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Messages - rod-

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1
Help! / Re: Baron/Haggler better than double-Jack?
« on: December 30, 2012, 12:30:01 pm »
Sometimes 15+/-2 loses to 16+/-2.

2
Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Play a Goons and Familiar on Turn 4
« on: December 29, 2012, 10:13:54 pm »
I'd be coming in here to post my log / brag if i managed EITHER a goons or familiar on turn 4 in a real game.

3
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Deck construction
« on: December 15, 2012, 11:44:20 pm »
My first thoughts were to do something like a "challenge mode", where you set goals for the new players and they try to achieve them as quickly as possible. 

First few 'challenges':

1st to province with only X card in supply:
1) Market/chapel (teach trashing...prob best to start them out 5/2 though, unless you want to learn overtrashing too!)
2) Silver/gold : (Teach big money)
3) Village/smithy? (Teach counting total money in deck, plus light engine building practice - could be brutally slow though)

Engine/Deckbuilding:
"Draw your deck" goals with:
???

I'm sure there are more interesting 'tiny' boards, but if you were to play these 'games' in quick enough succession that people remembered the rough # of turns it took to complete each challenge, it might be a reasonable crash course.  You'd probably want to add something much faster, too, to show that big money isn't the only way to play.

4
Game Reports / Re: Hunting Party/Counting House
« on: December 13, 2012, 11:46:33 pm »
The sim is going to play neither card optimally, but manages to play Nav less wrongly.
My point was that there might be a valuable conclusion to draw from investigating how/why it plays Nav less wrongly.  If the bots are (as i assume they would be...) playing a very basic "just discard everything to nav, always flip the deck with chancellor" strategy, I would expect chancellor to win.  If that isn't the case, I'd want to look at some logs to figure out why.  Especially with a hunting party deck...

Also, nav doesn't have partial discard.  If it did it would be quite a bit better...

5
Game Reports / Re: Hunting Party/Counting House
« on: December 13, 2012, 05:55:30 pm »
Perhaps more surprisingly, it also beats HP+Woodcutter and HP+Chancellor and is on par with HP+Nomad Camp.
How can Navigator beat Chancellor in a simulator?  The ONLY possible benefit of navigator over chancellor is "saving" a particularly good hand, rather than just discarding everything to reshuffle faster.  Do the play rules for navigator actually allow such choices to be made properly by the AI?

6
Game Reports / Re: WW Annotated Game #1
« on: December 09, 2012, 02:54:51 pm »
I admit that when i play lately, the chat window might as well not exist.  My brain just blanks it out like an ad.  I don't get any satisfaction out of exchanging "hi gl gg" with faceless nameless strangers that i probably will never see again, and if i want to talk strategy, there's this forum.

I'm not defending WW's reaction to Stef's overreaction, but at least on the charge of being impolite...I can't make myself care.  The "can i annotate this game" topic has come up before, and the general consensus was that if you have an indication that your opponent doesn't want to be known, you can obscure his name.

Do that.  It's obviously too late for this game, but it's no trouble at all to search/replace in game logs before you start your annotations.

7
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Stupid Pet Tricks
« on: December 03, 2012, 10:46:10 pm »
I was just yesterday contemplating changing my username to j walter weatherman.  So i could do post-mortem game analyses such as "And that's why you don't skip a mountebank". (Unless, apparently, trader and watchtower and king's court are also on board...)

8
Game Reports / Re: Lost the amb war but won with 10 curses.
« on: December 02, 2012, 11:45:03 am »
What I want to know is how likely is it that he would have won had I bought 2 provs instead of harem curse?
More than 0% likely.

9
Dominion General Discussion / Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« on: November 25, 2012, 10:37:07 pm »
Thing is, I think Dominion games are typically short enough that you can reduce the effect of luck by just playing more of them. One dominion game between may well come down to shuffle luck, best-of-three will give the better player a chance to catch up despite some bad luck, and if you move it up to, say, best-of-seven, then it's pretty unlikely that shuffle luck will decide the match.

As long as the margin of difference between "better" and "worse" players is 10 levels, i agree.   As soon as it gets down to +/- 5, variance kicks in and you can't expect to get the same result.  When you go back to the council room data (i know, i know...how dare i remember any of these stats) you have to remember that "only" 5 levels translates to a pretty slim marginal edge.  It's (relatively) easy to judge a weighted coin in 7 flips if it's a 90%/10% flip, but more or less impossible when it's a 55/45, and no point trying when it's 52/48.

