by Werbaer
genoan wrote:
Ive played the game around five times now, always with the basic/standard board.
Which contributes a lot to your problem. Everybody has a field of size 5.
When you play with other boards, there usually will be players which have several small fields. They might take the animals that the player with the big field is collecting. You will rarely have 5 animals of a kind in these games, unless you heavily invest in ships (and always keep a good worker reserve)
5 or 6 animals of the same kind in a big field is great. 4 or even 3 is much less usefull. Asume that a player with a size 5 field has only 4 of one kind, plus another single animal tile. That's about (calculating with the average of 3 animals per tile) 3 +6 +9 +12 +3 (other type) + 15 (area bonus) +2 (phase E) = 50 points for 10 dice actions. That's good, but not gamebreaking; a dice action is usually worth about 4 points.
Yellow tiles often give about 12 points for 2 actions; most city tiles don't give bonus points, but grant you an extra action, so the actually eat up only one die.