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.

51

Dominion Articles / Re: Settlers/Bustling Village

« on: June 13, 2018, 05:03:50 pm »

I find that a decision on how to compete with an opponent for these cards is quite difficult. Quite often, having a minority of settlers or minority of bustling villages doesn't seem fatal, especially if you've been buying other good cards instead.

I'm going to suggest. without any proof, that an efficient deck construction would have a similar number of coppers, settlers, and bustling villagers. Having more of one type of card will increase draws but not by so much. Does anyone have any views or stats on that?

52

Dominion Articles / Re: Ghost Town

« on: June 09, 2018, 10:42:38 am »

I've found a few other specific effects with ghost town:

• If ghost town is the only village and they can provide an extra action only on alternate turns, this is a limit on the maximum potential of your deck.
• if ghost town is your only village then you know how many actions you have at the start of the turn. It doesn't change with drawing. You can plan across turns with this knowledge.
• Like other duration cards, ghost town decks can gather momentum as you get more ghost towns down each turn for draw and cards. Once you lose momentum, with no ghost towns in play, it could be a struggle to play the actions requred to get more ghost towns played and regain that momentum.
• Your opponent's ghost towns give a measure of their future turns too.
• Notionally, the cost of drawing a ghost town (which gives you +1 card next turn) is covered by the ghost town putting you a card ahead on it's first play. However once you start drawing your deck or have to discard/draw to fixed hand size then this calculation changes.

53

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Favorite/least favorite Landmarks?

« on: June 08, 2018, 11:32:07 am »

For me, Keep can be too successful at what it does, essentially prolonging games by adding turns of treasure buying that are not really moivng the game forward at all.

54

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: [new player] Beat the Bot on this Kingdom

« on: June 04, 2018, 01:55:14 pm »

This could be a very tricky multiplayer kingdom. There's probably no single best multiplayer strategy.

55

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Trashing the Engineer

« on: June 01, 2018, 10:00:53 am »

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned that the engineer has an intrinsic cost of a terminal action each time you play it. If you are buying other terminals, even other engineers, this becomes a big indicator of when you should trash it.

56

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Question- which one tilts you?

« on: May 28, 2018, 06:42:21 pm »

Quite often, a good draw is just an average looking draw where you get an even distribution of notable cards. After opening chapel/silver you generally want chapel + XXXX in one hand and silver +XXXX in the other. That's as likely as any other notable outcome. Players also plan their purchases and card play for likely draws so when those draws come up they should fit the plan. In other words, if you are willing to let the most common draws frustrate you then you're going to be frustrated far too often.

57

Help! / Re: Base game kingdom with no trashing

« on: May 23, 2018, 04:39:23 pm »

That kingdom is pretty weak so bureaucrat could come into play. A deck with a bureaucrat, labs, poacher, is pretty simple and probably competitive. Bureaucrat + council room does better than council room + money in the simulator.

58

Help! / Re: Base game kingdom with no trashing

« on: May 22, 2018, 05:34:46 pm »

In this sort of deck, there aren't many hands where your cellars are failing since you play out all your labs and markets then dump copper and estates with the cellar, every time. I don't think it needs more than 3 or 4 cellars but you probably get a feel for it as you are playing the deck. You need to be a bit clever with cellars so that you don't create a bad discard pile, then draw from it and leave a bad hand in the draw pile for next turn, but that's a problem cellars can solve as well. Artisans can always gain cellars if you desparately need them.

59

Help! / Re: Base game kingdom with no trashing

« on: May 22, 2018, 08:06:45 am »

Just looking at the kingdom, there is laboratory, market, artisan, cellar, merchant, throne room, council room, gardens, festival and library. What's bad about an engine here is unreliability. The coppers and estates slow you down. What's good about an engine here is fast gaining of many engine cards each turn using artisans, possibly throned, plus plenty of money and buys too. All those gained cards can help the engine. The draw is good too with laboratory and cellar. Cellar is really good when you have big hands to play with.

