Dominion Strategy Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Messages - UltimaPenguin

Filter to certain boards:

Pages: [1]
1
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Shelters exacerbate 5/2
« on: September 03, 2012, 01:08:59 am »
I think the potential problem of not having hovel in hand on your later vp-buying turns is a good point.

This would be an interesting thing for some simulations...

2
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Shelters exacerbate 5/2
« on: September 02, 2012, 09:48:43 pm »
Another way to look at it: Imagine that Estate had Hovel's reaction ability. Wouldn't you use this for your first few province buys if you could, even though you'd be losing a point? I'm pretty sure I would (barring the sort of unusual circumstances already discussed).

But since Estate doesn't have that ability, it follows that you'd rather have a Hovel instead of an Estate in that situation (since once its trashed it doesn't matter what it was). And if at turn 10, you'd prefer a Hovel over an Estate, it usually doesn't make sense to replace your Hovel with an Estate on turn 1.

3
Rules Questions / Re: Durations and cleanup
« on: August 31, 2012, 05:24:32 pm »
One extra caveat that I've seen come up on a fan card or two:

Be careful with text like "While this in play X". By convention, this indicates an effect that doesn't happen as a result of the card being played, so the duration cleanup rule doesn't come into play.

For example, lighthouse still gets cleaned up after your next turn, even though it would continue to provide protection benefits as long as it stays out. If lighthouse didn't give the +coin at the start of your next turn, it would get cleaned up at the first opportunity just like a non-duration card (of course making it completely pointless)

What this means is that if you want a permanent duration with only a passive effect like that, you should include some kind of extra wording or mechanism to keep it in play.

4
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Charity - a $1 cost card
« on: August 20, 2012, 03:05:29 am »
One thing that Poor House has that this doesn't (and I suspect is a large reason why Poor House ended up at $1) is a interesting interaction with the copper upgrade path. When you play a poor house, it usually doesn't matter if the other cards in your hand are coppers or clashing poor houses. But if you've got actions, swapping coppers for Poor Houses becomes a potentially great deal.

I can't think of anything similar going on with Charity. If you don't have actions, turning your coppers into a terminal $1 is pretty bad. Plus, with the +Buy, if its worth buying at $1, its probably worth buying at $2 as well. So I don't think it really fits in the $1 niche as well as Poor House does.

That said, unless the filtering aspect ends up being way strong, I don't really see anything necessarily problematic with pricing it as $1, it just isn't super interesting to me.

5
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Clasic_Cards #27 - Blockade
« on: August 14, 2012, 02:34:48 pm »
Which cards are you thinking of that mess with opponents but don't count as attacks? When I think of pseudo attacks, Possession, Masquerade and Tribute come to mind. For those 3 cards, you can't selectively screw over your opponents, there just happen to be certain deck styles which those cards can exploit (though I'll admit Possession is absolutely infuriating). Blockade on the other hand lets you inspect a player's top card, and either leave it there or discard it. This is clearly the attack part of Spy, so I'm not sure why that doesn't count as an attack.

And it looks like Blockade stays out indefinitely... so can I do a Spy attack per Blockade in play whenever an opponent reshuffles?

In addition to the non-attacks you mentioned, there's Noble Brigand's on-buy effect and Ill-Gotten gains on-gain effect. So there's certainly precedent for attack-like things that can't be blocked by moat or lighthouse.

Also, why would it stay out indefinitely? The wording is just like lighthouse.

6
I don't know; in a deck without any TFB, buying a rats really seems exactly like buying an Estate. Playing it adds 0 value to your deck, and quite often you would rather just hold in it your hand than play it.

I'm not sure. Its a tricky card to evaluate for sure.

So, the first one you buy seems questionable. It's a cantrip, plus you have to trash a card from your hand (hopefully an estate). So the first time you play it, it doesn't do anything meaningful to your hand (estate wasn't helping and if you hadn't bought the rats, you'd have the next card in your hand anyway), and its only impact on your deck is swapping an estate for a Rats, which doesn't seem useful without TFB cards.

But next, consider the possiblity that you draw a hand that would have been EECCC. BUT, instead you've replaced that first estate with a Rats "for free" (didn't spend a buy on it). So now you get to play that Rats and draw a legitimate extra card to your hand. As a side effect, you have to replace the second estate with a Rats, but the point is the initial Rats purchase made the first hand it appeared in no worse, and now actually made this hand better. And if you're getting hit by curses or ruins, this kind of process can continue, giving you a cycling benefit as long as you have junk cards to turn into rats. Plus, its obviously extra good if you're trashing curses, since it actually nets you points. And at some point, sure, you want to stop playing your rats and just treat them as junk in their own right, but hopefully by that point they've already helped you.

