Crimea Innovative Strategy

We have an update for the Crimea Innovative strategy. After some more serious playthroughs, and countless games on Scythe Digital Edition (which you can get through Steam), we’ve made some big changes that seem to make this combination more competitive.

So, let’s dig in and see what we can do. We get 5 Power and 0 Combat Cards from being Crimea. We get 5 Coins and 3 Popularity from having the Innovative mat.

Innovative Mat.

The Innovative Player Mat starts a player off with 3 Popularity and 5 Coin with a turn priority of 3A. It’s strongest column is Produce / Deploy, followed closely by the Move / Enlist column. Now, both of these columns are the least for coin gain on the mat; however, both rows are the most efficient as both BRA’s work toward Stars while the TRA’s are the most standard actions. Also, both Deploy and Enlist can be discounted down in cost with Upgrades, making them even more valuable.

Additionally, more advanced players consider the Innovative player mat the strongest in the game. The reasoning behind this solely falls in line with these two columns, and the results speak for themselves as the Innovative mat makes it possible to have victories in as short as 12 rounds with most factions in competitive games.

All of this isn’t to say the other two columns are useless. Trade / Upgrade has a lot of potential, and the fact is that players will always benefit from upgrades. Having the Trade action right above Upgrade only makes this mat more valuable as it means players need only produce 1 Oil before taking an action to Upgrade.

Suggested Strategy.

On the Innovative mat, it’s in a player’s best interest to focus on the Mech and Enlist Stars. And, in games where a player notices their opponent getting immensely high coin gains, it isn’t a bad idea to divert some attention to getting some Upgrades for the coin gain.

Crimea Innovative Star Strategy.

After going over what are some obvious strengths and weaknesses of Crimea Innovative, we should delve into some potential strategy for winning the game. Ideally, we should consider the Stars we want to go for and what some of the benefits and setbacks of each will be for us.

Popularity Star.

I don’t know that I’ve seen any competitive game that went long enough for someone to achieve a Popularity Star – not saying it can’t be done, but we’re not going to bank on getting this one.

Power Star.

This one is up in the air. Primarily for Crimea, it would be dependent on if we have neighbors that are upgrading a great deal and us enlisting for upgrades early enough in the game. Aside from that, it would be on us to Bolster which means we’d prefer to have some lumber to Build for the bottom row action. Because it’s so dependent on variables, we won’t make it our focus, but it’s not entirely off the table.

Upgrade Star.

It takes six upgrades to get the Star, which isn’t easy to accomplish in a typical competitive game of 14-18 rounds. Crimea Innovative has the benefit of using a Combat Card for a resource once per turn with our Coercion faction ability, and the Trade action is above Upgrade on the mat. This seems like it should be something we go for, especially with the 3 Coin payout for each Upgrade; however, the tough part is we’re going to be dependent on our neighbors enlisting enough to keep giving us a steady supply of Combat Cards. If not for that, we’re looking at having to use our supply on resources and we’ll seriously stunt our combat ability. Additionally, we’d be tying up six turns devoted to just this. Six is pretty much a third of the turns we’re expecting. So, again, not a forerunner, but maybe a backup.

Mech Star.

As Deploy is tied to our Produce action, it’s definitely in our interest to get all our Mechs out. And because Crimea has a Mountain in its base hexes, we’ll have little problem collecting the needed resources to make this happen. 

Build Star.

There are too many things we’d have to do to get the buildings online; and by the time we do all that work, we would have much better options available. So, Build Star is a no go.

Enlist Star.

Enlisting is always important to Crimea for the use of Coercion, and suffice to say, it would take a lot of derailing to stop us from getting the Enlist Star.

Objective Star.

We always want to try to get an Objective. Provided the Objectives we receive are possible to accomplish, this Star is on the table; but more on that in the related section below.

Combat Star(s).

We’ll need some combats to get Six Stars in a competitively relevant amount of time, so we’ll be making this another point of focus for our game.

Worker Star.

We’ll be going for this as we start with a Village in our base, but also, our fastest games as Crimea depend on being able to get a solid amount of resources through some big Produce actions. So, we’ll definitely need all our Workers out.

