by davypi
As much as I hate to speak negatively about one of my top three games, its hard to disagree with most of what you've posted, but I will offer a few observations here.First, while I think coke/steel is the dominant strategy, it starts to wane off if you play against experienced players. Everybody needs to use the same buildings in order for the strategy to work, so the buildings are constantly blocked, so you still have to figure out how to earn points in the intermediate turns. Against equally skilled players, you cannot win on coke/steel alone.
Second, special buildings can significantly change a strategy. If you look at the specials that convert goods into money, you usually get one more dollar than you would by shipping them. This can be really significant for two reasons. First, its better than shipping. Second, you don't need to build a boat in order to convert the goods, so that is time saved. I've been in quite a few games where leveraging the special buildings has been critical, for example:
In the last game I played, I was tired of doing coke/steel, so I decided to play a heavy building strategy just for fun. One of the special buildings that came out allowed you to convert clay and another resource (I forget which) into money. As usually happens in an end game of Le Havre, clay is useless in the end game, so the offer had seriously piled up. I already had a stockpile of the other resource and the clay offer was 14 chits. I think I pulled in 30-40 bucks in two moves off this conversion and won the game by 20 points. So I think its safe to say that without that building I probably would have lost. I had no other way of making up that difference in the same two moves.
Similarly, I played a game once where the ironworks and the hardware store were buried deep beneath the stack, making it very difficult to get the iron needed to build boats. But, as mentioned above, conversion buildings don't require boats. So by stockpiling the resources needed for a special building, I was able to convert goods into money and buy the first two iron ships before anyone else even had the resources to build them. Money has a lot of power in this game (entry fees, no loans, buy what you need) and if you can somehow generate a bankroll before the first half of the game is over, it can have some serious long term benefits.
Regarding leather, I agree that its crappy strategy. I think the real problem, and a huge flaw in the game, is that the cokery has no limit but the tanning factory does. We have a house rule that removes the 4X limit from the tannery, but even with that gone, its still hard to make that strategy pay out. You can ship cattle for more money and fewer actions than it takes to ship leather. (And, cows get harvest bonus - leather does not.) Unless you really need the food, killing cattle is generally a bad move. I have never seen smoked fish pay off. I have made grain to bread pay off, but its usually a secondary or tertiary strategy, never the main one.
Next up is that player count matters. Its easy to run coke/steel in a two or three player game because you need four different buildings to make it work and they can't all be blocked. Each player can cycle through the buildings behind the previous player. The four player game changes things. The building strategies become much more viable with higher player counts. Shippers have fewer actions and more competition.
Finally, as kind of pointed about above, because of the variable setup, you can have games where iron/coal can be rare. Thus, coke/steel becomes less viable in these situations. Part of successful Le Havre play is being able to adapt to situations where coke/steel is too rare to be the primary strategy. These are the games were cattle or building actions or lux liners become more valuable. Part of what does make Le Havre one of the best games out there is that you do have to learn to adapt to the situation at hand. If Coke/Steel are flowing, they are King. But when they aren't flowing, you will lose if you don't know how to play the other aspects of the game.