Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

26

Dominion World Masters / Re: Finals order [plus a point/card counter debate]

« on: July 03, 2012, 10:28:49 pm »

Re: Marriage / Tournament analogy
----
This is why you form an explicit agreement upon entry into the tournament / wedding / whatever.  You codify what is and is not allowed.  You make a binding contract of a social nature.

The social contract involved in entering into the qualifier tournament included absolutely no particulars that stated that (external) point counters were disallowed, in fact, the isotropic counter was to default to ON. 

If you enter into an open marriage, you don't get to say "Yeah, i said you could have sex with other people, but i'm upset because you went and did it with a girl."  Girls are people, too!

Unless, of course, you say it outright, from the beginning.  Then it's a rule. 

27

Dominion World Masters / Re: Finals order [plus a point/card counter debate]

« on: July 03, 2012, 04:44:55 pm »

I've seen so many games fail this way....

This is where people have their blinders on.  They only remember "Hey, i like to play this game offline, let's do the same thing, but on the internet" and don't think "Hey, this game is good offline, maybe it could be great online". 

I also don't understand it.  I don't see people pushing for a button to push to manually reshuffle their decks or draw their cards...The interface is sleek and streamlined and takes away all of the unnecessary grunt work, leaving you to play the GAME.  A point counter does the same thing.  It doesn't play for you, it doesn't do anything that you can't do on your own, it just does it faster. 

28

Feedback / Re: Mafia

« on: May 25, 2012, 05:24:01 pm »

To be honest, it bugs me too, and I'm participating in a Mafia game.  I read "Recent Posts", which is flooded with Mafia posts now.

One suggestion is to browse the forum with "unread topics": http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?action=unread;start=0

Another is to use http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?action=unread;c=1 which is all unread posts in the Dominion-related forums.

Is there a way to get seperate RSS feeds that include/exclude certain subforums?  I don't actually look at the webpage proper anymore except to post once in a rare while...just glance at the rss feeds regularly. 

29

Help! / Re: Torturer Chains

« on: May 05, 2012, 04:17:16 pm »

I'd suggest that great halls were in error, since torturer decks often (almost always) are dead-drawing cards off of torturer.  Both of you did wind up buying them (presumably to have some hope of winning the three-pile victory, which wound up not mattering) but you started and wound up with far more.  The log doesn't tell me for certain that that is the reason why you had such difficulty getting to 5-6 for extra torturers after turn 6, but i have my suspicion. 

With border village especially, you don't want to be dead drawing extra green.  Also, headso's approach of having 1 extra village can make it easier to set up chains and harder to draw dead actions. 

30

Council Room Feedback / Re: Useful use of Councilroom data?

« on: May 04, 2012, 08:49:17 pm »

It would be marginally interesting to go back over tournament results and use this predictor as a comparison against the baseline (level) predictor for the results, and it would be relatively simple to script it out.

However, until the next tournament comes out and people start betting on their tournament brackets, it's of no practical value.  I'd even argue that its' academic value is tainted by virtue of the fact that the "training set" of data (all games by player X on CR) is included within the "testing set" of data (some specific games by player X, also on CR)

31

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The game's largest structural flaw, imho

« on: May 03, 2012, 10:20:12 pm »

Edit: With your system it is far less relevant as if I buy Library Library festival I need only to draw a festival to allow the playment of my second library instead of as currently you need to control the luck as best you can.

How do you control luck, again?

32

Dominion Isotropic / Re: What's the worst Isotropic quirk in your opinion?

« on: April 19, 2012, 10:32:35 pm »

My friend makes me a nice cheesy casserole. I'm not going to tell them that I hate cheese incessantly, even though I do. Heck, if they're there, I'll even eat the thing, though it's terribly terribly disgusting to me. And in this case, I'm not going to tell them that, unless they ask. 'cause it just seems rude and ungrateful. Or I guess if it was like someone really really really close to me, I might tell them then, because I know they can take it, and they're close enough to me yadda yadda. But we're talking like family here.

This is the part of the social contract that I hate.  If you don't like my cheese casserole, let me know (preferably by saying "yeah i just dont like cheese, not my thing" of course - a little tact never hurt...) and it'll help both of us out.  I'm not going to be that put out to try to do something to remedy the situation, and you won't have to eat shit you don't like.  At very least, in the future, i'll actually know better. 

33

Help! / Re: WW needs help - how does Marin do it?

« on: April 15, 2012, 12:22:27 am »

If you're not ending the game and there is a possibility of the opponent coming from behind and winning, then you have taken a risk for absolutely no reward.If you're not ending the game and there is NOT a possibility of the opponent coming from behind and winning, then you are being at best wasteful and at worst a showboat.

