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1

Game Reports / Re: Finally Built the Deck of My Dreams - But How Would You Optimize It?

« on: September 02, 2018, 02:47:34 pm »

As viewed through the lens of the f.ds browser extension:





(Ranger, Catacombs, Mandarin, Mystic, Prince, Poor House, Beggar, Peasant, Tracker, Changeling, Donate, Trade)

2

Game Reports / City Quarter, Witch, Lurker, slow trashing with benefits

« on: September 02, 2018, 10:43:07 am »

I just played the following kingdom:

Code: [Select]

City Quarter, Lurker, Pearl Diver, Swindler, Island, Poacher, Sacrifice, Salvager, Merchant Ship, Witch, Banquet, Triumphal Arch
I drew a random kingdom, then replaced Ghost Ship with Witch; I think my gf might have injured me if I had Ghost Ship'd her CQs into oblivion every turn

So, this kingdom. Drawing cards is good and CQ is key in this. It's pricey and weak early. It can be gained with Lurker, but that's only non-risky if you're already drawing your deck and Lurker is not amazing early. It really hates non-actions, e.g. Curse and treasures. Those can be trashed with Salvager and/or Sacrifice, but both of those are slow. There are cute tricks you can do with Lurker; e.g. Salvager/Witch or Sacrifice/Island, then regain the trashed card. Or you can steal actions with Swindler/Lurker. There's virtual money in Swindler and Merchant Ship, but the duration effect of the latter causes a lowers action density compared to non-duration actions. Then again, it also increases your CQ density. A minor interaction is that Witch is great at emptying one pile fairly early, which turns Poacher into Oasis which is not super strong. Also, Lurker is great at end-game pile control.

Getting to the point where you're drawing deck is a drawn-out process. You're getting curses dumped on you, your trashing is terminal, the villages are expensive and the draw is weak until you have a high action density. In both my games, by the time I was drawing deck I had to green on a tight schedule—the missus really likes Island.

3

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Favorite Expansions in 2018

« on: June 30, 2018, 04:31:02 am »

Buying an Inn to cause the perfect shuffle makes me want to start smoking just so I can quit and see if the euphoria from that "last cigarette" I've heard so much about measures up.

I don't think I should be taking literally, but just in case: I would recommend against taking up smoking. The nicotine high from your first <10 cigarettes are not enough compensation for the elevated risk of an early death from lung cancer unless you have seriously weird preferences. Also, I've quit several* times and I never experienced any last-cigarette euphoria.

* The first n-1 don't really count

I hope I don't come off as a nagging nanny.

4

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Win with an all-blue deck

« on: June 29, 2018, 08:49:32 pm »

Compared to Ghacob's solution, I feel like these are cheating--but they work!
[...]
Variant 2 (technically a solution to 1 & 3 as well):

The Colonies don't count towards your score at the end of the game (they're not in your deck nor on your mats), hence it is not a solution to variant 2. Apologies if I have not been clear about the criteria.

I wanted to do something with Keep but I don't think I can with only two landmark/events and no ability to play coppers or have coppers in the deck at the end of the game...

Keep, Alms, Fool's Gold seems like it accomplishes something, though probably it just accomplishes a tie (your FGs vs. their Copper)

5

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas

« on: April 27, 2018, 05:23:40 am »

Dud Turn Event - $8
Once per game: When you buy this, when each other player takes their next turn, they cannot can't buy cards.

It's once per game. You buy it, then your opponent buys it, and then you can't do anything and then it's your opponent's regular turn.

In that scenario, Dud Turn is really just an $8 Mission that forces* your opponent to also get an $8 Mission. (* Well, makes doing so the best available option, most likely.)

Hm, I guess Dud Turn hits your opponent the hardest when your opponent has the largest expected (buy-oriented) payload, i.e. when they're most likely to retaliate, in which case it's just trading Mission turns. Could you use it to your advantage in some other circumstance?

If they retaliate, you're trading Mission turns. That benefits the player with the largest (expected) non-buy payload—so gainers, attacks, maybe traveler upgrades.

If they can't (or don't) retaliate, your benefit on your turn is your full payload, minus the $8 spent on Dud, plus the non-buy payload you have over your opponent. Either that's close to nothing, or your decks differ greatly in payload.

