What Now?

So as of December, I finished my mathematical analysis and presented it to the Math faculty and all of that.

So now what? Do I leave this blog to vanish into the depths of the internet, never to impart Settlers knowledge to anyone again? Well, I’ve been analyzing Settlers strategy based on the statistics I took and based on economic principles. Now that the mathematical analysis has been submitted for grading, I can delve into some of the more complex economic situations that the game presents.

I’ll get into that a little more later (I need to brush up on my playing so I can talk about things correctly), but for now, I’ll share a short story that indicates the importance of  knowing the economics of Settlers in trying to optimize strategy.

Is Getting Robbed a Good Thing?

Well no. It’s not. First, I should clarify my distinction between getting stolen from and robbed.
Getting Robbed is when a 7 is rolled and you have more than 7 cards, forcing you to discard half of them.
Getting Stolen From is when the Robber is put on your hex and the opponent gets to steal a card from you. This isn’t what I’m talking about.

So again: is getting robbed a good thing? No. It means you lose cards. In the strictest sense of the definition, getting robbed is simply spending cards and getting nothing tangible in return. It’s spending resources on nothing. More precisely, it’s spending resources for the convenience of holding those resources. So, in that sense of it, if at any time you find yourself holding more than 7 cards in your hand, you are essentially gambling half of them. We’re gambling against the roll distribution.

Here’s a little math lesson for you. Anyone who has taken some basic probability classes will be able to teach this lesson, so bear with me if this sounds like a class you took freshman year of college. Basically, there’s a set probability of rolling each number, shown by the graph below:

Manipulating Market Price

As of now, I’ve looked at a trend in development strategy that I’ve seen, and now I’m looking at pricing. There’s not much strategy here (or at least anything past a beginner/intermediate level), and you might be a little annoyed – isn’t this supposed to be a blog outlining the best strategy for Settlers? We’re getting there. Don’t worry.

As I said last time, value is determined by the market. For some, this is a flashback to any introductory economics class taken previously. For the rest of you, here’s the rundown: when you graph the supply curve of a product and the demand curve of that same product on the same axes, we can find the market price (or equilibrium) by where they cross. If the demand goes up (by a shift of the demand curve to the right), the equilibrium price will move up. If the supply goes up (by a shift of the supply curve to the right) the equilibrium price will go down.

So what does this mean for Settlers?