Haven't dug through the boards to see if a thread for this existed, but I wanted to see what others thought.  I am looking for other sound strategies that dont involve building an embassy.

Whenever my group plays, if you dont build an embassy, you lose.  No other build path seems to have anywhere near the power that an early embassy does.  Thoughts?

 Do you play with the base game or with the expansions? I find it difficult to compete with the Mint track once it gets going.

We play with expansions, and even with some bad rolls, I still beat a player who went mint last time we played.  I have notoriously bad rolls in this game, but with embasy and one of the battle tracks I usually finish first or a close 2nd. 

Occasionally we'll play a game where we'll say 'no embassy,' just to change things up, but it seems silly to limit the game like that.  I was wondering if other people noticed the same thing, or if there's other equally poweful paths and its just our group that has this problem

Do you play with any expansions? I saw this post and definitely was confused. This game sees regular play (~5/week) and we almost never see an embassy. Also, unless the dice are really crappy we see an average score for winning to be ~45 points. I have seen games go well past 60 if the priest is in use. We do use all of the expansion parts from "To Forge A Realm". Maybe this makes a difference. I will test out what you used here to see if maybe we are playing the wrong strategy.

Micre Reilanc

We played about 15 games, "no embassy no party" was the mood.

We tried to invest in other rows, but it seems without embassy you lose, apart from bad bad luck.

I honestly don't see how an embassy is that powerful.  Rolling for the queen is equivalent to three seasons with the embassy and is, therefore, so easy to counter it isn't even funny.  Obviously, if you have the embassy and can also get the queen, that works.  However, someone who goes the farm route is more likely to do that than you are.

If you also traded in a resource every turn, then that means +2 points per season...that is pretty good, but if I build one church, that just wiped out a whole year of your production. 

I just don't see it working out that imbalanced in any game I've played.

In my experience there are several ways that can get you say 50+ points.

Embassy is just one of them. There is the farm + Queen route, or Mint,  The architect's guild, etc …  With my luck in rolling the dice, I counter the embassy using the University :D


That being said, the embassy strategy is probably the easiest to achieve, while others might require a bit more luck (or bad rolling in my case). Still, our gaming group doesn't see it come to play that often.

The route that almost always wins is to build the bottom row (in the expansion pack).  It gives +1 soldier in the fall and military academy make it so that the player doesn't have to focus on military at all.  That player is then freed up to build items which score points and if they don't win, they are close to winning each and every time.