For example, if you have $16/2 and get Dud/Province and they don't hit $8, your buy of Dud maybe stole a Duchy from them? At the expense of them buying Dud later and stealing two Provinces from you, I think. And if they hit $8 and retaliated, you stole a Province but they stole two from you.

So I guess in the case of asymmetric payload, a Dud Turn exchange on net harms the player with the highest (buy-focused) payload. The poor get richer. Good in Big Money.

Cool. Still, it belongs in RBCI

6

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: "Shield", a Reserve single-attack Moat/Lighthouse variant

« on: April 19, 2018, 01:43:38 pm »

[assessment of Dbclick's Shield]
I thought that the idea of a Reserve defense was to have a trade-off between the flexibility of only defending when needed  and then only being able to defend once.

I more-or-less agree with your assessment.

The key dynamic I had in mind when thinking up Shield was the decoupling between the timing of the defense play and the attack play. That is, I can play Shield three turns before you play your Mountebank and it still works, unlike Moat/Lighthouse/Guardian, for any (positive) value of three. The fact that it also creates interesting decisions in case of multiple different attacks is frosting on top of the cake, from my perspective.

I don't know whether I should be unhappy that it's worse in multiplayer. One way of making it stronger which perhaps runs the risk of making it less interesting is something like "when another player plays an attack, you may call this. If you do, name a card. Until the start of your next turn, attacks by copies of the named card don't affect you."

That way, one Shield defends against every player's first Militia, not just your left opponent's first Militia, while requiring a second Shield to also defend against their Witch. The problem is that it also defends against the second, third, etc. Militia (or Witch, if you picked Witch). Maybe that's not a problem?

7

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: "Shield", a Reserve single-attack Moat/Lighthouse variant

« on: April 18, 2018, 12:52:53 pm »

My mistake, I did not get that you talked about a hypothetical perma-Moat.

Cool, I figured there was some kind of misunderstanding going on.

I don't think NoMoreFun's suggestion of a permanent defense Kingdom Reserv card is good as it would just kill all attacks.

I agree, which is why I tried something vaguely in that direction. I don't like my result all that much, but I think it's better for the game than "while on mat, you're moated".

The other part of his suggestion, giving it a stronger on-call effect, is worthwhile to be pursued though.

One I think I might like is "[start of turn, may call, for] +1 card". Maybe +2 cards, or <+2 cards, discard a card>, or something like that, combined with no on-play benefit.

At +2 cards, an interesting comparison is to Enchantress. Enchantress gives you both two cards and a one-card counterspell, where +2-cards-Shield gives you one or the other. The Enchantress counterspell effect is chosen by your opponent, constrained by "it has to be in their starting hand"; the Shield counterspell is chosen by you, constrained by "has the 'Attack' type", and it's partial (they still get +$2 from their Militia).

Does that make Shield (costed at $3) stronger or weaker than Enchantress? Man, I dunno, weaker probably? Depends on the kingdom strength of available attacks, and the reliability you can get. With a no-trashing village/smithy engine and weak attacks, Enchantress looks way better; with Chapel, Dungeon, Port and Rabble, maybe Shield starts to look more interesting? Maybe? One of the strengths of Shield, and Reserve cards in general, is that you time when you get the benefit. In the Shield-vs-Enchantress comparison, this implies that you can choose when to bear the cost of having to spend an action getting it back on the mat where it can draw you cards.

Shield is designed such that it could fit into Adventures; the design space I'm exploring here is similar/close to that covered by Guide and Hireling. Maybe I should look for some other on-call benefit.

Hm; maybe the real reason I'm not happy is that I feel it takes the focus away from Shield being a Reserve Moat. And maybe I'm wrong about that.

8

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Favorite Thematic Cards (part 2)

« on: April 17, 2018, 04:59:15 pm »

Whereever there's an Ironworks there's likely to be a Mining Village, a Smithy and an Ironmonger.

9

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: "Shield", a Reserve single-attack Moat/Lighthouse variant

« on: April 17, 2018, 04:48:12 pm »

The main idea of adding some effect when you call it without being attacked is to make the card more interesting in Kingdoms without Attacks

I think NoMoreFun's idea was to have a card with a strong while-on-mat effect and a similarly strong call-from-mat effect, forcing you to make a non-trivial choice, accepting that it becomes easier the fewer and weaker the attacks.

so I don't think that the call-effect has to be particularly strong. [For example, a bit more money might be OK but boring compared to Gladiator.]

