by Tanglebones » Sun Apr 21, 2013 12:01 pm
I'm a huge fan of Settlers of Catan. I used to work as a cook from 5am-2pm, so I'd come home and have no one to hang out with because normal people were at jobs and school and what have you, so I'd play Settlers on this online app called Sea3d (I guess for copyright reasons or something). I'm pretty sure it's discontinued now, and I haven't been able to get into the online game they have now... but fortunately, I have people I can play the real game with now.
I like all the incarnations of it I've played. I'm fond of the depth of strategy that Cities and Knights offers, but I like the speed and simplicity that the original game offers. I even play a two-player card game version of it with my wife. It's a good game too!
In Cities and Knights, my strategy is to go for paper first, followed by coins (because the politics cards let you be an asshole to other players) if I can't get a good paper source. I've never found linen to be that useful.
In general, my strategy is to try and guess which resource will be hard to get and grab that one. I prefer to settle on 5's and 9's over 6's and 8's since the way the board usually winds up, 5's and 9's have better second and third numbers (like, maybe a 10 and a 4) than 6's and 8's (maybe a 3 and a 12). I generally look at the board and where I can place when it's my turn to place and go with one of two broad strategies, either I try and grab really good wood and clay and go for longest road and spread out as far as possible as fast as possible (to prevent other players from settling on good numbers), or I try and settle a good stone/wheat/sheep combo and invest in building cities quickly and buying lots of development cards. Of the two strategies, I prefer the latter, since I've found that it's easier to wind up in a resource-costly race to maintain the longest road than it is to wind up in a situation where you're racing to build/maintain the largest army. The other big thing is that I always try and make sure to "diversify my portfolio" as it were. By which I mean, I prefer to have a settlement on a 5 and a 9 than on two 5's, mostly because I've had games where I had great numbers... on paper, but maybe only like 3 great numbers total (say 4, 5 and 10). Your odds of getting those numbers should be pretty good... but then if you don't get them, you get nothing.
I've often felt like I should have a forum signature, but have always felt awkward about it. What if mine's no good?