One of the things I like about innovation is that all the players have little goals. For example, pulling ahead in factories so you can blast industrialism. We make sacrifices to meet these goals, like taking a turn to score 1 with pottery just so you can claim achievement 2 first. Sometimes two players will have a skirmish over some goal for a while.
With that introduction: I just played a very intense game against WarMage:
http://innovation.isotropic.org/gamelog/201306/25/game-20130625-124705-3947f559.htmlBetween turns 6 and 11 WarMage has the potential to set up a fermenting engine. I want to try to get gunpowder to kill fermenting, and failing that at least grab reformation to stop the big tucking. He wants to protect his fermenting somehow, and hopefully grab reformation. We have a back-and-forth where he draws up the 2's and 3's, and I share alchemy in clever and/or lucky ways. Turn 11 I think I'm set because I have colonialism and gunpowder in hand, but then he steals them with engineering. I had kept reformation, luckily.
Warmage gets the 1,2, 3 achievements, sometimes just barely. But turn 15 I get ready to start vaccinating. There's more back and forth between his chemistry/canning and my vaccination, he's able to achieve 4 but after that I clear out his score pile and can achieve 5-7 (combustion!).
The ending was close: on turn 21 he was something like 1 action away from empire (which he did), 3 from monument (publications to use industrialism, he had nearly 12 factories), and 3 away from splay-achievement. I got monument from genetics, though, and achieved 8-9.