Just put them out of their misery.

The games I mentioned were games where:
1) He accuses his opponent of not ending the game, but his opponent has not yet finished his turn, and in fact DOES end the game on that very turn.
2) He accuses his opponent of not ending the game, when his opponent merely takes a free turn with outpost to rack up some points before buying out the last pile.

In neither case was there a risk, in one there was absolutely no justification for complaining, and in neither did the opponent prolong the game by even a single turn.  At most, the second case prolonged the game by the twenty seconds that the last turn took, and given that it was an outpost turn, an argument could be made that he was merely playing out his actions, and I've yet to see someone complain about a person playing out his deck on the last turn when all he has to do is push the +coins button to buy out whatever pile is available.  I FULLY agree with people ending the game ASAP, but I do not agree with WW's assessment of the two games in question:  The games were over, and the games were ended promptly.

34

Help! / Re: WW needs help - how does Marin do it?

« on: April 14, 2012, 10:25:44 pm »

You could be a bit slower to frown upon his "poor play", just because he's not ending the game in the exact way that you would.  Even "taking an outpost turn" to win on instead of winning outright is an entirely valid option, at least when you have 5 throned wharves to make sure you can't whiff.  Complaining about your opponent not ending the game on the turn that he could have ended the game mere seconds before he does that exact thing just seems petulant.

Winning every game as fast as possible is not the goal ; winning every game is. It might not make a difference, but a bit of an attitude change never hurt.

The attitude difference might also be part of why he seems to be a much better engine player ; you're running a sprint to four(ish) provinces, while Marin is often sitting at the starting line building a racecar. 

I only watched a few games, but that was the impression i got. 

35

Dominion Isotropic / Re: I've hit a plateau, can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

« on: April 12, 2012, 07:26:53 pm »

As for plateaus, you're going to hit plateaus.  That said, you're doing the right thing asking questions.  You'll be on your plateau for a long time if you don't go looking for the next peak.

Game 1:  Both of you went overboard on tunnels.  Tunnel is good, often a must-have....but rarely a must-have-more-than-two, especially not a "empty this pile by turn 8".  Your overload of tunnels made your economy way too slow:  Big money beats 24 turns, and BM+lab won't run over 16 on a bad day.  Your opponent ruined his deck less.

Game 2:  Walled village is not a good opener ever - you're essentially trading your first round draft pick for a third round draft pick.  No kicker.  Had your WV been a militia or silver turn 4, you could've been the first one with the wharf, and if it'd been militia, you would've even kept your opponent off of wharf for another shuffle.   Don't ever skip the power 5s.

Game 3: Crossroads/Wharf is a valid opener on 5/2 here, although you're likely to be a little in the hole against a familiar strategy.  Your veto of woodcutter, however, says you intended this to be a possibility?  You'd rather keep strong cursers on the board than eliminate them.  Island on turn 3 is the error that doesn't follow your strategy through.  Potion instead gives you a chance to catch up on the familiar game due to your deck's inherent speed:  Crossroads+Wharf=fast shuffling.  Buying islands and crossroads in the same deck is just....counterintuitive.  You want to keep your green in the deck, not waste buys getting it out.  Pick 1 strategy and hold to it.  (Try to make sure it's the best, first...)

Game 4: Without +actions, what is your chapel deck supposed to be building towards?  BM masq is the best on this board, with a late-game remodel if the province split is close. 

Game 5: It's hard to beat DoubleJack, and neither of you tried, and it would've won your game by five turns.

I'd say that your next plateau is one of getting an idea of how fast which strategies are.  Simple single-card strategies are the best benchmarks to know.  Masquerade, Jack, etc.  Then make a judgment call about whether you're faster or slower than that.  If you don't know, try it once to find out, sure, but then remember.

36

Other Games / Re: Games to buy?

« on: March 21, 2012, 08:44:43 pm »

For "The Resistance" how much do the Plot Cards add?

The plot cards add an entire additional level of logical thinking to the game, effectively making it harder for spies to perform.  If you enjoy the logic puzzle aspect of the game more than the social engineering aspect, you'll probably enjoy the plot cards.

If you enjoy the "acting" portion of the game more, you might not like them very much.  It's nearly impossible to make up an effective lie in a half second when you're trying to explain how it is that you're not a spy when person A to your left looked at your card and said you were a spy and person B to his left  looked at person A's card and said he was not a spy, and person A+B+C succeeded on Mission 2 but person D+E failed mission 1 in a game with 2 spies.

