XBOX Live: Settlers of Catan tomorrow! (Wednesday)

Yeah, I get the idea that easy is really just for learning the game. You’re almost guaranteed to win, so you can cruise through a whole game and get the feel for things before the A.I. puts the spurs to you.

On medium, it doesn’t really display any of those behaviors, and it approaches trading much more conditionally (and will often shut you out of trades entirely, if you get too far ahead). On hard, the A.I. can be downright vindictive. I refused a series of trades with one, and it turned around and played Monopoly on me, taking all of my bricks (which I really needed to maintain my “longest road”). Then it started offering them back to me piecemeal, in exchange for the stuff that it really wanted. Cruel.

Easy is definitely for beginners. I won my first game essentially by luck. Tonight I tackle medium.

All of the text is very readable on my SDTV setup. I guess it’s possible a different font is displayed depending on the type of television used.

It actually shows the cards flying over to them, too. There’s a “deal speed” setting in options - maybe you can slow it down and it will help this syndrome?

I find myself looking at where people’s settlements are and saying “well they can get wood real easy because they’re next to a common number” or they have three settlements on wood-producing tiles or whatever. And just figuring from there, that they probably have that resource if they don’t have a nearly empty hand.

Sorry for those that sent me messages and invites yesterday. I started the download before I went off to take a shower and make dinner. When I got back, I was playing my first game of Catan ever, against the AI, to learn the rules and stuff. So I wasn’t ready to drop out of a single-player game and into playing with people who know what they’re doing. :P

The GF and I switched off playing a few games last night, so I think I have a pretty good grasp of it now. Some of the different strategies are emerging. You can try to get on spots that give you all the different resources, or you can try to get lots of settlements on the 6s and 8s and get to a port or two to load up on cards for trading. If the random board layout works out the right way, you can even start to monopolize a particular resource and make it hard for everyone else to get it.

I mainly won my game against the medium AI by having a HUGE amount of wool production, the wool port, and port-trading my way into a 12-length longest road (taking two points away from Sun Tzu and giving them to me) and building a new settlement for the win.

Yeah, I was pretty surprised by this. What really sucks is the blue text.

Didn’t Brian hype up how they got the crappiest SD TV they could find, and made someone play on it?

So can anyone actually confirm or deny whether or not it changes fonts based on your display?

I played it on a very poor resolution SDtv and had some trouble reading it, but nothing like Dead Rising, which on the same tv does not look like it even has text. Might be worse if you are new to Catan and don’t know what’s going on.

The small text is annoying, the blue text is just plain unreadable. Is there a way to change is so blue text is never used?

It probably uses a different font/text size on SDTVs than HDTVs. I can’t speak to HDTVs yet, since I haven’t tried it on one yet. But on a crappy SDTV on which I can’t read Rainbow Six’s text at all, the Catan text is perfectly readable and in nice decent sized letters.

Another game I noticed that uses a much bigger and different font on SDTVs is Marble Blast Ultra. It’s nice when developers do that for chumps like me who haven’t upgraded yet. :)

I have an HDTV and while the text is readable it seems unnecessarily small.

Hmmm, I have an LCD TV and have no problem reading it. Sure, the font is not exactly large, but still very readable.

It’s very clear and readable on my TV; my set is fairly large, though (46" Samsung DLP).

I haven’t seen a single person on my friends list playing this. It also seems to take a little while to find opponents in ranked matches. Bummer. I figured there would be more interest in it than I’m seeing. I guess the fact that the demo was taken down is probably affecting that. I don’t blame people for not blind-buying when most of the games that come out of XBLA feel so half-assed. Ironically, Catan is one of very few exceptions that
doesn’t leave me disappointed about what could have been.

Kaigen and I played a couple 3-player games with another Live member this afternoon. It was fun!

I never played the board game, but I might pick this up later. I entered a contest for it, but its not over yet, so I’m not buying yet.

Err, double post.

Doh, really? I was looking for people to play with this afternoon. Add me if you’d like to play sometime, and the same goes for anyone else. I only just started playing so I’m not that great yet.

Snarglebargle and I were on playing for a while yesterday, and Fuzzyslug was looking for players before that. I think a lot of people downloaded the game last night, but wanted to learn how to play in solo mode first.

Well yesterday was a late night at work for me, and tonight is a midnight showing of Spider-Man 3, otherwise I’d have been playing both evenings. And I’ve been putting a lot of time back into Marvel: Ultimate Alliance lately, but it’s just in working through the extra missions, never anything so important that I can’t break away from it if you see me and drop me an invite for Catan.