Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion General Discussion => Topic started by: Screwyioux on July 25, 2018, 02:25:31 pm
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Just want to get some feedback from different voices. Put an Engine in Dominion into words as best you can:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1efjKpTpZoYOxlwtHwmSiBLxSdXxCZ17_IpTjB84LrjE/viewform?edit_requested=true#responses
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OK I had an answer all ready, but now I'm just wondering why you're doing this survey thing instead of people just posting here in this topic.
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OK I had an answer all ready, but now I'm just wondering why you're doing this survey thing instead of people just posting here in this topic.
Mostly because that same link is in several different places throughout this series of tubes we languish beneath.
Doing it as a google doc puts everyone's responses in the same place.
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It also makes it so noone can see them?
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After much deliberation, I have come to a point where I feel like I can adequately describe what an engine is in layman's terms.
An engine is a deck where you are able to both (a) potentially gain more than one set of points a turn and (b) seeks to increase consistency (or at least not decrease consistency) in the deck before greening. In this way, an engine seeks to expand further than a set boundary of one Province/Colony/Dominate a turn.
Let me break down what that means a bit. Say you buy an Estate. That is a set of points, or in this case a point. Say you buy a Province, that is a set of points. Any time you score with a purchase or gain, that is a single set of points, no matter how big or small. Play a Monument? That is a set of points. Play a Goons and buy something? That is a set of points. Buy a copper and get Fountain points? You get the picture.
Secondly, consistency increase in deck building, at least to the point of where consistency does not decrease. The idea is, you want to play your good cards more often. This means trashing, this means draw, this means sifting.
Since a "money" deck seeks to only buy a single set of points a turn, thusly it only has an X hurdle to clear. Engines have a higher hurdle to clear and thusly want at least the potential for an increase of consistency, and an output greater than a single set of points a turn.
Some edgecases:
1. Workshop/Gardens. This deck does gain more than one set of points a turn, however it does not increase consistency and thusly is not an engine.
2. Donate with Lucky Coin, a lot of action cards, but no other gains. This deck will be highly consistent, however it will have no cap larger than a single set of points, and thusly there is no engine on the board.
3. An engine that is possible given the rules, but can only gain estates from Workshop/Ironworks. This is indeed an engine because it will increase consistency and score more than one set of points, however it is a very weak engine, and may lose to the more focused money deck.
4. Council Room/Margrave deck with nothing else. Yes, this is an engine. It increases consistency and it can score more than one set of points a turn. However, it is a very weak engine.
5. A deck with Lurker, Graverobber, Chapel, and no money at all but no Action increasers: The idea here is you Graverob something every turn, score a single Province, and reget your trashed stuff every turn with Lurkers, while getting incredibly consistent with the Chapel. Yes, this is merely "money", it is not an engine since there does not exist a way to score more than one set of points a turn.
I might be missing something here, but that is my current theory on engines. As you can see, the terms "money" don't always naturally fit (due to case 5 as an example), and thusly I am open to ditching the term entirely and going with a new one, to entirely replace the concept of money, except in terms of referring to the really bad single draw card Big Money of ages past.
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Don't forget about the Engine Alignment Chart: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=17975.msg735511#msg735511
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I said this on discord a few times but I'll put it here too: sometimes a word can be useful without painstaking definitions being possible or useful. I suppose its unclear what the survey is trying to get at especially since its only being posted here by an ambassador of the real person who made it.
I think the word engine sticks around because it captures a very essential mindset for a type of deckbuilding. I think trying to pin that down precisely with terms like "multiple sets of points" is just a losing battle. I think the more interesting question by far is to ask "If someone you trust tells you to build an engine on a given board, what are you looking around for?"
Anyway, my own 2 cents are that the interesting characteristics are (1) The deck as a total deck is close to the deck's turns: roughly speaking if you add a key card the average turn improves by close to the entire power of that card and (2) the deck aims to use (1) to improve its own capacity.
I think (1) is the real universal thing are saying, and (2) is a debatable characteristic which I mostly use to distinguish classic overdraw/gain-and-play/explosive engines from golden deck type of scenarios where a single pattern that involves the whole deck is repeated over and over again.
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My answer, as typed in the google form:
An engine is a deck whose average value per turn derives from its total deck composition, rather than its average deck composition. So, if you randomly set aside some cards from your deck, it would hurt this turn. Most typically, an engine has a nonzero probability of drawing or sifting through the entire deck. The probability does not need to be high, i.e. I don't think "consistency" is a requirement.
Of course, there are a bunch of pathological cases:
-A Travelling Fair/Counting House is an engine because its value derives from the total number of copper.
-A deck that gains Silk Roads technically derives value from its total deck composition, but I don't count that sort of thing.
-A 5-card deck, or say a deck with 10 peddlers and 4 stop cards, I would put in a third category, neither engine nor good stuff.
-There are also stockpile decks, that collect e.g. coin tokens, Royal Carriages, Duplicates, or Native Village cards for a big turn. Here, the value of the megaturn derives from the total deck composition, but the rate of building the megaturn depends on average deck composition (e.g. how quickly you can play Royal Carriages), so I actually consider these to be good stuff decks.
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An engine is a deck where you are able to both (a) potentially gain more than one set of points a turn and (b) seeks to increase consistency (or at least not decrease consistency) in the deck before greening. In this way, an engine seeks to expand further than a set boundary of one Province/Colony/Dominate a turn.
What if I have a deck with only one gain per turn, but I try to draw deck every turn just so I can play Ghost Ship every turn? Does that fulfill (a) or not?
I don't understand why Workshop/Gardens doesn't fulfill (b). You say that gaining gardens decreases consistency, but by the time you're gaining gardens, that would be after greening, no?
