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1

Goko Dominion Online / Re: I'm switching to Goko, because Dominion > Isotropic!

« on: March 08, 2013, 04:03:16 pm »

My perception is that Dominion =/= Isotropic.  Dominion is a solid game.  Isotropic is a solid foundation for online board gaming.

I think this statement is pretty grandiose - much of what you're calling "Isotropic" is likely quite specific to Dominion UI, and the parts that aren't don't seem particularly different from how internet game servers have run for a long time. I've looked briefly at Innovation (which I'm not familiar with) and it doesn't look nearly as amenable to the isotropic style UI that fits Dominion so well. More than most games I know, Dominion fits really well with being played online. (edit: That said, I'm now interested in learning Innovation, so mission accomplished there. We'll have to see if a remotely comparable player base ever gets established.)

I'm having a hard time imagining being offended over one's true Dominion fanhood being impugned. I guess that's a meta-insult.

2

Dominion Isotropic / Re: The Future of Isotropic

« on: March 06, 2013, 12:02:46 pm »

I'd like to talk about what Isotropic will be then.

It will presumably continue to be what it already is - a place where dougz messes around with things he likes.

3

Dominion Isotropic / Re: Dark Ages on Isotropic?

« on: February 28, 2013, 12:38:39 pm »

This probably has been asked somewhere else, but why dougz hasn't bought the rights himself, with the help of the community if needed?

Yes, it has been. dougz is not interested in running a Dominion business, and I believe it was also viewed as important to have the official version look nicer.

4

Dominion Isotropic / Re: Dark Ages on Isotropic?

« on: February 28, 2013, 12:11:38 pm »

Yeah, I think for a lot of people the end of Iso will be the end of Dominion for them. The physical game is too cumbersome for my tastes, and Goko has a way too Zynga vibe and I wouldn't be able to play it at work anyway.

Yep.

Donald has certainly commented before that people are complaining because they were given something free and then it was taken away from them. That's certainly true, but that leaves out a pretty big aspect of the issue: Donald gets something out of it too. The only reason I know of Dominion and have spent any money on it at all is because of isotropic.

Seen as a purely strategic issue, it's really not clear to me what the best course of action is. Dark Ages exclusivity certainly seems to have drawn some people to Goko; on the other hand, I suspect there are a fair number of people like me who have a sour view of the whole thing that turns them off. Eons ago rspeer made the analogy to Scrabble and Hasbro, which seemed pretty apt, then and now. I guess since so many of the best board and card games are "public domain" (chess, go, backgammon, poker, etc.) that I'm really unused to thinking about board games from an intellectual property perspective and (without any commentary on the correctness of this attitude) it's a pretty big buzzkill when somebody insists on framing it that way.

5

Game Reports / Re: Somebody please tell me what happened!

« on: February 16, 2012, 10:31:20 am »

Not getting a Familiar as soon as possible is suicide (which is why the $2P is so deadly)

I mean, that's obvious in games where there's no good buy at $2P. In the specific case of Apothecary, I think it's less obvious. I wouldn't be surprised at all if that were still true, but Apothecary in particular is such a fantastic early card. Early on it offers huge draw and cycling, meaning that you can get your Potion back in hand and a Familiar running relatively quickly. It also offers pretty early shots at $6 that are very unusual in Familiar games.

added: In the meantime, I found the game I was thinking of. It was actually from the tournament:

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20111129-182040-12d0faf4.html

6

Game Reports / Re: Somebody please tell me what happened!

« on: February 16, 2012, 10:05:13 am »

I've actually wondered if in Apothecary/Familiar games you aren't better off getting the Apothecary before the Familiar. I stumbled upon this once in a 2+P situation and ended up with a basically even curse split with my opponent who got a turn 3 Familiar. My economy was substantially better from the early Apothecary, though, and so I won. I think Apothecary is way preferable to Pool here early, although after I have 1 or maybe 2 Apothecaries I do switch to Pools.

Can't find the game at the moment, but if I do manage to I'll post it.

