by Mools
PLUS you get a dollar back for every [coal] conversaion.
This is irrelevant. You have to have to coke in order to make massive amounts of steel. You also get this dollar with the steel strategy, so the benefit applies to both goods.I may be wrong, but I don't think you get money for converting iron to steel. You do get a dollar for every coal you convert to coke. So convert a lot of coal and you get a lot of cash in return as well as coke.
How so? One coke (5F) is enough to convert two iron (4F) into two steel (16F). That a seven Franc gain per conversion with no limit. If you've got ten iron, thats a 35 point gain in a single action. You need defend your "extremely expensive" claim.
True. Comparing coke directly to steel makes it seem very valuable. You are trading 5 points for 16. However, you need to take the extra action to get the coke anyway. Converting 10 iron means you need 5 coke. Plus more to ship (or even build your ships in the first place potentially). So in theory you are using actions to take coal, convert to coke then gather iron and convert that to steel. So I wonder if the extra actions spent getting the coal and coke over the course of a game would be better spent shipping the coke than worrying about steel.
The savings in actions MAY make up for the lower value of shipping coke vs steel. Especially since iron supply often feels tighter to me than coal and it may be more valuable to use that 10 iron on buildings or ships than steel. If I did have steel, I think I would be more tempted to use it on a ship or even luxury liner than ship it.
I think this strategy would be best tested on a game with other players than a solo game. The solo game is much different than my usual 4p.
I've not watched the Rhado video so I will tread here with caution. I agree that getting the hides are a free action if you need the food. However, it does cost an action to convert hides to leather. With the 4x cap, this comes out to an 8 point move. I think one time I sat down and figured out that a winning score requires at least 7 points per action, so the conversion here really isn't that bad. The problem is that you rarely actually make a seven point move. Typically you make two or three moves that set you up for a single action that score a lot of points. The leather conversion just doesn't fit into the normal scheme of the game very well. If you have the extra action and the extra room on the boat, it actually is an average move. Its just that most of the really good strategies 1) don't afford you that extra move and 2) don't rely on killing cows for food. If you need to kill cows for food, that means you don't have boats. If you don't have boats, you aren't shipping leather (or anything for that matter). If you do have boats, two cows ship for more money than one leather. Its just a square peg in a game where all the strategies have round holes.
Yeah, I agree. It is more of a back up action or even a "piggyback action" than anything I'd call a primary strategy. I also agree that if you have cows, shipping them is likely better than dealing with trying to get leather. But at the same time, I often like to convert cows to meat anyway so if I need to pay others to use buildings, I'd rather spend food than money. And I have played games where I didn't get ships until later into the game than I would have liked, but by that time I had so much food from cows that I could purely focus on trying to catch up and get shipping before game end. Granted, I don't think I won that one, but I did quicly catch up and only lost by a point or two. Sometimes hogging food forces others into loans and then when they are struggling to either get rid of loans or feed later in the game, you can sometimes catch up. Especially if your "catch up" is blocking actions they need to get rid of their loans.
Man, all this talk about the game makes me remember why I loved it so much when it came out. All the more reason to bring it back to the table more regularly. :D
