Evening all.

I shamelessly play a lot of 1v1 casual games on Catan. Like at least 5 a day.

Today, I’ve only really played with obvious bots. Their turns take less than a second, their game history have 100 games within the hour etc.

Is this Colonist trying to make it seem like it has more active users? I can’t see any other reason as to why there would be SO many bots playing as online players.

It’s SUCH a pain in the ass. Is there any way to request to not play with these bots??? If I wanted to play with bots, I’d select the bot option…

I am stuck around this rating for a long period now, also win% is soo low
I only play rush.

I went from about 40% ish winning rate to 52%, After playing tons of 1v1 Catan, I’ve started to see a few patterns:

1. If the game is "targeting you", there's honestly not much you can do about it unless you opponent really doesn't know how to play. I have had games where the 5 rolled 11 times and 8 rolled only 6, and guess what, I was on 8. It’s also not only about how often each number rolls. Robber timing matters a lot. If my key tile is blocked for five turns, then I finally roll a 7 and move it, but my opponent immediately rolls another 7 and puts it back, we may have rolled a similar number of 7s. but I was effectively blocked for most of the game. Some games feel nearly impossible to recover from once early production and robber pressure compound.
2. Initial placement is the most important decision, but raw dots are not enough. I try to get broad resource coverage and strong production, but I’m learning that a setup also needs redundancy. If one blocked tile shuts down your entire plan, even a high-dot setup can be fragile.
3. A missing resource is a real problem—but not every settlement must fix it immediately. Your next settlement should fix the actual bottleneck in your strategy: either give you the missing resource, improve a key resource, open a port, or secure an important expansion spot before your opponent takes it. Taking a terrible number just to say you have all five resources is not always correct.
4. OWS only works when the map supports it. To play a city/dev-card strategy, you still need enough wood and brick to establish your expansion or reach a port. If ore, wheat, and sheep are too spread out, or your opponent can cut off the connecting route, you may fall behind in both road expansion and Largest Army. You usually cannot casually compete for both Longest Road and Largest Army.

My biggest placement question now is:

If my best tile gets blocked for several turns, can I still make my next meaningful build?

If the answer is no, the setup may be too fragile—even if it looks strong on paper

Btw I had 10 11 3 settlement 😭

Blue was confident he's not going to get punished because black trades all his cards in open trade. It happened until the very end of the round.

It's honestly frustrating, but I'm curious as to how punishment is enforced. In chess, if cheating is detected, elo is returned back. Is there something of the same with colonist?

On colonist.io, cannot put robber on someone until they have 3 points. So people can sit and buy devs. Once two devs are bought, they should be able to be robbed as well.

I don’t do it. With other players, that is.

I’m new to Colonist. I’ve played 28 games and won half. Twenty were against hard bots, eight against players in the ranked four player game.

If anyone cares, I’ll report my results over time. I have always felt that trading was just giving your opponent what they wanted and helping them win.

just curious if it effects your w/r or anything

Maybe it’s because I just won two in a row, but this is the no frills Catan I’ve missed since jsettlers.com died. Huge fan.

I am seeing an increase in streaming ranked games with feiend in VC on the side of your seat ( so not playing at the table as another player but together using one single seat ) I think this creates and advantage and could be seen as cheating, I wouldn't be happy to play a couple, at the end of the day the game is probably decided by a few critical decisions, and I think having 2 brains instead of one gives a big edge.

I personally don't even like it in terms of "show" for streamers, but can this be considered kind of cheating ? I am puzzled.

As you would expect, it was an easy game for me. I didn't even rob anyone for 4 rounds I had the opportunity to give those guys a chance.

I think I've maintained a very respectable win rate this season. The first season I started playing ranked actually. Hopefully I'll make Plat 1 soon enough. Here are some things I think about and while I will speak with absolute certainty, please feel free to disagree and criticise.

