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Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: "Features" threads
« on: April 28, 2016, 03:23:32 am »Although it's not common in chess, I think delays would work a lot better than increments in Dominion. With a delay, the clock freezes for a short amount of time after a move but extra time is never added to your total. With a ~3 second delay after every decision, the clock won't count down while you are making simple decisions but will when you are making more complicated ones. The Cartographer/Scrying Pool player loses very little time drawing their deck because they are making so many decisions that the clock is frozen for most of their turn and the Village/Smithy player doesn't gain any time by making a simple engine because unused time isn't added back to their clock. They each end up having close to the same amount of time to make the big decisions like what to buy. Some strategies will obviously still require a lot more thinking time to play, but with a sufficiently long time control (15 minute time bank per player + X minutes increment added per turn + Y seconds delay per "decision") I don't think it would make any decks unplayable.Your turn:3. Ability to select "timed game" as an option. One way to implement a "timed game" would be to enable the players to set a base time (i.e, 5 minutes, whatever), and an increment (i.e., 2 seconds). Each player starts with the base time, and during his or her turn, it ticks down, while being increased by the increment with every action taken. So the opponents' base time is the "dead time" I'm willing to invest in the game, since the increments offset the time spent by the opponent actually playing and taking action. Players could even set separate (personal) base times and increments (perhaps as a profile setting), and the matching feature could enable the ability to accept only opponents meeting a chosen threshold for base time / increment. In this way, players could be operating with different starting "base and increment" times, while all players are satisfied with the timing setting.
In my oppinion a timer should not be a standard feature for Dominion. It can be something like a special add-on, but the way Dominion is designed doesn't really fit a timer.
I think a lot of you are a bit influenced by chess, where timers work great since every move (not the thinking about it, but the move itself) takes almost the exact same amount of time. In Dominion, however, the difference between resolving Smithy and Scrying Pool can be huge. This means (and you've seen this with the Blitz feature in the MMF mod) that a timer greatly influences the strength of certain cards and the viability of certain strategies, which is not really the point of a timer.
Well, the idea is that *every* action you take during your turn would trigger the increment. So every time you play Scrying Pool on your turn, you trigger the increment. Every time you play Smithy, you trigger the increment. This way, it does not matter which cards are in the kingdom; it just matters that play proceeds with reasonable flow, even if entire turns vary drastically in terms of their actual length. Both a quick Smithy turn and a lengthy Scrying Pool turn would result in (approximately) the same time remaining in the bank, if the player plays both turns with the same pace.
Play Cartographer (+5 seconds), draw card, look at top 4 cards, decide which to discard, rearrange the rest (takes 8 seconds)
Play Scrying Pool (+5 seconds), decide on opponent's card, decide on own card, draw a shitload of cards (takes 5 seconds)
Net: -3 seconds
My turn:
Play Village (+5 seconds), draw card (takes 1 second)
Play Smithy (+5 seconds), draw 3 cards (takes 1 second)
Net: +8 seconds
In any case, it doesn't sound like this is something that many people want. It would definitely need to be optional and that might end up splitting the player pool and increasing the wait to find a game. Maybe it's something worth experimenting with a bit down the line if there are a lot of players.