Lol, I am describing the rules as written. You just don't seem to realize that your strategy is even more awful than I even originally imagined.Mord wrote:You are describing a great game of subtle interactions, but not the rules as written. Long necks straight up pull food from the bag, so they are at less risk of being shut down by limiting the food available on the board. Burrowing doesn't disincentivize attacks or make them more difficult, it forbids them when the conditions are met.
Burrowing prevents all attacks on species if they had eaten enough food to equal the population. Before then they are still fair game, and if a carnivore is ahead of them in the turn order they can get eaten. This is in fact worse than many other defenses like Climbing, which outright forbids attack on the species unless the carnivore also happens to have Climbing (meaning you have to be lucky enough to actually draw Climbing). There is also the Intelligence card which can cancel any defense and ignores any "forbid" clauses.
Now, long necks have a synergy with burrowing because it gives you a free feed before the carnivores get to act, so you are theoretically safe from any attack if your population is 1.
The problem is that you are exposed to attack once you increase your population, and you can only ever collect food equal to your population. This means that your 3-card species will be stuck with only 1 population to remain "safe" and just collect 1 food per turn! That's an absolutely awful return on your investment.
Compare your strategy instead to this: I will instead use the Burrowing and Long Neck cards to create two additional species, each of which has zero abilities. That will give me 3 species (1 starting, 2 new), each of which has 1 population and can collect 1 food apiece per turn. So instead of collecting 1 food per turn, I'm collecting 3.
On top of that, three additional species gives you three extra card draws per turn - meaning more chances to spawn population, body size, or new species - while the long neck burrower is stuck with one.
In short, your "broken" combination only gives you a "safe" source of +1 food points and +1 card per turn that has no effect or denial ability on the board. By contrast you can take the exact same resources and give yourself an engine that generates +3 food points and +3 cards per turn.
Which again points back to the meta issue that you ignored. The cards are not broken and comparing them with one another is mostly pointless. Each card is instead highly situational, and even cards that are weak for a particular board have outlets in the form of population increase, body size increase, or species generation - all of which are always useful. The real issue therefore is understanding the board state and knowing which cards are good, and whether it's time to pump up population, body size, or new species.
If there are many carnivores on the board or a lack of vegetables for herbivores then the 3 vanilla species would certainly be the weaker play, because these vanilla species might be killed and stop generating +3 food/cards.
But if your only opponent started turtling with long-neck burrowers then 3 vanilla species would absolutely crush that strategy and lap it 3 times over. They could collect food with impunity since the long neck doesn't even compete with them, and there are no carnivores to kill them.
In short, Evolution is a great game of subtle interactions. The problem is that you lacked the imagination and strategic insight to go beyond simplistic card vs card comparisons.