I don't know of any data showing how many games are dictated by 'shuffle luck', but given that a bot mirror match "should" end in a P1 victory barring any significant shuffle luck effects, it might be as high as 40%, although 20% may be more palatable to most in the crowd.

10
Dominion General Discussion / Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« on: November 25, 2012, 09:36:47 pm »
A talk (about which games are chosen to be featured on Wil Wheaton's Tabletop) at BGG.con last week would tend to agree that strategy and luck are independent axes where games are concerned.  Everyone in the audience bought that supposition.

The producer's rationale for choosing the games he chose was that high strategy + high luck games give nubs the feeling that they could've won if only X+Y, while still giving experienced players the feeling that their actions weren't meaningless.  (These games are also better "television").  Coin flip chess goes too far along the luck axis for any experienced player.  Regular chess goes too far down on the luck axis for any nub.

I believe the argument of some (many? - certainly the OP of this thread) here is that in Dominion games between two experienced players, the luck rating is still unacceptably high (if only, perhaps, by a slight amount).

11
Dominion General Discussion / Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« on: November 25, 2012, 04:04:57 pm »
even something as modest (and complicated) as rod_ suggests in reply#12, you actually get some issues - what happens is that the cards that miss the shuffle all get clumped at the start not only of the shuffle immediately after they miss, but also in the next shuffle.

Technically, nothing would ever miss a shuffle in my suggestion, as there would be no such thing as a shuffle.  Supposing that you opened silver/silver, and both were randomly selected to be drawn 11th/12th, they woudn't be drawn 13th-15th (you still can't draw the same card more than once per turn), but they could be drawn anywhere thereafter.  Essentially, you reshuffle your deck every turn, but nothing would get "stuck" at the top / bottom and played disproportionately as a result.

Re: Warehouse, yes, you could expect to draw a card that you just discarded, assuming it was among the cards previously drawn the fewest times.

Re: Drawing your deck, starting with cards that were drawn fewer times is not a priori better for an engine.  It's often worse, as your engine is less likely to "go off" if you drew all of your coppers and estates first.  I'd imagine that, when it comes to something like hunting party stacks that "draw" a lot of bad cards over and over again, there would have to be some sort of qualification (no card can have a counter more than 1 greater than the lowest?) to prevent over-priming your draw.

Edit:  Maybe a better way to implement the OT suggestion (and which may potentially be physically possible) would be to simply mark / note one card left out of the current shuffle, then randomly insert it in the deck during the following cleanup.  You can still have cards missing shuffles, but you can't just throw your action chains together every turn without proper trashing.

12
Dominion General Discussion / Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« on: November 25, 2012, 12:56:17 pm »
The proposed "solution" is just ignoring the underlying problem.
I would guess the proposed "solution" was mostly a joke, which of course partly reduces the problem, as the more you play the more likely the better player wins.
None of the four different people who said "deal with it" gave any indication that they were joking.  Also, if four people make the same joke, shouldn't it at least be funny?  I don't think any of them were joking.  They're all coming into this topic effectively just to say "I don't have a problem with that, you shouldn't either".

Peebles' comment is another of the same.

Play regular dominion all you want, a house rule for reducing luck is no threat to that. 

I don't know why I'm all up in arms trying to keep posts on topic for this topic in particular, i know the internet's full of failure, and i know i've posted plenty of things off-topic, but at least i don't go into the "what's missing?" threads and post "an actual game of dominion" as the answer to every one.  If you don't see how those two are the same, maybe someone else can clarify for you.

13
Dominion General Discussion / Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« on: November 25, 2012, 10:54:34 am »
I have actually put a decent amount of thought into solving the reshuffle problem, and when it comes to online implementations, it is quite trivial:

Each card has a 'has been drawn X times' counter associated with it.  Every bought/gained card is assigned the highest value of that counter. (EG: On turn 1, your starting 3 coppers and 2 estates have a counter = 1.  The silver you buy also has a counter = 1).  You will always draw cards that have counter = 0 before counter = 1, so you'll get your 4/1 hand before that silver.  However, you will *never* get your starting estate a fourth time before you get that silver a second.

Effectively, nothing ever 'misses' a reshuffle - every card will get drawn exactly one time per deck cycle. 

Mostly impossible to do offline, though, so i can't really fault Don for leaving it out of Dom

14
Dominion General Discussion / Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« on: November 25, 2012, 10:36:24 am »
Suggestion for mitigating unequal tax burden:

Spend time being both poor and rich.  Sometimes you will pay taxes, sometimes you will get a refund.

Maybe that's too subtle.  The point is:  The proposed "solution" is just ignoring the underlying problem. 

