check my math here).
I'll make the bold (but justified) hypothesis that ER is a good, if not the best, estimation of the probability of success of any given project (assuming it is of exactly average quality). After all, the extreme cases of coherent with that : ER=0% means that everyone has to participate, which is extremely demanding with economy being very tight in the game, therefore with almost impossible success, and ER=100% means than only half has to participate, which is very quick and easy to achieve. As for ER=50%, well it's ideal : let's say 1/3 participates, 1/3 doesn't and 1/3 is just not sure when the age begins (pretty realistic imo), then the probability EQUALS 50% (depending on the undetermined decision), which equals ER when T=(2/3)*P. Unfortunately, for obvious arithmetical reasons, it was not possible to keep ER at exactly 50% every time. Let's see the detail :
- P=3 -> T=2 -> ER=50%
- P=4 -> T=3 -> ER=33.33% (lowest)
- P=5 -> T=3 -> ER=66.67% (highest)
- P=6 -> T=4 -> ER=50%
- P=7 -> T=5 -> ER=40%
You see where I'm going now, right ? I think that 3p and 6p are THE way to go with this expansion, at least if you want fair and competitive games. For the same reasons than in the base game, 3p is better than 6p (for anyone wondering, my pseudo means "Seven Wonders Is Best At Three"), but calm down, let's agree to disagree here : I know some people really dislike the 3p setup (and there are good reasons, like a tiny bit too much hatedraft possibilities sometimes). In that case, go with 6p (and struggle with me while you're looking for people on the website). I also like it. Very skilled friendly, with much less hate.
The problem with other player counts is that, despite devs effort, the project mechanism is broken by ER not equal to 50%.
- 4p ? Garbage. Projects fail to often, there is nothing you can do about it, and if the punishment (which is either the penalty if you don't participate OR the gold cost of participating) happens to be especially harmful to you at any given time, you're sunk. This makes the game very random and frustrating.
- 5p ? Less garbage but still chaotic. Projects now suceed too often. Their fate is very rarely at stake. This enables total ignorance (rebellion against the projects if you will) as a valid strategy, which makes the expansion look stupid. For the same reasons as Leaders/Cities, though, it can still be fun though, with safe combos possibilities. I thus recommend it in real life casual games, but not in a competitive environment.
- 7p ? The game is broken as a whole because economy distribution is scarce (no added browns/greys from 6p to 7p, remember) and unfair (there's a whole hand you will never see, and total strategic randomness with the ones you will see). Edifice aggravates that with a fairly low chance of success for any project. Don't play that. In fact, at home, burn your "7+" cards. Or pin them on your wall. Of course, I'm exaggerating. But you get my point. I actually had a good time with friends at 7p, but I wasn't trying to win (which doesn't avoid you to win, funnily enough).
So if you like 7w and if you like strategic, timing sensitive, stressful games, if you like to do some educated guesses, then play 7w Edifice, especially at 3p, and also a bit of 6p for variety. It's better than you think, trust me. Except Ur night. That one is unacceptable. Shame on Ur night.
Thank you for reading that long post ! Looking forward to read your answers. Get mad at me, send me your devastating Ur night victories. I want them. Yummy !
Hi there, I'm a huge fan of the 7w collection (I have all, including "duel for middle earth") and I'm pretty enthousiastic about the recent Edifice add-on here. I didn't find any real strategical discussion about it yet, so I figured why not launch it myself ! To all solid/decent players (like me) of even top tier players (not me at all) : I would be very grateful of finding your ideas here. I really miss the Wonderful Plays videos from youtube. For now, I will make some loose commentaries out of my short experience at all player counts.
Important caveat : none of what I right below is a certainty to me yet, and I would be glad to be proven wrong. We need meta ! For the record, I won't compare with other expansions (hot take, to me Edifice is the best of all, feel free to insult me) or with Great Projects from old Babel (which I don't know enough about). Feel free to do so, though. Without further ado, let's start ! I hope my english skills are not too bad, please forgive me if you find me painful to read.