Against a money player, the only limit on how big you can build this engine is emptying three piles. Apart from that, you can build the engine up as large as you can with merchants, labs, markets, thrones and then play 4 throned artisans to empty the gardens on the last turn and buy up whatever vp and coppers you can to score a win. The garden scoring suits the engine player perfectly.

Is this fast enough to beat someone just playing council room + money, I'd expect so. In multiplayer you get two problems though. There will be less engine cards for each engine deck if more players use the engine. Council room + money gets faster when more than one person does it in multiplayer. So in multiplayer the money option looks somewhat safer.

60

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Card alchemy revelation....

« on: May 19, 2018, 09:14:10 am »

= +:  + -

61

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Playing to lose?

« on: May 11, 2018, 11:28:01 am »

It's entirely up to your group as to how they play when they are losing. There isn't a right answer. You just need to speak to them and sort it out as friends. Remember that they might not care and you might be the odd one out by making an issue of it.

62

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Would you trash an estate worth 2VP?

« on: April 17, 2018, 09:14:07 am »

Just a though experiment...

If your starting estates were worth 2VP would still chapel them? What if they were worth 2.5VP? or 3VP? Obviously it would depend on the board, but in an average game at what point would you not trash them?

I believe that trashing is essentially the same decision as 'not buying'. In a big money game the simulations show that you shouldn't buy a duchy if you are going to draw it more than once. You shouldn't buy an estate if you have more than a 50/50 chance of drawing it. You could set up similar simulations for tunnel quite easily but it will fall into a similar range.

Those stats ignore end game competition, of course.

63

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Losing streaks

« on: April 12, 2018, 05:01:51 pm »

I'd say there are streaks when it gives you a lot of numbers close to 0, and streaks when it gives you a lot of numbers close to 479001600. And not just random streaks, but statistically significant and/or predictable streaks.

At least that's how it feels to me sometimes. There's obviously no way this is how it works. If ShiT knew the difference between good and bad shuffles then I'm sure it would have a better computer opponent than it does. And even then, it still depends on the kingdom, player order, your opponent's shuffle, game theory stuff, etc. At the end of the day I don't doubt it's all just psychology at play. But I'm still curious what ShiT's RNG is.

Here's a quote from my old maths text book from University.

" ... even the simplest coin flipping models can yield to surprising, even shocking results. They are of practical importance because they show that, contrary to the generally accepted view, the laws governing a prolonged series of individual observations will show patterns and averages far removed from those derived for the whole population. In other words, popular psychology tests would lead one to say that in a population of 'normal coins' most coins are 'malajusted'."

In other words, if you look at a series of randomly generated Dominion games the shuffling will quite probably look abnormal in some way. It's not the exception. It's what you should expect.

64

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Losing streaks

« on: April 12, 2018, 08:50:07 am »

I think there are a multitude of psychological traps you can fall into when you're on a losing streak, whether it's blaming bad luck for bad play, giving up bad positions too early, shortening your thinking, letting anger replace analysis, losing observation and awareness, miscalculating risks, playing a game as if it's the same as a previous kingdom, and so on. Losing streaks really only show that you are human (or Lord Rattington).

65

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

« on: April 10, 2018, 06:16:59 pm »

Alchemists and schemes have a been a problem for UI design going back to Isotropic and Goko. It presents a different type of selection but the real problem is doing it in a way that doesn't confuse the user.

66

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion jokes

« on: April 07, 2018, 09:34:13 pm »

Pro tip: Next time you want to add a thread on a topic that's already done, just add "part 2" to your subject

Dominion jokes: When do you call a royal carriage?

67

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Nocturne Cards: Conclave

« on: April 03, 2018, 10:45:28 am »

Conclave is more difficult to manage the more conclaves you have in your deck so it is an unlikely pile to run out. The big advantage of conclave is that you often want a buy a silver (say) for income and your first conclave offers that income but is also an asset to an engine.

68

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Nocturne Cards: Cemetery (and Haunted Mirror)

« on: March 30, 2018, 12:00:04 pm »

If you can gain a cemetery easily with alms or workshop then it's like having a chapel hand and there's little reason not to go for it and build the engine later. Buying a cemetery generally involves more deck construction as you need the 4 coins plus a bunch of cards left in hand to trash, so you are often forced to build first and trash a bit later.

