Another thing - if we decide to build a Carcassonne house, we should as well do it now, as we have the necessary resources now, and it is useless to leave them unused in our stock, while the house could bring some resources. If we decide to go for the weaving-mill, just ignore this message - we don't have the resources yet and aren't likely to get all of them before next month.

Still another thing - if we want to build a Carcassonne house, we will need a name for that one. Suggestions?

Esterio

Ol_Roger (and others),

First of all, thanks for your message. I was feeling quite lonely here...

Using the townhall for trade, it is possible indeed to pay roughly 3.2 wool for 1 cloth, instead of the 3 for 1 rate we would get with a mill. As we need about 300 cloth per month, we pay about 60 wool in excess of what we would pay with a mill. If we had a mill, we could convert these wool into 20 more cloth, which would be worth about 9,500 talers indeed. We would also be able to convert some more wool (during normal months, we produce more wool than we would normally use - although we might require more and more as people are gaining levels) into cloth, making some more profit on the way - let's say the total gain per month would be 10k talers.

This may not seem much compared to the initial cost (about 90k talers worth, as you computed - probably a bit less in fact as we produce the wood and the wool ourselves and wouldn't have to buy them, and we can probably trade the other resources at slightly lower prices than the ones you used), but having a mill would have several other benefits:

• we could generate all the resources needed for our requirements (food, cloth and talers) alone, without making any trade
• we could afford trading cloth away, which can only broaden the range of possible trades with other towns
• we would be much less dependent on the wool/cloth market ratio, which usually varies between 3.0 and 3.4, but might go further up without any notice

For all these reasons, I think that we will need a mill eventually - the sooner being the better, of course, to take advantage of its benefits (and the low cost of most resources involved) as much as possible.

As for playing out of town instead of in town (for games that we have, of course), I am convinced it would be a mistake, for several reasons. Even if only 15% or 20% of our total production is wool, I am not sure it is possible to find any city whose wool production is significantly higher. Assuming a 3 player game with 1 EC player, playing in EC would give us on average 66% of 15% wool, while playing out of town (once we have identified the most appropriate town) would only give us 16% of 30% wool (or even 40% wool, if that exists). We would also lose the few talers every game played in town gives us (2 or 3 talers per player - not huge, but better than nothing).

It is true that the difference is slightly less important when more than 1 EC player is involved in the game, but even if all the players are from EC, 100% of 15% is the same as 50% of 30% (and we would lose the extra talers).

Of course, for games that we want to play and do not have in town (there are still quite a few of these), it would be better to choose a wool (or ore) producing city, as these commodities are worth much more than the other three. The difference shouldn't be that big, however, as the stats posted every month by nat268 show that most of the MU games we play can be played in town.

Esterio

Hi all,

After some more thought, calculation and discussion with Hanno yesterday, I think my opinion may have changed about our next possible building.

It appears that a Carcassonne house would pay for itself after far less games than I thought: less than 300 games (two players, one from EC) should be necessary, considering the current market values.

Also, we got some talers from the Carcassonne guild, which I didn't know before yesterday (the donation occured during my holidays last month). I feel that it means we should build a Carcassonne house.

Moreover, we already have the resources to build it now, and building it as soon as possible would give it more time to pay for itself. And we still would have one available house to quickly host a game we would like.

What do you think?

Esterio

A slow month indeed, but it has been quite busy for some of us (I know I was away for about 3 weeks), and February is also about 10% shorter than other months.

With the recent addition of Ligretto, the top 10 games played by EC citizens can now be played in town. Only Can't Stop and KUK have been played more than Ra, which is once again the least used of our gamerooms.

Top Race, which was not included in that list, has been tried by several of us as well and might be worth considering. However, I would be very reluctant to be convinced (to understand why, just check where Medina or Sticheln stand on this list, while some of us thought both of them would be must-have games a few months ago).

We still haven't decided what to build next. We have enough resources at the moment to afford building a game house (not a windmill yet), but several questions remain:

• do we want to use one of our last houses?
• do we want to buld a game instead of a tower or a weaving-mill?
• which game, if any, would we like to build?

Esterio

Hi Alexfrog,

I wasn't able to connect in the past few days (not enough time), but should be around regularly during the next weeks. Hopefully we will manage to have a few Tichu and/or Doko sessions, even if our connection times don't match ideally... See you soon,

Esterio

Check the Emerald guild forum for detailed infos, but
you have until March 13th to register to the Emerald tournament, which will take place on March 15th and 16th.

http://www.brettspielwelt.de/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Emerald;action=display;num=1046559706

Esterio

Hello,

Guilds cannot contribute that much in talers compared to the cost of a building (most of it being the cost of resources needed, and not the talers themselves). Still every help is appreciated.

As for the games you propose:
- Carcassonne could be nice, but we already have CCE; I am not sure Carcassonne + CCE in town would be played more than CCE alone
- Can't Stop would not be in my personal list of games I would like to see in EC; it isn't one of my favourite games, and it isn't worth very much either as resources or as points; however, it is short and light enough, and I can understand that some players like it for these reasons
- Attribut in the current, German version would seem quite out of place in EC; on the other hand, it would be very nice to have in the English version; any idea about a possible release date?

