Winning in Catan is easy

[modern valley]

All you have to do is guess the number that will be rolled 30% of the time

[chrome oasis]

What do you mean? It takes so much skill to place a settlement on a 6

[novel pulsar]

All it takes is to be on a 6. Winning is easy…

You too can win in 60 rolls

[modern valley]

With brick and wheat on 4, I thought I was going to win... but my oponent had 9 🙁

[glacial mist]

it has trends, sometimes you will notice 5/9's rolling like crazy with 6/8 hardly being rolled all game... other times 7 will just roll like no tomorrow and everyone gets frustrated lol

[jovial willow]

What world does 11 roll more than others. Just so irritating

[novel pulsar]

Only in Catan universe can you put your first settlement on an 11 and second on a 3/10/11 then proceed to roll 2/3/11/12 all game and win. What a bunch of bull

[novel pulsar]

Way better than good placement and being on a 4/6/8/9/10…

[vital holly]

lol this is so true, that’s why I was the card stack option to be available in non-custom games

[modern valley]

In this game of roulette, I unfortunately bet on 8 instead of 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 10 or 11

[waxen ice]

winning a 4 player game in 26 rolls, zero thinking required
8 out of 10 games are like this

[chrome oasis]

So much skill needed to win

And they will still swear it’s completely random

[chrome oasis]

Shame on me for putting a settlement on 8

[modern valley]

I wish I had gone all in with 9

[nimble nova]

The community complains bout that for years now - nothing got changed.

Compared to other games this "randomizer" does not make any sense. My opponent once rolled 3 x 12 in a row. I ve never seen that in my live until I played CU.

[novel pulsar]

Just when you thought you were going to have a killer game! Had an awesome 4/5/8/9/10 start…

[modern valley]

I wom despite betting on 5 and my opponent betting on 6. That was difficult 😋

[tiny saffron]

Zero times the number nine...

[vital holly]

Why won’t they add card stack dice option to auto match, these “bell curves” are more like m curves

[chrome oasis]

All recent games. Winner decided within first 10-15 rolls.
This app completely destroys the fun of Catan with all these issues and bugs.
No wonder the community is more and more toxic

[chrome oasis]

Almost every game is like this now

[wind lily]

Why is the dice so broken, all they have to do is make it random

[distant laurel]

it could be argued that it is random... but realistically there should be a much more even spread!

[chrome oasis]

Just when you thought you finally have a good game and dice rolls seem fair…game decides to spam 9 over and over. It’s actually comical how bad the dice are

And the only thing developers seems to be able to do these days is unfreezing stuck players 😂
Must be a full time job with how broken this game is and how many players get stuck

What a joke of a game. Shame on you developers for charging money for this POS

[chrome oasis]

Next 2 games right after

[humble marsh]

The team is currently looking into improving the player's experience with the dice 📝 An announcement might be coming in the near future.

[jovial willow]

Might be? thats how much of a joke we are to you

[cinder raptor]

please finally fix these dice!!!!!!!! too many game one number is repeated, i totally can confirm that!

[cinder raptor]

quitting until this garbage is fixed, the game is unplayable right now

[chrome oasis]

Why might? Why can’t you guys be transparent about it??

[humble marsh]

*you will, sorry for the unclear wording 🥹

[modern valley]

I wish I had placed my bet on 6!

[serene violet]

does the cards option at least work?

[jovial willow]

How rigged are the games?
Catan: yes

Just pathetic, accept that you favour rotation of wins among players. This game has gone far from being fair.

[gaunt void]

Wait guys I ACTUALLY got a bell curve game the other day! One in a million:

Mostly bell curve at least ha ha

[modern valley]

Good placement also helps, of course

[modern valley]

I wish I had written "winning in catan is easy"

[modern valley]

The player who bet on 8 quit; the player who bet on 6 won. Gotta love this casino.

[calm coral]

bUt tHeSe cAsEs ArE sO rAre 😂

people say catan is 70% skill and 30% luck, but here it is the opposite

[jagged steppe]

what's special about this one

[mellow obsidian]

It's another quickie, assumably with people who have low skill in Catan.

[calm coral]

what special skill does it take to roll one number 13 times? Teach us master

[nova epoch]

Number diversity. If you have e ery number, it doesn't matter which ones roll a lot.

[calm coral]

didn't know you can cover 10 numbers with 2 buildings lol

[mellow obsidian]

Luck is a huge factor with any game including a dice, my apprentice. It is important to accept this.

[mellow obsidian]

But you can cover 6 of them at the start. You can spread from there. Unless you pick bad numbers and/or you got bad luck. Bad luck can come in several forms, as an example being blocked by other players so you can't pick good numbers or can't spread, having players with low skill who help winning player with trades, having robber sitting in your tile, not getting trades, dice not hitting your numbers, etc.

[mellow obsidian]

Lets take this as an example, and dig into the starting positions. Two easiest rookie-mistakes to notice: Red started with 8,4,3 instead of 8,10,4, while the resources would've been identical. He could have spread to a harbor with 8,3, instead of a harbor with only 3. It would've been a risk to have someone parking at the 8,3 harbor, but this game is about taking risks, as his 3 harbor, instead of 8,10 harbor, shows. Yellow chose 6,9,2 instead of 6,9,3. Yes, yellow got lumber, but with number 2. You never take 2 or 12 if you have options. Then the chat. It reveals that there was most likely more than one trade made that paved way for blue to victory. Blue won because he played with noobs, aided by the fact that he got lucky with the dice. NOT solely because of the dice, as one could understand from this thread's context. In other words, cehc84 is just waving his jerk here after easy victory.

