From another thread:
In response to 2: It really depends on the land that is being auctioned in my opinion. I know you're a big advocate for buying land at high prices (at least I remember you saying something like that in another post). But I'm not. I wouldn't pay 800 for a desert plot in the first 3-4 rounds of the game. I might not even pay 500 depending on the circumstances. I would be more inclined to purchase the food and energy thus enabling me to pick up more valuable mountain spaces that could net me a fortune by turn 6 or 7. Its a matter of preference and play style I suppose. I personally don't value land a whole lot. I have no problem winning games with 2-3 less plots than some players.
A plot of land adds 500 points to your score, so when you bid $800 you only "lose" $300. $300 will buy you ~5-7 units of energy from the store, assuming no major price spikes. A plains tile (not even desert) bought on turn 2 will produce 33 units of energy over the course of the game, more if you have additional energy plots to benefit from production bonuses. Those 33 units of energy are incidentally worth a
minimum of $330 if you sell them all, so even if the energy market is absolutely terrible from the get go that $800 plains plot will pay for itself and make you a profit of $30. That's being extremely pessimistic about energy prices, too; more likely, if you didn't get that plains plot turns 2 you would have had to buy at least 1 unit of energy at store price (or worse, monopoly prices) in order to keep your other plots powered for turn 3, then several more if you want to wait until turn 4 to start producing energy (or if you just want a buffer in case of acid rain/radiation killing your energy production.) So that extra energy plot on turn 2 can be saving you a couple hundred additional dollars.
Even that is not even beginning to scratch the surface of how valuable that plot is. Setting aside smithore shenanigans that will probably be fixed, at the end of the game your main goal is almost certainly to be producing crystite. If you have 10 plots, then at the very end you should have 1 farm and 9 crystite plots. At that point, assuming all of them are located adjacent to at least one other crystite plot, production bonuses mean your "no crystite" plots will be producing 4 units of crystite a turn in these last couple of turns for an average expected value of $800 assuming you manage to go full crystite by turn 11 (typically this means hoarding energy in advance, which is usually easy because the energy market will probably have crashed by this point; for 10 plots your target is 23 energy at the end of round 10, although you can try converting your river to energy in order to knock out a few extra units.) So if you buy another plot that's $800 in endgame crystite on top of the $500 valuation on the plot itself and a couple hundred dollars worth of energy savings and production early on. You could pay almost
double that $800 land bid and still potentially come out ahead.
But it doesn't even stop there. If you manage to get two more of those $800 plots as the game goes on, you can now manage to get 12 crystite plots in addition to your river farm. Compared to the guy who doesn't buy any land and has 10 plots, your additional crystite plots give you +1 production to each and every crystite plot you have. So you've got +9 crystite on your first 9 crystite plots, then those extra three plots you bought are now each producing 5 crystite on average, thus the combined advantage of your 3 extra plots is 24 extra crystite a turn at endgame production for an expected value of $2400. If you bought those three plots at $800 each, you can probably make back your purchase price in
one turn at the end of the game--and you can probably expect to get two turns of full production, plus you still have $1500 in equity, plus you have all the not-inconsiderable accumulated production from those plots prior to turn 11. This all assumes that none of the plots have any crystite, and that the two-turn best crystite price doesn't break $100 at the end. You could quite reasonably expect to get upwards of $7000 total out of those three plots, in the neighborhood of
three times their $800/ea. price tag.
That's just assuming we're pretty much writing off the interim production, too. If you get an extra crystite plot on turn 3, 6, and 9, then by turn 11 if you get even 1.5 average production per plot out of them (and that's a conservative estimate, considering that for turns 9 and 10 at least you should be up to 3 average production minimum if not 4, even for no-crystite plots) that's another $2250. At this point you're looking at something like
quadruple returns on your $800/plot investment.
Of course, this is all just assuming you're playing a hypothetical future release where smithore has been nerfed and is no longer the predominate endgame strategy. In the current version, a 4-player game will probably include at least one other player interested in exploiting smithore; if you work with them you can almost guarantee all the smithore highs you want (especially if a third or fourth player jumps in), then you can use smithore instead of crystite, which generally gives you +1 production per turn and means you can assume an average sell price more to the tune of $200. Our estimate for turn 3-10 production jumps up to 2.5 units per plot per turn at $200 each, ballooning to $7500. We're no longer going to be able to guarantee maximum profits on both turn 11 and 12, though; if turn 11 is a price spike you'll sell at $230, then the price will drop to the low triple digits for turn 12. At the end of the game our net production advantage in smithore is 27 units/turn more than someone without three extra plots, so assuming prices of $230 and $115 for the last two turns that's $9315 in extra profit. Long story short, after you add in your $1500 equity value, those three extra plots are adding something like $18000 total to your score, and without the risks of pirates and price fluctations that crystite would run into (although the price fluctuations are more likely to help than to hurt, and pirates aren't
astoundingly common, so it's not
too optimistic to take these two factors and call them a wash.) If the other players let you get those plots at $800 apiece, those three plots are earning you back
seven and a half times what you paid for them.
And if the smithore market can be manipulated so that the spike falls on turn 12, you can save all your production from turn 11 and sell it all off at $230. That brings your two-turn endgame profits up over $12000, approaching a
ninefold return on your three $800 land purchases under the current version.
This is not theorycraft. There are some risks involved that I didn't get into, so I'm not really going to bid $5000 on every plot that comes up for auction even though I'm reasonably confident that three such $5000 plots will return a profit. And, as mentioned, once smithore gets brought back down to original profitability levels that number is going to go down quite a bit. There are also opportunity costs to take into consideration--you generally want to save at least a tiny bit of money for expenses. But by and large, the numbers do work. Time and time again I make "crazy" bids of $2000, $2500, $3000--I once paid over $4000, although that was mostly showboating--and turn a substantial profit off them.
There are other benefits to highballing land values, too. The thread this spun off from was about the advantage of players who are ranked lower on turn-by-turn scores. If you spend $1500 on a piece of land, the game only treats that as a $500 value, so you've just knocked $1000 off your score. Later on you'll earn that much and more back, but for
now you're $1000 lower on the scoreboard and more likely to be in a lower rank where random events will start to favor you.