I think it has to be approximately as strong as not calling it, on average across random kingdoms, for the choice to be non-obvious and thus interesting. If the effect is "you're immune to attacks until you call this", the on-call effect has to be correspondingly strong, and I'm not sure a delayed Gold is strong enough. Swamp Hag is strong because cursing is strong, Secret Cave is cantrip but eats three cards, Raider costs a lot more and has an attack but is not a particularly strong card.

While perma-Moat is the weaker of Champion's abilities (most of the time?), it's still pretty strong and Champion is really hard to get into play. Hm...

I don't think that calling to defend when attacked should be mandatory [...] it kind of defeats the purpose of a Reserve version. [...] why nerf your terminal Reserve version that only defends against one attack (and thus decreases in strength in multiplayer games) even more via force-call?

Because I think perma-Moat is... 'too strong' is almost right; I think it makes the game worse by removing elements from it. Forced call seems like it could be interesting to work with/around, provided the on-call effect is reasonably-strong enough. It preserved one aspect of NoMoreFun's suggestion, which is that whether you're defended against the first attack or not is not a function of your calling decisions.

I guess, though, at this point it's almost equivalent to a duration: "mild effect now // at the start of your next turn, reasonably strong effect — when someone else plays attack, discard this from play". Also, if I stack multiples, in almost any way of phrasing forced-call you end up calling all your forced-call cards.

Hmm... non-trivial

10

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: April 15, 2018, 03:10:06 pm »

Strictly better Harem?

Soon to come:
- more edge cases

11

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Forced Wins Training Sessions

« on: April 15, 2018, 03:08:16 pm »

At 19:40, Adam is revealing Wandering Minstrel, Colony and Spice Merchant to a Wandering Minstrel. Remaining in his deck are Platinum, Gold and Peddler. Plan out the rest of his turn such that he wins the game. The payload part of Adam's previous turn, from 17:00 to 17:30, might provide a hint if you're stuck on one particular aspect. Watching from 19:40 onward will give a big hint.

(My solution is available as a youtube comment.)

12

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: "Shield", a Reserve single-attack Moat/Lighthouse variant

« on: April 15, 2018, 02:53:06 pm »

What would be tactically interesting is if you were immune to attacks while it was on the mat, but it had positive effects that made you want to call it off the mat

I think a permanent Lighthouse can potentially be quite strong, though it obviously varies from board to board. It can create situations where some cards (attacks) become too weak at their price point, so you're effectively playing a 10-minus-n-card kingdom.

If I were to pursue an idea like this, I think I would do something like the following:

NoMoreFun's Shield
Action — Reserve
Cost: ?
[very mild effect, like +1 action, maybe. But Duplicate doesn't need any on-play benefit, so maybe nothing.]
—
When another player plays an Attack card, call this, and you are unaffected by that Attack.
At the start of your turn, you may discard this from your tavern mat. If you do, [reasonably strong effect].

The key idea is that the calling is mandatory. That way, it's not a permanent Lighthouse; with enough spamming, you can overcome a pile of shields. It also makes any attack a way of preventing [reasonably strong effect], so it might cause weaker attacks to see play.

It's probably not going to be great against Minion stacks; you're going to need more shields than they have Minions to get [reasonably strong effect], and exactly as many to not be hit by the attack. Against some engine that likes to payload a single [whatever attack], it might be fine though.

13

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Engine with no extra cards per turn?

« on: April 12, 2018, 06:16:22 pm »

Hello, I've been lurking here for awhile, but decided to register today to ask what a couple questions.

1. Is it ever correct to attempt to build an engine (ie attempt a deck that can draw itself and/or play all of its actions) when there is no way to gain more than one card per turn?  So no +buy, no gainers, no remodel-type cards, no digging in the trash, etc.  In this scenario, what could make an engine any faster/better than a money-focused deck?

Welcome aboard f.ds

Is it ever correct? Yes, sometimes.

Here's a very general statement: if your opponent starts getting VP before you do, you need to get more VP per turn than they do to catch up.

