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Messages - boris

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1
Adam Horton talked a couple times about organizing IRL tournaments on the Making Luck podcast and said that he banned some cards due to various reasons. One of the reason for a card getting banned is if it takes long to resolve. Here is a blog post by him on this topic (I only skimmed it): https://adamhorton.com/flog/dominion-running-an-irl-tournament/

I guess you should be able to find more information on his website.

In addition to not playing with stuff like scrying pool, I would say that playing without any villages speeds things up.

2
Today I trashed a Province with Catapult reaching 8$ to grab the last Province and win with a one-point lead because of the curse from the Catapult.

It felt weird trashing a Province with Catapult.

3
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas
« on: November 29, 2018, 06:29:17 pm »
Money Laundering
Treasure
Cost: $5

$1
Return a Treasure card you have in play to your hand.
Interesting, and not necessarily a really bad idea. Crown has shown that playing a Treasure twice isn't overpowered, and Money Laundering is quite close to being a Scepter for treasures in most cases. It's not often that you'd draw Money Laundering after playing a Treasure, and not often you'd want to to do anything with the Treasure other than play it again. The corner-case exceptions might be enough to make it fun.

The $1 feels unnecessary, though?

I also think that it could be interesting. It would create a nice combo with Capital (better than Crown, because you could play the same Capital more than twice). I didn't think thoroughly about it, though.

The $1 probably makes it an RBCI :P With the current wording, you can trivially create endless money. Play "Money Laundering", get it back to your hand, play it again and repeat.

EDIT: (I know it's RBCI but anyway) Also removing $1 would not be enough. I guess 1 Counterfeit + 1 Money Laundering, which would be great in terms of theme, could create endless money and buys. It could still be a nice card after some changes.

4
Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Best Asymptotic Point Scoring
« on: November 21, 2018, 03:36:47 pm »
Really great work. As far as I understand the growth analysis, it seems fine, but I cannot follow two steps, which are more related to Dominion rules.
If we started with 2A BMs and 2A Hs, doing one step of this loop gains us (2A)^2=4A^2 cards. We can choose this to be 2A^2 BMs and 2A^2 Hs. We can repeat the loop by playing all the Hs then all the BMs again. Even ignoring the Hagglers played in previous steps, one step of this loop changes A to A^2 (i.e. A -> A^2 -> A^4 -> A^8 -> ... ), so with B SPs, we can end up with 4*A^(2^B) actions in our hand costing less than 6.

It seems to me that this needs additional support, because every pair of BM and Haggler gives you 4 coins, but 6 are necessary for Fairgrounds. Asymptotically, this would not change a lot I guess, since two-thirds of the cards could still be gained.

Now, we can repeat this second loop for every Golem we started with. Since we started with X BM, H, SP, and got to repeat this loop X times, we went from A to 2^(2^A) X times, starting at X, which is (2↑↑(2X))^X > 8 * 2↑↑(2X). Letting Y = 2↑↑(2X), we can let this be 4Y SPs in hand and 4Y changelings on the top of our deck, and play all the SPs, drawing the 4Y changelings. Then, in our Night phase, we use the Changelings to gain Y each of BM, H, SP, G, topdecking them (putting the scrying pools on top for next turn).

Where do the changelings come from? I could imagine that these could be exchanged tradered silvers, but you mention drawing some silvers and trashing them with Count. 


5
Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Best Asymptotic Point Scoring
« on: November 21, 2018, 03:30:30 am »
In summary:
  • Kingdom: Black Market, Haggler, Scrying Pool, Squire, Golem, Count, Changeling, Page.
    (BM deck: Fairgrounds, Trader, Royal Seal).
  • Growth rate: f(n) = 2↑↑↑(2n-c)
  • No Renaissance cards needed!

Wow!
I need to carefully go through this again, but I guess, there should also be a gardens to gain some VP. Or am I missing something?

6
Cobbler/Cathedral in general but especially Cobbler/Cathedral + Rats/Lackeys
Had all four of those in a game just now. Gain Rats with Cobbler just to trash it to Cathedral for an extra card or gain Lackeys for +2 Villagers just to trash it.

Was this actually good? Couldn't you just get something with Cobbler that you actually wanted and skipped the Cathedral? Cobbler/Cathedral + Rats alone is just a worse Ghost Town.

7
Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Missing auto-plays
« on: November 09, 2018, 02:45:29 am »
Autoplay Workshop/Gardens on suitable boards.

