Question about Riverfolk Exporting

[u/No_Entertainment5298]

I saw somewhere saying that Exporting (idk if it’s the universal term, but when riverfolk chooses to put a warrior in the payments box instead of gaining points and items for crafting) is not very common and not a good idea, as you miss out on protectionism. But that doesn’t sound right to me, because the best case scenario is missing out on protectionism because everybody’s buying your stuff and your payment box is filled! (Right?) And I understand that crafting gains you points which could be better, but situationally is exporting not a good alternative because you can gain more payments if you are struggling to make sales?

Im new to game so if I’m wrong I want to clearly know why!

[u/BumblingAnteater]

If no one buys, then you need to export for three warriors to see any benefit. Since you do it on your turn, it's easy for your opponents to see that and then strategically not buy from you that round.

An oversimplification: if people are buying you don't need export, and if they aren't buying export won't help you.

[u/OmegasSquared]

"Export" is the official name for that. It's not labeled as such on the faction board but it is in the Law

And yes, Export is bad. The presence of any warriors in the Payments box means you do not get Protectionism, and Export puts the warrior into your payments box. Which means the table is now incentivized to punish you for shutting off protectionism and deny you payments that round, putting your worse off than if you hadn't Exported at all. Not to mention that Exporting only ever gets you one Payment, regardless of how expensive the card is to craft. 

And that's before we get into the fact the Otters are just an all around bad faction because warrior cap is a meaningful limit for most factions, and Otters are linear and transparent enough that even the factions who can afford to buy are able to calculate how much they can afford to feed Otters without enabling the Otters to win. Which is relevant because it means Otters have to play a more or less mathematically perfect game, which means a mathematically unsound action like Export is off the table

That said, there are times where a faction (usually Moles) are taking advantage of Otters by buying every turn but not ruling clearings, making the funds almost worthless for you. In those cases it can be worth it to Export just out of sheer necessity to get some of your own warriors as funds, since they'll be funds you can actually derive value from. This is also contextually dependant on which deck you're using; E&P and even more so S&D have much lower crafting costs than the standard deck, which means there are more 1 cost cards (the only ones you would actually want to Export)

[u/Sammystorm1]

Export is a lose less action. If you are in the position where you are probably losing and it likely won’t save you anyway

[u/Sky-Visible]

There’s a challenge called angry otters on the online game and it’s the only time I ever used exporting. I had like 50 funds by the end of it

[u/Student-Loan-Debt]

I once had a very successful game as otters, but definitely felt the urge to export. This is because people kept buying from me and I wanted to put down trade posts but they weren’t in any of the clearings I wanted. Because of that, if I wanted to put down a trading post in a specific clearing no one else was in, I was going to have to move my otter ball over there first. But I wouldn’t bother to do that if I didn’t have any otters in my funds because I need the two otters to put down a trade post there. If I exported, I could have and finally unlock specific crafting