If thanks to Militia your opponent can only hit $8 every other turn but you can hit Province every turn, you're scoring 6 VP/turn to their 3 VP/turn on average. That satisfies the requirement. It doesn't matter that it takes you two turns to double-Province, what matters is that you get more VP per turn than your opponent. Here's a thought experiment: pretend that two turns are one; then you double-province to their single province in "one" turn. Then explain why it would matter that it happens across two turns.

The most common way of scoring more points per turn than a big money player is payloading more money and buys than them, but we're deliberately skipping those cases. The other ways are by making yourself score more points per buy* (Colony, Dominate, etc.) and by making them score fewer points per buy; attacks help accomplish the latter.

(* playing a Monument doesn't expend a buy, but buying the Monument does. If it helps, you can attribute the VP gained by each Monument to the buy that gained you the Monument. Then the VP for that buy is the number of times you play the Monument. If you look at it that way, Monument and similar cards is also a way of scoring more points per buy.)

Here's why it might matter that you double-province across two turns rather than one: your opponent draws cards in their clean-up step, so they see more cards in total. This plus the second buy makes it more likely that they'll also double-province. Attacks makes them draw and/or keep fewer cards (and/or worse cards in case of junking), which is sometimes enough to keep them at single province.

One game which is approximately an example of this is the one below. Adam Horton plays a DoubleTac deck with Bishop, Treasure Map and Militia. It goes through a pair of T'Maps every three turns, so it's 16/3 = 5.33 VP per turn on average (less than reliably single-provincing). The Militia makes it very hard for Qvist to hit Province. (To see the same game from Qvist's perspective: <youtube>/watch?v=KuXwudapuiY)



(Technically Adam gains multiple cards on some turns, but I think a restatement of your question that captures much of its essence is "if I'm capped at 6 VP per turn, is it ever right to go for the engine?", and that certainly applies to this game. That way of phrasing the question excludes the more-points-per-buy stratagems, though.)

14

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Favorite Thematic Cards (part 2)

« on: April 12, 2018, 03:50:47 pm »

Counterfeit let's you double-spend your money, it even gives you two buys instead of your normal one. That's exactly how you counterfeit cryptocurrency.

A bit anachronistic, perhaps, but I think it works

15

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Holy Week Kingdom

« on: April 12, 2018, 03:43:32 pm »

[something something] 30 Silvers.

I was about to suggest that Masterpiece might be a good fit for exactly this reason.

Samath, would you mind explaining your thought process to the Sunday school drop-outs?

Secret Cave is the resurrection.
Sacrifice is the crucifixion. Also, to a minor extent, some general Jesus-ness?
Crown is... uh, there's an xmas song that goes "[...] new king born today", but this is for Easter. Do I remember correctly that there's a wreath of thorns involved in his execution?
Rabble is the crowd who would rather execute the thought criminal for wrongthink and release the all-round scoundrel Barabbas (murderer, thief?) than the other way around.
Sacred Grove?
Pacovf explained Baker and Wine Merchant already (last supper).
Is Scheme Judas' betrayal? Moneylender is Judas, yeah?
Procession? They're chronological, so it's not the condemned carrying their crosses to the place of execution...

16

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What should Dominion do next?

« on: April 12, 2018, 02:52:02 pm »

I quite like the Reserve mechanic and permanent Duration cards. If done the right way and with moderation, they give you a mild board presence which adds something, while overturning neither what Dominion is, nor—maybe more importantly—what Dominion isn't.

The famous quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery springs to mind: "A designer knows [they have] achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." — Don't go crazy, show some Reserve-ation, but explore this space a little more.

Of course, phrasing the new batch of Reserve cards is tricky: either you print a second set of Tavern mats, or you don't reference it, or you do and explain in the new rulebook that you can just pretend to have a mat somehow, or... something.

There's already a mechanism for abnormal discard timing, and that's duration. Maybe you could do something like

Duration Coin
Treasure — Duration
Cost: $2
+$1
—
Directly after resolving an Action, you may get +2 Actions if you haven't done so already.