I guess the point is that buying cantrips is a waste of a buy, since it doesn't do anything. But a single rats purchase can replace your junk with essentially limited-use cantrips (as soon as they would force you to trash something good they themselves are just junk), which could have a non-negligible and low-risk deck acceleration effect. I'm not sure if this would be helpful with trashing coppers though, since that seems like it would be hurting your deck, but against cursers or looters... maybe it would be worthwhile. Again, its hard to really visualize how helpful or not-helpful any of this would be in practice, but while we're theory-crafting I think there's a case to be made for properly played Rats having a positive impact on some decks even without TFB cards.

Really looking forward to seeing what simulators have to say...

7
Dominion: Dark Ages Previews / Re: Puzzle: The Four Mysterious Ruins
« on: August 08, 2012, 10:11:50 pm »
Was it ever made clear that all of the Ruin cards were Actions?
No. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Ruined Estate: Victory that costs $0 and gives 0 VP.

This is basically what Confusion cards were, and those were scrapped.  But maybe they'll be mixed in with the rest anyway?  If they have something like this, I would definitely rule out a Ruined Village that only gave +1 action.  +1 action and nothing at all are too similar.

Personally I think a +1 Action ruins is more likely, which would then probably rule out the ruined estate :) But In addition, I think it would be awkward with the coloring scheme. The other ruins are all brown, but one would be green? I don't think it would qualify for dual coloring, but if it did a brown-green mix would be even uglier IMO. I think any other non-action ruins would have the same problem of just looking out of place and kind of bad.

8
Dominion: Dark Ages Previews / Re: Puzzle: The Four Mysterious Ruins
« on: August 08, 2012, 09:22:26 pm »
My guesses:

Ruined Village: +1 Action
Ruined Library: +1 Card
Ruined Mine: +1 Coin
Ruined Chapel: Trash this

- For Ruined Village, I think +2 Action would be too "strong". I mean, yeah, its pretty bad, but having any action splitter at all can really enable certain strategies so I think would be too swingy in certain boards. Even consider how it interacts with cultist the only looter we've seen so far. Cultist can potentially draw a ton of cards, but without a splitter, any non-cultist actions it draws are dead. But with just one +2 action to start, you have the ability to play one or more of those cards.

- I think most people are in agreement that there will be a +1 Card and a +1 Coin. Personally, I think Library and Mine sound cooler thematically, and would allow for super cool art. I don't think a ruined smithy or even a laboratory would be as cool looking as a ruined library. But that's pretty subjective (i'm sure some will disagree at least wrt lab). Similarly, I can't think of anything else that would really fit that well for the +coin card aesthetically other than Mine, but again, pretty subjective.

- I think Ruined Chapel would be awesome aesthetically speaking, and Chapel is such a prominent base set card to boot. I think trashing itself would be cooler than trashing something else, while still keeping with the basic spirit of what Chapel is all about. Again, I kind of feel like even trashing 1 card is a little too good for a ruins card, especially given the context of Dark Ages (its presence in the game guarantees you've got major trashing targets and being able to trash anything can unlock on-trash abilities that may be inaccessible to players who got a different ruins) Also it seems too obvious based on Donald's post. Trashing itself is neat though. It literally does nothing, but if you've got a spare action you can at least self-clean it from your deck.

9
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Warlock
« on: August 05, 2012, 04:24:42 pm »
Maybe it was something Donald X. said, but I can't find his post nor do I dare misquote him.

I guess it had to do with targeting, but also that Attacks need to be strong and you shouldn't have to worry about playing them. A Moat only helps the defender, but doesn't hurt you. When your own Attack can hurt you, that's not good.

I can't find it either, but as I recall the gist of it was that if you have a card like this on the table, it only does anything if people are buying attacks. But if this card is on the table, people are going to be much less likely to buy attacks. And if as a result, people don't buy attacks, then nobody buys this either. So the goal is to add an interesting new dynamic, but in practice it often is going to result in two dead cards, which is no fun.

10
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Clasic_Cards #15 - Brokerage
« on: July 30, 2012, 09:08:00 pm »
First of all, I don't think this card is going to be worth buying. It's terminal, not worth very much coin, and forces you into an awkward buying situation for two turns. Even if you can take advantage of it cleanly in the current turn, it might screw you over next turn.

But if you improve it so that it's worth playing, its got a nasty scaling problem in multiplayer games. Imagine 4 people play this. Each player at the table might be forced to buy 3-4 copper during their turn. Gross. Finally, this generally discourages the entire table from getting any other cards with +Buys on them, since they become liabilities, which I don't see as a good thing.

