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51

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What are the white/blank cards used for?

« on: July 12, 2011, 05:40:04 pm »

Cards are always produced in a certain multiples -- If I'm correct, they're cut from sheets which are always a certain size. For instance, if there are 50 cards per sheet, but you want to make a game with 92 cards in them, too bad, you're going to need to make 100 cards. Donald X. had the option of either throwing those extra cards away or giving you blank cards, and he chose to give you the blanks. There's no specific purpose to them but there are lots of things you can do.

iirc books work the same way, the number of (physical) pages in a book is usually a multiple of some number. The publisher usually just puts in more/fewer dedication pages or other filler to round out the number.

52

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How to play these cards?

« on: July 11, 2011, 09:56:22 pm »

A single shanty town in a deck with no terminal actions acts as a very cheap laboratory.

Think of it like this: +2 cards/+1 action is very strong, one of the best $5 cards in the game. But in order to use Shanty town like this, you pretty much can't have any other terminals and can only have 1 shanty town in your deck (you play all your non-terminals first, then shanty town). (I say +1 action because you have no actual terminal cards to take advantage of the +2 actions, but don't worry, just the +2 cards/+1 action is strong enough as it is.) On the other hand, +2 actions is very weak. If you use Shanty town this way, the non-terminals had better be worth it, since you're sacrificing a whole card to get that extra action. They better be very good card draw to mitigate your loss of a card (torturer) or else they had better not care about your small hand (library).

All in all, you probably shouldn't get shanty town too often, as most boards won't be comprised of only good non-terminals or contain good enough terminal card draw to make shanty town worth it.


Side note: opening silver/shanty town, your shanty town is as good as a laboratory (until you buy a terminal)! So maybe it's not that easily discounted.

53

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Which is the card you hate the most?

« on: July 08, 2011, 09:14:00 pm »

I mostly just dislike familiar, because drawing $3P on turns 3/4 is still somewhat unlikely even if you open silver/potion. Sea hag has that bad thing that happens where your opponent's sea hag discards your sea hag.

I actually think it's less an issue with luck than with fun factor. King's court is probably more swingy than either of the above but it's fun to play. Drawing $2P with familiar as the only potion card is just depressing.

54

Dominion General Discussion / Re: 5/2 split and mint..

« on: July 08, 2011, 02:52:35 am »

http://councilroom.com/openings

Notice how the mint openings are near the bottom It is an extremely rare board where opening mint is good, but new players seem to find it really sexy at first glance.

55

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Ambassador vs Sea Hag

« on: July 04, 2011, 09:10:31 pm »

I don't think it's a good idea to skip Ambassador in the face of Possession. If your opponent gets an Ambassador, you're going to have a lot of trouble to get $6P with all the junk in your deck.

It all depends. I played a game recently where my opponent took an ambassador and got the possession many turns before me and some provinces as well. There was something like king's court or golem in the kingdom though so as soon as my possession arrived the balance of power shifted until I had every useful card from his deck.

There's still the issue of your opponent being able to play Ambassador, reveal an Ambassador and give you one anyway.

56

Simulation / Re: Simulating Challenge 2

« on: July 04, 2011, 03:52:20 am »

It's obviously common in game theory, but I was speaking to Dominion in particular, and I don't think it's that common at all. Maybe 1% of boards. Probably less. I mean, of course in a particular game you should pay attention to what your opponent is doing and make adjustments, but usually these adjustments are really quite small. But I mean, if it was common, it would lead to a significant second player advantage, and that isn't backed up by data.

A second player advantage from the rock-paper-scissors effect could cancel out the first-player advantage of sometimes getting an extra turn. The data wouldn't be there but you can't conclude that there is no rock-paper-scissors effect.

57

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Ambassador vs Sea Hag

« on: July 04, 2011, 03:49:08 am »

*2*
Same game, 4:3 with Ambassador/Sea Hag but now the other eight are random.  What needs to be on the board to NOT open with A/A or A/SH?

Again, if you are second and see his buys how does that affect your buys?

Normally I'll prefer Amb/Amb over Amb/Hag- if Ambassador is out chances are I'm just going to ignore the Hag period- they're both terminal, and Ambassador is both stronger and counters Hag very well.  There are very, very few situations where I'd take Hag but not Ambassador.

There are a few scenarios where I'd skip the Ambassador entirely, mostly involving Chapel, Possession, or Gardens.  In fact, I would consider an opponent who opens Ambassador (while I'm second) to be a strong incentive to go Gardening if there's really any support at all.  For example, Horse Traders/Gardens is marginal by itself, but it's helped tremendously by opponents' Ambassadoring.

It's even possible to win with Gardens on a board without any +Buy or Gain, just your opponent's Ambassador.  Obviously it helped that I could grab a couple Provinces with Counting House, and that my opponent kept sending me crap even after it was obvious that it was bloating my score, not just my deck.  http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20110630-164132-04c75f0d.html

I don't think it's a good idea to skip Ambassador in the face of Possession. If your opponent gets an Ambassador, you're going to have a lot of trouble to get $6P with all the junk in your deck. Furthermore, your opponent's deck will be so trim that he will be able to play his Possession very often while you will not, even if you manage to get one in the first place. Finally, your opponent can always make you take an Ambassador anyway, by Ambassadoring and Ambassador.