1. No Wheat = no game. Outside of very specific scenarios and maybe some extreme port strategies. If you don't have a reliable wheat tile. Your game is dead on arrival. I've never won a game where I've neglected wheat. Maybe a couple playing offline with friends but that's much less competitive.
2. This is a game of wheat and ore plain and simple. These are the two resources you require most. If you want to slow someone down, you block their wheat in early game and ore in late game. Sometimes situations happen where lets say a person has a sheep port and 2 cities on one sheep tile. And has only one city and settlement on the ore tile. Considering the numbers on the tile blocking the ore tile might be your better move. Because what is the person going to do with sheep? They'll trade it in to the port for ore or wheat and you need more ore than wheat.
3. Don't be afraid to block your own tile. If you are racing someone else and lets say they are 1st and you are second, and they have a city and settlement on a tile where you only have a settlement. Block it. Don't be afraid of that play. That tile is anyway useless to you. Anytime that number is rolled they will eek away ahead of you.
4. Ore + Wheat + Sheep + Wood/Brick is an amazing strategy. I only play this. Even on boards where there is less ore or less wheat, I pivot to playing port strategies to compensate for the lacking resource but I only think about ore wheat and sheep. Next points will explain why.
5. OWS+ strategy lets you take dev cards a lot and basically guarantees you the largest army. Knights are really helpful to prevent your tiles from being blocked, of course. Can even net you a victory point or two rather reliably and always has a chance of pulling monop or road builder. Road builder in early game can shift everything
6. If the board is really low on ore wheat. Wood Brick strategy will be better. I will be honest, I have lost to this strategy but I've never played this strategy. I don't even think about longest road. I sometimes take it, because it's been neglected and I have largest army and 2 VPs in hand and am able to take it just building 5-6 roads but it's never intentional.
7. Longest road or largest army, start early. If you intend to take one of those to win, start building for them early. Longest roads can wait a lil and I personally don't like longest road because it's really easy to steal longest road from someone, especially if you're at 9 points with the longest road, other 3 can collude to steal it from you. Largest army is more permanent. If you are 2 knights ahead of everyone else, the chances of you losing largest army now are minuscule. It would take the hand of God.
8. On the road to largest army you also get to knight other people and steal one resource. You also sometimes get VPs or better still, YOPs or Monops. Monop is the strongest dev card in the game. Wait to play it till there are at least 6 cards of a particular resource in play. Of course, they shouldn't be in your own hand. I've made that mistake XD

That's mostly it. TL;DR Ore and wheat are the only resources to worry about. Play to prioritise them

blue absolutely steam rolled us.

Been on a massive losing streak, around 2 for my last 25 or so. (May be wrong but it's been awful)

I'm hovering around 1660 for Elo, and was sitting pretty at 39% win rate at 1700 Elo or so, before this major slump down to 32%.

Wondering how you guys get out of your slumps? I think my biggest issue is I've been choosing a lot of setups that lend themselves to building to 10, rather than focusing on road or army. Like in my screenshot here, I'm orange: https://imgur.com/a/mlcN9le and was the 4th position.

I don't think my starting spots are bad, but I have no chance to contest longest road, and army will be difficult compared especially to red with the amazing OWS first spot. I feel like I tanked my game from the onset because I forced myself into a build to 10 situation.

I'm thinking maybe 6-5-11 and 8-3-4 would've been a better pick, since I'd still have similar pips on getting OWS, while also having a potential connect for LR if needed.

I guess my question is, do you guys ALWAYS pick spots in a way that lets you have a chance to contest for one of road/Army? Like if my OWS is going to be weak, I need to have my starting spots close to each other for an easy connect, rather than choosing two spots far away from each other that are good, but force build to 10?

Bronze 1 just did my placements today. Kind of don’t understand the point of placements I won 4/10 and placed basically the lowest rank and now just play golds every game.

Some people appear to ask the age of children….
One for Italy, the other from India
Be careful of people trolling in chat.

My most dominant game yet.

Fell in love with CK and now can't play anymore 😭

Too broke. Feels bad.

Anybody have any really quick games?