11
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Gray's Cards #4
« on: July 28, 2012, 06:26:13 pm »
I think it needs to say explicitly that it stays out until you choose to trash it. I would interpret the "durations stay out as long as they do something" rule to only apply to active stuff that happens as a result of playing the card.

Compare the wording with that on lighthouse, which also has a "While this in play, X". Lighthouse gets discarded after the "now and at the start of the next turn" stuff is done, even though the protection component is continuing to do something. By that reasoning, its not clear that this card should stay out for more than one turn (except for that the card design wouldn't make any sense if that were the case!)

12
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Clasic_Cards #11 - Scavenger
« on: July 27, 2012, 04:23:35 am »
That shouldn't work; this card doesn't retroactively turn GH and Nobles into Coppers that produce $, and you can't play them for $ during the action phase because they're no longer Victory-Action; they Treasure.
The Scavenger turns previously played Victories into coppers. So you could play your GHs and Nobles, then play your Scavenger then your Tactician.

But you don't get coin from them. If all you did was play 5 nobles, then scavenger, then tactician, you would have zero coin to spend. Although you have 5 coppers sitting in the play area, you've played zero coppers. You don't buy things by counting up the treasure cards in front of you. Rather, treasure cards generate coin as they are played. Like someone mentioned, if you played say two Grand Markets and 7 coppers, you could buy a Mint, trash the 7 coppers, and then still buy another grand market. You no longer have coppers in play, but you still have 6 coin to spend.

Maybe we just don't get what you're trying to do though.

13
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Gray's Cards 1
« on: July 25, 2012, 11:05:17 pm »
I think its worth noting that the "While this is in play" phrasing is a convention that indicates a static effect, but on its own, it doesn't unambiguously say anything about how it interacts with KC/TR. I think there's a plausible initial interpretation of cards like Goons such that when you play TR-Goons the "While this is in play, do X" text gets executed twice, and thus sets up two distinct triggers (similar to how scheme or duration cards work) but where both effects just happen to also be conditional on whether or not the card is still in play.

It's the rulebook's Goons entry that concretely specifies how the card interacts with TR/KC. Also, it's not actually in the rulebook, but the meaning of the dividing line is supposed to be that it separates things that happen with different timings. For example, for Goons, the above-the-line stuff happens when the card is played (and thus can be duplicated by TR/KC) while the below-the-line stuff happens when some other condition is met (specifically, whenever a card is bought while its in play)

Your card has text that seems like you want to use alternate timing found on Goons/Highway/etc, but as phrased, clearly happens (and has to happen) as the card is played, so I don't think it really works the way you want mechanically.

It might be possible to make it work, but I would bite the bullet and just let it work with TR/KC and rebalance it appropriately if necessary. Then reword the "while this is in play" part to something like "whenever you gain X during this turn"

14
Rules Questions / Re: Possession Turn Order
« on: July 24, 2012, 01:17:23 pm »
The only place I disagree with AJD is his explanation is who chooses between P2 and O1 coming next. I say Becky chooses, as the choice is made between turns. Other than that, I agree.

Becky is still being possessed at that point though.

I disagree. The decision for which extra turn goes next happens between turns. Nobody is possessed between turns. Donald ruled in this post (http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/540344/multiple-possessions-from-multiple-players-stack-o/page/1) that the "active" player between turns is whoever took the most recent turn. The most recent turn was made by Becky (whose choices were controlled by Alex, but it was still Becky's turn). So Becky is the "active" player, but it's nobody's turn, so nobody is being possessed while this decision is made. So I'd say Becky chooses.

15
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Handicapping
« on: November 10, 2011, 05:59:33 pm »
At first glance, the idea of having a Dominion handicap seems strange to me. I guess I just don't understand the psychology of it. If Bob is frustrated because he always loses at Dominion, is he really going to feel better about himself if he barely wins with a handicap? Because it seems like its 100% clear to anyone with half a brain (including Bob) that Bob played just as poorly as he would have without a handicap, and that the win is totally artificial. If Bob takes any extra satisfaction from "winning" with a handicap, it seems to me that Bob should be able to take the same satisfaction by playing without a handicap and striving to lose by fewer points. So I'm trying to think about what actually changes with any kind of Dominion handicap that makes it more appealing to anyone involved.

For example, consider a gold handicap. Two golfers might compete on the same course, but one starts off at a closer tee. This makes sense to me for the following reason. What do golfers pride themselves on? Well, barring Happy Gilmore, its probably not their brute strength. Most golfers probably take more pride in their accuracy, precision, putting/chipping, etc. So if you have two golfers with a huge strength difference, its probably not very interesting for either of them if one of them always wins due to brute strength factors. So having different tee locations allows them to still compete based on technique while correcting for strength differences.