7

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Official(?) Dominion App Available on iTunes

« on: February 14, 2012, 02:52:44 pm »

Well the AI would be just very simple to learn the basics, so I assume that the app would be primary for multiplayer...and what the hell is more important for multiplayer than rating?

I would say being able to actually play the game against other people is more important. While I tend to agree that a lot of people here are driven by the urge to sit atop a leaderboard, I could also imagine that there's a potentially large casual fanbase that doesn't care at all that would be perfectly happy to just play the game.

We'll see how the final product turns out. I'm fairly pessimistic about this sort of thing but who knows, maybe it will still be appealing to the hardcore fans. The BGG thread mentioning that user-created AIs may be possible is promising.

8

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Jack and Warehouse? Good or bad?

« on: February 14, 2012, 10:39:17 am »

I like Jack/Warehouse, although I'm not sure you really need to bother with a second Jack unless you're getting attacked.

9

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Pivoting out of Fool's Gold?

« on: February 11, 2012, 03:36:12 pm »

No, conceding all the Fool's Gold is a bad idea.

I think this is the sort of spot where you plan on converting the FGs to Golds whenever given the opportunity.

10

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What is the worst card in Dominion?

« on: February 08, 2012, 05:44:59 pm »

Optimal is defined as "most VP gained per turn." And a Goons engine can gain VP infinitely as long as you return the cards you buy with Ambassador. The deck consists of all action cards and ~60 coppers. Counting house to draw the coppers, scrying pool to draw the rest. Return the coppers with KC'ed Ambassadors, play all the goons and buy them all again. There's more to it, but that's the basic idea.

Aha, fair enough.

11

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What is the worst card in Dominion?

« on: February 08, 2012, 02:21:57 pm »

For what it's worth, Counting House is an integral part of the optimal infinite VP-gaining engine. 

a) How is optimal defined?

b) No matter how you define it I have a hard time believing that, since any true infinite VP-gaining engine can only be based on Monument, as Bishop and Goons will eventually exhaust piles.

12

Dominion Articles / Re: Fool's Gold + Chapel

« on: February 07, 2012, 03:54:25 pm »

A little fix so it only plays chapel from first position. This beats pure FG 48-45. The reason is that as first player, you can still get an OK FG split, but as second player, you can't.

Is this predicated on the assumption that 1st player is going FG/FG from the getgo? A lot of the discussion is centered on the idea that FG is being picked up by the opponent as a blocker. If that's the case, then I don't see why second player should be getting hosed here, because they will often come out of the first shuffle with either a 1 FG edge or FG parity, not behind by 1 FG.

13

Dominion Articles / Re: Fool's Gold + Chapel

« on: February 07, 2012, 03:20:51 pm »

Yeah, I'd think that if you're going against another FG gaining strategy you absolutely want to be gaining FGs even at the cost of less than maximal Chapeling. If you end up doing worse than just raw FG+Big Money that way, I'd guess it's because you don't get enough speedup to make up for the missing Estate points. I'd be really surprised if that were true, but it also wouldn't be astonishing if you didn't get huge gains. added: This is presumably the crux of WW's argument that you expect Steward to be straight better in a realistic environment - even without the eventual benefits Steward offers, you're unlikely to be able to use your Chapel as anything more than a glorified Steward anyway.

14

Dominion Articles / Re: Fool's Gold + Chapel

« on: February 07, 2012, 10:57:48 am »

Yup. Any of those things will beat you. You can buy golds too, but you're basically just running chapel=>BM, which simply isn't good.

Yeah, but then what is your opponent running? If they've taken a sideline into FG just to block you, it doesn't seem likely that their deck is going to be well optimized for anything. Thus the fact that you're slow in an absolute sense doesn't matter much because your opponent is probably slowing down substantially in order to keep you from getting fast. This same phenomenon seems to happen a lot in Minion games. added: Embargo is obviously a completely different story, that's a good stopper.

While I'd agree Chapel isn't the best FG enabler, I do think that it's a pretty workable plan.

