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4551

Dominion General Discussion / Re: 206th card

« on: May 13, 2014, 06:18:45 pm »

Obv. once the promo is out, they are extremely likely to have it at big cons, e.g. Origins, GenCon.

4552

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: May 13, 2014, 04:50:16 pm »

Have you made any games other than Piņa Pirata that use the "Suit Deck"? Seems like it could be an interesting deck for a poker-style game.

I had big plans to but never did. It seems like it has potential. Of course some people do play versions of traditional card games using dominoes.

4553

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: May 13, 2014, 04:22:25 pm »

While waiting for Piņa Pirata, I picked up The Dwarf King by Bruno Faidutti. It seems like the kind of game you would make if you were to make a trick-taking card game. It has quite a bit of variety, using 1 out of 14 special cards and 1 out of 40 scoring goals each hand.

Have you ever made a trick-taking game, or are they not really your thing?

I've made a dozen or so simple ones. I haven't seriously pursued any of them. The one I remember as the most interesting was Rook to King's Five. You deal 8 cards to each player and 8 cards face up, from a 40-card deck. You take turns; on your turn you play onto one of the cards as if playing on a trick. The face up card is the led card. If you are now winning the trick you played on, you move it to in front of you to track that. You can play on any trick with less than 5 cards, but once you've picked a trick to play on you have to follow suit if possible. And there's uh a trump suit and it's a normal trick-taking game otherwise. I only played that one twice but it sounds worth pursuing. You can also have people lead tricks that are resolved right then the normal way, but you lead your choice of one of 8 face up cards. Those are both pretty unusual; the others were more conventional.

4554

GokoDom / Re: GokoDom III: Playoff Round Results and Discussion

« on: May 12, 2014, 04:19:33 pm »

Looking back, yeah the Marauder certainly didn't help my situation, but I was under the impression that Procession/Rats is not an effective way of accomplishing anything and I thought a good player like AI wouldn't go for it.

It's unclear whether or not Procession/Rats is a good thing, at least it's unclear to me still.

I wouldn't say that Procession/Rats is a thing, but Procession/Fortress is obv. strong, and Rats/Fortress is a thing sometimes, and if you have all three you will be Processioning some Rats.

4555

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: May 12, 2014, 04:12:02 pm »

'Hi Donald, I'm LadyEliza.  Tell me more about "glhf"'

It would be stuff specific to plays. You buy Scout and it says, "Huh. Interesting strategy." It buys Rats and says, "I'm going for it. What could go wrong?" You buy first turn Mountebank and it says "GG."

4556

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: May 12, 2014, 03:07:16 pm »

Is it possible to know your username then?

On online Dominion I am Donald X., and I have already played AdamH due to him asking in this thread, so your chances aren't bad.

4557

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: May 12, 2014, 03:00:52 pm »

But if I do want to zap heavily, Salvager can give us both our preferences automatically.  So the question is, would you still consider it antagonistic if Salvager had three auto-zap options: none, "fair" or "heavy," with none as the default and heavy limited by how many I've bought with coins?

There's obv. nothing antagonistic about using your zaps automatically.

It just seems like throwing the promos up for sale is simple enough to be done in parallel with adventure improvement, and would net some money from people like me.  So I'm not sure why MF doesn't do it, but I guess they have reasons I don't know about. 

My current guess is, they have decided to be crippled by their inability to find the lag bug.

4558

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: May 12, 2014, 03:38:01 am »

Donald, do you ever play Dominion on Goko?

Yes, there were a couple months when I stopped due to it no longer working on my system except in Firefox, but it's reverted to being what would be my go-to small-amount-of-time diversion on the computer except that after one game I am usually sick of the lag.

4559

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: May 12, 2014, 03:26:14 am »

Right, I was pointing out that Salvager could "cheat," but just because something is possible doesn't mean we should do it.  More recent posts indicate Salvager can check my available zaps, and as you noted zaps effectively come free with games against other humans, so maybe something like "use all available zaps" is less antagonistic and more reasonable?  That's just automating what I could do by hand. 

