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Messages - cherdano

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1
Help! / Re: Baron/Haggler better than double-Jack?
« on: December 30, 2012, 03:15:12 pm »
I think Caravan and Cartographer are very good enablers for your Baron and Haggler. I would bet on your opponent's strategy if I have to.

2
Game Reports / Re: When not to go Horse Traders-Duke
« on: December 29, 2012, 02:07:56 pm »
I wasn't sure about what happened in the game so I put this through the simulator. The two approaches seem pretty even but the city deck will be stronger with human decision making. Some of the optimizations might be

Horse traders - buy a few horse traders before taking duchies, always take extra coppers
Cities - take an early smithy (or two), buy out the cities instead of contesting the dukes
Did you add a horse trader or two to the city engine?

3
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.
« on: December 27, 2012, 09:13:02 am »

If you don't like "politics" in games, why did you call the strongest $3 card "ambassador"?
(To be fair, you also called the weakest one "chancellor".)

You say it should be fun to lose. Do I need to say "torturer"?

Bishop is usually not a great opening buy, but chapel obviously is. So I am confused - are you for or
against child baptism?

Ok, now you can all get back to serious questions and arguing :P

4
Rules Questions / Haggler and Inn
« on: December 24, 2012, 10:17:57 am »

The question is pretty much described by the topic:
I play a haggler, buy an Inn. Do I shuffle in action cards immediately, then gain a card from haggler, or is it it the reverse order?
(I am asking because isotropic implemented a different order than the one I expected.)

5
Game Reports / Re: My first Stale mate!
« on: December 24, 2012, 06:03:10 am »
I always wondered whether there could be a stale mate where both players come down to deck that they can draw on every turn, and that includes two smugglers.

6
I seem to get a lot more bad luck when I play at 3AM. I wonder if there's a connection?
I find it gets even worse after a beer or two!

7
Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: Password I
« on: December 17, 2012, 11:07:48 am »
Oh, remember the folksy days in 2008 when "pig" would have been the obvious clue for lipstick?You betcha!

8
2012 / Re: Upsets
« on: December 14, 2012, 06:24:47 am »
With a 4-2 win over Wingnut, I just became the lowest seed advancing to the third Round at #53!
http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=5690.msg153268#msg153268

And I am not surprised!

9
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Common strategic misconceptions
« on: December 12, 2012, 03:08:51 pm »
Here is another:

"My opponent opened with a strong trasher, so there is no point for me to buy a curser."

This is absolutely true on some boards, but completely wrong on others. Sometimes, the curses will slow down the opponent's engine building enormously, since it will take him longer to trash away the bad stuff. One way to think about it is: if the opponent has a small deck, say due to having trashed 4 cars with a chapel on turn 3, the additional curse makes a much bigger difference to his average card value. That's why Witch/chapel is a pretty good opening!
Other times, the opponent is already on his way towards drawing his entire deck and can afford the extra action to use his trasher to get rid of your curses. They will hardly make a difference. That's why you would hardly ever buy a sea hag on a board with remake, menagerie, a $2 cantrip and a +buy.

So this should be a decision to think about for a moment, not one to take reflexively.

10
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Common strategic misconceptions
« on: December 12, 2012, 02:37:58 pm »
Let me give an example myself:

Not every board with a grand markets is a race to win the grand markets split!
Once your buying power is strong enough to hit $8 in a province game, you should have good reasons to prefer a grand market over a province. If you have an engine that should soon be hitting double province buys, then of course you should go ahead and buy the grand market. But otherwise you often won't be able to catch up on provinces in time.

11
Dominion General Discussion / Common strategic misconceptions
« on: December 12, 2012, 02:34:29 pm »

I thought the card-ranking threads were interesting partly because many posters made good points about why certain cards are frequently overvalued. Similarly, the ranked card lists may be useful to beginning or intermediate players simply because if they find a placement of a card highly surprising (SCOUT IS NOT A TOP 3 CARD???), that tells them something about their own misconceptions.

But of course it depends on the kingdom. So I thought it might be worth to make a separate thread about common misconceptions/wrong uses of some cards etc. in the context of a kingdom.
What concrete type of mistake have you seen most often among players 10 levels below you? Among players with roughly the same level as yours.

12
Game Reports / Re: Humiliation
« on: December 10, 2012, 06:51:39 pm »
I agree it's very swingy. But the answer to your question is "wharf".

13
Game Reports / Re: Humiliation
« on: December 10, 2012, 05:43:01 pm »
You'd be hard-pressed to get an engine going at all, much less find the cards that you want to trash, if you skip the trashing first and let your opponent inundate you with Curses.
Maybe what I wrote sounded as if I waited until turn 10 to pick up a steward. Say I start with miltia/village at turn 1/2, a wharf and another village at turn 3/4, and then a steward around turn 5 or 6. I would argue that my draw from wharves will more than make up for the delay in trashing.

14
Game Reports / Re: Humiliation
« on: December 10, 2012, 06:47:31 am »
Maybe I am out there, but I think all the early comments are missing the point.