15

Game Reports / Re: Tactical embargoing

« on: February 06, 2012, 02:07:24 pm »

If someone is willing to buy through the Embargoed Minions to get their engine going, as the majority of people seem to be suggesting is worth it with the Chapel, wouldn't you just Embargo the Minions again?

What you're hoping to achieve with Embargoing the Minions is slowing them down at the beginning. As such, yeah, if you can get 2 Embargoes up relatively quickly, it's worth a shot. But once they've thinned and have multiple Minions it's really not likely to be that big of a difference. A deck of a few Minions, Chapel and 2 Curses should be able to get $5 and trash 2 Curses quite reliably while keeping you at 4 cards a hand every turn.

added: Similarly, while Noble Brigand will slowly pump Coppers into the Minion deck, that's unlikely to be a big deal unless the opponent has pursued something like a Chapel/Noble Brigand strategy. Otherwise I'd imagine the penalty for having a +$1 terminal as a major component of your deck more than makes up for the attack.

16

Help! / Re: Beaten by my own Lookout (and numerous other things too)

« on: February 06, 2012, 12:01:31 pm »

1. worker's village + lookout is not a terrible opening with peddlers lurking, especially because you'll want the worker's village later for torturing. wv + silver makes a little less sense to me, but isn't terrible. i may be wrong, as the power fives are so important that it may be worth foregoing an aggressive peddler opening in favor of making sure you'll get 5 on the second shuffle. but wv + silver seems like a mix and match of an aggressive peddler opening and a make sure you get 5 on the second shuffle opening, and that can't be right. lookout + lookout is not bad at scoring you peddlers either.

Lookout/Lookout seems likely to be a pretty big dog to WV/Lookout in terms of Peddler rushing. And I think Peddler rushing is probably what I'd be inclined to do on this board. Once you've done that, it's quite easy to go back and then pick up a couple of attacks. I think the timing on this is likely to work out just fine - since you're getting WVs and building your economy, you will transition smoothly into an already fully functioning Torturer engine quite quickly. If your opponent went attacks first, then you will probably have a decisive Peddler advantage - if your opponent is also Peddler rushing, then you're basically at parity.

The Horse Traders/Shanty Town opening is interesting, in that it allows flexibility to go either way depending upon what you draw.

17

Dominion General Discussion / Re: THE Dominion Card List(s): $6 cards

« on: February 06, 2012, 11:49:03 am »

And Expand helps you get extra Provinces -- about as often as Fairgrounds ARE extra Provinces.

This seems like crazy talk to me, and I'm one of the people who agrees that Fairgrounds are underranked on this list. 6 VP Fairgrounds being a legitimately strong plan (I'm not that interested in desperation plays where it's a low probability gamble to recover) is not exactly rare, but still way less common than Expand boosting Golds or 5s to Provinces in the late game.

Forge is the top of my "Effect With" list at 2.5, for whatever that's worth. Like Outpost, it deserves to be near the bottom of this list because it's very often neglectable . . . but like Outpost, it occasionally kicks mega-ass.

18

Game Reports / Re: Tactical embargoing

« on: February 06, 2012, 09:16:37 am »

If you're going for any sort of Big Money you really need to embargo both FG and Minion. Chapel + either will be quite strong, even without +buy. Chapel/Minion is probably more robust against a single Embargo - once you've thinned and have mostly Minions, it will be pretty easy to end each turn with Chapel and Curse in hand. But the flipside of that is that Chapel/FG is quicker to get going, so if your opponent does not lay down the Embargo on that as early as possible you can probably get pretty strong quickly.

So basically this seems like a set where what your opponent does is crucial to making the right decision. I'd say Chapel/Minion is the correct plan against an Embargoing opponent, but if your opponent has missed the Embargo idea Chapel/FG is better.

19

Dominion General Discussion / Re: THE Dominion Card List(s): $6 cards

« on: February 06, 2012, 09:05:19 am »

I'm still in the KC > Goons camp, but those guys are definitely right that Goons > GM.

