Strategies for Seafarers, Cities and Knights

Okay, now I'm going over strategies for the Seafarers expansion.

A lot of players will try to build on a good gold field and surround it with cities.  Be careful about this, as this spot will likely be a robber magnet.

Wool are made important, as you need them to expand across the water.  In fact, in some scenarios, they're even more important than brick.

The longest trade route isn't as hard to get, as you can use ships and roads to get it, and if you have a lumber and only one of brick and wool, you can still expand on your longest trade route.

In The Four Islands, Into The Desert, The Fog Island, and Heading For New Shores, try to get the extra victory points for expanding to foreign areas (or, in the case of The Fog Island, try to reveal the fog-covered hexes so you can be the first to build on them, and get the resources as prizes for revealing them.)

Generally, it's best to use the robber instead of the pirate, unless you're racing to an island against another player, as the ability to shut down a hex's production is a lot more powerful than shutting down another player's ability to build ships.

Don't get too worried about where you're going to put your ships, as you can always move them.

Now for the Cities and Knights.

There are a couple of main strategies one can use.

You can focus primarily on building knights, in which case you need pretty much everything!  You need wool and ore to build knights, coin because a lot of blue cards involve knights and so you can upgrade your strong knights to mighty knights, grain to activate your knights, and brick and lumber to build roads so you have more spots to build them.  You should build your knights so they can chase the robber off your more productive hexes, as well as avoid displacement by opponents' knights.  The green card smith lets you upgrade up to two of your knights for free, and paper is also nice because of the ability to grab any resource you want for a roll that doesn't produce anything for you.

Paper is really nice in any strategy, as you can use it to get whatever you want for a roll that doesn't get you anything, and you can also get really useful cards, such as the inventor, which lets you swap any two number tokens on the board, road building, which lets you build two roads (or ships, in seafarers), medicine, which lets you upgrade to a city for an ore and a grain less, and others.  A metropolis also gets you two points closer to victory.

There are two ways to protect yourself against the barbarians: city walls and knights.  Knights are nice because they can be used to chase off the robber, but city walls are nice because you can use them to increase your card-carrying capacity by 2.

If you want to trade a lot, your best bet is cloth.  Yellow cards deal with trading, the merchant gets you a victory point, and you can trade commodity cards at the 2:1 rate.  The Master Merchant is useful if you are losing.

Oh, and do try to get a bunch of commodities.  They all come in real handy, giving you progress cards at no charge, some abilities, and extra victory points in the form of metropoli.

And now for the combination of Seafarers with Cities and Knights:

There's not much change here, except it's less risky to build a bunch of cities on a good gold field because you can use a knight to drive the robber off it.