1
Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Dominion Offline: Seeded/Repeatable Games
« on: May 28, 2016, 07:06:56 pm »
By seeded I mean "throwback to the 90s when freecell had 32000 puzzles and you'd go through them, knowing (thanks to a collection of freecell enthusiasts) that each game was winnable (except for one)".
I like playing dominion single player against the MakingFun AI despite their general ineptitude, but sometimes they get a 5/2 split, you get a 3/4 and away you go to an unfortunate defeat as they play off their mountebank twice before you reach yours in the deck - there's a question in the back of your mind "was this game winnable after the 5/2 split", if the answer is yes, which there's a good chance it was you hit the 'rematch' and your opponent gets a 3/4 and you get the 5/2. Away you go to an easy victory.
This is okay, of course, it's a game that relies on luck, but this does have the downside that you can't really determine how things /could/ have gone had you played differently. Enter the seed, the pseudo-random nature of the seed would mean that you would end up with the same shuffles on each play through, and so, you can test exactly how the game could have gone - you know that you're playing against a bot which will get a 5/2 etc.
Since there are a /lot/ of dominion kingdom possibilities, this wouldn't really have much of a negative impact on the players - the games would be distinct until replayed. However, it would give benefits to discussing kingdoms on f.ds, and improving play more measurably against a specific board - this is the general reason why I would like it.
For a possible extension, this could be used to produce kingdoms of the week for solitaire play, and people would then be able to compare how people played this board - however, I understand that this then relies on collating data even from people who are using an offline version.
Edit: A second possible extension would be for tournaments, though I'm not sure I'd want that, but people might.
This might not be a feature for everyone, but I know that I'd appreciate it, at least in some form (perhaps only for when you use the button to take you to play a game from the log) and maybe other people might too.
Summary: Pseudo-random play to allow for the game to be repeated as-is and to compare gameplay with identical shuffle-luck.
I like playing dominion single player against the MakingFun AI despite their general ineptitude, but sometimes they get a 5/2 split, you get a 3/4 and away you go to an unfortunate defeat as they play off their mountebank twice before you reach yours in the deck - there's a question in the back of your mind "was this game winnable after the 5/2 split", if the answer is yes, which there's a good chance it was you hit the 'rematch' and your opponent gets a 3/4 and you get the 5/2. Away you go to an easy victory.
This is okay, of course, it's a game that relies on luck, but this does have the downside that you can't really determine how things /could/ have gone had you played differently. Enter the seed, the pseudo-random nature of the seed would mean that you would end up with the same shuffles on each play through, and so, you can test exactly how the game could have gone - you know that you're playing against a bot which will get a 5/2 etc.
Since there are a /lot/ of dominion kingdom possibilities, this wouldn't really have much of a negative impact on the players - the games would be distinct until replayed. However, it would give benefits to discussing kingdoms on f.ds, and improving play more measurably against a specific board - this is the general reason why I would like it.
For a possible extension, this could be used to produce kingdoms of the week for solitaire play, and people would then be able to compare how people played this board - however, I understand that this then relies on collating data even from people who are using an offline version.
Edit: A second possible extension would be for tournaments, though I'm not sure I'd want that, but people might.
This might not be a feature for everyone, but I know that I'd appreciate it, at least in some form (perhaps only for when you use the button to take you to play a game from the log) and maybe other people might too.
Summary: Pseudo-random play to allow for the game to be repeated as-is and to compare gameplay with identical shuffle-luck.