A local gamer strongly resisted Air Baron, claiming it took forever. But we played 6 players in the typical 90 minutes. (w/ advanced rules). Most players followed what I call the 'typical' strategy.
- Get a single hub in several spokes (to earn the $3 bonus when that spoke is drawn). Usually get ones that are valuable (to have more of your money invested), but save a few bucks for next turn.
- Once you've got a reasonable base, try to control a hub. Some prepatory moves (jumbos, foreign spokes) may help if you plan on doing this via a fare war.
- Now that you have market share (and income) start attacking adjacent hubs.
Let's call this strategy "Expansive" since it spreads out quickly.
The old group would start attacking players who split up in phase 1. (They call it wimpy play). So they attack! I'm not sure on the details ... but this strikes me as a non-stable strategy, on the other hand, it poisons the environment.
If we assume five opponents who will attack people who split up ("Punishers") then an Expansive player is doomed. He expands, and then punishers attack. Even if they fail often, and cost themselves dearly, odds are that one of them will knock me out. And while they incur a large cost (paying twice as much for ~60% shot at kicking out the expander), the expander losses the whole investment as well. So in a spoke valued Y, several punishers lose 2Y (paying and failing), one looses 2Y (paying and succeeding) but has potential future income. And the expander loses all that future income. [I'm making a lot of simplifications].
Now, this clearly does suck the amount of money out of the system. In a game with all punishers, they'll start grouped out (for safety and too avoid triggering punishment) and so will earn money at a slower rate, and increase market share quickly. That will toss in the 'event' chits into the bag, and those suck money out of the game too. 9 Hours seems excessive, but I could imagine three.
But put one "Mellow Defender" into the mix. Mellow won't provoke an attack (like the expander), but won't attack him either (unless it's genuinely a good play). In essence, he'll let the punishers deal with him. Given that the punishers overpay (to punish), he should win more than his fair share. Other players notice, and switch from Punishers to Mellow. If there's only a single punisher, he'll rarely win.
This doesn't help the poor expanders, who were driven extinct (in that play group) long ago. Ah, group think and evolution. To complicate things, Punishers may retaliate against the 'parasitic' mellow player. Evolution worries about free-riders.
1. Fuel Hike: people are almost always overextended in the market share department, frequently with loans already to support the insatiable need to attack, so the fuel hike almost always serves as a semi-reset except for the players who have "wimpily" set themselves up as early bash targets.
2. The extremely annoying no player elimination rule. What frequently happens is one or two of the "punishers" flare out and are "eliminated". All this really means is from that turn on they basically have unlimited funds to play spoiler and help bash the leader since they can come back into the game, immediately take out a max loan to take a pot shot at any random spoke. If they fail, they just reenter next turn and try again.
Basically the game degenerates into some leader bash extreme elimination challenge and I would say 3 hours would easily be the average game length.
In terms of evolution, I don't think that happens because of the personalities of the players involved. I think the attacking is more important than winning or losing to at least 3 of the players. And wimpy play can be defined as the mellow defender type as well.
Another note about the play style of this group. For some reason when we first played this game we failed to notice the rule about getting 3 dollars from a hub in which you had presence. Obviously, this encouraged people to quickly ramp up their market share in order to ramp up their expected gain in a profit draw more quickly. It also turned buying a spoke in a hub where someone already owned a spoke into a highly agressive and "punishable" offense. The rule correction didn't change this perception leading to the play style we have today.
Despite all that I still stand by my belief that there is way too much luck involved in the game. Even with it clocking it at under 2 hours there are many other games that I would much rather play.
That group has very odd play styles in some games though. In Settlers, the trading economy has basically devolved to nothing. So that game in most cases becomes just a hour long dice fest with them.
I play 4-5 player games, taking 2 hours (with fairly slow players). I avoid 6-player Air Baron, as this can easily take twice as long as the board isn't quite large enough for six viable midgame positions (leading to lots of low-odds attacks that drag out the endgame).
Personally, I find Air Baron to have mostly "manageable luck" (with the loan rules being the key to doing so), but your mileage may vary.
Turning to play styles, in addition to Expansive, we sometimes see "Do or Die" by the last player in the first round (an immediate Fare War in an attempt to gain market share; if it fails, then disband and relaunch as a new player and try again). Sometimes this works and pushes the game into the midgame (see below) earlier than usual.
There are several interesting decision points in a game of Air Baron. During the opening game, there is the question of when to start consolidating spokes into hubs versus acquiring spokes in new hubs to keep driving income as the chit cup fills.
At some point, you're investing in spokes that will eventually get taken over by other players, but, in the meantime, you're reducing your variance in the chit draws (leading to fewer wasted turns due to no money), increasing your relative average income (until hub control income outweighs hub presence income), and adding potential jumbo footprints. And, you're not pushing market share to 50+ to enable loans. This is important, since loans can be used to mitigate otherwise lost turns, conquer neutrals, or start the jumbo arms race.
Thus, in our games, early hub consolidation moves tend to occur in hubs with market share of less than 50/100 to delay triggering loans. In Chicago or Los Angeles, players will often delay full hub consolidation by a turn or two by buying foreigns so that the gain by doubling foreign income when the hub is consolidated offsets having to open up larger loans to other players.
A second interesting decision point revolves around what the lucky early leader does with his or her cash: consolidate a good hub?, start acquiring jumbos?, or expand against mostly neutral hubs?
Neutral expansion, if successful, is very nice. You're paying only Y, not 2Y, to acquire neutral spokes; you're facing no defensive bonuses due to controlled/adjacent held hubs, foreigns, jumbos, or players in fare wars; and you're diluting the chips in the cup. Even if the chips you put in are mostly 1s and 2s, every such chip drawn is not a good chip drawn by an opponent. The downside is that your increased market share has added a lot of loan capability and brought most of the event chips into play including, probably, the fuel rate hike (which you're the most vulnerable to). On the other hand, you can now take out loans to consolidate your position and, barring any future player implosions to fuel rate hike, no other player will be able to do a massive fare war at Y, instead of 2Y, cost.
The jumbo strategy is an alternative investment for an early cash advantage. If a player can get a large lead in placed jumbos, say, five jumbos to other players having only one or two, while the chit cup still is half-filled, a player can often ride this to a huge cash advantage, which, in turn, can either lead to an outright victory or become a war chest for a late game fare wars. Jumbos also don't increase market share, keeping available loans small, making it harder for players to chase this strategy, as well as minimizing the effects of fuel rate hike (if it is an early event chit).
Once an early leader buys the first two jumbos, we often respond by buying one jumbo apiece to double our best spoke's value and take advantage of all three jumbo chits being in the cup. Because jumbos make attacks more difficult (and which, when successful, produce "attack jumbos" which allow the defender to respond in kind), this reduces the incentive for early player-player attacks and creates an even larger incentive to conquer neutrals (in order to dilute the jumbo and doubled chits now in the cup).
As a result, we rarely see anything like "Punisher". Our favorite interfering moves are to jump into LA or Chicago, buy up an expensive spoke, and then, as jumbos begin to appear, jumbo it. This spoke will eventually fall, but it will typically turn a nice profit, slow down an early leader's expansion, and produce an "attack jumbo" about the time the serious endgame wars begin.