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A lot of these definitions strike me as a bit strange in that they don't really describe how one uses the word "engine", how the word might have come into existence in the world of Dominion, etc.--it's just a whole lot of retroactively looking at a lot of engine theory and finding some ad hoc way of connecting loose threads: an engine is a deck which, on more than 60% percent of turns gains multiple cards OR plays more than x number of cards EXCEPT in the case of....etc.
The concept of engine is easy to explain! "Hey, that strategy where you buy one smithy and money? Well it's not as good as this deck--see how efficient it is? It's sort of an....engine, you could call it".
(I find a lot of the aforementioned descriptions really really interesting! And I'm not saying they are useless. But the concept of definition should be nailed down more.)
EDIT: Ahh, Avorian said something similar. Ninja'd, as they say.
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The concept of engine is easy to explain! "Hey, that strategy where you buy one smithy and money? Well it's not as good as this deck--see how efficient it is? It's sort of an....engine, you could call it".
That's what the philosophers call an "ostensive" definition. You define the concept by pointing to examples of it. The limitation of an ostensive definition, is that it doesn't explain what in particular makes a deck an engine or not an engine. So we might each hear the same ostensive definition, but develop different theories of what makes an engine, and then ultimately disagree on the classification of decks that neither of us thought to point to when we started out.
The thing that we're trying to pin down is an "intensional" definition. The intensional definition describes necessary and sufficient conditions to call a deck an engine. There's also the "extensional" definition, which would literally be a list of every deck that would be called an engine.
There's also prototype theory, which argues that the way we understand concepts isn't really through definitions, but through prototypes. That is, we adopt a few central examples of "engines", and we deem a deck to be an engine if we think it bears enough resemblance to one of the central examples.
...I really like Wittgenstein, okay?
It's fun to invent intensional definitions but I totally agree that they aren't necessary, nor are they accurate descriptions of how we understand concepts.
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I really don’t feel comfortable answering this without knowing why it’s a survey and how the answers are gonna be used? Are my words going to be lumped with similar sets of words for a poll? Are my responses going to be picked apart and misinterpreted? This is just such a strange way to collect what should be a back and forth discussion.
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An engine is a deck where you are able to both (a) potentially gain more than one set of points a turn and (b) seeks to increase consistency (or at least not decrease consistency) in the deck before greening. In this way, an engine seeks to expand further than a set boundary of one Province/Colony/Dominate a turn.
What if I have a deck with only one gain per turn, but I try to draw deck every turn just so I can play Ghost Ship every turn? Does that fulfill (a) or not?
I don't understand why Workshop/Gardens doesn't fulfill (b). You say that gaining gardens decreases consistency, but by the time you're gaining gardens, that would be after greening, no?
That is "money". Playing an attack isn't gaining points. Such scenarios also lend themselves to longer games anyways, meaning weaker engines are things you usually go for then, if possible. Engines favor the longer game, and attacks lend themselves to longer games. But what you describe by itself is not an engine, because there are no additional green gains.
Workshop/Gardens doesn't fulfill (b) because there's no consistency at all. You aren't trying to draw deck, you're not thinning down, you're not sifting.
Please, keep trying to tear my idea down. It needs to be tested.
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Seprix, does reducing opponents' score count as scoring a set of points? Cursers, Swindler, Knights, etc.
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Seprix, does reducing opponents' score count as scoring a set of points? Cursers, Swindler, Knights, etc.
Hmmm, that is a great point. I am going to say yes, if it can lower points it is an alternate way of scoring, with the idea in mind that perhaps Curses can be trashed. It depends, but something I did not think about.
Another idea WanderingWinder presented: He postulates that Native Village/Bridge does not fit the qualifications, I counter that Native Village is setting aside cards and you are building to one giant turn, so there is a consistency factor there, and there is a scoring method that is higher than a single set of points.
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An engine is a deck where you are able to both (a) potentially gain more than one set of points a turn and (b) seeks to increase consistency (or at least not decrease consistency) in the deck before greening. In this way, an engine seeks to expand further than a set boundary of one Province/Colony/Dominate a turn.
What if I have a deck with only one gain per turn, but I try to draw deck every turn just so I can play Ghost Ship every turn? Does that fulfill (a) or not?
I don't understand why Workshop/Gardens doesn't fulfill (b). You say that gaining gardens decreases consistency, but by the time you're gaining gardens, that would be after greening, no?
That is "money". Playing an attack isn't gaining points. Such scenarios also lend themselves to longer games anyways, meaning weaker engines are things you usually go for then, if possible. Engines favor the longer game, and attacks lend themselves to longer games. But what you describe by itself is not an engine, because there are no additional green gains.
Workshop/Gardens doesn't fulfill (b) because there's no consistency at all. You aren't trying to draw deck, you're not thinning down, you're not sifting.
Please, keep trying to tear my idea down. It needs to be tested.
Your definition is inadequate to capture what we commonly refer to as engines then. YOu can definitely have an engine that plays Ghost Ship every turn and gains only one green card.
Also, the definition "gets more than one set of points" is super arbitrary. A deck that plays Swindler and buys a Dominate each turn is not an engine, but the same deck playing a Monument instead and buying a Colony each turn is?
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An engine is a deck where:
- You use a combination of trashing, draw and other methods to cycle through all or almost all of the starting cards every turn
- You use the fact that you're cycling through your deck every turn to keep building in a positive feedback loop, resulting in a deck that is more reliable and/or has more payload, allowing you to green effortlessly
- You acquire cards that draw more cards to increase your handsize and optimize your economy to match with the +buys available
- You acquire enough antiterminals to play all the terminal Actions in your deck that you have to play
- Since you're cycling through most of the deck every turn, it only takes one turn to use the new cards and you might be able to even gain and play the cards on the same turn
- You maintain the correct balance between different engine components and cards that aren't engine components to minimize the odds of dud turns
- Your resulting deck is extremely flexible and can opt to go for whatever greening tactics that counters the opponent the best
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I haven’t figured out the words for it, but “an engine” (as much as like dozens of different decks can be lumped together like that) differs from money / slogs in that money and slog building aims around increasing the output of the average turn, where a turn sees a relatively small subset of the deck. Whereas an engine aims to consistently see and play / buy its key cards every turn (through draw, sifting, trashing, etc).