15
Dominion General Discussion / Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?
« on: November 25, 2012, 09:51:09 am »
Play more fixes nothing....

Play more and (statistically speaking) you will see good luck even out the bad luck.

Variance being evenly distributed about the mean has no effect on the fact that the variance is high. (Statistically speaking)

16
Goko Dominion Online / Re: Google + Walled Village
« on: September 18, 2012, 07:36:34 pm »
And that's all behind us. They got Walled Village, now you know. Go scream about it to Google if you want. If you want to scream at Goko, scream useful things that can actually result in the game being improved.

I expect a Google card would be Scavenger.  Search for the card you want! 

Or maybe Hunting Party or Sage.
I bet the card they *really* wanted Donald to make was Walled Garden.  Walled village had to suffice.  Google's been 'over' search for years now.

And, a little bit more on-topic:
http://support.google.com/plus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1228271, which says that your attempt to create an anonymous Google+ account (for dominion purposes) will get that account suspended, and you will not be able to make full use of Google services that require an active profile (Like, depending on the implementation, Goko, or the WalledVillage you paid for)

17
Dominion Isotropic / Re: "Play faster newb"
« on: September 16, 2012, 03:51:18 pm »
I'm sure that I won't reach my target audience with this comment, but here's trying:

If you want to play against faster players, set your preferences to a tighter window (if possible, one that doesn't include levels 1-15).  Also, don't reject everyone you come across that's ranked higher than you and still expect everyone to play fast.

I think getting repeatedly-rejected by a player named "fast players only please" when I accepted -without looking at the board- as fast as humanly possible struck a nerve. 

18
Dominion General Discussion / Re: A super random question
« on: September 12, 2012, 08:37:20 pm »
But the person with no sense of strategy has no idea when a level 45 is better than a province.  I'm pretty confident that it's far fewer than 50% of the games, and therefore the 45 option should be avoided altogether.

But the person has no sense of strategy, so...that doesn't mean the option *will* be avoided altogether.  It's a bit of a paradox.

19
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Ok you probability people...
« on: September 11, 2012, 05:50:57 pm »
Go back to the original 9/10 dark ages 1/10 prosperity discussion:

Method 2 is the only one that allows all possibilities ; if you look at the top card and it's prosperity, the bottom card is not prosperity.  There is no way to get colonies w/o shelters using method 1(3 is, as far as i can tell, functionally identical). 

20
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Riddle I came up, but have no solution of
« on: September 11, 2012, 12:01:43 am »
Ask someone else (anyone else) where to sit. 

21
Game Reports / Re: - Stef - buys Herbalist with $11
« on: September 09, 2012, 02:44:29 pm »
Looking at the actual game, though, it's less obvious that it was a necessary play at that point in the game: stef needs to get *all* 7 coppers (in a hunting party engine) to get a double-province turn, and he would have been ahead 3-1 with 8 hunting parties if he'd just bought provinces.  (Assuming that 8 HPs is still effective enough at cycling your deck every turn, which seems safe given that 6 HPs is usually plenty)

Overbuilding an engine so it doesn't stall is fine when your opponent's deck isn't coming together at all, and arguably the correct course, but we're talking about converting a game that's essentially already won into a game that's essentially already won, but might have a 1/200 chance of going horribly wrong instead of a 1/100 chance.

22
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Excavation: A Choice Treasure Gainer
« on: September 08, 2012, 07:22:13 pm »
I'd be interested to see how gaining a card to the bottom of your deck compares to regular gaining. Like you said, it causes it to miss the shuffle, but it also gives it to you during the current shuffle. I have no idea which you'd prefer.
I think it hurts, but not a bunch. I don't really care either way, but I just thought gaining to the bottom was cute.
It can't hurt.  It's strictly better than a regular gain.  Not by much, but you get your card somewhere between 0 and (length of shuffle) turns faster.  There's also a nonzero chance that you get it in this shuffle and the next.

23
Goko Dominion Online / Re: Ask FunSockets anything!
« on: August 18, 2012, 07:45:10 pm »
I've read it all before, I just take issue with the premise.  I understand the argument completely and it is logically sound.  I still think it's silly.  Just chalk it down to a generational difference, what with me considering google an extension of my self instead of an unholy abomination the use of which will destroy all that it means to be human.

24
Goko Dominion Online / Re: Ask FunSockets anything!
« on: August 18, 2012, 07:13:38 pm »
So if someone has a really really extraordinarily good memory, are they playing a variant too?

25
Dominion General Discussion / Re: What can be tracked for advantage?
« on: July 07, 2012, 08:06:27 pm »
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.
----
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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