I think lucky one is right that you should build a wharf semi-engine here first, and then pick up a steward for trashing and a witch later. Wharves don't mind coppers, so you only really want the trasher for estates and curses. And with your engine going, you can trash those pretty quickly. Similarly, I think you have a good chance of catching up on the curses race if you buy the witch a few turns later, but then you can play it almost every turn.

I think opening militia/steward is pretty bad here (and I am a big fan of steward openings). You really want to pick up that wharf (or witch if you disagree with my opinion above) on turn 3/4, and then you have three terminals with at most one village - and you hoped to trash some cards too! Opponent's militia also makes the early steward much less effective. If you want top open steward at all, I think it should be steward/silver.

I am really curious what others think.


15
Game Reports / Re: WW Annotated Game #1
« on: December 09, 2012, 02:22:09 pm »
I admit my main thought is "this community was actually nicer without WW".

16
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.
« on: December 07, 2012, 02:38:41 pm »
What brought me to dominion was that I realized right away that there was a fantastic community discussing dominion strategy. Thanks to this community, dominion is IMO played at a higher level than any other recently invented board game (i.e., any game other than the classics chess, go, bridge). Are you worried at all that this community will no longer thrive once the free dominion online implementations will shut down?

17
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Tactics
« on: December 07, 2012, 12:47:11 pm »
It's a really simple, but I enjoy it every time it comes up:

I am ahead by 2-4 points, two provinces left, opponents plays a Counterband, I have $8 in my hand. Rather than reflexively disallowing provinces, it's usually right to disallow duchies. Whereas with $7 in my hand, it's better to disallow provinces.

Although maybe it's actually not so simple: if my opponents knows I knows this tactic, shouldn't I just bluff and disallow duchies even with $7 in hand?

18
Sure, and Nate Silver will get the top spot for each of $3, $4 and $5.

19
General Discussion / Re: Baseball MVP
« on: November 16, 2012, 06:00:01 pm »
Breaking news: baseball writers confirm in a landslide vote that they don't understand statistics.

20
Help! / Re: I win the village-wharf fight, lose the game?
« on: November 10, 2012, 06:28:59 am »
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201211/08/game-20121108-054859-ce770fd1.html

So this seems like a pretty obvious Village-Wharf board, and I pick up a Trader in order to get Silver quickly... I end up taking 7 of the Wharves and 4 WV which really ought to be enough, but I still get beaten out. Is Envoy really that good here? He can presumably draw a lot given the Envoys and a bunch of Villages, but it seems like he played Wharf in preference to Envoy when given the chance...
I am not sure what is best, but I am sure that Wharf+BM does better than 37 points in 17 turns.

21
Just make sure you live in a house made of bricks, not straw or sticks or anything like that.
I would have appreciated if the power lines hadn't been built of straws and sticks. I used to live in CT until recently. We had two days without power - i think that put us in the 80% percentile in our town, i.e. we were among the lucky and privileged.
(And if you haven't lived in the US countryside: no electricity means no running water. Which doesn't sounds so bad until you remember you use it for more than drinking and cooking and washing dishes...)

I hope all of you in the NY region will be fine.


22
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Greatest Isotropic Moments of 2012
« on: October 28, 2012, 06:36:15 pm »
I recently won three prices in one turn. I had only one province in my deck.

(Unfortunately I don't have the link.)

23
Game Reports / Re: What was wrong with my Potion/Fool's Gold opening ?
« on: October 19, 2012, 06:50:15 am »
With a 5/2 opening I would definitely go potion/fool's gold. I don't think you can afford not to contest FGs, with venture, moneylender, golem and councilroom they are just too good.

24
General Discussion / Re: Fantasy (American) football?
« on: October 07, 2012, 04:11:05 pm »
Burke is interesting to read. But I don't think he is sufficiently aware of the limits of his statistical approaches. Simple example: his win probability calculator ignores timeouts, since that's too tricky to get right. That might be true (I haven't thought about it), but then you should probably be a little bit careful about this before writing an entire column about a 4th-down decision that his WP calculator "proves" wrong.

He also has many posts on pass-versus-run decisions that I had my doubts about.
I think you're right, but that particular example (I assume you're talking about CAR's decision to punt) is egregious.  When you have Cam Newton, 4th-and-1, where a conversion is a win, a failed conversion is decent ATL field position, and a punt is slightly worse ATL field position, it makes zero sense at all to punt.
Oh I agree this example was obvious. But at some point he constantly wrote entire posts on some late-game decisions (field goal or go for it? etc.) where the percentages were much closer, and he never once acknowledged this limit of his model, instead taking it as gospel. As accurate gospel, in fact.

Nevertheless, I am a fan of the statistical 4th-down analysis in general. IMO it's the most clear-cut example where you can prove that highly paid "experts" at a profession constantly get a decision wrong.

25
General Discussion / Re: Fantasy (American) football?
« on: October 04, 2012, 08:32:35 pm »
Burke is interesting to read. But I don't think he is sufficiently aware of the limits of his statistical approaches. Simple example: his win probability calculator ignores timeouts, since that's too tricky to get right. That might be true (I haven't thought about it), but then you should probably be a little bit careful about this before writing an entire column about a 4th-down decision that his WP calculator "proves" wrong.

He also has many posts on pass-versus-run decisions that I had my doubts about.

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