Once you take your +2 actions, Duration Coin has nothing left to do and will be discarded in your next clean-up phase. One difference is that it'll be in play rather than on a mat until you "call" it. It feels rather clunky, but I think it recaptures the reserve mechanic while neither (a) needing a Tavern mat; nor (b) jumping through completely horrendous hoops to avoid needing a Tavern mat.

Idol kinda' reintroduced the journey token, except the set of cards which shared the new journey token is {Idol} and it resets every turn. More of that could probably work fine. Meh, it's a thing you can do, not something that super excites me.

Events are cool, one could easily do more of those.

Replacement starting cards is a cool idea, one could... uh, i dunno. "In games using X, each player adds one Y to their starting deck", that does not sound great. Introduce more Heirlooms and use randomizer draw order to tie-break which ones work and which ones don't. That would introduce the unlikely possibility of having heirloomers without their heirlooms, which is... ok I guess?

TL;DR: Reserve, permanent or long Duration effects, events. Do Adventures again, basically

Edit: Oh, also, I enjoyed the modal cards from Intrigue. That can easily redone, see for example Wild Hunt

17

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Favorite Expansions in 2018

« on: April 12, 2018, 02:10:05 pm »

The expansions I own are Base (2E), Intrigue (2E), Empires and Seaside, listed from earliest to most recent purchase. My favorite opponent is my gf, and we mostly (only?) play single-set games, playing each kingdom three times. That obviously colors my evaluation.

Ordered from great to merely-moderate enjoyment of single-set games:

1. Intrigue, man, all the cards are awesome! There's strong slogging in Duke, there's quirky-draw-your-deck in Minion, there's awesome payload in Bridge, there's a cantrip engine in Conspirator if you can activate it, there are some pretty decent money enablers (not that money is often the best strategy). Plenty of really great cards; As Commodore Chuckles said in first post, classic cards that continue to be interesting.

Okay, Shanty Town, Harem and Nobles are a little bit bland. If you replaced those with Crown, Fool's Gold, Tunnel and/or Farmland, Intrigue would be nearly perfect. Swindler and Torturer can creating swingy games, let's admit faults, but man, Intrigue is great.

2. Empires is great. Variation in how you score points expands the strategy space and up-ends established. Events are cool. The cards are great. If you mix Empires in with your other expansions it's top notch frosting. For single-set games I can't help but think that I'd like some proportions that are a little more cake-heavy; maybe that's just I'm not yet bored of playing stacks of Village/Smithy variants.

3. Seaside—Tactician, Wharf, Ambassador, even the mundane Warehouse and Salvager are great fun to play with. Some of the other cards are not the most powerful ever, which is really not that important when you're playing all-Seaside, and the flavor is great.

4. Base is... Base is fine. It's on the boring simple side of things, and it has to be. No hate for Base, but it does get kind of bland after a while.

Among the ones I don't own, the ones I'm most looking forward to are:
1. Adventures — Other than the Warrior and Champion-first lotteries, everything looks great. Wonky cool duration cards. And tokens!
2. Prosperity — Holy bananas, gimme dat KC, Goons, Grand Market and City. You can keep the Loan and Counting House, though.
3. Hinterlands — No game-warpers, few hard duds. Haggler, Highway, Jack of all Trades and Scheme excite me.
4. Guilds+Cornucopia — This looks Hinterlandsy, with fewer cards that excite me but they all look nice. Guilds looks a bit more exciting than Cornucopia.
5. Dark Ages — Dark Ages looks mostly fine. Cultist, Rebuild, Urchin lottery and Knights lottery concern me, and the remaining 87.5% don't excite me quite as much as Hinterlands and Guilds.
6. Nocturne — I'm not sure about the Boons/Hexes, the theme is a little on the too supernatural side of what I think Dominion should be. The Heirloom mechanic looks cool. I guess I'm just uncertain about the new and unfamiliar.
7. Alchemy — Some cards look like real stinkers, some of the other ones look really cool. Apothecary and Vineyard in particular.

If I merge the lists with single-set play in mind, it probably comes out something like this:
1. Adventures
2. Intrigue
3. Empires
4. Prosperity
5. Hinterlands
6. Seaside
7. Guilds+Cornucopia
8. Dark Ages
9. Nocturne
10. Base
11. Alchemy

18

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Which cards are the most difficult to implement in digital format?

