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

Game Reports / Re: Engine vs BM embassy

« on: October 17, 2014, 02:48:08 pm »

Here are 4 games awaclus and I played on this board link.  we had 5/2 splits on 3 out of the four games, and in each case that player got haggler and went engine.  first two games opened identically, the last one 5/2 went first and, with ideal early draws (hitting $5 w/haggler T3 and then $7 w/haggler on T5, then trashing 4 coppers to mint T8) the engine player mopped up, forging to end the game with 4 provinces T11 - this game was clearly an outlier, but it does show that the engine can be explosive.  evenly distributed wins for engine and BM.  When the engine won, it had minted/haggled golds as payload with 1 CR and 2 embassies for draw (games 2,4), but this didn't work with a 3/4 opening (game 3).  Merchant Guild did not work as an engine payload (game 1).

I think shark_bait has it aright when he says that a lot hinges on 5/2 and then hitting $5 with haggler early.  if you can do that, you're in very good shape.  I dno how to build the engine best with a 3/4 opening, but I think the engine can't afford to avoid treasure.  When the engine won, it opened 5/2 and hit $5 in the first reshuffle; when it hit $5 with 5 coppers (buying council room, though I am now thinking mint would've been better given that there was a silver and a haggler in the deck), the win was narrower.  I agree that Mint and Forge are important for the engine.  The engine needs gold in order to catch up to the BM player, and Forge also helps in this regard, eating the deck in the endgame, forging $5's into duchies, or gold+hamlet/estate or 5+silver or 2xTR into province - or province into province if you should somehow manage to get ahead.

52

Game Reports / Re: Engine vs BM embassy

« on: October 17, 2014, 01:21:09 pm »

anybody want to play this right now?

53

Game Reports / Re: Engine vs BM embassy

« on: October 17, 2014, 11:53:04 am »

hamlet/embassy doesn't increase your handsize without throne room support, and council room helps your opponent.  My inclination would be to go for a single province semi-engine, going for an early council room with an eye toward mint trashing.  your opponent was lucky to get 5 provinces by turn 14, but you made some mistakes: probably exchange one of the early TR buys for silver, aim to green sooner, plus you had only one council room for draw making for an unreliable engine.  trashing down to exactly $8 was questionable too.

(take all this with a grain of salt as I've been off my game recently.)

54

Help! / Re: bandit camp/council room vs scrying pool

« on: October 15, 2014, 05:04:24 pm »

(maybe like 4 more hours later? sry)

55

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Best Dominion Moments 2014

« on: October 15, 2014, 05:03:43 pm »

i think uncontested FG+Black Market/tactician (with some added +buy in there) wins handily, but then i'm out of practice...

56

Dominion General Discussion / Re: When luck is not on your side

« on: October 15, 2014, 12:44:51 pm »

(strongly prefer lab/chapel to market/chapel on a 5/2 as it gives better chance of finding the chapel and matching it to desired targets while the difference in economy is modest.  lab in an over-drawn deck isn't the hottest thing, but it helps reliability, which is not to be underrated.)

57

Help! / Re: bandit camp/council room vs scrying pool

« on: October 15, 2014, 12:24:46 pm »

i'd be free later on, like in 4-5 hours?

58

Help! / bandit camp/council room vs scrying pool

« on: October 14, 2014, 12:52:33 pm »

http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?/20141014/log.5075b25251c30da02a09b898.1413304268129.txt

Code: [Select]

Embargo, Pawn, Scrying Pool, Lookout, Workshop, Bandit Camp, Council Room, Market, Royal Seal, Peddler
I'm out of practice!  I've been playing bots too much and I guess I'm not used to the pace set by actual humans.  I just got crushed by a player ostensibly 22 levels lower than me...

My opponent and I both opened lookout/potion.  first reshuffle, he got bandit camp, then eec/pot/lookout on turn 4, which means two estates (good) and potion and lookout miss the 2nd reshuffle.  I got pawn/scryping pool turns 3/4 with nothing missing the reshuffle.  I'm thinking, market has to be a better first-five than BC with peddler on the board, but then he gets a council room and it never misses his bandit camps, despite his weak trashing and 1-2 bandit camps.  Now, council room is good here since i'm overdrawing my deck, but he totally crushed me, getting 4 provinces T12 (!) primarily fueled by bandit camps and 7 markets (why so many markets?).  So where did I go wrong?

