by Ranior
ddyer wrote:
Le Havre has so many paths, you have to be very aware of
what your opponents are planning. It's completely plausible
that your opponent's style makes some plans unworkable.
While it's true that your opponents moves can make some paths more or less attractive, there's almost no way that you can actually win the game with no boats, assuming you're playing even decent opponents. Certainly at higher levels of play there is no way.
Now if he means no boats early on...sure. In my games I think players often rush boats a bit too quickly rather than just accepting some early loans and that totally works. You can make do with only getting a few boats late (preferably 2+ steel boats) and then making huge points off of a couple shipping runs.
But if you truly have no boats throughout the entire game you are going to owe a lot in food throughout the game. All those actions or francs you are spending represent a lot of potentially lost points from other sources. On top of all that you can't ship for points, or be building luxury liners if you truly are going no boat, so your literal only path to points is buildings. (And francs, but how are you generating any decent quantity of money that you're not using to feed is beyond me). And even if you manage to build tons of buildings and get tons of entry frees, it just won't be competitive with other good players.