The wood-brick strategy purpose is to obtain as much wood and brick early in the game, in order to build settlements and roads faster than your opponents.
A wood/brick port is very useful with this strategy, as finding a way to get ore/grain will be important to build cities in the middle to end game.
There is skepticism with this strategy as it can be seen as less effective on a small or congested board, as you need room to grow in order for this strategy to pay off. This strategy is although most effective as it increases the number of roads you have will allow for more options to expand into locations with limited number of expansion spots. Also ore-grain player’s worst nightmare is playing on a congested board with one or two wood-brick players. This strategy naturally lends itself to getting the longest road. .
For this strategy, it is very important that you build new settlements around open grain and ore hexes, or you will have a very difficult time trying to build cities later on in the game, which can be crucial for to win the game.
Optionally, with your increased settlement production, you can build on a number of ports to get ore and wheat.
With your increased road building capability, you should build your roads to cut off other player’s expansion. This can help in denying Ore/Grain players from acquiring enough building sites they need to win the game. This leads into the next variant, which takes this to more of an extreme:
The constant expansion of roads at a fast pace is crucial to get the win, but there is a variety of ways to use the roads such as blocking off your opponents. Blocking off your opponents requires you to focus on building roads first rather than production. After you are done blocking off your opponents then you can focus on getting victory points.
This requires a lot of wood and brick, so your first cities should be on these, rather than ore. Trade aggressively for wood and brick, before it’s obvious you might be a threat.
This strategy is can be difficult to do as it goes against the philosophy of the game that requires the player to build up his/her production. It can work better on smaller boards with less people as it is easier to block off your opponents rather than a larger board with more opponents.
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