It’s much easier to define an engine in terms of what it’s not. I have no problem calling a lot of golden decks or combos engines, either.
(If anyone wants to engage with the content of this post please reply in a forum where we can talk back and forth about it, I’m not going to submit it into a Google form)
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An engine is a deck where:
- You use a combination of trashing, draw and other methods to cycle through all or almost all of the starting cards every turn
- You use the fact that you're cycling through your deck every turn to keep building in a positive feedback loop, resulting in a deck that is more reliable and/or has more payload, allowing you to green effortlessly
- You acquire cards that draw more cards to increase your handsize and optimize your economy to match with the +buys available
- You acquire enough antiterminals to play all the terminal Actions in your deck that you have to play
- Since you're cycling through most of the deck every turn, it only takes one turn to use the new cards and you might be able to even gain and play the cards on the same turn
- You maintain the correct balance between different engine components and cards that aren't engine components to minimize the odds of dud turns
- Your resulting deck is extremely flexible and can opt to go for whatever greening tactics that counters the opponent the best
Are these an "and"; are they all required?
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I don't see why we can't just say an engine is where you draw/sift through your whole deck every turn (at least until you start greening.)
Arguing about whether edge cases like golden decks are engines might be interesting, but we already have terms for those (like "golden deck") so I'm not sure it will be that helpful, at least when describing what an "engine" is to beginners.
4. Council Room/Margrave deck with nothing else. Yes, this is an engine. It increases consistency and it can score more than one set of points a turn. However, it is a very weak engine.
I fail to see how this could be considered anything other than Terminal Draw Big Money. Tacking a +Buy on Smithy Big Money does not an engine make.
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I don't see why we can't just say an engine is where you draw/sift through your whole deck every turn (at least until you start greening.)
I don't like the "whole" in that sentence. If you can consistently draw 3/4 of your deck; and consistently generate enough coin and buy to keep going, I wouldn't think to call that not an engine just because you have a few more stop cards than you have draw.
4. Council Room/Margrave deck with nothing else. Yes, this is an engine. It increases consistency and it can score more than one set of points a turn. However, it is a very weak engine.
I fail to see how this could be considered anything other than Terminal Draw Big Money. Tacking a +Buy on Smithy Big Money does not an engine make.
Agreed.
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An engine is a deck where:
- You use a combination of trashing, draw and other methods to cycle through all or almost all of the starting cards every turn
- You use the fact that you're cycling through your deck every turn to keep building in a positive feedback loop, resulting in a deck that is more reliable and/or has more payload, allowing you to green effortlessly
- You acquire cards that draw more cards to increase your handsize and optimize your economy to match with the +buys available
- You acquire enough antiterminals to play all the terminal Actions in your deck that you have to play
- Since you're cycling through most of the deck every turn, it only takes one turn to use the new cards and you might be able to even gain and play the cards on the same turn
- You maintain the correct balance between different engine components and cards that aren't engine components to minimize the odds of dud turns
- Your resulting deck is extremely flexible and can opt to go for whatever greening tactics that counters the opponent the best
Are these an "and"; are they all required?
Yes.
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I don't see why we can't just say an engine is where you draw/sift through your whole deck every turn (at least until you start greening.)
I don't like the "whole" in that sentence. If you can consistently draw 3/4 of your deck; and consistently generate enough coin and buy to keep going, I wouldn't think to call that not an engine just because you have a few more stop cards than you have draw.
Yeah, I guess this is the main sticking point for me. I think it's been implied by some people here that an engine just isn't worth doing if you can't draw/sift your whole deck, but I might be wrong?
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I still like a variant of the definition of engine Wandering Winder used when laying out his 5 deck types. Here's what I entered into the Google doc.
An "engine" is a deck that aims to use good cards to fill as many of the following roles as possible, but generally in a modular fashion: a) something that lets you play extra cards in a turn, b) something to let you buy or gain more cards a turn, c) something that draws you more cards, d) something to trash or cycle, e) something to attack or slow down your opponent.
Engine decks have the following properties: they aim to 1) draw or cycle through all cards as quickly as possible and 2) play a large number of cards or select key cards with high frequency.
It is usually (but not always) strategically correct when playing an engine deck to lump the gaining of Victory Cards into as few of turns as possible. Sometimes engines will win with one turn of Victory Card purchasing or without having to gain any Victory Cards at all. I think of this last thing as a consequence of engines and correct play rather than a property that defines engine decks, though.
The problem I have with the term "engine" is that with more expansions and better play, it's becoming increasingly clear that the vast majority of the time, an "engine" of some kind is the correct build on a board. That makes the term "engine" and discussing "engine" versus "not engine" mostly strategically useless because what the best engine will look like and the build path to achieve it on any given board could vary widely from kingdom to kingdom and be very complex or unclear.
Saying "build an engine" on a given kingdom almost amounts to saying something generic, like "play well". It's mostly vacuous and minimally useful once you are beyond the point of understanding this type of deck is possible to build and should be built often.
This is a good thing. Dominion is a better, more complex, more fun game when the correct strategy for a kingdom is not something super simple. But it means we should resist using "build an engine" to end, rather than begin, a discussion of strategy.
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I don't see why we can't just say an engine is where you draw/sift through your whole deck every turn (at least until you start greening.)
I don't like the "whole" in that sentence. If you can consistently draw 3/4 of your deck; and consistently generate enough coin and buy to keep going, I wouldn't think to call that not an engine just because you have a few more stop cards than you have draw.