Autoplay Smithy-BM on Base only boards without splitters. :P

(and without Workshop/Gardens I guess)

Autoplay as Lord Rattington would be great :P

8
You're gonna run out of Watchtowers, though.

Ah yes, that's true.

9
Capitalism drastically simplifies infinite loops. This is a loop for arbitrary amounts of VP:

Hand: Storyteller, Rogue, Monument, Watchtower

Trash: Mandarin

Play Storyteller to play Monument, Rogue gaining Mandarin (topdeck Storyteller, Monument, Rogue), reveal Watchtower to trash, draw Storyteller, Monument, Rogue back from Storyteller.

Awesome find. You don't even need Monument per se; anything with +coins and +buy will also do the trick, since you can play it an arbitrary amount of times and just empty the supply afterwards. Goons is best, of course, but you win even without the VP chips.

Still, you'll likely not see a board with all of Mandarin, Storyteller, Watchtower, Rogue and Capitalism in a lifetime if you always play full random.

You'd need some way to build up coins, which you can't do if Storyteller keeps eating them. But it should be simple enough to find an alternative to Storyteller.

I think Black Market plus Festival would work to provide unbounded buys and coins.
You play BM, and then Festival to get two actions. Now you can play Monument and Rogue as part of BM, gaining Mandarin to topdeck all four cards and trashing Mandarin as before. You have now two actions and use one for Watch Tower to draw your topdecked cards. The last remaining action can be used for BM again at which point the cycle repeats.   

10
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card
« on: November 05, 2018, 12:47:13 pm »

11
Another interaction, which I noticed: you can make Peddlers cheaper on boards without non-terminal actions (other than Peddler). 

12
I don't whether this qualifies as unexpected, but Bank can become pretty strong, with significantly less effort.

13
Storyteller playing actions with "+ Coin" (obviously) and "+ 1 Action" enables village-like effects.

14
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: New fan based alchemy cards.
« on: October 29, 2018, 03:52:19 am »
Village idiot is a weaker version of swamp hag. Cause a copper is always better than a curse.

I thought a bit about it and I also think, that it is comparable to swamp hag, but I would not say that it is necessarily weaker. Village idiot is non-terminal and therefore simpler to play in multiples and you can get it sooner than swamp hag.

I would not say that copper is always better than curses, at least in the long run. Curses run out eventually, but there are 46 coppers.

What I would be concerned about, are situations which completely wreck the next turn of your opponent. If you have played 4 village idiots (and you decide not to get the coppers altogether, because you already have 20) then all cards cost at least as much as a card like city quarter, which is a pretty strong card. Playing 4 witches and 4 swamp hags on the other hand is more difficult, because these cards are terminal. On top of that,  their effects eventually wear off.

So throne room issues aside, the card may create situations where your opponent's deck is either full of coppers or they cannot buy a whole lot. I guess removing "+1 Action" would solve this and the price might still be reasonable.

15
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: New fan based alchemy cards.
« on: October 27, 2018, 11:18:54 am »


I think this could be too strong with the current wording. If you for instance throne two village idiots, which probably would not be hard, this could really hurt opponents. Maybe consider "while this is in play" to rule out throne room stuff. Still, it is relatively simple to play multiple village idiots I believe.

16
I'm aware you can embed infinity. Another more complicated way to do so wold be via the kc/throne room/procession stack. That doesn't imply any sort of undecidability though.

You are right, having arbitrarily large piles by itself does not imply undecidability. You need to factor in game strategies, which simulate TM logic. From that point of view, TM completeness is not extremely surprising.

17
I think there may be two separate questions going on in this thread at the same time.

The first question I'd describe as something like:
1) Can you make an encoding of a Turing machine's program and state as Dominion states, where if the Turing machine can perform a step, the Dominion state can perform the same step using legal game actions?

Most of the posts seem to be concerned with this question, and I think the answer is very likely yes. However, this question is different from these questions:
2a) Can a computer program determine if a starting Dominion state A can reach another Dominion state B?
2b) Can a computer program determine if, from a starting Dominion state A, it is possible for player 1 have more points than player 2 at the end of this turn?

If there's no computer program that can solve 2a) or 2b), that would be the typical way of saying that it is undecidable/Turing complete to reason about Dominion.

I agree, most likely you can encode a TM. As noted in previous posts, this is actually quite simply, because you do not need a lot more than two counters/stacks.
Regarding 2a and 2b, I think you should not confuse Turing completeness and undecidability. 2a (and maybe also 2b) follow from Turing completeness, but I guess the opposite does not hold.

