Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

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.

1

Game Reports / SmuggledProvince

« on: January 28, 2012, 10:03:25 pm »

At some point in this game, I was staring at 5$ and knew i didn't want to let him smuggle duchies off of me, so I thought "why not try to collide 2 highways and a smuggler?".  He obliged by smuggling a highway, letting me resmuggle it. 

Got pretty lucky to actually make it happen, but cartographers are good combo enablers. 

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201201/28/game-20120128-185922-cf6b581d.html

2

Simulation / A day at the simulators

« on: January 03, 2012, 05:09:05 pm »

First, I was interested in finding out why DoubleJack was the defacto standard for all jack plays ; I'd done several solitaire games yesterday comparing different methods of early estate trashing + BM strategies, and i found that SingleJack was a much more consistent strategy, although slower by ~.5 turns in the BEST case. My 10 solitaire matches found that SingleJack was 4provinces in 13.6+/-0.9 turns while DoubleJack was 14.14+/-2.95.

Simulations of the two (unoptimized?) strategies against each other find a 48/52 in favor of SingleJack:
Default DoubleJack:

Code: [Select]

# Buys two Jacks of All Trades and otherwise plays a version of Big Money.
#
# This has no Colony rules, because it would be a terrible strategy in
# Colony games.
{
  name: 'DoubleJack'
  author: 'rspeer'
  requires: ["Jack of All Trades"]
  gainPriority: (state, my) -> [
    "Province" if my.getTotalMoney() > 15
    "Duchy" if state.gainsToEndGame() <= 5
    "Estate" if state.gainsToEndGame() <= 2
    "Gold"
    "Jack of All Trades" if my.countInDeck("Jack of All Trades") < 2
    "Silver"
  ]
}
SingleJack simply changes the < 2 to < 1 for Jack-buying.

However, from the solitaire matches, I'd found that the biggest obstacle to getting fast provinces was an early duchy, which had a way of ruining the deck's ability to function (worst being a game in which I was stuck at 7 from turns 13-19, primarily due to quick reshuffles making those duchies and extrajacks come back to haunt me).  After playing around with the "how soon can i buy duchies" I found that no strategic play could make DoubleJack beat SingleJack. 

Obviously, attack cards and other strategic combinations such as oasis may have a different result, but the simple "always buy two jacks" rule is one that can be challenged.   





Second:  Warehouse/Tunnel:


RR asked if Warehouse/Warehouse aiming to get tunnel was better than Warehouse/Tunnel in sims.  The first step was getting a good combo Bot to start out with:


Do you even buy golds?  It doesnt seem to make much difference, but 52-48 in favor of the gold-buying bot.
What order do you buy tunnels and warehouses AFTER the opening?  They really more or less tied here too.
How many warehouses do you buy?  Apparently 1 more than you have tunnels. 
How hard do you fight for tunnels in the mirror?  If you open W/T you need to fight hard to get a 5/3 split, but opening W/W you almost don't care if you get more than 3. 


Overall, I couldn't come up with anything that would make warehouse/tunnel better than 47/53 versus warehouse/warehouse:


Bots Below:

Code: [Select]


# Open Warehouse/Tunnel/Warehouse For Warehouse/Tunnel Board then fights for Tunnels
{
  name: 'WareTunnel'
  author: 'rod-'
  requires: ["Warehouse", "Tunnel"]
  gainPriority: (state, my) -> [
    "Province" if my.getTotalMoney() > 15
    "Duchy" if state.gainsToEndGame() <= 5
    "Estate" if state.gainsToEndGame() <= 2
    "Gold"
    "Duchy" if state.countInSupply("Tunnel") == 0
    "Tunnel" if my.countInDeck("Tunnel") < 1
    "Warehouse" if my.countInDeck("Warehouse") < 2
    "Tunnel" if my.countInDeck("Tunnel") < 6
    "Warehouse" if my.countInDeck("Warehouse") < my.countInDeck("Tunnel")+1
    ]
}


Code: [Select]

{

# Open Warehouse/Warehouse/Tunnel then maintains warehouse/tunnel parity on Warehouse/Tunnel Board
name: 'DoubleWareTunnel'
author: 'rod-'
requires: ["Warehouse", "Tunnel"]
gainPriority: (state, my) -> [
    "Province" if my.getTotalMoney() > 15
    "Duchy" if state.gainsToEndGame() <= 5
    "Estate" if state.gainsToEndGame() <= 2
    "Gold"
    "Duchy" if state.countInSupply("Tunnel") == 0
    "Warehouse" if my.countInDeck("Warehouse") < 2
    "Warehouse" if my.countInDeck("Warehouse") < my.countInDeck("Tunnel")+1
    "Tunnel" if my.countInDeck("Tunnel") < 6
  ]
}

It's possible that both of these bots get too many warehouses/tunnels, but whenever i lowered the count of warehouses, it was a bad thing.

