Thanks for the comment Matt! I find this an interesting article but from my experience in games and from learning from some pro players I'm not convinced by its usefulness. Wheat and ore are generally considered far more valuable than brick.
Winning the game without cities is extremely rare, because you'd need longest road, 5 settlements, largest army and a vp from a dev card. (Or 3 vp devs and no army). Wheat is so important because it is needed for everything that can get you points - dev cards, settlements and cities. Ore is rarer and also essential to win the game, but good port strategies can be found so sometimes you can get away without starting with it. (The other good thing about starting without ore is that with the other 4 resources you have the capacity to build towards an ore spot with an early settlement.)
One really useful tip is that it is almost always optimal to point your roads from your starting settlements outwards, towards the ports. The ports are often undervalued, and getting into races with other players can be detrimental even if you win them, as it can be expensive to win those battles. Pointing to the ports avoids these races.
Dev cards also tend to be massively undervalued by most casual players. Early in the game, every type of dev card is really useful except VPs, but even these aren't that bad. In a lot of games, it can be a very tricky decision to choose between getting an early dev card or saving for a city. Often I would decide this based on my likelihood of getting robbed - if likely, I'll want to get dev cards to remove the robber and avoid getting my saved up cards repeatedly stolen.
Brick, on the other hand, is always massively overvalued (hence why the chart probably ranks at as the most 'valuable') because it's rarer than wood and people always want to get their settlements down early before thinking about cities. I've won quite a few games where I didn't even start with ore but players would gladly give me theirs for my brick, and allow me to get an early city.
Some other tips:
- Think very carefully about where others will place in the initial placements. When you put your first settlement down, think about what might be leftover for you for your second one.
- It's your relative position compared to the other players that matters. Sometimes you're better off placing to stop another player from getting a crazy good set up, even if it gets you something slightly worse than you might otherwise be able to get.
- Think about number diversity. If your starting settlements share 5 or 6 different numbers between them then your chances of getting something on any given roll increases a lot. Even if you don't get exactly the resource you want, having a higher turnover of cards allows you to make more trades with other players or get 'cheap' buys like dev cards or roads.
- Always start out with a plan for victory. You will almost always need to go for largest army or longest road to get the win, unless you are able to get really high production, so think about this from the start.
- Trading is really important. Suppose you make a trade which helps you and the player you traded with equally. Then you have gained an advantage over the other two players. If you trade more often, even if you sometimes help others more than yourself, you gain on the pack. Thinking about trades when placing can also be useful, e.g. noticing a player has lots of wood so taking a high brick spot and therefore likely getting lots of trades between each other.
- The 'meta' in high level games is to go for a heavy ore wheat sheep setup and crank out dev cards and cities, even without brick or wood. The abundance of dev cards means you can continually move the robber off yourself and pretty much lock down largest army. Knights, year of plenty, monopoly, road building also all give you routes to getting roads or wood/brick to help you get a settlement. With this set-up, it is common to win with only one settlement expansion, winning with 3 cities, largest army and 2 vp dev cards. This doesn't always win but it's common.
- If one player seems to be clearly in the lead, then it is important for the other players to team up to try and stop them. E.g. giving cheap trades to allow a different player to take longest road off the leader, or repeatedly robbing the leader. The thing to be wary of is that at a given moment in the game, the person with the most VPs might not be the person with the highest likelihood of winning!
I've been really enjoying learning more and more about the theory of the game and managed to get into the top 120 on Catan Universe (the platform I currently play on) and my goal is to hit top 100. Once I've done this I will probably switch over to colonist.io, which is what most people use these days and can be played in browser.