I think the difference between drawing 3/4s and drawing the whole deck is significant. If you're drawing your deck (and let's say you have at least 1 overdraw), then when you add a stop card, you get the whole value of that stop card. If you're drawing less than your whole deck, then when you add a stop card, then it only increases your deck value if it's better than your average stop card.
A concrete example of this is a double tactician deck with ~13 stop cards. I don't consider that to be an engine. It can still be a good deck though.
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The problem I have with the term "engine" is that with more expansions and better play, it's becoming increasingly clear that the vast majority of the time, an "engine" of some kind is the correct build on a board. That makes the term "engine" and discussing "engine" versus "not engine" mostly strategically useless because what the best engine will look like and the build path to achieve it on any given board could vary widely from kingdom to kingdom and be very complex or unclear.
Saying "build an engine" on a given kingdom almost amounts to saying something generic, like "play well". It's mostly vacuous and minimally useful once you are beyond the point of understanding this type of deck is possible to build and should be built often.
This is a good thing. Dominion is a better, more complex, more fun game when the correct strategy for a kingdom is not something super simple. But it means we should resist using "build an engine" to end, rather than begin, a discussion of strategy.
I agree with this at the highest levels of play, but I think a more simplified (maybe even less accurate in practice?) definition can still be useful to people learning to get better at the game. This is one of the things I was trying to get at with the "skill plateaus" article I wrote...and then never revised ::). That people learn these principles and guidelines for play before discovering that stronger play actually requires progressively more complex and nuanced understanding of those principles and guidelines. But you need those oversimplified rules and definitions to even be able to recognize that.
For example, I initially didn't like Awaclus's definition because it seems to describe the ideal engine, not lots of engines in practice. But that ideal is much easier for a lower level player to wrap their head around than most of the definitions people have presented here, and many "less-ideal" engines are striving for that ideal but just make do with what they have.
I guess that means I'm just echoing what others have said here already: that we need more clarification on what this definition is for. What level of players is it directed at? What is it being used to better understand or teach? Who is expected to use it and when? Why does the definition need to be more standardized than the "gut feel" definition that many people probably generally agree on? Etc.
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An engine is a collection of cards that can repeatedly be used together for extra benefit. I think main critieria of an engine definition is not to define specific ideas but to exclude
- A good stuff deck that succeeds because individual cards are working well in a suitable environment
- A planned deck that never uses cards together (like workshop - gardens)
- Some megaturn decks that do little apart from hitting the megaturn
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There are two qualities I use to qualify whether a deck is an engine or not: control and growth rate. Decks with high control are able to play higher fractions of their useful cards each turn, with the archetype obviously being a deck that draws itself with perfect reliability. Decks with high growth rate are able to quickly obtain useful payload, and ideally use extra gains to grow non-linearly.
If a deck possesses both of these qualities, I consider it a strong engine. Some decks possess one but not the other; for example Hunting Party + X has control but not growth rate, and Bridge Troll + Village (or Ironworks + Gardens) has growth rate but not control. I call these decks weak engines.
Strong money decks can incorporate a limited amount of control (e.g. through Donate), growth (e.g. through Delve), or both (e.g. through Jack), but they can be differentiated from engines as the primary goal while building is to increase the coin value of the average card in the deck.
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I, like, literally wrote an article with this exact title
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I, like, literally wrote an article with this exact title
In case anyone is interested, here's the link for the article (https://dominionstrategy.com/2017/11/06/dominion-101-what-is-an-engine/).
Here's the discussion page, too. (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=17704.0) Lots of good stuff.
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Your definition is inadequate to capture what we commonly refer to as engines then. You can definitely have an engine that plays Ghost Ship every turn and gains only one green card.
Also, the definition "gets more than one set of points" is super arbitrary. A deck that plays Swindler and buys a Dominate each turn is not an engine, but the same deck playing a Monument instead and buying a Colony each turn is?
Actually you cannot according to the definition, it would more or less play like consistent money. Attacks are a way to decrease consistency, and necessitate building further, but if there really is nothing else but playing Ghost Ship, there is no engine there.
No, playing Swindler and buying Dominate is not an engine by itself. Yes, Monument and buying Colony is absolutely an engine as long as you are increasing consistency, which means either sifting, drawing cards or trashing them. Engines aren't always good.
4. Council Room/Margrave deck with nothing else. Yes, this is an engine. It increases consistency and it can score more than one set of points a turn. However, it is a very weak engine.
I fail to see how this could be considered anything other than Terminal Draw Big Money. Tacking a +Buy on Smithy Big Money does not an engine make.
Let go of your romanticized ideas of engines. Something has to give in the end, to define something so contradictory in nature. It could very well be that my idea is insane, but something at the end has to give. Nobody is going to be 100% happy with an idea at first. I never said it was a good engine, it is in fact a terrible engine. But it is nontheless an engine according to my interpretations.
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Your definition is inadequate to capture what we commonly refer to as engines then. You can definitely have an engine that plays Ghost Ship every turn and gains only one green card.
Also, the definition "gets more than one set of points" is super arbitrary. A deck that plays Swindler and buys a Dominate each turn is not an engine, but the same deck playing a Monument instead and buying a Colony each turn is?
Actually you cannot according to the definition, it would more or less play like consistent money. Attacks are a way to decrease consistency, and necessitate building further, but if there really is nothing else but playing Ghost Ship, there is no engine there.
No, playing Swindler and buying Dominate is not an engine by itself. Yes, Monument and buying Colony is absolutely an engine as long as you are increasing consistency, which means either sifting, drawing cards or trashing them. Engines aren't always good.
