I was playing Pipeline tonight and I forgot that buying machines as early as possible is not always a good strategy due to the fact that pipes connected to a machine cannot be run manually and that it costs $15 to run your machines.

In my last game, my machine was only connected to two pipes and I had no other pipes that I could run manually. The two pipes were of different colors and could only upgrade the oil once. Since my pipes were for different colors, I found myself in a loop of selling one oil barrel, buying oil of a different color, and then running my machines. This was compounded by the fact that I could never both buy more than one color of oil and sell oil in the same turn. This resulted in very thin margins, preventing me from expanding my pipe network.

I recall that I’ve run into this problem before in past games, and I should really stop. I shouldn’t buy machines too early; I should instead wait until I have enough throughput to make it worth the cost of running the machines.