« on: April 12, 2018, 12:24:49 pm »

This thread of existing Card Bugs provides some evidence/context for this discussion:

http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=1226.0

Excellent, I like evidence, much approved. Maybe what we can learn from this list is how subtle some cards and interactions are, which is different from how much effort it took to implement them. This is a list consisting only of bugs that were not caught before the cards were released—we can't really know from the outside how many Possession bugs were discovered and fixed before Shuffle IT went live.

Here's my take on whether the bugs are due to the cards inherently presenting either deeply tricky issues, many finicky issues or otherwise demanding lots of effort and thought:

- BoM/Overlord bug (VP Calculations): Inherent to BoM/Overlord/plays-as-another-card
- Blessed Village (Boons out of turn): on-gain abilities and gaining cards on someone else's turn, not inherent to Blessed Village. Ambassadoring a Border Village is the same kind of timing; the Boons deck is new, maybe attribute this to the boons deck.
- Changeling (autoplay bug): really an autoplay thing, not inherent to Changeling, though Changeling is probably unique in having an on-gain exchange ability (the others are on-discard on Travelers and on-play on Vampire/Bat.)
- Crumbling Castle and Haunted Castle: finicky timing and UI issues, landmarks.
- Fool: purely a UI issue.
- Governor: seems like a simple mistake rather than Governor being hard.
- Inheritance (with Fortress): sounds like it might be related to the essentials of Inheritance. Maybe half a point to Fortress as well.
- Inn: really about Possession.
- Magic Lamp: seems to be about tricks in relation to double-playing cards and is maybe mainly because Magic Lamp is new? Let's give a full point to Magic Lamp and half a point to Crown and Counterfeit. And maybe action-throners are hard as well for the same reason, except they've already bug-fixed that by now? I notice there's no bugs about Tragic Hero, another conditional self-trasher.
- Possession (UI stuck): yep, that's Possession being long-haired for you.
- Prince (with Scheme): yep, that's Prince being tricky.
- Quarry (cost-reduction with Inheritance): that's really about Inheritance.
- Royal Carriage: yup, that's about the essentials of Royal Carriage being tricky to get right in all cases.
- Sauna: that's really about autoplay.
- Scheme: that sounds like a poor UI but no rules misinterpretation? If you play Village, Wharf, Scheme, go to cleanup phase, you should be able to choose Wharf with Scheme even though that doesn't do anything, right?
- Small Castle: seems like a simple oversight.
- Stonemason: a scenario is made impossible by an unfortunate UI choice; it's only relevant thanks to a quirky interaction between Villa and Storyteller.
- Temple: I'm not sure whether to attribute that to Temple being tricky or an only-very-bad Dominion AI being tricky. I think Vault had a similar soft lock bug a while ago and Vault wasn't on any one's list of tricky cards.
- Villa: going to your action phase with pending effects being resolved in your action phase, yeah, that's Villa being sneaky.
- Wall: hard to reproduce, so it's hard to judge.

Cards with 2 bugs due to inherent finicky-ness: Possession, Inheritance.
Cards with one such bug: BoM/Overlord, Prince, Royal Carriage, Villa, probably Magic Lamp, somewhat Scheme, maybe Stonmason, arguably the Boon/Hex mechanic.

The rest I counted as minor bugs and simple oversights, not due the card in question being inherently complex.

19

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Which cards are the most difficult to implement in digital format?

« on: April 11, 2018, 06:19:02 pm »

Have you ever tried playing with [Black Market] IRL?

I have not. I've seed it played in videos. It looks... cumbersome but reasonably straightforward. I can see tracking issues IRL: you have to remember how much of your money you've spent. What am I missing? Or is your point just that: that it's cumbersome?

I can see myself coding up something that does Base and Intrigue, and then being surprised to learn that treasures can be played in your action phase—and even more, that you can buy something in your action phase. But your claim wasn't about that, so... I'm still not seeing the thing that should make my head explode?

20

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Which cards are the most difficult to implement in digital format?

« on: April 10, 2018, 04:28:38 pm »

I think [Sentry was hard due to] the and/or part

Hmm... I gotta think that it can't take you that long until it occurs to you that "for each card, choose whether A, B or C happens to it" is equivalent to "for each of A, B and C, choose the set of cards it happens to", and that the latter admits of a much nicer UI.