T6 i make a questionable play.  My hand was ecc+lookout+pawn.  I play the lookout, revealing cc/SP and trashing a copper, obviously.  Now, if I discard the scrying pool, I can get up to $4 and grab a peddler.  If I discard a copper and pick up the scrying pool, the rest of my deck is 6 coppers, 2 estates, and one scrying pool, so the likelihood is that I draw a copper and end up with $4 anyway but now three of my actions have missed the shuffle (along with ecc).  I opt for leaving the SP on top and getting a second lookout.  Should I have gotten a peddler here?

Did I blunder strategically?  I mean, by T13 I had $19+P to spend and a very reliable deck, but my opponent had just gotten 4 provinces on his T12.  I mean, it seems like I over-trashed and neglected my economy early, but aside from T6 I'm not sure that I made any really poor plays...  Was he just lucky?

Any help would be appreciated.

59

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Dominion Cards Lists 2014 Edition: Potion cost cards

« on: October 14, 2014, 11:16:10 am »

apothecary way too low (below alchemist??? srsly?) and fam too high.

60

Game Reports / Re: yay for misfits

« on: October 09, 2014, 04:36:18 pm »

perfunctory https://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20141009/log.518171c5e4b00de2f7e3ac32.1412877789564.txt

61

Dominion Articles / Re: The Perils of Slow Trashing

« on: October 09, 2014, 04:34:28 pm »

is forager TfB?  I mean, if you trash a new treasure, you get a benefit for that... 

62

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Can Salvager detect if opponent is on iPad?

« on: October 01, 2014, 03:33:04 pm »

chrome on my ipad doesn't seem to use any of my extensions (which are typically carried from device to device).  playing dominion on ipad w/chrome, I have no access to any salvager features.

63

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Bot "Pro" Games Effect Leaderboard

« on: October 01, 2014, 03:26:32 pm »

plus having your quit % affected when playing against bots is wrong.

the simplest solution, suggested above, is to have a rating-mode switch when hitting 'play bots'.

64

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Bot "Pro" Games Effect Leaderboard

« on: September 30, 2014, 04:55:45 pm »

i play against bots when I don't really want to pay attention to what I'm doing or when I want to experiment with long-shot strategies.  I do not want "play bots" games included in the ranking.  I do not want "play bots" counted on the Pro leaderboard at all.  I suppose it makes some sense to have the option to play bots on the pro leaderboard, but for now, if I want to play casual games against bots it is veryrelatively laborious (must do it thru the multiplayer interface).

65

Dominion Articles / Re: When cycling is not good

« on: September 04, 2014, 10:48:07 am »

mandarin/count produce anti-cycling, which is again covered by my definition but not the OP. 

66

Dominion Articles / Re: When cycling is not good

« on: August 07, 2014, 11:25:56 pm »

It's dead horse time.

I would define cycling as any effect that takes cards out of your draw pile (without trashing them - i think that's an edge case that basically won't happen tho?  dare I taunt the gods?).  This includes chancellor, smithy, Fortune teller, rebuild, HP, etc.  This article seems to be about sifting and not cycling.  Chancellor and smithy both fall outside the "two meanings of cycling" described in the OP, so we know that something important has been left out. 

(The main problem with my definition is that when you try to take cards out of an empty draw pile, then you trigger a reshuffle, so the net effect is to put cards into your draw pile.  I don't think this is a fatal flaw.)

The salient differences between good and bad "cycling", as described in the OP, are to do with the effects of sifting, not cycling.  As an article on sifting, it's fine, but it's confused because sometimes it really is talking about cycling.

The major mistake in the article is found in the statement that neutral cycling doesn't help you.  Silverspawn identified the problem with here: it ignores the primary effect of cycling, which is to make the cards in the discard appear sooner. 

Now, if we want to talk about how to tell whether cycling is good or bad for you, I think these are the essentials:

The value of cycling is determined by the relative quality of the cards in your discard pile vs the cards in the draw pile.  If you're triggering a reshuffle, then you also have to consider the cards in hand and in play.  So if you're building, then the cards in the draw pile are likely to be good, while the opposite is true for greening.  Tracking what's in your draw pile will of course add information about what's in the draw pile and change the value of the cycling. 

When cycling effects cause reshuffles, then the question of whether this is something you want is really more about reshuffling per se rather than cycling, but the same basic considerations apply: do I want these cards (draw pile + hand + in play) to miss the reshuffle or not?  That is, are they relatively better or worse than the cards in the discard?