All told, in this game the Stars we’ll want to focus on are Mech, Enlist, Objective, Combat(s), and Worker. We can keep the Upgrade and Power Stars as flexible options, but we’ll only be looking at those in the event we can’t complete an Objective or we get derailed by other factions.

Crimea Innovative Objectives.

Before any game starts, we’ll always want to look at our objectives and see if we can accomplish any of them. If we can, we want to decide if we have to go out of our way to get one of them completed, or if it’ll be easily within our scope of typical actions. Additionally, this is an opportunity to make some tweaks to our strategy.

For this playthrough, we received “Foundations of the Empire” and “Balanced Workforce.” Both of which are fairly easy to complete for Crimea, so we don’t need to reconsider our planned Stars.

Foundations of the Empire reads: “Have at least six of your tokens (i.e. character, workers, mechs, and structures) on one territory.” If we end a turn with this being met, we can complete it. And this objective is quite a bit easier than the other to complete as we’ll complete it on the turn we get our final workers, so we’ll be going after this one.

Balanced Workforce reads: “Have the same number of workers and recruits.” Basically, have the same number of workers as times we’ve enlisted. What’s tougher about this one is we essentially would have to stall our production of workers, because at any point if we have more than four workers, we can’t complete it (as we max out at four enlistments). As such, and because we got an easier Objective, we’ll pass on this one.

Crimea Innovative Step by Step Strategy.

1. TRADE: 2 Oil.
2. PRODUCE: 1 Food, 1 Worker.
3. TRADE: 2 Oil. UPGRADE: Move / Enlist.
4. PRODUCE: 1 Food, 2 Workers.
5. MOVE: Hero to Farm, 1 Worker from Village to Mountain. ENLIST: Enlist / Combat Cards reward.
6. TRADE: 2 Oil. UPGRADE: Hex / Deploy.
7. PRODUCE: 1 Food, 1 Metal, 3 Workers. DEPLOY: Speed Mech on Village (use Combat Card for 2nd Metal). [Worker Star] [Objective Star].
   • We completed “Foundations of the Empire” for producing our final Workers.

Mid Game.

8. MOVE: 1 Worker to Farm, 5 Workers to Mountain, Hero to Mountain Encounter. ENLIST: Coin / Popularity reward.
   • Encounter: Make sure we don’t spend all our Popularity for the next Produce.
   • We received Encounter 21. We’ll pay 2 Popularity for the 2 Combat Cards and 3 Power as we’re not going to have much of a chance to Bolster for Power in this game and every little bit helps.
   • I chose Popularity reward for Enlist because on our next move, we’ll be going for another Encounter if we can and having the ability to spend our Popularity keeps our options open.

9. PRODUCE: 2 Food, 6 Metal. DEPLOY: Riverwalk Mech on Farm.
   • We don’t need to spend any more Combat Cards on Metal for Mechs as we have enough for the rest of our Deploys.
10. MOVE: Farm Mech + 6 Workers to Tunnel Tundra, Mountain Mech and Hero to Encounter Village. ENLIST: Build / Power reward.
    • We’ll need to spend a Combat Card on our Enlist to have enough for our next one.
    • Encounter: Ideally we’d like something that gives us an Upgrade, Power, or Combat Cards. Barring that, Food would be decent.
    • We received Encounter 12. Not ideal for our purposes, but we’ll opt for the 2 Food and 1 Popularity to save Combat Cards on our final two Enlistments.

Late Game.

11. DEPLOY: Scout on S. Tunnel Tundra.
    • We skip the top row Produce part of our action as really we won’t be needing the resources and the cost really won’t outweigh the benefits for us.
12. MOVE: Hero to Factory, Mechs drop Workers on Tunnels into Combat with Polania on Tunnel Mountain and N. Tunnel Tundra. ENLIST: Upgrade / Coin reward. [Combat Star] [Combat Star] [Enlist Star].
    • Combats: Polania had 3 Combat Cards and only 5 Power. I decided to attack both Tunnel hexes they were on.