Note that even if the answer to 1) is yes, it doesn't necessarily imply that 2a) or 2b) are impossible. To see this, consider the game Calvinball-Dominion, which is just like Dominion except that in your action phase, you also have the option to move a card from any zone to another as many times as you want, whenever you want. This game can certainly encode a Turing machine in its possible states by just moving stuff around arbitrarily. But it is also easy to reason about this game: given a starting state, you can basically reach any state that has the same cards in the kingdom.

If we're just trying to answer question 1), I think we're basically there. I have a bit to add that with opponent cooperation, you can make the top of their deck a stack as well: add to the top of their deck with Sea Hag (Curse) or gaining Embassy (Silver), with them topdecking with Watchtower for the silvers, and remove from the top of the deck with Jester.

Question 2) seems way harder to resolve and I'm not sure what the answer is.

That is where I was getting at in my post. Answering 2a for general boards without any restrictions on players' strategies is undecidable, but may be decidable in some scenarios.

The observations regarding Turing-completeness imply that making a perfect bot is basically impossible.  Given specific restricted scenarios/board, the situation may be different.

I need to think a bit more about question 2, but probably simulation (combined with some form of optimisation) is the best tool to answer such questions.

18
Villagers and Coffers are infinite, you can save two slots of arbitrary data in a Dominion game. Loops with Lurker, Graverobber or Rogue allow you to have infinite operations. It is easy to build a two-stack push down automaton. That proves, that Dominion is Turing-complete.

Yes, I agree, all you need is to have these two piles which you can control freely. One non-trivial issue, though, is input encoding. You would need to show that your TM/2-counter/stack machine encoding (two piles + trash-gainer + deterministic player decisions) does the same as the respective machine on any input. Now there are infinitely many inputs and you need to encode them with the rest of Dominion. I think this could be done by assuming no randomness and to predetermine card order after shuffling based on what input should be encoded.
The top of your deck is essentially a stack, and top-decking/drawing are your push-pop actions. So as long as you control how much you can draw (or you assume some kind of infinite deck), you never have to worry about shuffling.

You are right, you can do that with some initialization. In that case, we would another form of input. The opponent could for instance pass "inputs" via Masquerade. Maybe that would even make more sense than using the deck for input encoding. However, the opponent would need to be non-random. 

19
Villagers and Coffers are infinite, you can save two slots of arbitrary data in a Dominion game. Loops with Lurker, Graverobber or Rogue allow you to have infinite operations. It is easy to build a two-stack push down automaton. That proves, that Dominion is Turing-complete.

Yes, I agree, all you need is to have these two piles which you can control freely. One non-trivial issue, though, is input encoding. You would need to show that your TM/2-counter/stack machine encoding (two piles + trash-gainer + deterministic player decisions) does the same as the respective machine on any input. Now there are infinitely many inputs and you need to encode them with the rest of Dominion. I think this could be done by assuming no randomness and to predetermine card order after shuffling based on what input should be encoded.

So the general question whether some game state can be reached is undecidable. It would also be interesting what other questions are undecidable as well, especially if you factor in randomness again. And it might be interesting where the boundary between decidability/undecidability lies. For instance, it is probably possible to reason about expected outcomes of competing Big Money strategies (assuming that you find suitable definition), but are all questions concerning Big Money decidable?

20
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dutch Nocturne is 'expected'...
« on: September 20, 2018, 02:30:34 pm »
(is 'orderable' even a word?)

In English, anything can be a word

Am American, can confirm

Challenge: translate German compound nouns. In German, anything can be a word. An elegant example would be "Hauptbahnhof" for "main railway station".

Sorry about continuing the OT.

21
In a sloggy game without Estate trashing and Haunted Woods, i discovered that Crossroads can be a soft counter to the Attack part of Haunted Woods.

It is not super efficient, but for instance topdecking three green cards and Crossroads can provide a start with 4 other cards + 3 Actions in the next turn.

22
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Semi-Interesting Dominion Moments Thread
« on: September 13, 2018, 06:08:43 pm »
I played a game where I gained a ghost which I used only twice.
First hit: Forge with no reasonable targets. First use gains a copper for me and the other discarding a card by trashing and regaining it.
Second hit: Small Castle when the castle pile was already empty. At least I got 1VP as I had Crumbling Castle in hand.

I still won though. I might have had some luck otherwise.

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