A Data-Driven Strategy Guide for Through the Ages, Part 4

Index:

1. Introduction (Link to Part 1)
2. Data Analysis
    2.1 Classification: Infrastructure Development (Link to Part 2) 
    2.2 Classification: Cards Played (Link to Part 3)
    2.3 Separating players with TrueSkill (Link to Part 6)
3. Analysis for Boardgamers
    3.1 Infrastructure Development (Current Article)
    3.2 Cards Played (Link to Part 5)
    3.3 Mistakes made by Good Players (Link to Part 7)

3. Analysis for Boardgamers

Disclaimers: 
(1) We can only learn correlations from data.  Whether these correlations actually imply causation is up to our interpretation.
(2) The data comes from 10k+ recent games at boardgaming-online . I did not separate the "level" of the games.  Thus, it represents the behavior of all players, not just good players.

3.1 Infrastructure Development

Please refer to Section 2.1 if you are interested in the methods I used. For boardgamers, here is a summary of what you will see here:

(1) I recorded 6 aspects of infrastructure in every round per player per game. They are:

(A) Number of Civil Actions (CA) used.  (take/play cards, build/disband things, revolution is counted as 1 CA, wasted CA does not count)

(B) Number of Military Actions (MA) used. (draw cards + build/disband units + play aggression/war/tactics + adopt tactics, wasted MA does not count. In this counting, a Robespierre revolution will drop this to 0 but add 1 to CA.)

(C) Resource produced. (ignore corruption)

(D) Science produced.

(E) Culture produced.

(F) Food produced (minus consumption).

(2) Up to a specified round, you will see 1 number (weight) per round per aspect. This number implies how strongly such aspect at that round is related to a good performance in the end of the game. (>90% of the winner score is classified as good). A positive weight means being better than your opponent on this aspect is important. A negative weight means that you being better on this aspect is bad.

We will try to determine whether some strategic lessons can be learned from these weights.

Here is what they look like from Round 0 to Round 4.

Lesson One: All curves except CA start at 0 in round 0. This is the card-selection round, so no one can do anything different. A small but positive weight for CA implies a small advantage to later players.

Lesson Two: At Round 1, the common actions is to build the 3rd mine (73%). If you have Urban Growth, you can build the 2nd Lab instead (5%). They perform equally well. This resource or science advantage actually has almost the largest weight up to Round 4. Thus it is probably not a good idea to build a farm or work on Wonder instead.

Lesson Three: At Round 1, the only way to get extra CA is Hammurabi. The negative weight suggests that it may not be a good idea to exercise his ability right away. Also, the only way to get MA is Caesar. The negative weight suggests that he may be a relatively weaker leader. Although, it could also mean that typical players do not know how to use him properly. Since the MA weights are no longer negative after Round 2, maybe one should avoid electing Caesar at Round 1. There is a little puzzle here though. Presumably, the only disadvantage of using Hammurabi's power is 1 less Military Card. And the only advantage of electing Caesar is 1 more Military Card. It is not impossible, but quite amusing that both are bad.😏

Lesson Four: From Round 2 to Round 4, extra CA seems to be the best investment. There are three ways to get it. Hammurabi, Pyramid, or Code of Laws. It might be wise to prioritize them.

Lesson Five: Foods are mostly irrelevant, probably because most people produces exactly the same amount anyway. A small exception happens in Round 2, during which you can delay growing a population to produce 1 more food. This is usually means working on a Wonder, delay the 2nd Lab, or risk missing out an Age A event. The relative lower weight in science at Round 2 also indicates that delay 2nd Lab for this may not be a bad idea.

Next, we move on to look at the same thing up to Round 10.

Lesson Six: Food is consistently irrelevant as expected. Most of the time, people dance near the upkeep and produce 1 or 0 food each round. Food matters only in combination with population footprints and happiness. Thus the long-term food production trend does not teach us interesting lessons.

Lesson Seven: Between Round 4 and 7, all the weights remain relatively small, with Resource production being slightly more important than others. Before and after such quiescence period, CA and Science are highly valuable. This is the natural rhythm of TtA. Before Round 4, we are working to setup Age I technologies. CA and Science is the key to get better techs and discovering them earlier. We then need resources to reach the full potential of those techs. A few rounds later, Age II technology comes and we want Science and CA again.  The resource lead during the quiescence period, can come from either Iron upgrade or a 4th Bronze.

Lesson Eight: Culture production and MA stays underwhelming until Round 10.  In fact, to see their full potential, we have to look at the entire game duration.

Here, we divided every game into Round 0 plus 10 portions (so 1 portion is about 2 actual rounds). We can see that the importance of MA shoots up in the last 1/3 of the game. The importance of Culture increases steadily and also becomes quite relevant in the last 1/3. They both drop back at the last 1/10 of the game shows that this is a timing issue. Your opponents will catch up eventually. But you can win by setting up an earlier aggression or massive culture production.

Lesson Nine: CA becomes important again in the very end. You need them to grab essential technologies and Wonders. They also increase you ability to complete Wonders.

It is a bit tempting to interpret the negative CA weight at 4/10 of the game as "the prime time for revolution", since in my way of counting, the revolution player would have taken just 1 CA that round. I myself do not trust that interpretation too much, since the same feature did not show up in a round-by-round analysis. While looking at the entire duration of the game and there are much larger weights in late game, one needs to be careful about interpreting the meaning of other weights.

In the next Section, I will use the same technique to analysis individual cards.