I played this game IRL earlier today with a friend, and enjoyed it so much that we ended up playing twice. I won both times - in fact, I dominated (yeah I know that's frowned upon here, but I'm mostly asking questions at the bottom, not focusing on how I won) - but I still have no idea if what I was doing was the best thing to do, if I was focusing on the right things, what could have been done differently, and most of all, WHY I won by such a huge margin, especially the second time when we played similar strategies.
Kingdom:
Delve
Encampment/Plunder
Fool's Gold
Catapult/Rocks
Lookout
Woodcutter
Ironworks
Quarry
Walled Village
Wild Hunt
Royal Blacksmith
Colony/Platinum, Estates.
So as a preface, almost no experience with Empires. This was my first time playing with all of the Empires cards here, except Catapult. The first game was a bit of a mess. I saw Delve + Catapults was nice, and Catapults + Lookout could trash down coppers (while attacking for the formers case) and make Royal Blacksmith very effective, and with Walled Villages to power that, get a mean engine going. I went for it, my opponent wanted to go aggressive with the Catapults and score with Wild Hunts, but ended up getting bad draws early with his Catapults, prioritised playing Wild Hunts and ended up with a massively bloated deck. With Delve constantly providing ammo for Catapults as well as some payload, I won by a massive margin, something like 7 Colonies to 1. Also, I bought a Woodcutter with a single buy for $23, which I'm sorta proud of.
The second game we both had a better idea of what to do - trashing down was too important to ignore, as was constantly attacking with catapults to get those curses into your opponents deck and stop them using catapult efficiently while buying cards themselves, but you also need to grab that Woodcutter at some point and get your engine flowing so you can consistently attack, draw your deck and get Woodcutters into play for extra buys. This time I added Encampments in after getting a Gold - they weren't 100% reliably matched up, but for only $2 each they really helped the deck anyway, and it was okay to lose them back to the supply occasionally. I also laser focused on the Catapults and the engine, constantly attacking while building up, putting those Walled Villages, Royal Blacksmiths and Encampments in, along with two Woodcutters and enough Delving to keep Silvers around for curse slinging. My opponent did largely the same but opted for Wild Hunt over Royal Blacksmith, and got 3 Catapults to my 2 Lookouts. He also trashed his Estates with Catapult first, instead of Copper. And yet these small differences somehow ended up with the game going very similarly to the first - my deck ended up in a very powerful engine, playing everything fairly consistently, and regularly getting $20+ money to spend, while his stuttered along, choked on curses and not able to play Catapults enough to consistently hurt me, or consistently pick up the engine pieces it needed.
Based on these thoughts I have a few questions:
1) What do you think the best strategy here is? Even after playing twice, I don't think I was anything close to optimal in my choices (I feel like Ironworks should have been involved somewhere - somehow I didn't even realise it was in the game during the second match). Do Plunder, Ironworks or Wild Hunt have a place?
2) Based on the description I've given, how come my deck was so massively better than my opponents? I can understand if my deck was slightly better, due to better choices, but my deck just sorta dominating while his was so weak really surprised me. Did not prioritising attacking with Catapults, and going 3 Catapults vs. 2 + Lookout really slow him down that much? He's not a weak player, either. I probably win more often than not against him but he's pretty decent.
It was a very fun kingdom, I feel like almost everything was relevant in some way except possibly Ironworks for us, but even that could have been. It was kinda neat that most of the different basic treasure cards had this subtle attached effects in the game due to stuff going on - Copper was cheap Catapult ammo but also bad for Royal Blacksmith, Silver was a $2 card which took no buy but still triggered the full effect of Catapult, Gold enabled Encampment, and Platinum was your big money payload. It made them feel almost like kingdom cards.