In this game green had the choice between 2 different “5/8/10-spots”.
Which should he choose?
The only difference is that you can either get more sheep production with the 10, or get some bricks.
Most people would choose the 5-8-10 with the brick because getting three different resources seems to be better than only two.
Green chose the strictly worse spot – especially because there’s a lot of sheep production on this board.
But why?
Green tried to think about flexibility.
The chosen spot offers a “3:1-spot” like the one on the bottom, but you also get the sheep port.
Besides that, you get another settlement on the 5 Wheat later.
Green knows that he only needs a few bricks to win the game but he needs a lot of ore in the late game. Using the sheep-port can be more beneficial in the end game than the bricks you need in the early game.
If you need some brick, after settling on the sheep port, the 10-sheep spot can be translated to 1 ½ points of brick production.
If you want you can also convert the sheep to the precious Ore.
The spot at the bottom (if you don’t race blue to the brick-port), has 3 points of brick production, but you need 3 bricks to produce one ore.
Additionally, placing on the sheep port automatically grants you five more points of sheep production, which could be translated to 2 ½ points of “flexible production”.
You could also place on the 8/3/4 on top to get three different resources, but that means losing production. Furthermore the sheep port would get a bit worse.
Likewise, you would lose the flexibility of the ports.
If the 5/8/10 player gets cut off from his sheep port he can still go to the “3:1-port”, the 8/3/4-player getting cut off would mean needing another extra road to get to the next port.
Ports grant you flexibility in resource production which can be translated to more possibilities in-game.
Furthermore it’s best to pick spots that can be flexible with ports.
If you get cut off from your only accessible port your game will be slowed down a lot, if you have access to different ports with one road, it’s way harder to hurt your game.
In the next example you’ll learn why 3:1-ports are considered as better than 2:1-ports by many top performers in King of Catan.