Visiting doctor_atomic

[prog]

So the vacation last weekend was great. The train trips to and from New Jersey were uneventful, comfortable, and not overly long. I like the train.

It was so nice to spend a lot of non-thon time with doctor_atomic, which I haven't really done since we were housemates four years ago. As she's usually completely consumed in her research, my arrival made her

Comments

[luckylefty]

Assyrians aren't nearly as powerful as they seem at first. Is it possible you missed the rule that I missed at first? When you destroy a temple with the Assyrians, you take the destroyed temple, turn it upside down as a stack, and put it on the top of the deck. This means that when you destroy my temple, then at the end of your turn, you'll put the 1 and 2 from that temple on your "available temple levels" pile, and I'll start my next turn rebuilding these levels. Then at the end of my turn, I'll put the 3 and 4 on my "available temple levels" pile, and if you're not able to use these on your turn, I can build them, too, and the 5 and 6 you will draw at the end of your turn, and I'll have rebuilt my full temple.

Assyrians are especially powerful against temples built using Hittites, but that's needed to balance the Hittite power a bit.

The most important effect of the Assyrians is the possibility of them causing a sudden victory. If you have a 6 temple, you have to be careful about entering phase II, lest you be knocked down from 15 to 9 and lose. But this danger can be avoided by staying at 14 until you can go to 16 or more.

I've played this a lot, and have done pretty well, and if there's any imbalance among the races, I think it's the Sumerians that are too powerful. Card denial can be a powerful strategy.

[prog]

We got the rule. I note that you just spent three turns to rebuild a temple I smashed in one, and that's if I didn't use any of those tiles myself. And I'll probably just smash your temple a second time, won't I?

The most viable strategy we found after one game involves spreading out construction across the five spaces. Any temple that rose too tall generally got pulled down the next turn.

[luckylefty]

Of those three turns, the middle one is your turn, so the temple is rebuilt after two of my turns. But the point is that it doesn't "use up" those turns; in addition to rebuilding my temple, I can still do whatever else I was going to do on those turns. So after those two turns, you have spent a card to knock my temple down, and I have rebuilt it without spending a card, so your effort using Assyrians has lost you a card and gained you nothing.

You say "if I didn't use one of those tiles myself", but the point is that you have exactly one chance to use one of these tiles. So yes, if you use Assyrians to knock down a large temple in a situation where you are able to use a 3 on the following turn, that can be useful. But that limits their power quite a bit.

I think that what happened is that the game didn't match your expectations; you expected the temples to grow steadily, where actually they fluctuate fairly radically. The thing that grows steadily is your workforce. If I have a larger and well-organized workforce (meaning one where it's easy to create and move 3's through migration), I can overcome a substantial deficit in temple levels, given time. The interesting decisions are whether to build a well-organized workforce, or to opportunistically grab the useful temple levels, which are a useful but transient gain. If you can quickly push your temple levels all the way to a win, you win; if not, my better workforce will eventually triumph.

As to imbalance, I'd happily play for high stakes where your starting hand had 2 Assyrians and 3 random cards while mine had 2 Sumerians and 3 random cards.