That's a solid strategy right here. Plus, I was wondering if players will let some fires burn to get that early faith going. During playtests with friends, I saw that most of them went to extinguish the fires right away, but that's actually not always needed.
I'm so glad to see that you took advantage of this "discoverable" mechanic!
I wonder - what do you think about the Meadow and Forest cards? Did you find them useful in any capacity?
In fact for me - meadow & forest are a big food cost for nothing. They have no immediate value since you can build directly producing tiles on burned lands like farms. However in potential harder maps where you start with burned tiles already healing the land first might be necessary before placing lumber camps.
If you’re too slow to extinguish fires, then restoring land can be useful for placing houses, pastures, or lumber camps.
Otherwise, there are usually enough wood-producing tiles on each map, making meadows and forests unnecessary in most cases.
The conclusion is that the game rythm and only 2 cards choices make the direct resource production way more usefull than land restoration. Even if you replace your burned lumberjack into a farm.
Agreed, and very insightful. making tougher maps with having to restore pre-burnt tiles is actually a really good idea, too!
I added those cards for 2 reasons:
1. In case you end up with too many burnt tiles or built tiles and can't build a camp, for example. To prevent the player from getting locked.
2. Every deck of cards needs some 'lower tier' cards you can discard or care less about, imo.
Other possible use cases for them in the future are:
1. Allowing the player to expand the map, and that it could only be done with non-structure cards.
2. Allowing the player to destroy buildings with those cards, so they could build better buildings.
Oh that sounds nice!
I really like the idea of using them to expand the map! It would give them a real purpose beyond just avoiding getting stuck. The ability to remove buildings with these cards is also an interesting mechanic, especially if it allows for better optimization (we can imagine fertile lands that can’t spawn but are buildable on burned lands only and boost food production on it for example).
I also first though plains & forest was here to replace water tiles that are used only for fishing. Maybe aqueducts can have also a special trait with water tiles ?
