When people were teaching me how to play Through The Ages, (TTA) they told me that one of the key things in the game is making sure you keep up with military. Being not-last is crucial, but even if you are safely above the last place in military there is a huge benefit to more military - you can beat up the person in last and take their stuff.
The person that falls behind and gets continually pounded is the bank, and if other people are raiding the bank, you want to be raiding the bank too. You won't win if people are resolving huge wars on the person in last and you just try to build infrastructure the normal way. Get a piece of the action!
I was worried in my league games that I would be the bank. I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I didn't know what the cards did, I was confused about many of the basic rules, and I kept on making errors for both of those reasons.
Turns out, I wasn't the bank. I ended up with a 1st, 2nd, 2nd, 4th showing, which is pretty great for having gone in with only a sketchy sense of the rules. I feel like I earned that result, because I really screwed up the game where I came 4th, (discarding wonders that are almost finished is bad!) and I quite liked my play in the game I won. It was a tight finish with me only coming out ahead by 2 points, but it felt good.
One of those 2nd places was a gong show though. I declared an early war against a player 6 military behind me. I calculated that he could only gain 4 on his turn, so I was going to steal a yellow token from him. Then Napoleon flipped off the top, and this allowed him to jump to 2 military ahead of me and I lost a yellow token instead. Whoops! That player then proceeded to rush massively ahead of everyone else in military and ruthlessly beat us all up for the rest of the game. I managed to hold onto 2nd place because after pillaging and warring us all into submission he finished it off with two huge wars for culture and stripped 50 points away from the last two players, but left me alone.
Without those two gigantic wars our point spread is something like 120-140, a tight game indeed. With those wars though, the winner crushed us by 110, and I beat the other two players by ~50. It looks like I secured 2nd by virtue of looking weak and harmless, not even worth warring with.
Note to self: Don't declare early wars unless you are really, really sure you aren't going to lose them.
I quite like TTA. The flavour is solid, and the gameplay is a fun puzzle. Some parts of it do feel strange though, like the numbers don't quite work. Mostly I am referring to the Age 3 civil technologies. I was looking at each of them trying to figure out the ROI on them, and they all looked mighty suspicious. You only get about 5 turns in Age 3, and building one of the Age 3 civil techs costs ~10 science, takes 2 actions, and this gives you the opportunity to spend 6 rocks and 1 action to upgrade a worker from age 1 to age 3. If I imagine that I upgrade 2 workers, and that an action can be spent for 2 rocks, this means I need to spend 10 science and 20 rocks to get 6 production per turn. I need the full 5 turns just to break even! If I get that tech down a turn or two after age 3 starts, I can never recoup the cost.
Sure, if I have actions / rocks / science that is worthless then I may want to turn them into something better, but generally it just seems like a terrible investment. I suppose if you desperately need food for example and you are stuck on the age A farm and you have lots of science and rocks then age 3 food could be good, but that seems pretty narrow.
I could improve my rate of return by upgrading 4 workers instead of 2, but then I am making 20 rocks / science / whatever per turn. That much of any one thing seems tough to use effectively, and even so I am still taking 4 turns to recoup costs. I can't see how I get all that done in the first round of age 3 anyway, so it seems like a losing proposition.
What I really like is the age 1 techs. They don't cost that much science, they stay out a long time, and they are an enormous advantage over age A. I am pretty happy to take all age 1 techs, quite frankly, and use all my science later on to buy things like Military Theory and Air Forces, as well as at least one type of age 3 military unit. I can't expect to actually get all of that of course, but my game plan involves getting 1 tech for rocks, food, science, and happy and only getting those techs from age 1 and 2. At age 3, I care about military and culture. The age 3 civic techs are a waste from what I can see.
However, I have only played 7 games in total, so I probably don't know anything. Can anyone with more experience tell me where I am wrong on this?
You mostly build level 3 techs because there are many endgame scoring cards that can be added to the deck that reward having them. The game is not in the last age about accumulating or converting resources; aside from inflicting pain via military aggression or pounding out culture points, it is about winning the race to scoreable milestones (wonders, techs, military, etc.).
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