(PS: do not do a google image search for "picking at scabs")

67

Game Reports / Re: Great Scout!

« on: August 05, 2014, 12:45:35 pm »

game log?

68

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Horsie Traders/Minion interaction

« on: August 01, 2014, 05:16:30 pm »

also, although ADK is correct that other considerations are usually foremost, you shouldn't disregard the discard attack of minion completely. 

It's probably not as powerful as militia, but I don't think the difference is really that much.

69

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Horsie Traders/Minion interaction

« on: August 01, 2014, 05:13:38 pm »

HT works well with minion for yourself too, since you can discard to the HT and then "discard" to the minion to draw up again (provided you have a free action and at least 4 cards in hand).

70

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Doctor with 3/4

« on: July 25, 2014, 09:23:10 pm »

aiming for later overpay is workable.  I'm thinking of it in comparison to how most strong trashers require you to give up a few turns to trashing.  I mean, there are differences, but the point is that giving up a turn to trashing is usually worth it. 

This kind of play really rewards deck tracking, naturally.

71

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Skip the Adventures code

« on: July 25, 2014, 04:33:44 pm »

I don't really understand why Goko...

Goko operates according to its own internal logic. A logic so advanced and wholly incompatible with anything hitherto thought up by man, that whoever tries to grasp it with the naive hands of common sense will lose his grip and tumble down into a bottomless abyss of existential confusion.

Seems like SCSN's stumbled onto a corrollary to Clarke's third law: any sufficiently advanced logic is indistinguishable from Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

72

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Prince now available in the BGG store!

« on: July 24, 2014, 08:28:25 pm »

Yea, playing scout every turn doesn't make it any more reliable, it just means that it probably will be decent once or twice.
Also the opportunity cost of a princed scout is even greater than that of a normal scout, since that's a whole prince that could have been way better.

But it makes your deck more reliable. You're almost guaranteed to never draw any green in your initial hand. Almost. And it applies to your initial hand only.

it applies to whatever you draw first.  It only makes your next hand cleaner if you don't draw much this turn _{(or, I mean, you could pick up a bunch of green and then reshuffle, so your next hand would be cleaner on average)}. 

As was earlier stated, the biggest problem with scout is the opportunity cost, and with Prince, the opportunity you've giving up is going to have much larger ramifications (provided the prince was a good in the first place).

73

Dominion General Discussion / When should you open island?

« on: July 23, 2014, 06:45:03 pm »

is there any kind of rule of thumb for when you should be opening island?  I feel like it's mainly in BM settings or with non-terminal $3s...

74

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Virginia, DC, East Coast US Meetup? Perhaps?

« on: July 22, 2014, 04:07:33 pm »

especially when most games played are just base set.  Pure luck for the winner.

yes.  4p base games can be fun, but they're pretty useless for picking the wheat from the chaff in the first round of a tournament.

75

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Elegant Storage Solution: Card Binders

« on: July 22, 2014, 03:56:42 pm »

But they could still fall out of the pockets. I've heard past reports that the binder solution results in some cards falling out every time you move them.

I have my (unsleeved) cards in binders.  bought all the components at staples.  (For reference, I'm storing all the cards but Promos, Intrigue, Alchemy and Guilds in two 3" binders, and I'd need a third to store what remains.  also, I put the GSC/PDE/Curses and tokens in a separate box.  I discarded the blue-back randomizer cards and the mats.)

They don't fall out "every time".  As a storage solution, it has many virtues: compact, light, cheap, easy access, minimal effort to acquire and set up; somebody said they liked the idea of seeing the whole card, and sure, there's that too.  But it is a delicate flower.  If I held a binder upside down, my guess is all the cards would fall out.  The cards just don't hang on to the sleeves at all.  Probably, with 1-3 cards per sleeve, the friction would be enough, but not with 10.  If you're careless when you put them in the car, the cards could end up all over your trunk and very bent.  It's not too hard to just line them up so the spine of the binder is perpendicular to the car's motion, but you have to make sure they don't slide around (alternatively, standing up in the feet-area of the back seat generally works pretty well).

For all that, the compactness is not to be undersold.  You can fit all the cards there are in a space that would have held three boxes (instead of ten), and the binders are pretty much the same dimensions as the boxes too.  I am very satisfied.