Amend that to if anyone rolls a 7, everyone with 8 or more cards in hand discards half.
Yeah, holding on to more than seven cards is a ballsy move. You’re generally better off blowing cards that you don’t absolutely need on port trades or development cards before you end your turn.
God, I’m loving this game so much. I keep getting my ass beat down on moderate difficulty though, because unlike in real life, I’m finding it really hard to keep track of what kind of resources players have.
For example, in a real board game setting, you roll a 9, lets say, and someone gets 3 ore. You kind of remember that, and you keep it in mind.
In this electronic version, I find myself forgetting almost instantly who got what. Especially if it was a couple of turns ago.
I think it’s the physical act of three cards being passed to someone that makes it more of a visual and audio memory for me, whereas in this version seeing “+3 ore” as a message is something I forget pretty soon.
To compensate, you can look at what everyone got in previous moves, but its a little overwhelming. I think that’s on purpose, because you don’t want people scrolling through the backlog to count up how many resources other players got.
But still, that’s my only real complaint so far. The lack of tactical stimulus results in me having a poorer memory than in the boardgame version.
On moderate, if you get too far ahead, the A.I. stops trading with you, and keeps slamming you with the numerous (!) 7s that get rolled, making it sometimes hard to clinch.
In one game the A.I. slapped down a City and snatched the Longest Road from me, in the same turn, winning the game. That was impressive.
They’re using sounds from Rise of Nations, and it disorients me. What just happened? Why am I on the couch hearing that sound? >.<
Hey, losers–let’s play. If anyone wants to get a game together around now-ish, send an invite my way (gamertag Ben Sones).
I would, but my Suns are on! Shoot me an invite if you ever see me online and you folks want to play. I’m a rookie, but I’m up for the challenge!
Downloading now. I’ll mess with single player to learn for a bit unless people want to toss me an invite (then I can be “in yer game, bein all yur noobs!”).
Gamertag=svenuce
A few very simply tips:
Starting city placement is important. Don’t place a settlement on a spot that isn’t touching 3 resources. Don’t try and start touching a port (although building so you can get to a port easily with your first new settlement can be a good idea).
Wood and Brick are the two most important early-game resources. Everyone needs roads and new settlements at the start of the game. Aiming to start on good wood/brick spots is a good basic strategy.
A few very simply tips:
Starting city placement is important. Don’t place a settlement on a spot that isn’t touching 3 resources. Don’t try and start touching a port (although building so you can get to a port easily with your first new settlement can be a good idea).
Wood and Brick are the two most important early-game resources. Everyone needs roads and new settlements at the start of the game. Aiming to start on good wood/brick spots is a good basic strategy.
The tutorial is very well done, guiding you through all the rules and how the game works by walking you through a sample game.
My only concern is how small the font is. It’s kinda hard to see on my hdtv, I’d imagine it would be hell on sdtv.
Catan’s text is very readable on my SDTV, and it’s so bad that even the text in R6: Vegas is hard to read. The text in Catan is reasonably sized, but, more importantly, it’s bolded.
Catan’s text is very readable on my SDTV, and it’s so bad that even the text in R6: Vegas is hard to read. The text in Catan is reasonably sized, but, more importantly, it’s bolded.
You talking the normal in-game text or the tutorial dialogue boxes? Because on my HDTV I find the tutorial stuff almost unreadable (like Dead Rising). Everything else is just fine.
And the game itself is swell :)
First time I’ve played Catan and I’m pretty into it from the two games vs the computer I played. If anyone is going to be around this afternoon, I’ll most likely be looking for games.
Yeah losers. Where was everyone last night? Ben and I tried to get a game going and couldn’t find one other, much less two to play. Half my friends list was away. The other half was watching a movie. Don’t you know that Catan is out? :)
I’m interested in getting a game in tonight. Who’s in, say 8:30 EST?
On the easy to learn comment:
I’m a newbie, having only played the tutorial and a moderate difficulty game against the AI (won both). I’ve never played the board game (but suddenly want to). I think it’s very easy to grasp the rules. Play a couple of games and you’ll have the hang of it. The tutorial and documentation (help and options) are pretty good.
I’m in, at whatever time works for everyone else. Snarglebargle and I ended up doing a game with 2 A.I.s last night, which is still fun, but not nearly as much fun as a four-person game. We both ended up losing to one of the A.I.s (which we set to hard), but it was a pretty close game. Well, close for Snarglebargle, anyway; I got stomped. Nobody rolled any fives (which I desperately needed) for the first half of the game, and at that point the other players had boxed me in and I had nowhere to expand. I was one turn away from grabbing a wood port (I had a huge abundance of wood) when one of the A.I.s grabbed it out from under me. Stuck with my initial two settlements and no ports, I was forced to switch over to a strategy of going after VPs via development cards. That was actually working pretty well; I didn’t get any VP cards, but I did manage to grab “largest army” and then also “longest road” (by playing a combo of Monopoly and then also a Road Building card), but I was too far behind, and the game ended shortly thereafter.
I have to say, the A.I. is pretty canny, especially on hard. It has a lot of human-like behaviors.
I wonder how many people will go out and buy the board game now that they’ve gotten a taste of Settlers for the first time.
As cool as the 360 version is (which is remarkably well done), the board game just has a very… tangible quality to it. It’s nice to have everything and everyone be right there with you, playing and trading and having a good time.
My bride and I have a monthly boardgame shindig at our place - 12+ hours of drinking and pushing around little painted avatars and colourful die. The day always starts with Settlers and then whatever else we feel like: lately it’s been Shadows Over Camelot or Betrayal At The House On The Hill.
There really is no substitute for gathering some friendlies and hunching over a shared board for hours and hours, but it’s really nice to have a solid Xbox option too.
I’m up for some multi-player games later in the evenings. I would have been on last night but my boss showed up at my door at 10:30 last night with a pile of work. And stayed 'til 1:30 >.<
Yeah, I’m psyched for a game of this…
Holy small text batman.
it doesn’t bother me all that much, but it’s REALLY small.
smaller than dead rising small.
unless it’s a different font in SD, there’s no way this is playable without an HDTV.
after the bitch fit thrown about dead rising and lost planet I’m surprised this hasn’t been mentioned more.
Unfortunately, on easy (which i only played for the tutorial game), it was all too eager to trade me its entire hand.
I’d trade a wool to a player for, say, a brick and a grain.
Then I’d trade the same player a brick for, say, a wool and an ore.
I quickly was able to trade their entire hand. It’s embarassing to the point of being a bug IMO.
I’m all for easy being, in fact, easy. But an obvious exploit like that that a human would absolutely never do is something that should have been covered.
Admittedly, medium seemed just fine, and I look forward to tackling hard tonight.
Overall, I’m extremely pleased with the game though, and it’s met my lofty expectations.