The cards are good, but if they're used carefully and come up randomly lucky, they can just end the game.

37

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How to play this weird kingdom?

« on: March 04, 2012, 03:32:01 pm »

Nothing stopping you from smuggling 7, at least not that I can see...assuming you purchased sufficient smugglers, which i would think to be smart...

38

Dominion Articles / Re: Combo: Fishing Village-Torturer

« on: February 26, 2012, 06:12:51 pm »

If the other village is border village, it is clearly the most important.  Otherwise, other villages are not as good as fishing village (typically) but still perfectly functional.

A properly-built village+torturer engine does not need too many villages, particularly ones as efficient as fishing village.  Fighting your opponent for fishing village (unless playing against more than one opponent) is quite silly, as you can build a quite functional deck capable of emptying out the curse pile with as few as 3 villages.  It's far more important to get an early edge by hitting 5 for torturer first and then managing to chain 2-3 of them together first. 

39

Dominion Articles / Re: Reasons for the 1st-player vs 2nd-player advantage

« on: February 20, 2012, 11:35:54 am »

Embargo. As second player, you have a good chance of knowing your opponent's strategy, and you may be able to disrupt his purchase of a key card. The most obvious situation is when first player opens Potion, seeking Alchemist, or Scrying Pool, or Familiar.

~1/3 of the time, your 1p opponent will get their 1st alchemist/scrying pool/familiar before you get your embargo.  Is it worth making your starting silver a one-shot to hand out a curse 2/3 of the time?  Often(alchemist, yes, others...probably not)...but the 1st player has a higher chance of making such a strong embargo play, although it's possible they will have to make their embargo buy "in the dark" as to their opponent's strategic plans.   

Essentially i think it would please the hard corers (which in my view is anybody who regularily visits forums about Dom) and would impact the game for the casuals

As far as casual players are concerned, every casual game of dominion i've played has resulted in the game ending with almost NO idea who is in the lead, with the player who ends the game just doing it without any real concern for the score except to say "well i got a province this turn".    Not much difference there.  And as for "feeling dirty" for winning a close game as 2nd player, I ALWAYS feel dirty winning a close game as 1st player.  When i squeak out a win (on provinces) by less than 7 points, I know that it probably wasn't deserved.  I've grown used to it.

40

Simulation / Re: Simulation Tournament (Pairs)

« on: February 19, 2012, 07:21:35 pm »

Why all the secrecy? I want to know what's giving you kicks and giggles!

41

Dominion Articles / Re: Reasons for the 1st-player vs 2nd-player advantage

« on: February 19, 2012, 10:39:44 am »

I spent an awful lot of time looking through CR at cards that people presupposed gave additional player 1 or player 2 advantage, but there was no significant deviation.  The (pretty accurately remembered statistic) ~10% bonus for going first is "just" the bonus you get due to the fact that you can end the game at a point where you've taken 1 more turn than your opponent. 

I've spent roughly no time doing the same, and I can pretty confidently conclude that you're flatly wrong, simply because you have to look board by board. In the aggregate, people take different strategies, and other factors on the board are largely going to make a lot of the stuff wash out. Probably more important, the whole thing gets hidden in the difference in skill between the players (let's not forget that p2 is in general quite a bit stronger than p1 here). Doing studies on things with many fewer confounding variables, we can see that there's very significant difference between 1st-player advantage in different kinds of decks.

Show me those studies?  The simulator results that have been posted on this page show the exact same distribution of mirror match results:  54/40 +/- 2.  This is completely on par with the councilroom data, although the proportion of ties is considerably lower on isotropic. (presumably, real people have a better implementation for endgame and an aversion to ties) 

I'd be happy to parse through the tarball again if you would help me ask the right question.  Should i be looking for a very specific board, or cutting all players with level less than X, or what?  Keep in mind that finding >5000 games is still going to be a requirement.  I've gotten much better with R over the last month, so given the right questions, I'd be a lot more likely to be able to find something of interest.

42

Dominion Articles / Re: Reasons for the 1st-player vs 2nd-player advantage

« on: February 19, 2012, 12:16:04 am »

(vaguely remembered statistic) ~15X more games end with player 1 having taken an extra turn than end in a draw.

Even if (wild guess) ~33% of the time player 1 is a moron and ends the game in his own defeat, there is a 10-fold difference....Saying nothing of the fact that the statistics clearly show that substantially greater than 50% of games end in player 1's favor.

I spent an awful lot of time looking through CR at cards that people presupposed gave additional player 1 or player 2 advantage, but there was no significant deviation.  The (pretty accurately remembered statistic) ~10% bonus for going first is "just" the bonus you get due to the fact that you can end the game at a point where you've taken 1 more turn than your opponent. 

