You can go for different "winning paths" 1. Largest Army, no Road 2. Longest Road, no Army 3. Both Road and Army (aka "The Double Play") 4. Neither Largest Army is generally considered the strongest, because it aligns with the same tactics that work well (Cities, Monopoly, Victory Points devs and Robber control). A great video for a new viewer to get into Catan strategy would be this one about the 6 most popular Catan strategies, which also explains the many nuances between choosing army or road: kzbin.info/www/bejne/h5ukYXRplqadrJosi=7Z45Mg3xj1rt1qf3

@Treeckosaurus ok, but how are they different than the other winning strategies? Everything he describes here is a winning strategy, you get what I'm trying to say? The only goal of each strategy Is to reach 10 points no?

That they kept playing you is wild!

Of course! Keep in mind, it won't be the same every game. Road - Easy part is settlements and roads, so have them as many as possible. A city is tougher, but build a city early on to avoid being stuck in a situation with 5 settlements down. TPP: 1 City, 5 Settlements, LR and 1 VP is the most average 10 points you'll see road win with. But yeah, sometimes a second city is easier or you pull more VPs. Ports - can essentially be anything. It depends on which win-bonus you include. If you go for road, settlement spots will get easier. If you go for Army, Cities are easier. Let's say you focus on Army. TPP: 3 Cities, LA, 1 VP and 1 Settlement. You could also sneak in a double play (Road + Army). Port Strategies are all about reading the game and its opportunities. I actually regret saying it's easy to play in this video.

@@Treeckosaurus thank you so much for breaking it down it makes a lot of sense thank you

I don't know, there's also people farming beginners on the starter board.

I will make a video on it later and share it then. Want to do it justice.

Hi Marcus. Thank you for your feedback. I see you're saying a couple of things: 1. I didn't make an effort with this video. 2. At 5:40 I didn't show the board. 3. I don't know my stuff. 4. I'm copying someone else's work. 1. I did. It took weeks. I came up with all the principles from the top of my head and I haven't seen anyone make a similar type of video before going off of principles. I was inspired by chess KZbinr I follow who did the same thing for chess. 2. It's not based on a board. It's fictional example to illustrate the principle. It's a bit of an exxagated example, but could you tell me what you consider further wrong with it? 3. That's up to everyone for themselves to decide. Do you care to know what I consider my best Catan achievements? 4. I copied the format from the chess KZbinr, but other than that I don't know what you're talking about. Obviously many of the easy and intermediate examples have been discussed by many Catan KZbinrs, but for a new player it's insightful to know, wouldn't you agree? Most advanced principles I haven't seen discussed by anyone else before outside of myself.

Who are you 😅 Any Catan achievements besides board game night against your family?

Thanks! And let's do it!

Cost of building and maintaining the LR is much less then LA

From my experience the cost is pretty much the same, but knights give return on investment

I might publish all the data at some point

Sure! If you could give me the correct times, I'll add them to the video

Yes, that's one of the flaws of this research. It's tough to make it perfect. If you have ideas on how to improve this part, I'm happy to try it in the future.

@@Treeckosaurus for simpler games you can just have automated players take sort of random actions each turn and then draw lessons from a much larger dataset. For games like chess you can generate a space of possible moves and search for promising paths. But Catan has that social element which makes me think it'd work different. One thing you could do is maybe try to quantivy the importance of luck. If you know the total pips each player had each turn, then compare that to how much they got, that might show being x percent above average translates into y percent greater chance of winning? My hypothesis is that a good player can snowball beginning luck into a win very effectively. But that later in the game winners have more villages and cities so they're not as exposed to the dice. Another is maybe there's something you can do with the social pressure. If you're in the lead, other players should act more against your interest. Maybe things like blocked roads or village locations become more frequent for players in the lead? Maybe you can think of a proxy for usefulness of trades and see if players in the lead tend to have fewer useful trades? Something like that? Might be interesting, because players behind will want to slow the lead player down, but not at the cost of their own prospects? I'm really not a high level player though, so I can't say how high-level players would play.