- All day sides are now reinforced becauses of their cheap costs and solid benchmarks (1 stage per age generally). Most notable examples are Rhodes and Babylone (and Rome but you reverse day/night, if Leaders is one day on the website), because 2 stages only is a serious handicap now. There are, of course, exceptions. Gizah night ? Maybe but it's so expensive. The possibility to build a stage without participating, and still participate in all ages, might be compensated by the high cost. I really don't know.
- Carthage is fun, flexible, and not too strong. Night side feels riskier and unstable, but can be very strong, especially with neighbors like Rhodes or Ephesos, with a very easy and competitive first stage. I love it, but for now I struggle with it. Need to figure out a lot of things. Day side is basically choosing between a weak Ephesos and a weak Rhodes, with some weak Gizah characteristics. Still more solid with the projects, though. There is also a lot to be said about its addition in the base game, as in the current arena setting, but I still need training.
- Ur is very weird. Day side is interesting, and also pretty flexible. The stone cost is, as always, a down side for early game, but the rest is reasonable and compatible with both red (ore and wood early on) and green (strong papyrus) strategies. The middle stage can be aggressive (bet on a future success), defensive (protection against a likely failure) or solid (past/likely/garanted success with a useful reward). The choice between the tokens can actually be challenging. A good side overall. Night side, absolute trash. It has the unique property of doing LITTERALY NOTHING in some scenarios (if you're too late basically). Way too vulnerable to other player's choices, especially at 4 players (more on that later). If you only build it for protection against penalties, it still feels sooooooo weak for the cost. Even below the worst Olympia night possible. However, even in the best case scenario where everyone is interested in all the projects, I don't know how you can justify trading 10 straight points for 2 additionnal projects rewards in most situations. At home, I advise a solid boost with at least 2pts/1pt like Halicarnassos (which would still be strong without them btw, please just give your points to Ur, mr Hali). Online, if you join a game with the choice (and you should hope so in every case), just take day, period. If not and you have night, just ragequit or do some kingslaying, I know people do that sometimes. More reasonably, The best I can think of is to just not build the wonder AT ALL (always an option) and try to be red/blue, maybe with some green splash, because wood is one of the best starting ressources for all that. You have at least wood. Not much (and garanted exclusion or penalty for the projects with this "strategy"), but not nothing.
- Money changes a lot, here, dynamically. Its value is most of the time increased because some very important projects are so expensive. Discarding cards is way more often a good choice, especially when the opportunity cost is the lowest : early age 1. For the same reason, dual browns are a bit weakened (if you take 2, or even 3 at 6p, you are pretty much out of some age 1 projects, which is not a big deal, sometimes, but still, be careful) and tavern is now a top tier card (at 5/6 players, it's very accessible : there are 2 of these little heroes !). With the "points for ressource cards" projects, if you are not interested, tavern is an absolute protection : you can loose THAT yellow card without actually loosing anything ! Very fun.
- Science is severely weakened, which is a very good news for beginners/average players. There are close to no green projects (agora with the scientists guild being the only thing that comes to mind) and it's the only colour with that problem (for good reasons though : projects are designed to benefit almost everyone, when generally only 1 or 2 players benefit from science). Plus, when you rush for science, you often starve for gold. If you're not Ephesos/Rhodes/Carthage with their extra gold or Hali with their brutal incentive to throw some good cards, a pure green strat without a tavern backup is even riskier than before. You won't be paid for your greys until age 3, remember.
- Projects are not perfectly balanced, to say the least. It's not bad news because everyone is in the same boat. I won't make any tier list here (partly because I can't remember the english names for them, partly from lack of xp, partly because collective rewards feel hard to classify, doing different things to different situations) but there are only 5 for each age, so it's not too demanding to analyse and there is a lot to discover. I'll say one thing though : be very mindful before deciding to participate. Sometimes it is necessary (at least for protection, for instance if your only blue is aqueduct then the blue penalty from age 2 is worse than the default one, and there are more subtle examples probably), sometimes it's useless or even harmful. Ask yourself if you can take the penalty (even the -2 from age 1 is sometimes very acceptable) and more importantly to whom the reward is best. Might be a very good move to let wasteful opponents loose their money in the void and take the hit (in which case you should of course prepare for it). Funny side effect : lots of potential for 3p games with low scores for everyone. I find it amusing.
