Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion General Discussion => Topic started by: blueblimp on July 04, 2012, 09:47:29 pm
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Recent discussion brought to mind the question: what can be tracked for advantage (in Dominion, particularly Isotropic)? The point counter extension tracks points and deck contents, but there's lots of other stuff that a player could also track to gain an edge.
Here, I'm thinking of information that otherwise you'd only know from memory.
Everything I can think of:
- Current points of every player (except for non-2-player Masquerade games).
- Deck size of every player (even with Masquerade present).
- Deck contents of every player (again excepting non-2-player Masquerade).
- Order of known cards in the Black Market deck. This would help a lot when a player misses a good card and it gets sent to the bottom. In fact, you could see strange situations where neither player wants to play Black Market on their turn, because there are 3 crap cards on top and 3 good cards after.
- Exact contents of your draw deck and discard pile.
- When possible, which cards are on the top of your deck and in what order. Maybe most useful when your opponent has been playing Spy-type cards.
Things that are impossible to track:
- Exact contents of your opponent's draw deck and discard pile, mainly because they don't need to show you everything they discard.
Things you don't need to track, because the rules allow you to check at any time (and isotropic tells you all of these):
- Number of cards in your draw deck (but not your discard!).
- Number of cards remaining in each supply pile.
- What's in the trash.
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You can partially track the contents of your opponents' discard piles based on what they play and buy. It would be advantageous to know what they cannot have in hand or draw deck.
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You can partially track the contents of your opponents' discard piles based on what they play and buy. It would be advantageous to know what they cannot have in hand or draw deck.
Based on this - you could calculate the probability of the opponent being able to purchase a province next turn - which would come in handy in PPR type of situations.
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You can partially track the contents of your opponents' discard piles based on what they play and buy. It would be advantageous to know what they cannot have in hand or draw deck.
Based on this - you could calculate the probability of the opponent being able to purchase a province next turn - which would come in handy in PPR type of situations.
That's a good point. Since isotropic makes it pretty awkward to hide unneeded treasure, it's fairly simple to know where your opponent's treasure is, even if you're not sure about their actions. (But this only applies to autoplaying treasure, and only when your opponent bothers to play any treasure at all, which they might not in $2+P scenarios.)
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I've started playing treasure awkward style lately to reduce the advantage there. It makes a small difference. And playing IRL makes me miss the luxury of keeping things secret.
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You can partially track the contents of your opponents' discard piles based on what they play and buy. It would be advantageous to know what they cannot have in hand or draw deck.
Based on this - you could calculate the probability of the opponent being able to purchase a province next turn - which would come in handy in PPR type of situations.
It might also affect which terminal you want to play, e.g. if you know most of their banes are in the discard, play YW, otherwise play (random non-attack card).
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You can partially track the contents of your opponents' discard piles based on what they play and buy. It would be advantageous to know what they cannot have in hand or draw deck.
Based on this - you could calculate the probability of the opponent being able to purchase a province next turn - which would come in handy in PPR type of situations.
You could calculate probabilities for a lot of other stuff too.
You could always show opening probabilities: Chance of drawing both terminals, chance of getting at least $5 with Silver/$2 terminal or Silver/Smithy.
And you can use probabilities and expected values for Wishing Well or even something like Scrying Pool or Adventurer. I'm sure that if players would see a tipping point for Adventurer where it averages out to more than $3 that they would buy a lot more Adventurers. :p
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In an Ambassador tennis, you can adjust what you send over based on his deck composition.
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A play aid could also give you -
- number of buys and gains available to your opponent next turn and which supply piles can be emptied
- probabilities for the top card of the deck (or top two, top three)
- probabilities for tribute resolution and possession hands
- probabilities for rabble, sea hag, saboteur, bureaucrat, fortune teller, thief, militia, minion and other effects
- probabilities for venture and loan type effects and whether they will force a shuffle
- predictions of an opponents spending before the next reshuffle (60% 6-7, 30% 5-8, 10% 4-9)
- recommended openings and purchases from a council room style database
- similar game summaries picked from a council room style database
- Wiki style pages with play guides on specific cards and strategies
- prompts for unique card combos within in a kingdom ("don't forget tactician with black market")
- additional warning messages to prevent casual play ("keep a treasure card in hand to trash with farmland")
- communication with other people for their advice during play
- a feed of game information into a simulator during play so that expected results are updated hand by hand
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So basically, depending on your programming ability and how bothered you actually are, a machine can do anything from precisely nothing to playing the game for you.
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So basically, depending on your programming ability and how bothered you actually are, a machine can do anything from precisely nothing to playing the game for you.
There's a difference in magnitude of difficulty, here. Displaying opening probabilities (for simple enough cards) could be implemented in under an hour. A Dominion AI that can play at a decent level (say level 30+ or so) would probably be worth a PhD thesis.
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depending on your programming ability and how bothered you actually are
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But the whole point of this thread is "what can be tracked", not "what a computer can do for you given unlimited programmer time and some optimistic assumptions about what's possible".
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Maybe that was your intention for the thread, but when most of the posts involve calculating probabilities and looking up statistics on CR, it's not really about things being tracked anymore. My post just takes the derail to the extreme, however I agree with you that it's not on topic and that was kind of my point.