Thanks!

Thanks!

There's theory that in high-level Catan games you don't want to appear too strong at the start, because of blocks/steals/etc. Perhaps Green took that too far. Or perhaps Green made a deal with Red - that if Green left Red the 6/4/3, then Green would get a brick trade. I agree with you it doesn't look good though.

Me too. Glad it got some glory.

Glad you enjoyed it! I will play a few games in around 2 weeks for Mind Sports Olympiad practice :)

I'm here to spread the word

Hi! Where I can play tournaments?

catancommunity.org/cms/Tournaments this is a good one for tournaments in the weekends. There is also a Discord community called 'Catan Championship' that's really good.

There's always the 10% of games in which you get so crazy unlucky or so crazy lucky that your gameplay barely makes a difference in the end result. However, for the other 90% of games, gameplay makes the difference between winning and losing. For that, my videos help. But theory alone isn't gonna cut it. You also need to play a lot, and realize your opponents have access to the same free resources here on KZbin.

Thanks!

Once underrated becomes known they're rated :)

That's odd, appreciate you making the effort of reposting. What if Markus (or someone else) would win 95/100? Would that change your mind? I've won 15/16 in my most recent games against friends and family. There's a lot of luck in Catan, I won't deny that.

@@Treeckosaurus i think comment got deleted by youtube since some of my words may have been triggerd some algorithm. I am sure Markus Heinze would win ~17/20 games on average in this very same setup. But that doesnt change that luck is more important in a single game. Imagine any other sports where a TOP 10 world guy faces a recreational hobby player. How often would the top 10 pro not win ?`Answer is never ! And that is despite the fact that Sports also include some luck. Basically if you have any game and a top 10 world guy faces an average hobbyist... as soon as the chance of the hobby guy winning is bigger than 0.... luck is more important in that game. In the long run ofc luck evens out so every longrun game is always 0% luck. you just need a big enough sample and luck evens out and therefore becomes non existent in any game. doesnt matter which game

@@Treeckosaurus seems youtube deletes a lot of comments that use percentage symbol or where you name adresses like colonist.... i made another comment that again got deleted. It was just a harmless funny story about our private catan round where i started out 1 out of 7 in our first 7 games despite being the most experienced catan player... next 10 games i went 7 in 10 though for now 8 in 17 wins ;)

Our experience is essentially the only deciding factor. We've tried all these strategies (perhaps except from the 2-resource set-ups). Of course, Wood Brick makes it less likely to win Army (unless you have an imbalance and a matching 2:1 port) Ore Wheat Sheep makes it more likely to win Army. Ore Wheat > Wheat Sheep, because of the power level. You'd have to bank trade less to get your production up making it more likely you have time/cards to fight for the Largest Army. Does this answers your question?

@@Treeckosaurusalso just brought me here but as a casual, I wasn’t sure why LA was important. Is it generally regarded that that’s an important thing to control? Is it a shorthand for saying prio dev cards or something? If you have another video explaining why LA is important id watch that first maybe.

We decided to filter for just the Largest Army, because strategies all work very differently if they go for different "winning paths" 1. Largest Army, no Road 2. Longest Road, no Army 3. Both Road and Army (aka "The Double Play") 4. Neither Largest Army is generally considered the strongest, because it aligns with the same tactics that work well (Cities, Monopoly, Victory Points devs and Robber control). A great video for a casual viewer to get into Catan strategy would be this one about the 6 most popular Catan strategies, which also explains the many nuances between choosing army or road: kzbin.info/www/bejne/h5ukYXRplqadrJosi=7Z45Mg3xj1rt1qf3

It was my absolute pleasure to do this tier list together!

weakness of this strategy is that you dont always get the right port or good wheat / stone tiles.

Cool. I love port strategies too, and they transition very well to top level Catan as well.

Well he won with his placement. Shows what I know. :D

I appreciate your level of detail in your answer, as it's something I'm trying to learn more about.

Yeah I don't know how to professional research. How could I learn that? Do you have great teaching tools or resources for me?