Expert Tips?

[Yxklyx]

I'm trying to get 75 rail or 100 water but keep failing over and over again. Any expert tips? I think one of them is un-intuitive at first glance: it's better to keep your rivers and rails near each other so that you can take advantage of that tile that supports both.

[Dark Slaughter]

I have the same problem^^ i think it will be able if we are able to stay longer in game, my record after 18h gameplay is around 16.800 points but still at 24/50 rails and 61/100 water. There are a lot of rounds i do not get over 10.000 points... maybe we have to wait for geting more balanced

[Drecon]

If you want to make one area really big, try to place all tiles of that type in the same area.

As you gain experience you can more easily plan out future tiles as you become more familiar with what tiles are more or less likely to show up. That can really change your odds of finding that one tile that you need and link your rivers or rails together when you need it.

That said, the river and train quests are pretty harsh and you need to get a pretty long game going if you want to finish them. You would probably need to get a pretty high score to get those quests so focus on getting perfect tiles for the game mostly.

[becephalus]

So here is the secret of this game. Don't worry about the awards and flags, those mostly take care of themselves. Instead focus on tiling perfection. Probably 100% of you tiles for the first several dozen should be perfect matches, and for a long time probably 90-95% of them. When you do this you don't go down in tiles much, so the awards and flags are less of an emergency.

Have your rail all off one direction, your water another direction, and keep it away from you main tiles. It is pretty easy to score in the 40,000-45,000 range.

[Dark Slaughter]

so if we are bad puzzlers, we never will reach the goal :D
i try hard to perfect play, so far. It ends with a huge amount of never ending "you never get this perfect tile"- holes. Maybe it is bad luck, because if i need 1 field 1 forest next to each, the only way i get this tile is with wrong direction :D
I started for star-building each tile in one direktion to reach the additional missions, with this i got my record. for the center i try perfect play (i'm at placed 66 at the moment)
Is there ratio, we can handle for?

[Dark Slaughter]

Originally posted by becephalus:

So here is the secret of this game. Don't worry about the awards and flags, those mostly take care of themselves.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2489819210

your rule worked for me, first row i started with "i don't care about missions" i got my new record. But as you see there are a lot holes, i don't think they would got ever the right part, what do you mean, how to prevent from this?

[Drecon]

On of the things you learn over time is to leave holes that are more likely to be filled. If you know what tiles are more likely to show up, it's often easy to set it up so that the holes you leave are more likely to get filled.

Also, if you're low on tiles, it's often possible to put a tile in a spot where it makes 4 or 5 perfects. That can sometimes be better than other options.

[Psyringe]

Originally posted by Drecon:

On of the things you learn over time is to leave holes that are more likely to be filled. If you know what tiles are more likely to show up, it's often easy to set it up so that the holes you leave are more likely to get filled.

Very good advice! To elaborate a bit on that: holes that have 1-6 edges with the same feature (excluding rivers and rails), and plains for any remaining edges, can usually be filled. For holes with two features it takes more time - the right tile might still come up eventually, but as long as you're waiting on it, your stack is short up to 6 tiles that filling the hole might yield. Hence I would try to to prevent those.

And if a hole requires 3 different features to match, then it might be better to plug it with a tile with 4-5 matching edges, to harvest at least _some_ of the "perfect placement" tiles. The chance for the perfect tile to show up would be 1/4096 even without rails and rivers in the game (assuming an equal distribution and excluding some special cases). And in reality, the chance is probably much smaller, since the tile generation RNG seems to favor tiles with a lower number of different features.

[Dark Slaughter]

i think the game also loves to give you wrong-side "perfect-plates" :D i believe now that you can only have (not for real) left house and right field, but not left field and right house at one corner.

many thanks to you for your care

PS: 26.470 points now as record

[Yxklyx]

I just started a game where 2 of the first 4 are impossible to be perfect - so 100% seems too much to ask for...

[Dark Slaughter]

eighter you exept it :D or you restart the game (around 5 times till you get one good) but as i recognized it right, a lake does not be good anyway for a perfect play. And i use a dump-place where i just waste all total unuseable tiles

[becephalus]

As for what to do with holes. As mentioned, just fill them in later with sub optimal stuff if you get desperate, otherwise I mostly just wait them out.

Here is an example where I made three pretty big mistakes misclicking in the mid game (my 4 and 7 year old were crawling all over me):

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2490177443

[zipper500]

I feel so inept! you guys talking about 1000's of points. I've been pleased with 8000+ until I read your posts! How do you get 45,000???

[Drecon]

Originally posted by zipper500:

I feel so inept! you guys talking about 1000's of points. I've been pleased with 8000+ until I read your posts! How do you get 45,000???

As someone who broke 1 million said on Reddit:

The game actually becomes easier and easier as you progress, because you have more and more places to put your tiles. With every tile you place, a future perfect tile becomes more likely (if you set it up right).

The trick it to survive the mid-game where you have just a few tiles, no immediate quests to complete and need to make a lot of perfects in a row to stay in the game. If you can do that, you can crawl out of that hole eventually.

[Daulken]

Originally posted by becephalus:

So here is the secret of this game. Don't worry about the awards and flags, those mostly take care of themselves. Instead focus on tiling perfection. Probably 100% of you tiles for the first several dozen should be perfect matches, and for a long time probably 90-95% of them. When you do this you don't go down in tiles much, so the awards and flags are less of an emergency.

Have your rail all off one direction, your water another direction, and keep it away from you main tiles. It is pretty easy to score in the 40,000-45,000 range.

So I don't understand this at all. 90% of my starts, it's impossible to place even just the first 3 tiles without already wrecking the bonus for at least one tile.

Start with the windmill, nope, restart.
Start with an all water tile? nope, restart.
Start with an all forest tile (first), restart.
etc.

I don't see how you're doing this unless you've got a completely different set of tiles from me.

[Drecon]

Originally posted by Daulken:

Originally posted by becephalus:

So here is the secret of this game. Don't worry about the awards and flags, those mostly take care of themselves. Instead focus on tiling perfection. Probably 100% of you tiles for the first several dozen should be perfect matches, and for a long time probably 90-95% of them. When you do this you don't go down in tiles much, so the awards and flags are less of an emergency.

Have your rail all off one direction, your water another direction, and keep it away from you main tiles. It is pretty easy to score in the 40,000-45,000 range.

So I don't understand this at all. 90% of my starts, it's impossible to place even just the first 3 tiles without already wrecking the bonus for at least one tile.

Start with the windmill, nope, restart.
Start with an all water tile? nope, restart.
Start with an all forest tile (first), restart.
etc.

I don't see how you're doing this unless you've got a completely different set of tiles from me.

Most people who go for high scores reroll the first tiles until they get at least the first few who match up. You can restart for free, so the only thing it costs you is time.