So, back to Dominion, what skills are you trying to adjust for when you give a player a handicap. The best I can think of is that a player might be bad at analyzing the tableau, but somehow they are still competent with making in game decisions. For example, one problem with playing players of different skill is that if the inferior player makes poor choices early on, the end game just becomes super dull. If they're not even close to you in score, there's no interesting tension as to when to buy provinces vs switching to duchies. If there's no threat of them making a comeback, the timing for switching to VPs stops being interesting for both parties. If I'm winning the province battle 5-0 in a typical game, and my opponent decides its time to start buying duchies over gold, I feel like the rest of the game is pretty much a huge waste of time. So, in that sense, anything you can do to make the game closer results in a more satisfying end game for the entire table.

So I guess I've kind of just changed my mind about the potential value of Dominion handicaps mid post, which is fun, but there's still a bit of a caveat. Mainly that I'm a little skeptical that a player who is bad enough to need a handicap is going to have the late game awareness to make the endgame interesting even with a handicap. And if you have to adjust the handicap so much that they can be "competitive" without being able to analyze the tableau or make good late game decisions, then I think you're back to getting pretty much no value out of the handicap.

Personally, the most interesting and useful "handicap" from my point of view is arguably not a true handicap at all. If I was routinely playing with people who were frustrated from losing all the time, I think the best thing to do would be to stop before the game begins and jointly analyze the board. Point out what strategies you see as viable. Ask them what they see and talk about why it may or may not work. This will hopefully put them on the right track for a reasonably competitive game without any artificial junk, plus it will teach them a lot more than an otherwise handicapped game would. Along with this, go over a game afterwards and talk about what did and didn't work and why, along with how everyone might adapt their strategy in a subsequent play.

tl;dr I can see some value in a Dominion handicap, but it seems like a generally poor substitute for actually trying to teach the inferior player better strategy.

16
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Reaction cards mechanics
« on: November 08, 2011, 01:10:55 pm »
Ancient Witch
Action - Reaction - 5
Trash a card from your hand, +2 Cards
-----------------------------------------
When another player plays an Attack card, set Ancient Witch aside. You are unaffected by the attack. On your next turn trash this Ancient Witch, if you do, all other players must reveal a Curse in their hands, or gain a Curse (this is considered an attack).
I agree that its a bit clunky, but I think this seems like at least a plausible idea.

One note though, is I see a lot of little notes on fan cards like (this is considered an attack) or (this is not an attack). If you ever find yourself writing something like this, its almost guaranteed to be a mistake. Take a close look at Moat and Lighthouse. They don't say "you are unnaffected by attacks". They very explicitly say "when another player plays an attack card". This has 3 parts to it. First of all, it has to be another player. Second, it has to be an attack card. As in, the card has the word "Attack" as a type. Finally, and most relevant to your example, the card has to be played. So, even if your Ancient Witch is "considered an attack", it doesn't get played, so it still doesn't interact with Moat and Lighthouse. As another example, some might wonder why ill-gotten gains isn't an attack. And its because it wouldn't matter if it were. The nasty stuff happens when its gained, and Moat and Lighthouse can't interact with that, no matter what the card type is.

Quote
Is there ANY scenario, in which a reaction card punishes the attacker in some way that is acceptable? Probably not, but I'm curious to see if conceptually one could be devised.

Who knows. Maybe? The real question is, why do you want to make a card that punishes the attacker? The only reason I can think of is that you don't want them to play attacks. But that just seems like bad design. Also, targeting attacks is always going to include stuff like Spy, which is just awful, since Spy isn't really even that mean or powerful.

How about a hybrid victory-reaction? If buying it early has a nasty enough opportunity cost, it might give attacks enough breathing room to still be viable and effective, but then having a big impact on the end game. If someone does really hate attacks and chooses to buy this card early, it still has both a positive (+vp) and negative (deck clogging) impact on them. Anyway, just shooting around some ideas. I'm still not convinced that it would make a good card, but if its something you really want to make for some reason, it might be possible.

Another idea is to dampen the effect on the attacker. Gain a curse is nasty. But maybe you could have something like "the attacker discards a card or gains a curse", or something like that to give the attacker an out. Again, not sure if that would be a good idea, but I think definitely gaining a curse is almost always going to be too hard to balance, mainly because that's one of the most powerful things an attack can do. So to have a card that counters any attack with the effect of the strongest attacks is probably going to be no good.

Pages: [1]

Page created in 0.051 seconds with 19 queries.