Goals! How much actions does it cost to complete goals? How many recources do you need. Of grandpa's goals, there are 3 that are completed mostly through money, being the Buildings, Animals and Money goals. Lets take the "Money" goal als a base line and look at the "Animals" goal. Now some animals are cheaper than others, but also you need to build the coop or shed first. Therefore the required recources for that goal grow non-linearly with the amount of players. Lets list the least amount of recources required per player for the animals goal:
-1p: 24 gold + 2 wood (coop and 2 chickens)
-2p: 40 gold + 2 wood (all coop animals)
-3p: 66 gold + 4 wood (and now for the barn)
-4p: 84 gold + 4 wood
Now we can already see how farm animals already requires more than double the gold that the "Money" goal, on top of extra actions to build buildings and buy animals. That is balanced by the opportunity to benefit from the collect from animals action, but the question is, does that make up for it? Now considering the buildings goal; You require about 10 gold and 2 forage tiles (wood or stone) per player plus an action to build. This can be outweighed by the benefit that the building offers. Some buildings like the farmhouse or the mill are always good, some buildings like the stable or shed have the opportunity to be good but can also go nearly un-used.
I will make a list of expected required actions for each goal after i have determined how much money you make in an action.
Money!
I have some questions about money making that I will answer for myself.
-How much money do you need to complete the game? (Which we can answer more easily thanks to above bit)
-Given this amount, what is the most action efficient way to get this money?
So where do we spend our money?
-Vault goal
-Money goal
-Build Buildings
-Buy Animals
-Upgrade Rod
-Remove Joja
-Buying Seeds
I am first looking for the absolute minimum gold required and then for a medium and worst case scenario.
In the minimum case, you remove all joja woth hearts or you dont need to remove them because they are no bother. Also you don't actually need to upgrade or play with the rod at all. And depending on the grandpa's goals, you don't need any money there either. Which leaves the vault. 6 gold per player minimum.
Assuming you get all the gold from farming and you buy new seeds when spot 3 to 5 are empty you get a single parsnip which you wil give as a gift and then every 3 other crops are worth 3, 4 and 5 gold in that order. Which means 12 gold per 3 crops and 1 cost per crop. We can now calculate how many crops we need to harvest this game.
1 player: 6 + 3 gold cost to get 3 crops worth 12 gold total. 1 action to plant.
2 player: 12 + 5 gold cost to get 5 crops worth 19 gold total. 2 actions to plant.
3 player: 18 + 7 gold cost to get 7 crops worth 27 gold total. near 2 actions to plant.
Additional questions:
-What is the effect of the mill? Is the mill worth it?
-What are the effects of watering can, hoe and the two combined?
-Is it more efficient to complete the upgrade tools goal with money for the rod or with other tools?
