by chris1nd
Note: This is NOT meant to be illustrative not an exhaustive analysis.Suppose the 2 dominant actions for you (without spending workers) would be 2 and 5. Say it is claiming a 5 tile and placing it on 2 space.
What are the odds you could get this exact result? 1 in 18 or 5.5%.
What are odds if you roll doubles (which happens 16.6% of the time)? 0. You cannot. You would have to spend workers or take a sub-optimal action. Similar problem exists if you are looking for adjacent numbers on one die (e.g., you have 1 worker and could use a 1 or 3 for the 2 option). If you roll doubles, the odds that you got a 5 and a 1 to 3 on the other are…well you can’t that “out” is gone.
Okay, but I contrived that so that you didn’t need the same number. But if you did need two 5’s, how many workers are you likely to have to spend to get that result? After all, odds of getting it exactly are just 1 in 36. The answer is more workers will be needed with non-matching doubles than any non-doubles.
On one throw, it is not so bad. But I have seen people roll 3 doubles out of 4 turns quite a few times. They usually end up having to take workers once and taking some relatively undesirable tile for them.
You can also look at how many different actions you can take or a number of other ways, but it is never as good to roll a lot of doubles.
What we do is every time you roll doubles, you get a gemstone. When you have 2 gems, you exchange them for a worker. Works very well.