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« on: January 25, 2013, 04:26:50 pm »
Yeah...as Ddubois said, the mint isn't the greatest thing, but it's definitely not what kills you.
At turn 11, you have one village, one Wharf, and THREE Goons. What are you going to do with all those goons? You're going to have a tough time playing more than one at a time because you only have one village and one wharf. And if you play the wharf you're gonna have a tough time playing the goons.
Then you buy three more wharves that you still aren't going to get to play, because you only have one village. So you have 7 terminals and only one village. That is not a good ratio. You needed more villages, a lot more.
You should have also prioritized wharf over goons. Getting a goons early is nice because it hurts your opponent, but Goons are not what make engines go, they are the end point of an already working engine. So you want an engine that is decently already up and running (Mining Village/Wharf in this case) before you start adding a decent amount of Goons.
Some parts of WW's engine article that I liked: "The biggest thing about playing the engine is to get the engine up and running first, before worrying about other things. This means not focusing on Treasure — you will need a little amount of money to get this going but not all that much. And then just focus very very hard on getting the cycling up to speed before worrying too much about other things. You often will want to pick up one attack early on to slow your opponent down, and at some point you may start to get hampered in your ability to buy more components because you can’t generate enough buying power – this should be your cue to get more payload; usually, you want to prioritize a nice $5 (or even a $4 or a $3) engine piece over Gold, unless you really need extra money."
"As for Villages vs terminals, you generally want to get the a terminal before you get a Village to support it, while you are building up, though at some point you will switch over to over-villaging in order to make sure your initial hand can get off the ground."