Okay, now let's get a bit mathematical. Let's talk about player counts.
Let us define ER, the "exclusion ratio". If P is the number of players and T the amount of tokens, then ER := 100*(P-T)/T (bear with me here, I'm getting somewhere). Assuming everyone wants to and can participate, but no one does it at the same turn (absurd at 7p but who cares about 7p right), which is restrictive but not rare in principle, then ER mesures the amount of excluded people (hence the name) compared to the amount of rewarded players. Before T was designed, theoretically, you could fall to 0% with as many tokens as players, and 100% (resp. more) with T being half of P (resp. less than half). Both are of course not desirable : projects should in theory benefit the quick majority and exclude the slow minority. To me the best ratio is 50% (One third of the players excluded from a successful and not simultaneous build). The devs seem to agree with me because they kept ER the closest possible to 50% at every player count (feel free to check my math here).
I'll make the bold (but justified) hypothesis that ER is a good, if not the best, estimation of the probability of success of any given project (assuming it is of exactly average quality). After all, the extreme cases of coherent with that : ER=0% means that everyone has to participate, which is extremely demanding with economy being very tight in the game, therefore with almost impossible success, and ER=100% means than only half has to participate, which is very quick and easy to achieve. As for ER=50%, well it's ideal : let's say 1/3 participates, 1/3 doesn't and 1/3 is just not sure when the age begins (pretty realistic imo), then the probability EQUALS 50% (depending on the undetermined decision), which equals ER when T=(2/3)*P. Unfortunately, for obvious arithmetical reasons, it was not possible to keep ER at exactly 50% every time. Let's see the detail :
- P=3 -> T=2 -> ER=50%
- P=4 -> T=3 -> ER=33.33% (lowest)
- P=5 -> T=3 -> ER=66.67% (highest)
- P=6 -> T=4 -> ER=50%
- P=7 -> T=5 -> ER=40%
You see where I'm going now, right ? I think that 3p and 6p are THE way to go with this expansion, at least if you want fair and competitive games. For the same reasons than in the base game, 3p is better than 6p (for anyone wondering, my pseudo means "Seven Wonders Is Best At Three"), but calm down, let's agree to disagree here : I know some people really dislike the 3p setup (and there are good reasons, like a tiny bit too much hatedraft possibilities sometimes). In that case, go with 6p (and struggle with me while you're looking for people on the website). I also like it. Very skilled friendly, with much less hate.
The problem with other player counts is that, despite devs effort, the project mechanism is broken by ER not equal to 50%.
- 4p ? Garbage. Projects fail to often, there is nothing you can do about it, and if the punishment (which is either the penalty if you don't participate OR the gold cost of participating) happens to be especially harmful to you at any given time, you're sunk. This makes the game very random and frustrating.
- 5p ? Less garbage but still chaotic. Projects now suceed too often. Their fate is very rarely at stake. This enables total ignorance (rebellion against the projects if you will) as a valid strategy, which makes the expansion look stupid. For the same reasons as Leaders/Cities, though, it can still be fun though, with safe combos possibilities. I thus recommend it in real life casual games, but not in a competitive environment.
- 7p ? The game is broken as a whole because economy distribution is scarce (no added browns/greys from 6p to 7p, remember) and unfair (there's a whole hand you will never see, and total strategic randomness with the ones you will see). Edifice aggravates that with a fairly low chance of success for any project. Don't play that. In fact, at home, burn your "7+" cards. Or pin them on your wall. Of course, I'm exaggerating. But you get my point. I actually had a good time with friends at 7p, but I wasn't trying to win (which doesn't avoid you to win, funnily enough).
So if you like 7w and if you like strategic, timing sensitive, stressful games, if you like to do some educated guesses, then play 7w Edifice, especially at 3p, and also a bit of 6p for variety. It's better than you think, trust me. Except Ur night. That one is unacceptable. Shame on Ur night.
Thank you for reading that long post ! Looking forward to read your answers. Get mad at me, send me your devastating Ur night victories. I want them. Yummy !