Cemetery isn't a significant vp pile unless you can gain it easily as part of a 3 pile ending.

69

Dominion Articles / Re: Castles

« on: March 28, 2018, 11:49:19 am »

To expand the discussion :-
- If you are the sole player buying castles, how you you build your deck differently compared to a province buying deck (more income, less income? less terminals? different trashing?)
- If you are playing against a player also buying castles, are there any castles you shouldn't buy as it reveals a key one for your opponent?
- If you are playing a mixed castle and province strategy, when should you switch between castle buying and normal deck building?

People always ask about multiplayer to be included in articles so ... there are a lot more castle points in multiplayer and it is a harder pile to ignore. The two humble castles become important when one player has both. The game is likely to be messy as you have multiple opponents messing up whatever plan you have for the unique castle cards.

70

Dominion Articles / Re: How to be good at Dominion

« on: March 27, 2018, 09:08:44 am »

It would be easier to take this article seriously if it wasn't similar to many of your less serious posts.

71

Other Games / Re: Terraforming Mars

« on: March 26, 2018, 10:46:09 pm »

I don't know where you get the idea from that a Euro should never ever have anti-kingmaking mechanisms or that such a thing is bad. In most games it is actually a good idea to have some way to target the leader.

The problem with the 'target the leader' thing is that there's no point playing a tight effective economy that is well planned and well executed if someone just looks at your position and says "I'm going to play this card and take off your pieces instead of someone else's". The game politics take over and makes a lot of other things, things you are spending a lot of time doing, redundant.

72

Other Games / Re: Terraforming Mars

« on: March 26, 2018, 01:14:53 pm »

For that size of game there is too much luck. I think the straight options are better than people think they are, and it's certainly a mistake to buy marginal cards (the "big engine") that actually provide no value, but you can still get hosed by bad cards draws (full of marginal cards). The map is more relevant than it first appears and gives a significant vp shift even though it does nothing for the big engine. It's probably a better 3 or 4 player game than 2 player game.

73

Help! / Re: I will try to post a game here every day.

« on: March 26, 2018, 11:45:01 am »

Board: Hound, Peasant, Smason, Oasis, Shanty, Diplo, Monument, Trader, Cache, RSeal; Colony, Raid, Palace
I went for: Oasis/Diplo/Shanty/Soldier

My questions:
-What stages of Peasant do you usually push?
-How many Soldiers did I want?  Did I want Fugitive instead?
-Should I have gone for the Palace strat?  Would it have been better in a Province game?
-What do you do with Teacher tokens here?
-Is that how the logs are supposed to look, and if so how do all the graphs and stuff work?

- I think that oasis/shanty/diplo thing is a lot of work and needs careful play but should give good deck development. Getting the deck balance right is going to be more important than blindly pushing peasants at times, particuarly if you're thinking of adding 3 terminals with stonemason/peasant. Preferably, teacher and as many disciples as you can squeeze out here.
- Soldiers generally fit with other attack cards and the exceptions would be in better engines than this one. Considering diplomat, keep no soldiers.
- Palace isn't anything here as an engine player can beat it with monument points. In an engine mirror the monument comes into play for a late lead before a 3 pile ending.
- I don't think there's a single right answer to the tokens here. With a stonemason you can trash an action card into two smaller ones and instantly create a different type of deck.
- Having said all that, it's hard to pick out what an opponent will do and this will need some adversarial play. The game could run short or long (if nobody builds with many masons).

74

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

« on: March 23, 2018, 06:37:51 pm »

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?

You might find a reliable deck that can repeat every turn, something like apprentice - province - scheme - royal seal - 8 silver with Dominate.

75

Dominion General Discussion / Re: When are Travellers ignorable?

« on: March 23, 2018, 12:46:03 pm »

Nobody has mentioned the other big problem in playing for a champion: lack of payload when you get there. It doesn't really matter how many cards you can play if you are just scoring one province each turn and your opponent starts with a good lead.