by chally
Hammy wrote:
I played Giants in my first ever game and the 2 shovel cost did seem rather daunting. I think I made an error though by using my first priest to reduce the cost of shovels to 2 workers. I am sure I could have used that priest far more effectively as I think I only used the cost 2 shovel ability perhaps once because I got a stronghold and then it was easy to teraform one hex a turn.
Depending on how you do it, reducing your Spade exchange rate on the first turn could precludes you from doing anything else (which would be a big cost). If you take the priest bonus card, so you only start with 6 cubes, two of which are spent to increase your spade exchange rate and four of which are required to terraform. In the beginner set-up, that means you are also passing early, missing the chance to score points for constructing dwellings, and are potentially getting crowded out of one of your starting spaces on the board.
Of course, you could burn three power to take the priest special action and either use your bonus card for more cubes or just spend the whole first turn on a double spade upgrade.
The big problem with a first-turn upgrade (double or single) is that it gets you way out of sync with the scoring tiles. For this reason, the sailing strategy looks better and better: double dwelling first turn (4 points) upgrade to Stronghold second turn (5 points), use the double-spade bonus action (and maybe the single-spade special action depending on your cube supply) to get 4-8 points on turn 3. It makes towns hard down the road, but it seems like a profitable early start.