13. DEPLOY: Wayfare wherever our heart desires.
    • We skip the top row Produce part of our action because we didn’t have the Popularity to produce. Otherwise we would’ve Produced this time because we could’ve gotten 3 Coins in end game totals off of those resources.

End Game Stats:

• Stars: Mech, Enlist, Objective, Combat (2), Worker.
• Round 13; 53 Coins.

Crimea Innovative Thoughts & Tips.

As with many of Crimea’s mat combinations, for Crimea Innovative if you can get your early game started strong, you can typically leave your base hexes with everything you need to win the game lined up and focus on objectives and combats. As with this game, we had everything lined up well and got Encounters that helped us, as well as an Objective that was basically built into completing with getting our 8 Workers.

I always try to play these like I’m playing real players, but even so, I will continue to harp on the fact that beating bots is not equivalent to beating real players. With Saxony and Polania in this game, real players would’ve presented much more of a threat. Moreso, experienced players would’ve identified us as a problem early on and started disrupting our workflow. By the time Polania can get out their Submerge and Speed mechs, they can invade the Crimea base. By the time Saxony gets Speed, Underpass and Riverwalk, they can invade Crimea’s base. As such, both of these factions can span almost the entire board to get to us with decent players.

All that being said, this game went smoothly. We didn’t have disruptions, we had neighbors who Enlisted a bunch – so we were never short on Combat Cards, our Encounters may not have been perfect – but they still were helpful, and we managed to come across fairly easy battles. Were any of those not the case, we likely would’ve need more turns and planning to get our 6th Star.

Video Strategy.

For some additional strategy and tactics on Crimea Innovative, check out this video by FOMOF:

Additional Thoughts – 12 Turn Crimea Innovative Win.

As more and more players get into Scythe, more strategies develop and in a lot of cases, games become shorter as these strategies shave turns off your collective play. One such strategy that we’ve heard a bit about is with the Crimea Innovative combination being able to consistently win 12 round games. This came up as potential proof that this mat combination may need to be added to the “Banned List” soon. So I wanted to delve into this and share my insight with you. 

The strategy I pulled comes from BoardGameGeek, user named pepitosegrilla.

1. Produce: 1 worker, 1 food.
2. Trade: 1 food, 1 metal.
3. Produce: 2 workers, 1 food.
4. Trade: 2 metal.
5. Produce: 3 workers (STAR), 1 food. Deploy: speed mech on village.
6. Move: 3 workers to mountain, 4 workers and mech to field, character to encounter (choose free recruits, mechs or power). Enlist the upgrade recruit with +2 power boost.
7. Produce: 5 food, 3 metal. Deploy: riverwalk mech.
8. Move: character to 2nd encounter, and field mech with 2 workers to battle or secret objective (possible battle and/or secret objective STARS). Enlist the enlist recruit with +2 battle cards boost
9. Produce: 3 metal, 3 food if you didn’t get any free recruits from encounters. Deploy scout mech on field inside the peninsula.
10. Move: character to factory, and any mech to battle (possible battle and/or secret objective STARS). Enlist the deploy recruit with +2 popularity boost.
11. Produce: 3 metal, and any other resource. Deploy: last mech (STAR).
12. Move: to get your last battle star or secret objective star (possible battle and/or secret objective STARS). Enlist final recruit (STAR).

Objections.

Now, pepitosegrilla states that this strategy is wholly dependent on getting our Objective Star, which is true, and he’s fully aware that this strategy may not work as well against real players – which I also agree with. I played this exact strategy a dozen or so times against the hardest bot difficulty, and even threw in Polania and Saxony intentionally a few times to see if they would try to disrupt us. Overall, as long as I got an Objective that was obtainable and an Encounter that gave me an Upgrade for additional movement, I was at about 70% on getting turn 12 wins. So against bots, this strategy is mostly sound.

However, in playing I noticed a few weak spots that I’d like to point out should anyone want to try this strategy against real players or online in Digital Edition:

Movement.