A deck that thins down in order to guarantee a Ghost Ship play and a single province every turn is definitely an engine (as opposed to a Ghost Ship Money deck that just throws a bunch of ships and Gold in there to try and have attacks happen often enough)
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A deck that thins down in order to guarantee a Ghost Ship play and a single province every turn is definitely an engine (as opposed to a Ghost Ship Money deck that just throws a bunch of ships and Gold in there to try and have attacks happen often enough)
I cannot disagree more. Take a deck with Windfall, Ghost Ship and Donate. I'm not calling that an engine. Sorry. It's just incredibly consistent money, which will have to be the case when under constant siege from Ghost Ship. Extend this example to Donate, tons of engine enablers but no way to gain more than one green card a turn. I'm still not calling that an engine, because it cannot be.
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A deck that thins down in order to guarantee a Ghost Ship play and a single province every turn is definitely an engine (as opposed to a Ghost Ship Money deck that just throws a bunch of ships and Gold in there to try and have attacks happen often enough)
I cannot disagree more. Take a deck with Windfall, Ghost Ship and Donate. I'm not calling that an engine. Sorry. It's just incredibly consistent money, which will have to be the case when under constant siege from Ghost Ship. Extend this example to Donate, tons of engine enablers but no way to gain more than one green card a turn. I'm still not calling that an engine, because it cannot be.
there’s not going to be a definition of engine that meets every example. Plenty of engines exist where the only payload beyond that Province is the consistent attack; just because some specific Donate stack plays like money doesn’t mean those other decks stop being engines.
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A deck that thins down in order to guarantee a Ghost Ship play and a single province every turn is definitely an engine (as opposed to a Ghost Ship Money deck that just throws a bunch of ships and Gold in there to try and have attacks happen often enough)
I cannot disagree more. Take a deck with Windfall, Ghost Ship and Donate. I'm not calling that an engine. Sorry. It's just incredibly consistent money, which will have to be the case when under constant siege from Ghost Ship. Extend this example to Donate, tons of engine enablers but no way to gain more than one green card a turn. I'm still not calling that an engine, because it cannot be.
I feel like engine more generally applies to how a deck plays than how it wins. Meaning, I don't see why the ability to gain points should be relevant at all.
Imagine a deck that uses all sorts of actions in order to draw and play your entire deck every turn. It contains 5 Universities, so you can use this deck to gain all the actions you need and increase consistency while draining piles. But it has no payload. Either it has no +buy, or it has no source of coin, either one.
I just don't see why that deck would not be an engine deck. It plays exactly like an engine. It's just a really bad engine; because you have failed to give yourself a way to actually win the game by getting points.
Or, what if you plan on adding a +buy late; using your Universities? Does the deck suddenly go from not an engine to being an engine the moment that you finally decide to gain some +buy cards?
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I think my response was something like: "A deck with the goal of drawing itself every turn."
I was going for parsimony, so I didn't feel like over-qualifying it.
My definition also doesn't make any effort to judge whether the engine is good or not. To me, a deck can be an engine even if it has shitty payload. That just means it's a poor engine.
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I cannot disagree more. Take a deck with Windfall, Ghost Ship and Donate. I'm not calling that an engine. Sorry. It's just incredibly consistent money, which will have to be the case when under constant siege from Ghost Ship. Extend this example to Donate, tons of engine enablers but no way to gain more than one green card a turn. I'm still not calling that an engine, because it cannot be.
Donate by itself changes the very premise of the game so much that you can pretty much throw all the usual deck classification out of the window as soon as Donate is there.
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For games in general, an "engine" is "do more." You increase how much you can do with your turns (yes or how many turns you get). When engine games started to be a thing, they were also called "snowball" games, after snowballs getting bigger as they roll down hills. Your engine snowballs; it does more and more.
In Dominion there are three basic ways you can do more. By default you get 5 cards a turn, can play one Action, and can gain one card. You do more by drawing more cards, playing more Actions (not necessarily terminals), and gaining more cards. Gaining more cards includes having the economy to pay for them (or using Workshops, which provide their own economy). So getting better economy is part of this too.
When people talk about engines in Dominion - and of course all that's useful is what people use the term to mean, not what any one person would like it to mean - they tend to mean decks that include all three of these elements. You have to be drawing more cards, playing more than one Action, and gaining more than one card.
I don't think there are people who seriously talk about a deck that has no draw or can only play one Action a turn as an engine. If you can only gain one card, well that can be good, drawing your deck with Labs say, and the Labs do snowball, to a point. But it's limited, even if the Labs never run out. To some people it may count but I think to most it does not; it's "drawing your deck" not "an engine."
It's all a loop feeding itself. Drawing, playing, and gaining more cards all help you draw, play, and gain more cards.
A weak engine is still an "engine." You would like to draw your whole deck every turn, play everything, and gain lots of cards; but just getting part of the way there is still an engine.
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Imagine a deck that uses all sorts of actions in order to draw and play your entire deck every turn. It contains 5 Universities, so you can use this deck to gain all the actions you need and increase consistency while draining piles. But it has no payload. Either it has no +buy, or it has no source of coin, either one.
I just don't see why that deck would not be an engine deck. It plays exactly like an engine. It's just a really bad engine; because you have failed to give yourself a way to actually win the game by getting points.
University is like +$5 +1 Buy with limitations.
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Imagine a deck that uses all sorts of actions in order to draw and play your entire deck every turn. It contains 5 Universities, so you can use this deck to gain all the actions you need and increase consistency while draining piles. But it has no payload. Either it has no +buy, or it has no source of coin, either one.
I just don't see why that deck would not be an engine deck. It plays exactly like an engine. It's just a really bad engine; because you have failed to give yourself a way to actually win the game by getting points.
University is like +$5 +1 Buy with limitations.
Right, that was largely my point... that even though it has the limitation "can't buy green cards" (action-victory aside), I feel like such a deck plays exactly like an engine would; even though it fails the criteria of being able to get multiple points in a turn.
