20 is the highest upper limit on roads and ships that I can justify. Also, since we play to more than 10 points (sometimes), we can add extra roads or ships to our route, as to build more settlements. Ships: When playing the Seafarers expansion pack, we can say that we split our road building into ships and roads. This is also sure to give us the longest road in most games played. Anyone who has played the game knows that this setup is a more inefficient way of building, but this will give us an upper limit on our spending. Now, let’s say that we had to space of 3 roads twice in our route. With 5 settlements being our maximum number, we have 9 roads bought, assuming we connect them all to one of our original settlements, and all settlements are spaced 2 spaces apart. So, when we find the maximum number of settlements bought, we can estimate the amount of road needed for the task.
Roads: I left roads until after the settlements for a reason – the main purpose of road building is to develop settlements. So, for settlement building, the most that we need is: Settlements: The most settlements that can possibly be built by a single player in Settlers is 5 – upgrading the original 2 settlements to cities and building 5 settlements gives 9 points, and no more settlements before a city us built, in which case 10 points is reached. We know that there are only 4 different things to spend our resources on (or 5 if we’re playing Seafarers): We can look at what we use the resources for, and the value of those things though. But what’s the difference between the 5 different resources? This is a lot harder to figure out, since we don’t have a nice graph charting what is most important. We know the difference between rolls, as we can look at the graph of the roll distribution.