Actually... if your discard pile is empty and Sentry looks at the last two cards and they are Tunnel and Overgrown Estate and you discard and reveal the Tunnel and trash the Overgrown Estate, whether or not you draw one of {Tunnel, Gold} and topdeck the other or leave them both in your discard pile depends on whether you discard Tunnel or trash Overgrown Estate first. I think. Does Shuffle IT get the interaction right? And did I get it right?

I think a potentially nice UI might be showing you the two cards, then have three choice buttons, "trash a card", "discard a card", "done". If you don't pick "done", pick a card and resolve the effect. Then show three choice buttons, "trash <name of other card>", "discard <name of other card>", "topdeck <name of other card>". If you pressed done, do a card ordering dialog for the topdecking (unless you revealed two identical cards). I think that should allow for all combinations. It might be slow, though.

Mountain Pass

Why do you think Mountain Pass would be particularly hard? It's not alone in doing things in the after-your-turn phase; the thing it does seems 90% self-contained and 10% impacting two already existing variables (#debt and #vp); and the bidding structure is fairly simple. Is it the per-game memory of "has a Province already been gained?" that you think is tricky?

Maybe cards like [Coppersmith and Envious].

I think they need a per-turn-state field, numberOfCoppersmithsInEffect :: Int and isEnviousInEffect :: Boolean. Set them to 0 and false on initialization and at turn's end; increment the one and set the other to true when you play Coppersmith and return Envious. Modify the on-play code of Copper, Silver and Gold to read these fields. It may be new that basic treasures need to take the per-turn-state record as an argument. It's not new that cards need to remember what happened or didn't happen earlier in the turn, see Hermit.

Black Market is hard to implement, not hard to implement in a digital format.

How so?

21

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Which Removed Cards Do You Use IRL?

« on: April 10, 2018, 03:23:17 pm »

Bank makes [...] your other treasures worth $1 more each (effectively).

Wow, you're totally right about Bank.

The on-play ability of Coppersmith is approximately "+$x, where x is the number of Coppers you play later this turn", except you can't determine the value of x when you need to know it. Also, the interactions with Counterfeit and Storyteller are subtly wrong with my phrasing. If you allow an even sloppier approximation, it's "Reveal your hand. +$1 for each Copper revealed".

A crazy comparison just occurs to me: Coppersmith vs. Secret Chamber (or any cards-into-money effect)—in both cases, if you plan to use this as a payload you'll be drawing lots of cards that you either won't play or will play for a very small per-card effect, and that's usually not great; Silver and Gold both offer much greater per-card payload value. The cool thing about Coppersmith that's not true about Secret Chamber is that you can re-use the same card for multiple Coppersmiths but not for multiple Secret Chambers, since you only "reveal" the Copper and don't discard it. (You're then required to play that Copper for the approximation to work, and it's wrong in many ways, but you know, in practice it's pretty close.)

You could phrase Bank as "for the remainder of this turn, when you play a treasure, you first get +". You would want to play it before rather than after your other treasures, and playing a treasure vs. having one in play is slightly different, but it'd be pretty much the same card if done that way.

Likewise, the text of Duke might as well be "Each of your Duchies is worth an additional 1 ". Here it really doesn't matter, since you score all your cards simultaneously—there are no timing problems it could have, and nothing is dependent on the VP value of your cards the way Storyteller is dependent on the money value of your cards.

The general principle is that <X does 1 thing per Y> and <X does 'each Y does 1 more thing'> are equivalent (typically, approximately, [edgecases-edgecaseseverywhere.jpg]).

22

General Discussion / Re: Dominion Cards that put songs in your mind

« on: April 10, 2018, 02:53:35 pm »

Oh, how could I have forgotten Wandering Minstrel?

And here I was expecting Sir Robin's minstrels from Monty Python and the Holy Grail [1].

So often the optimal number of Heroes you want to get is 1 which you exchange into a Champion and you want to keep the Warriors for the draw. This means the right thing to sing when MFs Exchange Screen pops up is: "We don't need another Hero."

... and for those exceptional times: Bonnie Tyler — I need a Hero [2].

In games with lots of Gold-gaining, my friend and I often sing Gold by Imagine Dragons.

