Which is exactly what will happen if you set out to get all 8 Provinces on your own.
Are you kidding? Wharf / Village can get 8 provinces on it's own fairly easily, and this board adds prizes, Scheme, and strong trashing! Getting 8 provinces will be a cakewalk, and Followers is just brutal.
The engine beats a Feodum slog every time here.
Now that's not to say that fairgrounds are useless here. They'll be quite good, and with luck could even get up to being 8 points a pop. But you'll want to get them later than usual, because tournament is just too strong.
Simulations I've done show that even Hermit/Market Square loses to BMU about 2.5% of the time. I've examined the logs of the losing games and they all show absolutely horrible shuffle luck (i.e. it's not due to poor programming). This surprised me: I expected H/M to win 100% of the games. So I started thinking a bit about this mismatch between my expectation and reality, and concluded that when I (and I assume others too) intuitively examine the validity of a strategy, we take for granted at least slightly bad to mediocre shuffle luck, thus not accounting for the worst 10% and certainly not the worst 1-2% of scenarios.
On to this game. I obviously agree that with, say, top 95% shuffle luck a massive Wharf engine crushes a Feodum strategy, regardless of whether you go for Provinces or Fairgrounds. Maybe going for Provinces gets you the win a bit faster, or maybe going for Fairgrounds does, but it doesn't matter: what's faster is completely irrelevant if you're winning anyway.
To determine what to go for, then, we have to look at the situations where you have atrocious shuffle luck in combination with your opponent doing well. This starts with not getting your first Wharf until the end of the 3rd shuffle, and it then landing on the bottom of your deck. You'll eventually grab some Provinces, but you keep drawing poorly: your Wharves keep on colliding, they draw two Villages dead, you keep hitting $7, etc. Now, in the absolute worst case scenario, your opponent will win regardless of what you do. In some slightly better situations, however, you slowly collect the Provinces while your opponent catches up via Fairgrounds. Here having gone for Provinces was a critical mistake, because denying Fairgrounds would have made it a hell of a lot harder for your opponent to catch up, as he now has to get $8 Provinces instead of $6 Fairgrounds, and the Fairgrounds are also easier for you to get, making it far less likely that you miss.
I have a very poor intuition for how often these worst-case scenarios occur (I wouldn't be surprised by anything between 0.1% and 5% lol), but I'm sure that when they do occur, having gone for Fairgrounds gives you significantly better prospects of still winning the game than having gone for Provinces does, and in all the other cases it doesn't matter.
Btw, I really do not appreciate things like "Are you kidding?" I'm certainly not always 100% right and I might even overlook something really obvious every now and then, but a priori it's much more likely that when something I say strikes you as totally ridiculous on a first glance, you're not fully understanding what I'm saying (for which I certainly deserve part of the blame--expressing myself precisely takes alot of time, and I often prefer giving a brief approximation of the underlying thought over saying nothing at all) than that I'm sprouting nonsense. If an objection is super obvious, it's likely that I've considered it as well.
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Topic: How do you play Feodum/Wharf/Tournament? (Read 8653 times)