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For games in general, an "engine" is "do more." You increase how much you can do with your turns (yes or how many turns you get). When engine games started to be a thing, they were also called "snowball" games, after snowballs getting bigger as they roll down hills. Your engine snowballs; it does more and more.
In Dominion there are three basic ways you can do more. By default you get 5 cards a turn, can play one Action, and can gain one card. You do more by drawing more cards, playing more Actions (not necessarily terminals), and gaining more cards. Gaining more cards includes having the economy to pay for them (or using Workshops, which provide their own economy). So getting better economy is part of this too.
When people talk about engines in Dominion - and of course all that's useful is what people use the term to mean, not what any one person would like it to mean - they tend to mean decks that include all three of these elements. You have to be drawing more cards, playing more than one Action, and gaining more than one card.
I don't think there are people who seriously talk about a deck that has no draw or can only play one Action a turn as an engine. If you can only gain one card, well that can be good, drawing your deck with Labs say, and the Labs do snowball, to a point. But it's limited, even if the Labs never run out. To some people it may count but I think to most it does not; it's "drawing your deck" not "an engine."
It's all a loop feeding itself. Drawing, playing, and gaining more cards all help you draw, play, and gain more cards.
A weak engine is still an "engine." You would like to draw your whole deck every turn, play everything, and gain lots of cards; but just getting part of the way there is still an engine.
It's interesting to hear it in that perspective, calling something an engine if its output serves to increase its output on future turns.
It makes a degree of sense when you think about it too, like Silver gets you to $6 so you can buy Gold which helps you buy more gold, calling that a "money engine" isn't completely ridiculous if you look at it in the scope of tabletop gaming at large, not just how we're used to talking about Dominion. And focusing on their aspects that break the rules of the game (like only being able to gain one card).
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Is the engine the thing you're building? Or is the engine the process of building it?
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I think my response was something like: "A deck with the goal of drawing itself every turn."
I came up with the same thing after thinking about this a bit.
The point isn't what the deck is actually doing, it's about what it's trying to do, or what the ideal case is. Smithy big money isn't an engine because you don't want to draw your other Smithies. Rushes aren't engines because the bar for what you're trying to do each turn is much lower. And so on. So when we say "go engine" what we're saying is "try to draw as much of your deck as you can."
And yes, this means golden decks are engines. I don't see anything wrong with this. The whole point of engines is consistency, and a golden deck is about as consistent as you can get.
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Is the engine the thing you're building? Or is the engine the process of building it?
I think of an "engine" as a deck you build, and an "engine strategy" is a strategy that aims to build an engine at some point during the game.
Hm... If an engine is a deck that draws itself, does that mean every strategy that aims to Donate down to 5 cards is an engine strategy?
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And yes, this means golden decks are engines. I don't see anything wrong with this. The whole point of engines is consistency, and a golden deck is about as consistent as you can get.
The point of engines is snowballing. Golden decks are static.
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An engine is a collection of cards that can repeatedly be used together for extra benefit. I think main critieria of an engine definition is not to define specific ideas but to exclude- A good stuff deck that succeeds because individual cards are working well in a suitable environment
- A planned deck that never uses cards together (like workshop - gardens)
- Some megaturn decks that do little apart from hitting the megaturn
I like this list of things that are not engines. It's not too hard to complement it and come up with a definition for engine. Something like: a planned deck based on interactions between multiple cards, with the goal of having consistent production for several turns (of money, attack plays or whatever the payload is).
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The problem I have with the term "engine" is that with more expansions and better play, it's becoming increasingly clear that the vast majority of the time, an "engine" of some kind is the correct build on a board.
I don't even find that the majority of random boards have the possibility of an engine. Sure if the engine is possible, it's usually also the strongest strategy. But like, no anti-terminals, no engine. No draw, probably no engine (edge cases notwithstanding). Junking stronger than the available trashing? Good luck connecting the parts. We don't need a super specific definition of engine to note that it has pretty steep requirements for what's needed in the kingdom.
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And yes, this means golden decks are engines. I don't see anything wrong with this. The whole point of engines is consistency, and a golden deck is about as consistent as you can get.
The point of engines is snowballing. Golden decks are static.
A snowball phase followed by a static one is characteristic of every deck, due to the nature of the game. The static phase comes sooner in money and golden decks, but you have to snowball up to both of these first; in golden decks the snowballing is necessary to get all the needed components before trashing all the others.
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What is an engine? A miserable little pile of Actions! But enough talk! Have at you!
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Snowball phase? (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=18090.msg739875#msg739875)
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And yes, this means golden decks are engines. I don't see anything wrong with this. The whole point of engines is consistency, and a golden deck is about as consistent as you can get.
The point of engines is snowballing. Golden decks are static.
A snowball phase followed by a static one is characteristic of every deck, due to the nature of the game. The static phase comes sooner in money and golden decks, but you have to snowball up to both of these first; in golden decks the snowballing is necessary to get all the needed components before trashing all the others.
If you call golden decks "engines," for whatever reason that makes sense to you, you will find that you are not communicating clearly with other people who use the word "engine."
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I guess the terminology confusion is partly due to other boardgames.
What is called a golden deck in Dominion is called an engine in a tableau builder. For example if you consistenly make x VPs via consuming in Race for the Galaxy.
For obvious mechanic differences it makes no sense to use the term engine for a deckbuilder in which setting up a static, VP-generating deck is a rare exception instead of, like in the case of tableau builders, the norm that occurs in a large fraction of games.
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I guess the terminology confusion is partly due to other boardgames.
What is called a golden deck in Dominion is called an engine in a tableau builder. For example if you consistenly make x VPs via consuming in Race for the Galaxy.