58

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Thought exercise: nerfs and buffs

« on: June 30, 2011, 07:39:22 pm »

- Pirate Ship.  After reading about Pirate Ship here, I am persuaded that Pirate Ship isn't the dominating force that it always winds up being when I play with it, or against it.  But not being a better player than I am, it just seems horrendously overpowered.  I played a couple of House Rules games with my brother, wherein every time we'd use Pirate Ship for the money, rather than the attack, a coin would be *removed* from the mat at the end of the turn.  This seemed to balance the card perfectly, but I fully concede that it may have only seemed balanced in light of our sub-optimal play.  Still.

I feel like too many people overreact to their opponent's pirate ships. If there is a strong way to fill your deck with non-terminals to block your opponent's pirate ship, go for it, but don't stretch yourself too far in doing so. It's fine to keep buying money if you need it, pirate ship is only probably going to trash a total of 6 money in a single game anyway (most of which will be copper). People rage hard when pirate ship hits their gold, when they forget it trashed 4 of their copper for them.

4p pirate ship can be a different matter however... this one can be quite vulnerable to groupthink. If three players get it, you may actually start to worry you can't keep money in your deck, so you look for a source of action-money ... hey, pirate ship is one of those cards!

You're not alone though. Pirate ship, I think, is the single card with the biggest difference in perceived power level between my irl friends and the folks on isotropic.


EDIT: How's this for a crazy adventuerer buff? "Reveal cards from the top of your deck until you reveal three treasure cards. Put two of them into your hand. Discard the other revealed cards."

59

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Vanilla Cards

« on: June 30, 2011, 07:28:46 pm »

Trusty Steed used to be +2 cards, +$2, during design. It got a couple extra abilities since then though...

60

Feedback / Re: Deck Scoring

« on: June 30, 2011, 07:01:07 pm »

Is there an "commonly accepted" algorithm to score a deck of cards, or a games current state?  (Say between 0 and 1)

Nope If you can think of good one, you can make a pretty good dominion-playing AI. As far as I can tell, there isn't a skilled AI Dominion player out there yet.

61

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas

« on: June 29, 2011, 11:10:36 pm »

Imba
Victory-Action
$2

Setup: At the start of the game, write down the name of a Kingdom card and set it aside. Whine a little, too.

Set this card aside, face down. At the end of the game, if another player purchased three or more copies of the card you wrote down, +200 VP.

I write down "Imba" and whine about it.

62

Dominion Articles / Re: Request: Avoiding end-game deck stalls

« on: June 28, 2011, 08:49:35 pm »

One thing to always keep in mind is that if you can nab more than half the victory points, and there are no saboteurs or VP chip cards, then it doesn't matter how stalled your deck is, you're going to win.

You should always be on the lookout for cards that can power your deck even if it is stalled out: Salvager, Apprentice, Remodel, etc. can trash your diluted engine cards for one last burst of power, and cards like Vault still shine even in a sea of green. If you are going for a strategy that buys the top VP card as fast as possible, cards that can trash Province->Province are useful because they defend against an opponent who is counting on your deck clogging up to have enough time to unleash their monster engine.

Another thing to note is that small, sleek engines will tend to clog faster. Big money + chapel is actually somewhat weak (though still stronger than vanilla big money) because it runs into trouble when it starts trying to buy VP cards (iirc it's worse than Big money + smithy). If you are playing a chapel game, you should definitely look to something that is more robust against VP clog than just big money.

63

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Game Selection

« on: June 28, 2011, 08:25:10 pm »

I'll autoaccept any game on automatch. I can see arguments for why some people would want to reject some sets, but if you need to do more than one rejection in a row I feel you should not be using automatch.

64

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What to do with the Treasure Map buy?

« on: June 28, 2011, 07:22:52 pm »

The normal big money buy rules say get a province with $8 when you have at least 1 gold in your deck, and you have four! Get that province.

I'm not sure what you'd do if you were building a +cards/+actions engine involving treasure maps, I've never tried this myself. Is this even a good idea?

EDIT: Also, I don't think I've ever gotten treasure map in a colony game either, so no idea about this one.

65

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Duke Analysis?

« on: June 28, 2011, 07:19:53 pm »

Universities can't gain Dukes or Duchies.

66

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Why is Remake worded that way?

« on: June 25, 2011, 04:57:02 pm »

I think the wording of Remake offends the sensibilities of people who are too used to Magic templating ("this" without a noun after it? What does it even refer to?) but I think the printed wording is much clearer, intuitively, for everyone else.

67

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Post an interesting set of 10

« on: June 19, 2011, 03:05:16 pm »

Secret Chamber
Pawn

Menagerie

Throne Room
Bishop
Militia

Minion
Vault
Laboratory
Venture


Opponent's handsize decreasers play well with your Menagerie, and the attacks have fun interactions with Secret Chamber. But would they still bother? Those are some of the strongest cards in the game..