by Rex Dart
I'm in the "semi-advanced beginner" phase myself, but my first big realization was that having a long-term food solution is extremely important.That led to another more general realization: the scarcest resource in the game isn't something like steel or francs or coal or whatever - it's actions. You only have a finite number of them, and every action you waste grabbing, say, 3 fish in order to meet this year's worker requirement is an action you aren't using for something more productive.
In my experience, the game forces you into a lot of situations where your action is more like the "least bad" action than the "best" one, but you at least want to strive to minimize that.
I actually found several of Earl Weaver's 10 Laws of Baseball to be useful to adapt and keep in mind while playing Le Havre:
4) Your most precious possessions on offense are your twenty-seven outs.
This is still the most basic aspect of the game, and still one of the most misunderstood.
5) If you play for one run, that’s all you’ll get.
... [T]here is usually no reason to spend your outs on one-run strategies like the hit-and-run or the sacrifice bunt.
6) Don’t play for one run unless you know that run will win a ballgame.
There are a few times to get fancy on offense, such as the bottom of the eighth or ninth inning in a tie game, or the top of the ninth if you’re on the road, but you had better be doing it with a player who can bunt or who can steal bases with a really good chance of success.
http://2guystalkingmetsbaseball.com/earl-weavers-10-laws-of-...
Applying Earl's Laws to Le Havre means you want to play for "the big inning" whenever possible. Converting a huge head of cattle at the Abbatoir is good. "Wasting an out" on picking up 3 fish from the dock for the equivalent of scoring one run (i.e., feeding your workers on that particular turn) is bad. Having ships is good, because (among other reasons ships are good), they feed workers without you having to use an action to get the food.
The newbie tip I'm still in the process of learning is "Loans in this game don't work like loans in almost any other game you might have played. Look at the loan rules closely and don't reflexively react to them like a vampire presented with garlic."