[calm coral]

Brother, I've lost games choosing top places with 568910 because the game decided to roll only 3 and 4s like 15x within the first 20 rolls.
On the other hand I also won games where I chose absolutely ridiculous positions, like only 2 or 3 tiles etc.
Has not much to do with skill, except the dices are going quite balanced which happens not even 50% of the games in CU. Those extreme outcomes which can appear rarely for sure, but not as often as they actually do in CU just seem like another bug alongside many other ones, making this game unplayable in a competitive/serious way. And this is probably why many people rage about it, trying to climb up the elo-ladder and then falling down over and over again, no matter how good you are, just because the system said nope.

[mellow obsidian]

I've done that "actually got the best spread of numbers, but lost anyway" as well. It sucks so bad. 😃

Damn I wish someone would take the time to conduct at least a small study about this. It is true that the perfect bell curve after 10k throws isn't a proof in itself. But such a study, even in small scale, would require quite a time and efford to produce.

I took a picture of some of my group's stats, and after looking them through couple times, I'm starting to think that the CU dice might not be as realistic as it could be. But I don't have all of the data from my group, and I've kept no records of CU's results, so I can only claim memory-based approximation that can be dismissed as bias if I start to draw conclusions.

[jagged steppe]

I have reached a conclusion...I hesitate to say it answers EVERYTHING but it feels that way...

The conclusion is this:
You can't win em all

[mellow obsidian]

Heresy!

[lunar hearth]

Stop talking sense --especially on this subject. Your chat post is rigged!🤡

[pseudo locust]

👍

[modern valley]

Ok, winning in Catan is hard

[limber roost]

The more of a jerk you're willing to be, the easier it is to win.

[mellow obsidian]

Blocking others is part of the strategy. The more nice guy you play it, the more you give others opportunities to win. (Now you know one of the reasons I struggle with winning in Catan.)

[limber roost]

oh of course, but there are different degrees of that, and I'm also thinking of robbing. More people seem to be robbing when you have 2 victory points now. I also tend to think it's obnoxious to place settlements and roads at the beginning such that your road can't avoid conflicting with someone else's. I've only done that 1-2 times in extreme cases due to the layout of resources hexes.

[mellow obsidian]

Friendly Robber is not a norm. It's something that is a selectable game mechanic in custom and solo, and on live it's something that is separately agreed upon before starting the game. Other than that, it's all up to the player's choice whether to rob 2p player or not. If you choose to be nice and not rob, that's cool, although it means one resource less for you and one more for opponent. It is tricky in a situation when all (others) have 2p. I usually try to weight the situation. If someone has something I need, robber is going there. If someone has clearly better starting position than others, I'm going to rob that one. Or, if I find someone a clear threat, like much more experienced player, I'm going to rob him (and try my luck with getting the robber back on me). If I'd be in a situation where I'd consider myself in a clearly better position and skill than others, I'd probably waste the robber in an empty tile. But usually there is more experienced players on same table with me, so it's usually about deciding who is the most threat to my possible victory. My group usually play with national championship rules, as there is lots of championship participants and medalists, so it's not for the faint hearted.

[limber roost]

I suppose I seek more comity, friendship, and community than sheer wins or ELO. Not that it's worked. My default is to rob empty hexes until they're gone. Robbing is basically mutual, so what it does is destabilize the game. In fact, I'd switch the 7 with the 2 and 12. But I can't disagree with your reasoning. I do think it helps to anticipate the potential reaction of the player you rob; if you rob me on 2, I'll make a point of robbing you a lot. If I'm ahead 8-5-4, I fully expect it (and try to coordinate accumulating knights with 2p gains like longest road that often make you more of a target).

Do we actually know that you're more likely to get the resource on the hex you rob? I've never been sure on that.

[mellow obsidian]

Well, the robber is crucial part of the game. Taking it off would change the game dynamics a lot. There's no way of hindering the leading player without it. I've experienced this first hand with bots when they play complete idiots with robber and either me or leading bot steamrolls to victory. The "steamrolling" can start as early as 4 points, if robber is not properly deployed.

[lunar hearth]

If you place a ettlement adjacent to an open wood/brick hex at the beginning of the game, you should expect someone will build there and if possible cut you off. That is just good strategy. I enjoy games where my opponents play absolutely the best they can.

[lunar hearth]

I rob the strongest player, not neccessarily the leader. Of course, I sometimes rob to get a specific resource. I find most players on here rob only for revenge. The calibre of play across this platform is not very high, to be honest. When I try to help someone take longest road from a player on the brink of winning, I routinely get told I'm cheating. Most of the good players moved to that free site once all the bugs on here became an issue.

[lunar hearth]

Not neccesarily. The psychology of the game becomes an important factor at higher levels. If you make an enemy during the game, it can come back to bite your @ss. Sometimes many variables need to be weighed to decide what play to make. I routinely compliment players in chat when they make a strong play, like say, a great monopoly. I'm looking for a fun game. If it is well played, against smart players that is what I enjoy most. Winning is great, but not the only thing.

[limber roost]

That's something I'd appreciate but haven't ever seen.

[novel pulsar]

When playing OTB we play where you can rob an empty hex and take that resource. Only works if it is completely empty. Then you can get what you want while still working the robber.

[modern valley]

Honestly, winning in Catan is not easy anymore. Outlier dice distributions are truly outliers nowadays.

So today I was just lucky.

[blazing pendant]

Wtf are you playing every other game is an outlier