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I recently got the The Gathering Storm expansion to Race For The Galaxy and I've played solo against the robot about twelve times, winning only once. I consider myself a competent player (consistently mid-50s or higher) but the robot seems impossible, even at the easiest level (I have yet to graduate to medium or hard). I find that the robot typically gains lots of victory points (usually 80-90% of the available 24 points) and my usual strategy of Consume-Trade exacerbates the problem.

What are some common strategies for playing solo against the robot? What are some common pitfalls of using player-verse-player strategies against the robot?

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  • When you say "my usual strategy of consume trade" do you mean that you do that in essentially every game?
    – Cascabel
    Nov 8, 2014 at 20:06
  • Yes, almost every game. I've found it's a great way to fill my hand so I can build large planets and developments.
    – Spig
    Nov 8, 2014 at 22:24

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From http://hiewandboardgames.blogspot.ca/2008_12_01_archive.html

To beat the robot you need to understand how it works and know how to minimize the chances of indirectly helping it. Knowing that sometimes it "copies" your actions, you need to think twice before selecting Consume x 2 if the robot's economy size is 5 (i.e. it would score 10VP if it also does Consume x 2). The robot's main ways of scoring are the 6-cost development tiles and the victory points. I find that usually it doesn't score much from worlds or normal developments. The 6-cost dev tiles (as opposed to dev cards) are a mechanism to adjust the difficulty level. The robot most of the time will be able to play all of its 6-cost dev tiles, unless you are really really quick in ending the game. So when you decide to play with 1 6VP tile (easy), 2 6VP tiles (medium) or 3 9VP tiles (hard), you are more or less already deciding that the robot will at least have 6VP / 12VP / 27VP.

You need to watch the robot's economy size closely. It's kind of a countdown timer. The robot's economy will grow, sometimes quickly sometimes not, and the bigger it grows, the more dangerous it will be. You cannot allow it to do Consume too many times, especially when its economy size is big. It can earn lots of VPs this way, and also end the game very quickly by exhausting the VPs.

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    This is just a generally good strategy for RftG: figure out what your opponents are likely to choose for their actions, and try and setup your board so that you benefit, while at the same time pursuing a gameplan that benefits your opponents the least (easier in 1v1, since there's only 1 point differential to keep track of).
    – Hao Ye
    Nov 25, 2014 at 21:37

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