At the end of the day though, I'm getting a bit sick of all of the recent threads about taking advantage of computing power to give yourself an advantage in what is, at the end of the day, just a board game. Not singling you out for making this thread, just the trend in general is kind of ruining the fun for me. I don't really feel like I'd have fun playing the game on Isotropic anymore knowing that a lot of players are currently thinking about ways to take advantage through debatable means (and for the record, I have no interest in entering the debate).
Seriously, it's just a game. Play it and have fun. I just hope Funsockets can find a way to put an end to this all otherwise I might be back to shuffling bits of card just a couple of times a month because I can't get a game more often than that.
And with that mini-rant out of my system, I've said all I have to say on this topic. I'm staying out of it from now on. Sorry if you felt it was aimed at you, it was not.
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I've started playing treasure awkward style lately to reduce the advantage there. It makes a small difference. And playing IRL makes me miss the luxury of keeping things secret.
i noticed you doing that in our games yesterday and am curious as to what small difference you think it makes. it actually made me step up and pay more attention to your totals and the state of your deck.
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I've started playing treasure awkward style lately to reduce the advantage there. It makes a small difference. And playing IRL makes me miss the luxury of keeping things secret.
i noticed you doing that in our games yesterday and am curious as to what small difference you think it makes. it actually made me step up and pay more attention to your totals and the state of your deck.
An example is: did they take that $5 because they only had $5, or because they prefer it over gold? That can be a big hint to your opponent's intended strategy.
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This is a conglomeration of things that have already been said, but it's a useful one that I actually pay attention to a lot in games:
You can track how many turns you have until your (or your opponent's) next shuffle.
This means both counting the cards left in your draw deck, being aware of all the cards left in your deck that draw cards or otherwise manipulate your deck, thinking about how many of these relevant cards you are likely to be able to actually play (are you going to have enough actions for all your smithies? Are you going to play a blind smithy if you have to?) and lastly, being aware of any deck-manipulation attacks that your opponent is likely to play.
I don't know that any tool short of an in-depth simulator would really help more than just tracking deck and discard contents; like I said this is really just a higher level view of WHY you might want to track those things, and a good way to think about the flow of a game.
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Well, yeah, these kinds of things make me decide on Nobles vs. Duchy in an already very much greened Duchy-dance type deck.
If I'm closer to my reshuffle I might prefer Nobles.
If the reshuffle is miles away, the Duchy is probably better if the game is over by the end of my reshuffle.
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I don't know that any tool short of an in-depth simulator would really help more than just tracking deck and discard contents; like I said this is really just a higher level view of WHY you might want to track those things, and a good way to think about the flow of a game.
Ok. So can you answer one to two questions for me? One, is consulting such a simulator against the rules (and keep in mind, Geronimoo's sim can do this)? Two, assuming your answer to One is that it is illegal, why is that the case?
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hey guys, question, what do you think about the ethics of the point tracker?
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hey guys, question, what do you think about the ethics of the point tracker?
I see an invisible troll face. :)
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It's not that invisible
vote: ehunt
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I would say that the biggest thing to track which separates good players from expert players are the potential cards in the opponent's hand to determine the opponent's likely hood in purchasing the last Province/Colony.
There are many games where the opponent should KNOW what is in my hand (because my deck is low) but decides to buy the second-to-last province anyways only to loose when I purchase the last one.
On the flip side, players can counter act this by not playing all of their cards in a single turn. For example, if have $11 to by a single Province, you can elect not to play a Gold in order to make the opponent's believe you still have a Gold to draw for that shuffle.
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I've started playing treasure awkward style lately to reduce the advantage there. It makes a small difference. And playing IRL makes me miss the luxury of keeping things secret.
i noticed you doing that in our games yesterday and am curious as to what small difference you think it makes. it actually made me step up and pay more attention to your totals and the state of your deck.
An example is: did they take that $5 because they only had $5, or because they prefer it over gold? That can be a big hint to your opponent's intended strategy.
Maybe this is just a function of me not playing enough games anymore, but how many games actually come down to that piece of information being relevant? You have to have:
1) A $5 being relevant, but not necessarily SO relevant that people care to always take it over gold
2) A viable counter to your opponent choosing to make that play
3) The ability to actually implement that counter without losing the game (compared to say, situations where it's turn 3 and your opponent drew 6/3 for 2nd shuffle, while you drew 4/4)
4) The ability to implement that counter without your opponent knowing that you're attempting to make that counter and negating that counter by implementing a different strategy altogether.
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I'm just really struggling to see the value. Again, maybe a function of me withdrawing from high-level play, but it seems like 99/100 times that the situation comes up (and this situation being a corner case to begin with...), you aren't going to care whether your opponent wants a card "badly" or not...he's still got it.
After all of the bruhaha about the point counter extension, i decided to play a set of games without it last night. Other than feeling extremely nervous that i'd lost count and was about to end the game to my detriment every game (one time, actually doing the thing i truly hate - not ending the game on piles when i could have because i wasn't entirely sure that I was ahead), I didn't perform any differently. My distaste for the nervous play stopped me from playing a long set - only did 4-5 games.
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I think you're right. I can't think of examples where where I used that info.
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If you want a $2 with your opening 3, you can influence their first buy by making them think you're going to buy a $5 on turn 2. That can be a pretty big deal.
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A better strategy would be to rapidly play and un-play coins to thoroughly confuse you opponent. The only requirement is quoting the great Dirty Harry on the virtues of counting.