This is very difficult question to answer because so much of it depends on your experience, play-style, and how the random elements of the game turn out.  These games have sufficient complexity that, based on how they are played by humans, going either first or last might be an advantage.

It's certain that one's play-style preferences will affect this decision.  If you are one who more often likes to find a best response to your opponent's moves, then going later will be 'better' since it suits your play-style, this you'll win more often going later than going earlier.  However, if you're one who prefers to be more strategic, going earlier might yield you more wins.

Two things to note:


If you have the choice of consistently going in a certain order, keep choosing the one you have the most experience with.  This will enable you to remove one variable of the game, and allow you to improve your skill in the game faster.
There ARE certain combinations of races and powers that are clearly better, especially in terms of how they interact, than others.  This means that in certain games, it will be more advantageous to grab them, thus go earlier.  However, it's not at all clear that these situations happen often enough to offset any advantages (if they exist) from going later.


Is it better to go first or last in Vinci?
I want to use my own .sty and .cls file in a project. I know of the following two possibilities of placing them:


in my local tex tree (or the general tex tree, which is worse)
in the same directory as the .tex file


Both of these I find unsatisfactory for the following reasons:

The local tex tree is unsatisfactory since the .sty file is specific for the project, so I want it to be close to the project, so I easily remember where it is etc. Also, I am using dropbox to synchronize the project files between different computers automatically, so the .sty file should be in the dropbox folder.

The 'same directory' is unsatisfactory since the project is in a directory with many subdirectories. The .tex files in all these subdirectories should be able to access the same .sty file.

What I would like to do is: create a subdirectory 'style files' in the project directory, where I put style and class files (there are several for the project), then tell tex somehow where to find them.

How can I do this?

I am using a recent TexLive on  Mac OS X.6

I know there have been questions about placement of .sty files, but I did not find an answer to this question.
