After sustaining a rare devastating loss in a team game (of all things), I'm rethinking some economic concepts. As I've mentioned before, rare resources play a huge role in team games because there are some many more rare resources on the map. In addition to the resources they bring in, they also bring in the bonuses, which makes them super doubly good. Of course, all this is pretty obvious, right? So get a lot of rares. The implication this brings with it, though, is you should set up your economy to get rares. Well what does that mean?

It means maxing out wood and wealth as early as possible. And the best way to do that seems to be an early COM2. I know this sounds like heresy, but I think it's true. First of all, an early classical has less benefit because raiding is not as prevalent in large team games as it is in 1on1 games. It's more difficult, and will likely set you back relative to the pocket players. Secondly, an early classical is designed to gather knowledge more quickly. In 1on1 games, I believe the logic of the early classical still holds. But in big team games, I think you can recover the knowledge gap with rares. Many rares have knowledge and getting those is better than spending wealth on scholars. So... in team games now, I am probably going to start going SCI2 -> COM2 or maybe even COM2 -> CIV2. I dunno, we'll see.
posted by Tim at 8:49 AM