For obvious mechanic differences it makes no sense to use the term engine for a deckbuilder in which setting up a static, VP-generating deck is a rare exception instead of, like in the case of tableau builders, the norm that occurs in a large fraction of games.
This is a huge part of where the confusion originates when you start talking about Dominion with people who aren't as focused on it in their gaming as the average FDS frequenter.
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After much deliberation, I have come to a point where I feel like I can adequately describe what an engine is in layman's terms.
An engine is a deck where you are able to both (a) potentially gain more than one set of points a turn and (b) seeks to increase consistency (or at least not decrease consistency) in the deck before greening. In this way, an engine seeks to expand further than a set boundary of one Province/Colony/Dominate a turn.
Let me break down what that means a bit. Say you buy an Estate. That is a set of points, or in this case a point. Say you buy a Province, that is a set of points. Any time you score with a purchase or gain, that is a single set of points, no matter how big or small. Play a Monument? That is a set of points. Play a Goons and buy something? That is a set of points. Buy a copper and get Fountain points? You get the picture.
Secondly, consistency increase in deck building, at least to the point of where consistency does not decrease. The idea is, you want to play your good cards more often. This means trashing, this means draw, this means sifting.
Since a "money" deck seeks to only buy a single set of points a turn, thusly it only has an X hurdle to clear. Engines have a higher hurdle to clear and thusly want at least the potential for an increase of consistency, and an output greater than a single set of points a turn.
Some edgecases:
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You know what, rather than lose sleep over this, I'll just agree with Seprix's definition here and concede that there are edge cases where it doesn't cleanly apply.
On the other hand, it seems odd that a deck which draws itself every turn but still can only gain one VP card a turn is not an engine ("draw-your-deck money"?), but then you add a single source of +gain and suddenly it becomes an engine. So like a Scrying Pool one-terminal-per-turn deck with a single Expand as the only source of additional points (an example to reflect an actual game I played), and that stops becoming an engine if you remove the Expand?
An engine is a collection of cards that can repeatedly be used together for extra benefit. I think main critieria of an engine definition is not to define specific ideas but to exclude- A good stuff deck that succeeds because individual cards are working well in a suitable environment
- A planned deck that never uses cards together (like workshop - gardens)
- Some megaturn decks that do little apart from hitting the megaturn
I like this list of things that are not engines. It's not too hard to complement it and come up with a definition for engine. Something like: a planned deck based on interactions between multiple cards, with the goal of having consistent production for several turns (of money, attack plays or whatever the payload is).
Maybe this is the better way to look at it.
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I guess the terminology confusion is partly due to other boardgames.
What is called a golden deck in Dominion is called an engine in a tableau builder. For example if you consistenly make x VPs via consuming in Race for the Galaxy.
For obvious mechanic differences it makes no sense to use the term engine for a deckbuilder in which setting up a static, VP-generating deck is a rare exception instead of, like in the case of tableau builders, the norm that occurs in a large fraction of games.
I think you're spot on.
This is kind of where I was going with my question about the build process being the engine. In many games, you spend some turns building an engine that can generate points, then just fire that engine every turn until you force game end.
In many (but not all) engine boards in Dominion, the engine's performance peaks before you start greening, then starts to degrade as you gain points.
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On the other hand, it seems odd that a deck which draws itself every turn but still can only gain one VP card a turn is not an engine ("draw-your-deck money"?), but then you add a single source of +gain and suddenly it becomes an engine. So like a Scrying Pool one-terminal-per-turn deck with a single Expand as the only source of additional points (an example to reflect an actual game I played), and that stops becoming an engine if you remove the Expand?
So thinking about engine in contrast to money, we usually refer to money decks by a single card, e.g. Embassy-BM, Swindler-BM, etc. Even if there might be another kingdom card in the deck, that's not the focal card and doesn't interact with much with the focal card, like maybe there's a trasher that does its job early and then turns dead.
Extra gains don't generally turn a non-engine into an engine, or else we'd have to call a deck with a bunch of Silver, Gold and a few Margraves an engine (I'd call it Margrave-BM).
Nonterminal stacks are a gray area, especially lab variants. Like would we say "Hunting Party BM" or "Hunting Party engine?" I think that depends: usually I say the former if the deck consists mostly of HP and treasures, with maybe one other terminal. But if I'm using HP to draw villages and terminals and play them, that's an engine.
So I think the defining feature of engines is interaction. A money deck has one action as its focal point (maybe two, depending on how we classify Lab-variant-plus-terminal), and mostly uses that card for its effect in isolation. In contrast an engine is built around interactions between different actions.
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Soooo .. when do we get to see the form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1efjKpTpZoYOxlwtHwmSiBLxSdXxCZ17_IpTjB84LrjE/viewform?edit_requested=true#responses) responses?
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On the other hand, it seems odd that a deck which draws itself every turn but still can only gain one VP card a turn is not an engine ("draw-your-deck money"?), but then you add a single source of +gain and suddenly it becomes an engine. So like a Scrying Pool one-terminal-per-turn deck with a single Expand as the only source of additional points (an example to reflect an actual game I played), and that stops becoming an engine if you remove the Expand?
So thinking about engine in contrast to money, we usually refer to money decks by a single card, e.g. Embassy-BM, Swindler-BM, etc. Even if there might be another kingdom card in the deck, that's not the focal card and doesn't interact with much with the focal card, like maybe there's a trasher that does its job early and then turns dead.
Extra gains don't generally turn a non-engine into an engine, or else we'd have to call a deck with a bunch of Silver, Gold and a few Margraves an engine (I'd call it Margrave-BM).
Nonterminal stacks are a gray area, especially lab variants. Like would we say "Hunting Party BM" or "Hunting Party engine?" I think that depends: usually I say the former if the deck consists mostly of HP and treasures, with maybe one other terminal. But if I'm using HP to draw villages and terminals and play them, that's an engine.
