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Comment by JeffJenkins | Hacker News Reader

I've played a lot of games of Catan against the computer on the Xbox 360, which gives stats, and I found that is almost all cases the player who had the most resources (produced - lost/stolen) won. To some extent this makes sense since a better economy will produce more resources, but it didn't seem to matter what the resources were or whether they were used directly or 4-crunched into something else.

What I took from that is if you're choosing settlement spots or robber targets you'll do pretty well just maximizing the number of resources you produce or block (which, for the robber, means multiplying the number of pips by the number of resource gained if the number rolls)

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It's true that the person with the most resources will probably win, but a key factor getting to that point is ability to best ramp up production to produce those resources.

Early in the game it is important to try to get that next settlement or city. If you can place a robber to block important sheep or whatever is in short supply then that can be better than just blocking a high number of pips. When placing a settlement sometimes it is better to spread out rather than circling around one hex with high pips (and being vulnerable to a robber knocking out your entire production chain).

Another aspect of placing the robber on an opponent's "high pip" space is that they become motivated to play soldiers and possibly move the robber to your own high pip space. If you instead place the robber on a ho-hum tile you might not block as many potential resources, but the robber will stay away from your tiles for a longer period.

That the player with the most resources wins seems obvious to me, because you have to buy all wining points yourself.(Cities, Towns, tech cards, streets, etc) There is no other way.

But you have a bunch of different strategies to get the most resources.

Trading is a pretty big aspect in a real Settlers game and the value of your resources depends on the overall resource output of the game field. E.g. When your the the only one controlling a iron field, it becomes more valuable for the others.

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