Dominion Strategy Forum

Dominion => Dominion General Discussion => Topic started by: Roadrunner7671 on April 16, 2017, 01:04:01 am

Title: Duchies
Post by: Roadrunner7671 on April 16, 2017, 01:04:01 am
Man, I struggle with Duchies. I always have, but I noticed recently that this has really been hurting my play. Can you guys offer general tips for when to buy Duchies?

-When do you buy them in an engine deck?
-What about BM?

-What are some cards that don't obviously effect when you buy Duchies but you should look out for?

-Duchies vs. Distant Lands vs. IGG vs. other 5 cost cards that offer points?

-Tips for Duchy dancing?

-How important is it to keep track of your opponent's points (this sort of has less to do with Duchies)

-When should $10 with two buys be a Province? When should it be 2 Duchies? When should it be Province/Estate?

-In general, is Duchy considered a good card for its price, a bad one, or an okay one?
Title: Re: Duchies
Post by: traces Around on April 16, 2017, 01:24:06 am
-When do you buy them in an engine deck?
After you think you need to. Points are stupid.

Quote
-What about BM?
Before you think you need to. Points are everything.

Quote
-In general, is Duchy considered a good card for its price, a bad one, or an okay one?
Absolutely terrible. Points are stupid.
Title: Re: Duchies
Post by: Awaclus on April 16, 2017, 03:13:00 am
-When should $10 with two buys be a Province? When should it be 2 Duchies? When should it be Province/Estate?

Depends on PPR considerations. Note that PPR doesn't just apply to the penultimate Province; it can apply to the fourth Province of the pile if your opponent is able to buy the remaining 4. It can also apply to Duchies and other cards when 3 piles are about to be emptied. Note also that sometimes the choice is between breaking PPR and probably losing and not breaking PPR and losing for sure, in which case the former option is a lot better.

-How important is it to keep track of your opponent's points (this sort of has less to do with Duchies)

Not very important since the client does that for you.
Title: Re: Duchies
Post by: Burning Skull on April 16, 2017, 04:14:52 am
When Duchy dancing, always lead your partner. Buy more Duchies than she would ever think you could: feeling such a seductive power of yours she will lose her head and buy a Province, and then you, a big bad wolf in duchy disguise, finish her!
Title: Re: Duchies
Post by: schadd on April 16, 2017, 11:45:06 am
-When do you buy them in an engine deck?
After you think you need to. Points are stupid.

Quote
-What about BM?
Before you think you need to. Points are everything.

Quote
-In general, is Duchy considered a good card for its price, a bad one, or an okay one?
Absolutely terrible. Points are stupid.
this is a good.............................                                                                       outline
Title: Re: Duchies
Post by: dedicateddan on April 16, 2017, 12:27:19 pm
When possible, play an overbuilt engine and green 1.5 turns before piles run. If that means buying a duchy, buy a duchy.
Title: Re: Duchies
Post by: schadd on April 16, 2017, 12:34:19 pm
-Duchies vs. Distant Lands vs. IGG vs. other 5 cost cards that offer points?
probably buy the other one.
-if distant lands is in the kingdom and you're playing engine you uh probably shouldn't purchase duchies unless it's an i stalled, there's a three-pile and i need points now; buy duchy so you don't lose, 877-points-now! sort of thing. but oftentimes that's just a province anyway.


-IGG sux for enginistas, unless you can remodel it somehow and i don't remember the last time i've done that. you wouldn't buy an estate for $5, and generally the igg hurts you more than the curse hurts the other guy (unless it's an engine mirror, in which case, uh. they can probably just trash the curse.)


-duke: he's interesting. typically, the thing that prevents you from getting dukes is that the duchies gunk up your deck for a really long time. with engine, not so! they are in fact in the supply for most of the game. if you think that you will, in a reasonable time frame, get something like $30 or $40 in one turn, just try to do that! and then play your gunked up engine against a bm player where your provinces are discounted by $3. in a non-mirror, the fact that engine gets to put off choosing between provinces and dukes till the last minute means duke usually favors the engine, and if your bm opponent is durdling around with duchies then you can just deny a bunch of them at some point and then put your eye on the provinces. if that doesn't end up winning you probably should have just picked bm.


in engine mirror it's not very simple. the first person that can handle getting 6 or so duchies in one turn kind of wins?


-fairgrounds: <---- buy that card


-gardens: also, counter-intuitively, favors engine i think. i actually think this is a way better card than silk road - people kinda chunk them in the same place (as did i for a while) because they're both the weird sloggy $4 alt-vp but silk road prescribes a specific set of stuff you have to do, whereas gardens is pretty easy to fulfill - people just tend to forget that their cantrips and engine pieces and stuff still count as cards in their deck, and they don't factor in the cards they will be able to gain by the end of the game. if, in a non-mirror, your engine gets to something like 25 cards (which is rather reasonable - say, 2 trashers left, 8 villages, 5 draw, 5 payload, and like 5 pearl divers or vagrants or whatever), you can remember gardens are on the board and then inflate it with whatever else there is - get the rest of the vagrants, more draw, more payload, something that gives you buys. doing that then getting 8 gardens can put you at like 40/45 cards, and then you can buy so, so many coppers by the end of the game. people think engines are good at getting provinces and engine pieces and whatnot, but no. seaway those squires and then just dive into the coppers. you can so reasonably get like 60 cards by endgame, and that competes with provinces so nicely.


-any of the exciting empires stuff: <---- buy that instead of duchy. groundskeeper is a good example


the thing to remember is that bm can get to 4 provinces quickly but each province after that is more of a grind, and there are often things you can do to make that more so.

Title: Re: Duchies
Post by: schadd on April 16, 2017, 12:38:56 pm
man i'm getting The Drive. somebody give me something to write an article about
Title: Re: Duchies
Post by: Skumpy on April 16, 2017, 03:26:05 pm
man i'm getting The Drive. somebody give me something to write an article about

Very well. I challenge you to do article on why Rocks rocks.

Be sure to include a log of yours where you use Rocks, so we can all see an example...
Title: Re: Duchies
Post by: schadd on April 16, 2017, 03:53:04 pm
rocks sux. it's like, you empty the catapults and then start diving into the rocks and then suddenly it turns out the curses are empty and you have 5 catapults and a ton of silvers
Title: Re: Duchies
Post by: DG on April 16, 2017, 04:43:56 pm
What about Big Money? Well, in the old days a money deck would buy a duchy over gold if you were only going to draw that duchy once. That balanced out the victory points for the duchy against the loss of points that a gold could buy. Nowadays big money decks are much more varied, they tend to be even bigger money, and events and landmarks shake it up.
Title: Re: Duchies
Post by: Chris is me on April 17, 2017, 08:19:45 am
What about Big Money? Well, in the old days a money deck would buy a duchy over gold if you were only going to draw that duchy once. That balanced out the victory points for the duchy against the loss of points that a gold could buy. Nowadays big money decks are much more varied, they tend to be even bigger money, and events and landmarks shake it up.

When Events and Landmarks affect scoring, the Big Money rules totally change. This is just because, Big Money is essentially a rush to get almost half the available points in the game, and then to end the game on Provinces before the engine can get the other half+. Landmarks (and to some extent alt-VP) change this equation a lot and it's thus hard to have general case rules like "buy Duchy when 4 or fewer Provinces are left" etc.

It also varies a lot based on the enabler, and how tolerant (or intolerant) the enablers are to green cards. You can green a lot more with Patrol BM than you can with Advisor BM (though, why play Advisor BM, that's a good question).