So I think the defining feature of engines is interaction. A money deck has one action as its focal point (maybe two, depending on how we classify Lab-variant-plus-terminal), and mostly uses that card for its effect in isolation. In contrast an engine is built around interactions between different actions.
Yeah that makes sense, but it's hard to pinpoint what constitutes "engine-like" interaction as opposed to the idea of "good stuff", which would be like a deck with a bunch of good terminals, some cantrips like Market, and some Menageries. According to Seprix's definition though, Margrave BM would be an engine. I was thinking of using a single terminal like Expand to gain two VP cards per turn instead of one.
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You know, for all the difficulty in defining the term "engine", I think the term "golden deck" is even more contentious.
The problem with a "golden deck" is that it was originally defined by pointing to a particular deck: Bishop, Silver, Silver, Gold, Province. And that might have made sense in the days of Prosperity, but I think by this point it's not very common, and not very good either. I'm not sure I've ever made a deck like that. So the question is, do we expand the "golden deck" label to a larger set of decks? Or do we just think of it as a narrow category, like the Hermit/Market Square deck, or the classic Hunting Party deck?
Some people seem to define "golden deck" as one of those decks that does the exact same thing every turn. So, like, if I have the bishop thing, and I opt to buy Gold instead of Province one turn in order to manipulate the Province supply, it's not a golden deck anymore? What if I added a few Chariot Races? Honestly this definition is just weird to me. In my play group, we use "golden deck" to describe decks that score points without adding dead cards, but maybe that's weird too.
I don't know why the term "golden deck" has such a hold on us at all. Maybe if people had just called it the bishop deck, we would have forgotten about the very concept by now.
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You know, for all the difficulty in defining the term "engine", I think the term "golden deck" is even more contentious.
The problem with a "golden deck" is that it was originally defined by pointing to a particular deck: Bishop, Silver, Silver, Gold, Province. And that might have made sense in the days of Prosperity, but I think by this point it's not very common, and not very good either. I'm not sure I've ever made a deck like that. So the question is, do we expand the "golden deck" label to a larger set of decks? Or do we just think of it as a narrow category, like the Hermit/Market Square deck, or the classic Hunting Party deck?
Some people seem to define "golden deck" as one of those decks that does the exact same thing every turn. So, like, if I have the bishop thing, and I opt to buy Gold instead of Province one turn in order to manipulate the Province supply, it's not a golden deck anymore? What if I added a few Chariot Races? Honestly this definition is just weird to me. In my play group, we use "golden deck" to describe decks that score points without adding dead cards, but maybe that's weird too.
I don't know why the term "golden deck" has such a hold on us at all. Maybe if people had just called it the bishop deck, we would have forgotten about the very concept by now.
I dunno, Dominate also enables a Golden Deck if you keep trashing the Province, as does Monument and King's Court in the same kingdom.
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I get the sense that the broadest definition of "Golden Deck" is one that gains a Province each turn with 100% reliability. So, the Bishop one, Mandarin HoP etc. The Hunting Party one is borderline because it's not 100% reliable, but still very reliable nonetheless.
I think maybe the term is popular simply because the idea of such a minimalistic deck seems really cool in theory. You're right that practically, it doesn't show up often, due to the dominance of that other deck type that we can't figure out how to define.
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I get the sense that the broadest definition of "Golden Deck" is one that gains a Province each turn with 100% reliability. So, the Bishop one, Mandarin HoP etc. The Hunting Party one is borderline because it's not 100% reliable, but still very reliable nonetheless.
There are Golden Decks that don't fall under that definition though. The best-known one consists of four Bishops and four Fortresses.
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I get the sense that the broadest definition of "Golden Deck" is one that gains a Province each turn with 100% reliability. So, the Bishop one, Mandarin HoP etc. The Hunting Party one is borderline because it's not 100% reliable, but still very reliable nonetheless.
There are Golden Decks that don't fall under that definition though. The best-known one consists of four Bishops and four Fortresses.
I guess if you use that you're assuming your opponent is emptying piles? Otherwise the game would never end...
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I get the sense that the broadest definition of "Golden Deck" is one that gains a Province each turn with 100% reliability. So, the Bishop one, Mandarin HoP etc. The Hunting Party one is borderline because it's not 100% reliable, but still very reliable nonetheless.
There are Golden Decks that don't fall under that definition though. The best-known one consists of four Bishops and four Fortresses.
I guess if you use that you're assuming your opponent is emptying piles? Otherwise the game would never end...
The idea is that you get super far ahead and then you can empty the piles yourself. In practice, whenever you pull it off and your opponent can't do anything better, they just concede.
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I thought Golden deck was defined as simply a deck that remains exactly the same after each turn, and does the exact same thing every turn. So if you trash down to nothing but 5 Coppers, that would be technically a Golden deck, but people wouldn’t use it in that way because it would be a pointless and bad Golden deck. But KC KC Masq Masq Masq would be a Golden deck. Or would have been under old Masq wording.
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But KC KC Masq Masq Masq would be a Golden deck.
You want a handsize attack there.
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The idea is that you get super far ahead and then you can empty the piles yourself. In practice, whenever you pull it off and your opponent can't do anything better, they just concede.
Wouldn't the optimal play for your opponent be to make the same golden deck and gain the same number of VPs a turn? Even though you're ahead, neither player can empty the piles with a win, so it's a stalemate.
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But KC KC Masq Masq Masq would be a Golden deck.
You want a handsize attack there.
Right, meant KC KC Goons Masq, the classic example.
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But KC KC Masq Masq Masq would be a Golden deck.
You want a handsize attack there.
Right, meant KC KC Goons Masq, the classic example.
I've done that one as KC KC Margrave Masq. That's even more painful, because it adds in a pointless decision for the victim each turn.