The game I would be most interested in having in EC is Meuterer; however, I'm not sure how many of us enjoy it - and there are already a lot of Meuterer rooms all other the world, compared to the number of players I usually find for this game.

Esterio

PS: Remember that several new Fürsten can be expected in the next few weeks, which means several new games will be available. Which games will be up to them, but it will improve the game selection a bit anyway (as I assume we won't have a 3rd PR room, will we?)

Hello all,

First of all, it would be nice to consider securing March cloth requirements before trying to build anything new. I have been away most of the time this month, but haven't planned any long holidays in the next few months (unfortunately ), so I should be able to follow the market much more closely than this month. March is also longer than February, which will give us some more days to worry about this.

However, we should also be able to start stockpiling resources to do something else - probably one of the three choices pointed out by nat.

As for new game rooms, I can't think of any game we play so much that it would seem compulsory to have it, like it might have been for Fuersten or TA. Sure, we would probably play any game a little more if it could be done in town, but even then, none seems really necessary. Furthermore, we will soon have a few more Fürsten with games in their residences, which will add to the game variety available in town.

I am not fond of the idea of a game tower either. It appears to be quite expensive, and not so useful. For sure, it would be nice to have, but I don't think that would be enough of an improvement to justify the cost. I would suggest to wat some more, till we have more games available, but as evaluating the benefits seems quite difficult to me, I may be completely wrong.

The weaving-mill would allow us to make our own clothes from the wool we produce. As cloth and wool are becoming more expensive, and as we require more cloth every month, it could be nice to be able to save some wool. Basically, the weaving-mill produces one cloth from 3 wool, while we have to trade about 3.2 wool to get one cloth from another town - or even more from the market). If we can save 0.2 wool for each of the 300 cloth we will require next month, this is worth about 60 wool at the end of the month - about 9000 talers worth at the current price.

Whatever we build, the cost of the resources needed for the building can be expected to be much more than the immediate benefits we can get for building it. My own opinion would be to try and build a weaving-mill first, but we still have some time to decide. We will need wood, stone and tools anyway (as well as cloth for our requirements).

Esterio

PS: By the way, once the requirements are secured, maybe we could spend some talers to improve the landscape a bit, even if that has few evaluable benefits...

Hello all,

As you may have seen, I'm back from my holidays and have started trading so that we can meet our clothes requirement this month. February is a short month, and it will be difficult to meet these (we still need a lot of clothes, as you can see). A few in-town Tichu or Doko sessions would definitely help collecting the final resources we need to trade for cloth. Any volunteers?

By the way, does anyone know how I could finally get my residence, so that I don't have to play Ligretto out of town any more?

Esterio

Hello,

As some of you may know, a party is being run at the moment by the PR guild. The PR guild members among us should go to the guild hall and press whatever green button they can find there. Not sure exactly why, but I guess it cannot hurt (much).

Esterio

And here is the fourth new game room in about a week:
Go: "Live and let die", in C41-26

We are now likely to make a small pause in room building, to give us time to play the new games , secure our requirements for this month, and gather resources for the next building (which should be more expensive than a game house, whatever it is).

That should also give us enough time to decide between Sticheln or Medina (or something else) as our next favourite game. And some of us could become Fürsten quite soon too.

Esterio

All in all, given your statistics, EC is doing very well in terms of resource production.

I think so as well, and the recently built new rooms will probably have a significant effect on this month production too. Even if the number of MU points will probably not change much, the proportion of games played in town will increase, which should provide us with more resources than before.

ET is natural starting point for English speaking newbies.  So ET will probably always have a significant number of people playing far fewer games.  I don't think this is a bad thing, for either EC or ET. Each town needs to decide what it's mission is.

I agree completely with that. You cannot compare EC and ET since their goals, sizes, age, context... are different.

I think both of sets of stats point out that both EC and ET are thriving, and this I know is a good thing.

Direct trade between EC and ET has been very useful to us, and hopefully to ET too (otherwise I hope they would tell me). ET has definitely been one of EC's first three trade partners over the past few weeks, and I'm confident it will continue that way.

Esterio

Hello,

Now that we have three new games in town, thanks to our two recently-built houses and Alexfrog's residence, we should start thinking about the next one (we shouldn't forget our monthly requirements either, but I will make sure we are on track for these, and they shouldn't be too much of a problem).

Considering how much time and discussion was needed to find names for the previous rooms, maybe it would be good to start thinking about a name for a Go room right now? What do our Go specialists suggest?

Esterio

Hello all,

A new Fuersten room has been built last night in Emerald City. You can find Leonardo's Workshop in /room C41-6, and hopefully we will have lots of games together there.

Esterio

Some more ideas to think about:

Florence-based ideas:

• Galleria degli Uffizi
• Medici vs Pitti

Game-based ideas:

• Prestige, what else?
• Everything for prestige
• Prestige first
• Artists welcomed

Other ideas:

• Leonardo's paradise
• Welcome, Leonardo

Esterio