I'd put Fairgrounds above Harem, probably, and I think I like Expand better than Nobles and Bank. Otherwise, seems pretty reasonable.

20

Dominion General Discussion / Re: THE Dominion Card List(s): $5 cards

« on: February 03, 2012, 10:42:40 pm »

What matters is still the amount of time it's actually useful, no?

Obviously that's not all that matters, otherwise we'd be talking about Caravan and Lab as being among the very elite cards in the game. added: I just find "sort by % gained" to be a very incomplete metric. Sure, it's something to look at, but there's other stuff going on in my opinion.

21

Dominion General Discussion / Re: THE Dominion Card List(s): $5 cards

« on: February 03, 2012, 10:08:32 pm »

It sounds to me like the way you worded it should strongly favor Goons. If you remove KC from a KC deck, you have a deck that can't get mega-turns, but still has all the pieces to do something. If you remove Goons from a Goons deck, you have absolutely nothing...

Goons as a slight patch on Big Money seems pretty common to me. If you then look at the kingdom minus Goons, it is most likely that if that's what was best before, what will be best now is basically a Big Money deck plus a terminal or two. Quite similar. By contrast, there are a lot of engines that become sufficiently strong to be best only in the presence of King's Court. If you remove King's Court from those boards, often you will move from an enginey setup back to a slightly modified Big Money deck being best.

22

Dominion General Discussion / Re: THE Dominion Card List(s): $5 cards

« on: February 03, 2012, 06:05:16 pm »

Here is a possible claim that might illustrate what it would mean to "change the game more." I'm not sure if this is true, but intuitively I'm inclined to think it is.

Imagine that we can construct ideal decks for a given set of kingdom cards. (Is that well defined? Almost certainly not, as what your opponent does will often suggest minor modifications. Nevertheless I think people will know what I mean here.) Now imagine comparing the ideal decks for two kingdoms where the only difference is the second kingdom is missing one card. I would claim that if you remove KC, on average the change in ideal decks is quite substantial - without KC to superpower them many engine strategies become void. By contrast, Goons can often be a small change to an ideal deck. It may offer a considerable improvement, but it doesn't change the strategy in the same way.

23

Dominion General Discussion / Re: THE Dominion Card List(s): $5 cards

« on: February 02, 2012, 02:58:10 pm »

To sum up, Goons is much better than KC according to any reasonable'ish definition of "better" I can think of.

Except, apparently, "more powerful."

I think most would agree that you want Goons in more decks than you want KC. However, often when you want KC it is a completely dominant card. The situations where a true Goons engine is possible (and thus dominant) are somewhat rarer.

24

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Mandarin: How do we use the $5/$5 split?

« on: January 27, 2012, 11:33:04 am »

Mandarin/Mint/nothing as an opener on 5/2 seems to be losing to big money (on 4/3). It does beat BM when it opens 5/2 though, so I guess if there's literally no better strategy on the board and you open 5/2, Mandarin/Mint/nothing is preferrable to Silver/nothing at least. Either way, I'm not exactly convinced.

Yeah, I think my memories are probably out of whack on this one. I've had them together 3 times (would have guessed it was more) and twice used it as an opening. In one case it nearly saved me against a JoaT/Fishing Village open - using 5/2 on JoaT/nothing seemed like a losing proposition so I gambled on Mandarin/Mint. It worked really well - I still got to 4 Provinces in 14 turns despite the delayed JoaT - but then JoaT and Fishing Village are practically ideal complements to that plan. The other game I played with it I have literally no idea what my plan was, as I appeared to be neglecting a Torturer/Farming Village setup.

25

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Mandarin: How do we use the $5/$5 split?

« on: January 27, 2012, 08:57:17 am »

Mandarin/Mint did cross my mind, though I wonder how good an idea that is, as you still need to get to gold to have something worth minting, and you'll still need to buy a silver to get to that stage.

It's not bad, although usually when I'm playing it it's because the 5/2 options are not at all appealing.