It's my favorite board game! You're playing no expansions right? I don't remember how to play vanilla race that much. I think you have to just think really hard about what the AI might do and take that into consideration. You don't want him always taking advantage of your action while you never take advantege of his actions (for example, if he has 8 cards in hand and you have like 2, and he settles or develops, thats bad for you). Also, consume x2 is considered slightly too powerful in the base game.
The first expansion changes the game a lot (for the better), and the ones after that are nice but don't add that much. So I do recommend turning on the first expansion.
Unfortunately http://rftgstats.com/ is down right now for some reason :( But it's a really cool website with beautiful charts showing which cards are correlated with winning games, and which cards are in general most often played, etc
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People who don't finish their sentences
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