So I've been chewing on this idea for a while, I tried it out for the first time this week and it went well enough that I thought I'd post it here...
My gaming group plays Power grid a LOT. I'd say almost all of us (with the exception of some newer people who are still learning the details of the game) are very high-level players. I'd also say that Nick is starting to pull away from the group and win consistently, and I'm just going to assume that it's because I posted all of my secrets on a public blog and he read them and got better
A lot of us have come to realize that there are many plants that are almost never worth buying after turn 2 of the game: I'm looking at the following plants:
Any of the starting plants that happen to be left over
11 (1 Nuke -> 2 Cities)
12 (2 Hybrid -> 2 Cities)
14 (2 Garbage -> 2 Cities)
15 (2 Coal -> 3 Cities)
16 (2 Oil -> 3 Cities)
17 (1 Nuke -> 2 Cities -- same as Plant 11)
19 (2 Garbage -> 3 Cities)
23 (1 Nuke -> 3 Cities)
...and in some other cases, the 18 and 22 (nothing -> 2 Cities) and even the 27 (nothing -> 3 Cities) or even the 21, 24, 28, and 29 which power 4 cities!
Granted, some of these plants don't always fit, and some of them are quite strong if gotten early enough, but after turn 4, it's pretty clear that in almost every circumstance, buying one of these plants would be a mistake for that person, and even a form of kingmaking if you're allowing a better plant to drop and you're in the middle of the turn order!
What results is a "stalemate," or at least close to it, where the bottom four plants are unbuyable and nobody can increase the number of cities they can power for several turns in a row as one by one, turn by turn, a single plant is removed from the game and you may see one or two good plants show up before the market locks up again. Everybody is accumulating a giant stack of cash, and if people are still running early-game plants for a profit of a couple of dollars, the resource market can start to dry up too. Sooner or later, maybe one person accumulates enough money to buy like 6 cities and wins the game powering 9 or 10 cities. Maybe the other players can see this coming and are forced to collude to stop them by buying all the cities or resources (to their own detriment) and maybe lots of weird decisions take place.
This situation is interesting, for sure, and maybe with a REALLY bad draw for the plant deck this could happen in an extreme case. Sure. but I found this happening in almost every 5P game we played for weeks in a row. This doesn't feel like Power Grid, and it doesn't strike me as the way the game was meant to be played. Why is this happening? I had a couple of possibilities in mind:
1. Suboptimal play: sometimes a step two stall can take place, but if it lasts a while, at least one person has screwed up. Maybe there's something that we're doing wrong that results in this. This is certainly a possibility: maybe we're collectively undervaluing these plants that we all think are bad and we're passing up opportunities to break the cycle to our own advantage?
Well I'd really like this to be the answer, and maybe I need to do some more experimenting, but what I'm seeing is that if you know this is coming (meaning that it's a 5P game) then you spend what you need to on those high-capacity plants early, sacrificing everything else on the assumption that you'll get an unnecessary amount of turns to recover your cash reserves and at the end you'll be that guy who can power 12 cities and win. This seems to exacerbate the situation because now there's even less incentive to buy the "bad" plants.
I'd really like to find a flaw in this logic but I haven't found it yet.
2. For a 5P game you play with the full plant deck, same as a 6P game. Maybe there are just too many plants in there? My theory is that 5P games will be better if you remove plant 17 from the deck before the game starts. I'm hoping to give this a couple more plays and see what happens.