When I was 80% of the way through that sentence, I expected it to end with "by Spandau Ballet" [3].


Some of my favorites are:

Masquerade: Rainbow — Black Masquerade [4]
Throne Room: John Williams — Throne Room [5]

[1]



[2]



[3]



[4]



[5]

23

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card

« on: April 10, 2018, 12:59:51 pm »

(in terms of net bonuses)

24

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Which Removed Cards Do You Use IRL?

« on: April 10, 2018, 12:41:34 pm »

I've been coming back to this thread and re-reading my post.

[TL;DR: I like Coppersmith, maybe Saboteur, a teensy tiny bit Tribute and Secret Chamber but very meh...]

Locusts provides roughly the same attack as Saboteur. You can't steer the Hex deck really well so you can't build a strategy around it, but it does let you anti-Rebuild your opponent's Provinces.

Also, hey, there's Giant which just trashes almost the same set of cards, and there's Swindler which turns cards into worse cards, and with Highway and Giant you can still trash Provinces.

So I'm totally not going to feel sad that I don't get to play with Saboteur; the similar-enough replacements are there.

Also, Counting House makes your coppers better, though in a different way and in different situations than Coppersmith. Bank makes your coppers better just as well as Coppersmith, although it also makes all your other treasures worth $1 more each (effectively). You can King's Court your Coppersmiths where you can only Crown your Banks, but you'll have a tough time finding that I care about that difference. Bank doesn't say "the meek shall inherit the earth" or whatever the same way Coppersmith does. Meh.

So I'm down to being sad about approximately 0 out of 12 cards. Only Tribute and Secret Chamber are still even considerations, and... yeah, no, I just don't care.

25

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: "Demon", the Druid of Hexes

« on: April 10, 2018, 11:56:26 am »

[Tormentor once did 'victim chooses one of two random hexes'] It was waaaaay too slow. Especially if you didn't have the Hexes memorized. I like the Druid version here better. Specifically one that lets the victim choose between two static Hexes.

Rotating brings back the slowness. Having three static Hexes is maybe too much to think about. Two seems reasonable.

Interesting. So I guess you looked at Pie Rule Demon and instantly concluded that it was too slow? Do you have any insight into what makes things slow and how to avoid it that you can articulate?

I guess "more decisions" and "more hard-to-calculate consequences of each decision (on average)" are two key factors. With a static Hex pool, there are (1) no rotation decisions; (2) that much less to read on each play, because you remember the effect of the two set-aside Hexes; and (3) you can generally estimate which Hex will be strongest against the kind of deck you're building, and quickly estimate whether the evaluation has flipped in each situation. Also (4) with a static pool, figuring out the interactions between the hexes when dealt out sequentially can be done as a one-time thing. (It's always a per-pool thing, but with a static pool there's only one pool, duh.)

Having just one [Hex] can often be too harsh. [...] Obviously if Misery is one of them, I think you just take the -4 VP and call it a day.

Yay, I spotted things on my own that others agree with

I don't like that you can just take -4 VP and call it a day when that occurs once every 6 Demon games. That's why I really want Veto Demon to be good.

I think beyond Delusion and Envy, the other one you need to worry about is War.  I just tried flipping up the top two hexes and they were Delusion+War and doesn't that sound nasty?

Uh, yeah. Especially with only one gain per turn—do you give up this turn's action card gain, or do you give up an earlier turn's gain? Demons trashing Demons, Knight-like fight to see who gets to keep a trashing attack, that could get really dicey and insert a long preamble before the real game begins. Except Demon (currently) doesn't have trash-the-attacking-card text, and I think it would be clunky if added. Or you just play Smithy/BM against this combination —I recall there was a bit in the pinned thread saying "your card should not excessively encourage players to play uninteresting strategies".

That is definitely a concern. Well spotted. Also, both Veto Demon and Pie Rule Demon face this; one obvious way around this is to change "3" to "4" on Veto Demon, but that makes it weaker and probably slower on average. Another is to buff the non-attack on-play of Demon and bump it up to $5; that way it can't be trashed by War, which... accomplishes something? It makes the very powerful Hex pair Demons stay around longer—which is great, mission success!

Hm. Hmm. Interesting. Well spotted.