1. We’re limited without any built in Upgrade strategy.
2. We become entirely dependent on Encounters to get us Upgrades.
3. We have to spend an additional turn to get an Upgrade if Encounters don’t provide us with one.
4. Or we have to spend additional Move actions to accomplish Objectives and/or Combats, netting us additional turns.

Excessive Produce actions.

After we get our 8 Workers, there’s 3 more Produce actions.

1. We lose 3 Popularity, 4 Power, and 3 Coin just to Producing. 
2. Limits Encounter potential. We can’t freely spend Popularity on Encounters at the risk of not being able to Produce again OR we are forced to take the gain Popularity option on an Encounter Card so we have enough to do our next Produce action.
3. We lose any chance of getting Tier 2 Popularity.
4. Combats become limited. We can’t realistically go into any combats prior to turn 12 that have Workers on the hexes as we’ll lose the Popularity needed to Produce.

Too many resources.

Each game with this strategy I rarely ever used Crimea’s Coercion ability and somehow I always had excess resources. To me this says we can likely eliminate a Produce action and better organize our Workers with their production placements.

Power.

1. We don’t have enough to be reliable.
2. In the best games, I had 8 Power to go into combat with.
3. In the worst games, I had 3 Power. Combine that with limited mobility, and we have a serious problem in dealing with opponents turtling on hexes or expecting to win any one on one combats.

Win conditions.

1. Once we get going with this engine, any little thing can derail us, and once derailed, we don’t have many options to save face by getting back on track.
2. If we have objectives we can’t complete, it’s an automatic additional 4 turns or more before we can get our 6th Star. This also destroys our score because chances are we’ll have to produce for additional resources, costing us more coin, power, and popularity.
3. Turn 16 is our likely deadline to win. Our coin count at best will be around 10 with a best case average score of about 50. The challenge is we’re putting all economy on the line for a rush win, and if we can’t hit turn 12, we really only have a couple more turns before we start losing our lead.

Misc Vulnerabilities.

1. Getting trapped. Should an opposing faction dump Workers on the S. Tunnel Tundra where we need to exit our base, we’re either losing our Popularity to Produce by bumping those Workers, or we’re waiting until we Deploy our Wayfare Mech to leave.
2. Any Move action we make that leaves a unit alone on a hex we should expect to be attacked. By the time we emerge from our base hexes, we’ll have maybe 6 Power and 3 Combat Cards at best.
3. Our very faction is our weakness. Even moderately knowledgeable players are going to target us because Rusviet and Crimea are the most likely factions to end a game faster than opponents can get Stars – more so if they are attentive to us having the Innovative mat. 

Adjustments.

Overall, this proposed 12 turn strategy wouldn’t be my go to, as it’s heavily reliant on a lot of things going our way – and if they don’t, we’re kind of screwed. However, if players have their hearts set on giving it a whirl, I would suggest these modifications:

1. Objectives. If they aren’t doable within the realm of these steps, you might as well use a different strategy because you won’t get a 12 round 6th Star.
2. Enlist the Enlistment bonus and get the Combat Card reward first, not Power.
3. Try to use Combat Cards for Enlists and Mechs if you have more than two in hand. If you balance correctly, you’ll only need to Produce twice after getting your 8 Workers and won’t need to use your top row for your final mech Deploy (unless you want the additional resources for end game scoring).
4. Focus on getting Upgrades from your Encounters. Having an upgraded Move action will help significantly.
5. As soon as your Scout Mech is out, get into Combat. Lose intentionally if you have to by throwing a 2 Combat Card or 1 Power; but you need to get those Combat Cards if you intend to win combats.

Crimea Innovative Epilogue

Otherwise, that’s all I have at the moment. If you are unfamiliar with the Crimean Khanate as a faction, check out our general Crimean Faction overview. Additionally, if you’re new to Scythe, check out our Quick Tips and Strategy overview. I hope this article helps broaden some horizons and perhaps helps you to gain some further success with Crimea Innovative!

As always, feel free to share your thoughts or ask some questions; and if you have a strategy that you think works, let me know!

Happy gaming!

• Norman