Some maps have more expensive connections than others. Sure, this may affect everyone equally (or does it?) but adjusting your game to account for this can mean the difference between a win an a loss. This article will help you identify which maps are cheaper and more expensive, and give you a push in the right direction for how to prioritize efficiency in power plants and board position.
Results:
I’ll start by showing you the chart that I now carry around in my Power Grid box with my other cheat sheets:
Out of the 16 maps for the game, each are compared and ranked for their connection cost in two different ways explained in the thread. If you just want to look at one of them, I suggest the bottom one labled “Simulation Analysis”, which was created by actually simulating many games of Power Grid.
There’s a green line in the middle of all the bars, which is how the maps are sorted. This is an approximation of the average cost of building cities and connections on each board. The bars show a range of how much this number can vary depending on which regions of the board are being used in a particular game. If you take nothing else away from this article, know that this is a decent way to rank the boards according to how much money you’ll be spending on cities and connections.
What does it mean? Well more expensive maps tend to lead to longer games; slower development of cities and more turns until the game is over. In the most general sense, efficient plants are better here because you’ll be able to benefit from them for more turns, so expensive map -> efficient plants are better.
The other number that I feel OK stating a result for is the “%chg avg” number. This number was derived by comparing the two different methods used to calculate total board cost, with one of those methods attempting to simulate some competition between players. The numbers are an attempt to quantify the impact of competition on each board.
Generally speaking, the positive (green) numbers mean that competition was a larger factor, and the opposite for the red numbers. It’s a loose conclusion, but it seems that prioritizing board position on the green boards will give you more benefits than the red boards.