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[Tables]

Also, good game everyone and congrats to theorel.

[Kuildeous]

Hmm, I thought theorel would have a larger lead. I'm not sure where my math was off.

But I was correct that I couldn't catch him. Well played, sir.

[theorel]

Yeah, I knew it was going to be close, but I thought I had you in the end (glad I was right this time .  If I could have cut you off from combining it would have given me some breathing room.

I also had a larger lead a bit earlier in the turn, but then ipofanes and qvist took me from first to last in air cult, so that cost me 6 points.

[ipofanes]

Ah, I misinterpreted the rules and didn't know that tunnels connect, therefore I was still hoping for second. Congrats to theorel.

All in all, these modern games tend to minimise downtime with their short and many turns. This is nice and all at ftf gaming, but has about the opposite effect in asynchronous turns.

Those old 1980s PBM games had massive, concurrent turns, which are a bit better suited IMHO.

Here's to Watno for patiently ref'ing!

[ipofanes]

Also, are cults a trap? The top Cultists scored bottom overall.

[Watno]

I'm not sure. In my most recent games, I have mostly build an early temple and grabbed most of the 3 spaces in the cults. I went quite good with that. I guess it also depends on how much competition you get in the cults.

[theorel]

I think it also depends on how much you're taking advantage of the end-of-round cult bonuses.  Getting those "free" bonuses along with the end-game scoring can be significant.  Just the end-game scoring is less so.

I'll note for this specific game, that I took a race that had an important separate usage for priests (i.e. terraforming them for points), and so my particularly low cult score is tied to that.

[Kuildeous]

Also, are cults a trap? The top Cultists scored bottom overall.

I guess the thing with Cultists is that you want to entice people into gaining power from you. On a bright note, you likely will never pay full price for a Trading House. Your success in this endeavor depends on how cautious the other players are. If nobody wants you to gain on the cult tracks, then they're going to give up free power in order to stymie you.

I imagine a great ploy would be to give power to the one player (or two if you're lucky) who isn't worried about cults. In this game, I was a great contender for that, because I wasn't really playing the cult game. In the previous game I played, I was also a good contender because I made it clear that if the Cultist player did not advance on the track that I wanted, then I would be more willing to accept power again later.

And even if you don't score well in cults (32 points would be nice but not very likely), I think that the Power gains from advancing on the tracks would be significant. You could possibly get 20 total Power from advancing on the cults. If you manage to get a 10-spot, then great. Then you can use that Power to build your empire.

I'm not experienced enough to weigh in on if Cultists are a trap, but I would wager that they're a fairly fragile race to play with. I see potential for them to be really brutal, but it depends on the kingdom players.

[Tables]

I think he was talking about factions going for cults, as opposed to Cultists, Kuildeous.

In general BGG people say that cult-focused factions tend to be weaker overall, so I don't think this was atypical of that. The cults should be used primarily as a means of giving bonuses, I think - the end of round bonuses and power bonuses, and the cult scoring should only be considered later on. Often, securing first place on a cult isn't even the best use of priests, if you can afford to upgrade tracks instead. But winning cults should be considered lategame, especially when it's cheap to do so. But don't spend so many resources fighting for a cult that you jeopardise other scoring means.

[ipofanes]

I think he was talking about factions going for cults, as opposed to Cultists, Kuildeous.

Yes I was. My bad.

[Qvist]

Wow, I played badly. Sorry for not finishing the game. Thanks for modding the game, Watno and grats to theorel for winning it.