I still think that player 2 should get a "free turn" after p1 ends the game, even if he doesn't get to buy phantom provinces a-la ascension.

43

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Is Transmute ever useful?

« on: February 16, 2012, 09:03:57 pm »

And here's a game where transmute (again with scrying pool) managed to go pretty ridiculously crazy for Stef:
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120204-082332-830ab209.html

Although in this case it was really just acting as a pseudo-buy.  I realized after he bought the 2nd transmute that my strategy of "just ignore all that combo crap, even with scrying pool out" was bound to lose..but played it out as a punishment.  Now i'm sharing the lesson

44

Dominion General Discussion / Re: One-Shots

« on: February 16, 2012, 05:46:03 pm »

I seriously prefer on-gain to one-shots, even if it's an immediate trash-on-gain effect ;  It would be too swingy to have to buy a card, wait for your deck to cycle back around to it, and (probably) have to waste an action / card slot on it.  Particularly if you had terminal draw/etc. 

I have more than enough experience with games where I buy a card just before a reshuffle turn 6 and don't see it until turn 9+ on the next shuffle where my opponent buys it on turn 8 and plays it on turn 9 before me.  ..anything that can be balanced to negate this stochastic effect would be better in my eyes.

45

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

« on: February 08, 2012, 05:18:58 pm »

Counting house can be a power card in ways that few others can:
Admittedly this board had nearly all of the support you can hope for, but there are still very few as lightning-fast as this game.  Buying 3 provinces on turn 12 was an almost-guaranteed game-loser. 

You can't build a kingdom where scout features heavily in a turn 12 endgame.
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120206-180249-25b9fb0d.html
Transmute?  Not a turn 12, but I lost for underestimating it.
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120204-082332-830ab209.html

46

Game Reports / SmuggledProvince

« on: January 28, 2012, 10:03:25 pm »

At some point in this game, I was staring at 5$ and knew i didn't want to let him smuggle duchies off of me, so I thought "why not try to collide 2 highways and a smuggler?".  He obliged by smuggling a highway, letting me resmuggle it. 

Got pretty lucky to actually make it happen, but cartographers are good combo enablers. 

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201201/28/game-20120128-185922-cf6b581d.html

47

Dominion Articles / Re: Reasons for the 1st-player vs 2nd-player advantage

« on: January 18, 2012, 07:45:13 pm »

(e.g. going tunnel if he goes militia & going militia if he doesn't go tunnel).

I saw this and just had to point out http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120105-165629-8d87aaab.html.  He went tunnel because i went militia, and he actually continued with tunnel.  I just didn't play militia, so he bought a blank card on turn 2 and turn 3.  Admittedly, I also had a semi-blank card and he had a 4 vp advantage, but I wanted to bring it up because it was a one in a thousand kind of game involving tactical counterplay. 

48

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Combo: ridiculous card + scheme + outpost

« on: January 16, 2012, 12:03:43 pm »

I would also consider Torturer for this. Even with no village, being able to play Torturer an extra time before an opponents turn can be really powerful.

Without a village, you'll have problems making your outpost+torturer turn happen.
With villages is worth considering, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to fit the outpost buy in.

49

Simulation / Re: Simulation Challenge - Endgame Polish

« on: January 12, 2012, 08:45:29 pm »

Filtering such shuffleluck-based "noise" out from simulations ought to be reasonably straightforward, and probably necessary for full optimization of things.

Add a few "# of times this buy condition is activated" statistics, and then allow filtering based on whether or not a particular condition was activated in a particular game, and you can find out what the "Right" decision is in situations as minor as some of the things we're talking about.

Whether or not the sims should focus on this instead of actually working out how to properly play dominion is questionable, but it's possible that you could bootstrap up from the above ; you could train a sim how to make the "Best" play (say, Steward trashing vs 2$ vs +2cards) in a particular gamestate by simply running a few million mirror games, filtering down to those where that particular decision was made, and seeing what the win percentages are in each case. 

50

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What's the difference between a level 30 and a level 40 player?

« on: January 12, 2012, 01:20:21 pm »

Geronimoo certainly falls into the "70% against the world" category - it seems both approaches can work. 

Perhaps I'm actually on the 30-40 transition and am just waiting on history to catch up, instead of being plateaued at 35+/-2 like i thought.  I stopped caring enough to graph my daily ranking a few months ago, as fun as it was to "know" every time i reached a skill plateau and force myself to shake up my playstyle afterwards.  Maybe that's worthwhile advice.