3

Variants and Fan Cards / Handicap alternative?

« on: December 28, 2011, 03:59:25 am »

I remember seeing one or two handicap posts awhile ago...for the people who're just too much more skilled than their opponents.  I had a thought that I felt was fairly elegant the other day.

Simply take 1 less turn.  In multiplayer, opponents will hardly notice, and in singleplayer, your opponent will likely forget by the end of the game anyway.  There's no obvious "oh right, he started with a curse" or whatever.

Issues:  You could get hit pretty hard by attacks.  You could be discarding cards on your 2nd turn or shuffling in curses as early as your 3rd turn. 

4

Council Room Feedback / Achievements inaccurate?

« on: August 24, 2011, 09:43:10 am »

I was just looking at my councilroom page again and noticed that for 2 of the 3 linked achievements on it, the links were to games that did not fit the bill of the achievement:  I supposedly "bought nothing but gold/silver" in a game where i finished with 6 hunting parties, and was a "one trick pony" in a game where i bought several of hunting party, horse traders, and islands.  Looking at it this way, it seems to be ignoring cornucopia.

It's clearly not a big deal but I thought i'd report it in case it's the symptom of a larger problem.

5

Dominion Articles / Combo: Apothecary / Native Village

« on: August 10, 2011, 11:34:08 am »

I just feel great about this particular deck combo, as it has no problem "going green" and has low chance of ever faltering, particularly with a few of the support cards present in this set: 

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201108/10/game-20110810-081535-37201fe4.html

Apothecary/Native village team up to put all of your non-copper/potion cards on the native mat.
2-3 Apothecary draws you up to a strong buying power early on and midgame allows you to get through to your (few!) actions.  Native village takes out all of the green that you buy, usually without you having to ever draw it.

Support cards:
Labs (Any NTD): Get you through whatever non-copper cards your apothecary left on top that you don't want to lose to native village and helps you draw into 2nd-3rd apothecaries if your 5cards whiff
Forge: Honorable mention this game, as it turned my 3estate silver native village mat into platinum (and allowed me to buy a 2nd platinum on the same turn before going back into hiding in the native village)

Failures: Leaving 7 copper in your deck, even with the rest of the deck being only 5-6 cards, means you are prone to drawing 5copper or 4copper NV hands.  Still, when this deck got firing, it bought 6 colonies in 9 turns and started quite early.  It should be considerably better at provinces, only needing to buy copper instead of platinum.

Questions:  Was the 2nd platinum a mistake?  In theory, 1 plat + 6 of 7 copper is all it takes to make a colony, and only 1 of the 6 colony buys was made with less than 6$ copper.

Obviously this deck needs to keep as high a density of Apothecary and copper as possible to be consistent.

6

Dominion General Discussion / Popular Buys Analysis

« on: June 16, 2011, 06:03:06 pm »

Excluding prizes, I have a terrible "effect with" rate with the most powerful cards: Why?
Idea 1:  These cards are powerful 5$s and sometimes shuffle luck will bite you and you will lose.  This is a somewhat boring hypothesis, but could be confirmed by a systematic negative effect among top players: (Yes, i'm being somewhat presumptuous putting myself in this company, but I started by looking at myself because i'm trying to find places to improve my game)

                      Rod|CFrisk|Theory|Rrenaud|Boloni
Mountebank:     -1.2|-0.7|-1.4|+0.4|+0.6
Witch :             -0.7|+0.4|-0.6|-2.9|-0.7
Familiar:          -0.5|+1.5|-2.1|+0.1|-0.2
Ghost Ship:      -1.3|+0.5|-0.9|-0.7|+0.2
Ambassador:    -1.1|-0.5|+0.6|+1.8|-0.3
(Control: pawn) -0.2|+0.4|+0.7|+0.5|-0.0

While each player other than me has 1 of the 4 power 5$ cards they are strong with, and ambassador probably does not belong in the list, it does seem to me that each of these cards has a pretty strong negative impact overall.

My conclusion: Look at how i play ambassador & improve that.  Worry about the 5$ attacks later on.