I don't want to use all the zaps I can. I want a fair game of 7 coppers 3 estates on both sides. Where I can't have that I want to approximate it.

This is what I'm going for.  Playing the adventures, even after zapping them by hand to make the starting decks even, has so far been a lot less fun for me than playing with other humans.  I doubt that will change because I happen to like chatting with opponents during and after the game, and bots don't talk back.  So my suggestion to heavily auto-zap is just geared toward maximizing my joy by spending as much of my Dominion time as possible playing with other humans. 

If Making Fun had accomplished amazing things in the months they've had the project, I would at some point suggest having bots say things in the campaigns (yes obv. this would not be having a conversation with a human). I am good at that kind of thing but at this point I am just hoping they do the utterly essential stuff they haven't done.

You're right that Salvager shouldn't be antagonistic, but other than that I just want to get the adventures out of the way as fast as possible.  For me the best solution would be if the promos were all available to buy.  I'd rather spend money than time on them, but that doesn't seem like it's about to happen.

There are people though that want to play the adventures, that enjoy playing against bots and like having the game setup selected to be especially entertaining. And some people like getting introduced to the expansions gradually. So I mean, I would like the adventures to be good for the people that might like them; they don't need to try to be good for the people that will never like them. For the people that will never like them, there should be another way to get the promos, or two other ways, and then so much for that.

4560

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Weird Band of Misfits Bug

« on: May 12, 2014, 02:55:39 am »

http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?/20140511/log.505d732a51c359e6597efeb8.1399876952798.txt

SheCantSayNo: turn 16
SheCantSayNo   plays Highway
SheCantSayNo   draws Highway
SheCantSayNo   plays Highway
SheCantSayNo   draws Highway
SheCantSayNo   plays Highway
SheCantSayNo   draws Band of Misfits
SheCantSayNo   plays Highway
SheCantSayNo   draws Highway
SheCantSayNo   plays Highway
SheCantSayNo   draws Ruined Market
SheCantSayNo   plays Band of Misfits
SheCantSayNo   buys Death Cart
SheCantSayNo   gains Death Cart

Had I been able to play it as Death Cart I could have bought the last Province for the win. Now I lost :/

Band of Misfits cost $0, so nothing was cheaper.

4561

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Gettings Promos

« on: May 11, 2014, 06:31:56 pm »

While we're talking about it here, you get this 1-3 star rating in these adventure games, so do you get more tokens if you have a better rating the "boss fights"?

No, they are unrelated.

If you just want one promo, start with the main set, then Prosperity act 1 and Dark Ages act 3. Those are all mostly beatable without more than the two "free" zaps (the Prosperity levels via knowing what you're doing with VP tokens).

4562

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: May 10, 2014, 08:58:59 pm »

It works as long as you don't have any zaps of your own available.

Or if we don't care how many you have! If we are just willing to have this suck up non-free zaps.

Again this system obsoletes zaps. Their only value, in this situation, is to let you make a level easier if you are having trouble winning a fair fight (well some games there are multiple opponents, but even there, it's plenty doable).

Example: I have 20 zaps available and I want to apply 3 on Base 1.2 (which is already balanced at 7C/3E each).  The default behavior is that I use the 2 free zaps and 1 of my own.  If the extension sets freeZaps=0, it would look like I had used up 3 of my own zaps and now had 17 left.  But either way, the server calculates that I have 19 zaps left, and that's the number that gets sent to the client when I open the next adventure level.

Acceptable.

Of course, Salvager could just ignore how many zaps the server says you have.  For example, it could balance the starting hands and then disable further zapping by just telling the user that he has no free zaps and no zaps of his own.  That would require some explanation, lest a user buy a flask of zaps and then get irate when it looks like he still has no zaps available, but it probably wouldn't be too hard to implement.

Yes, ignore, set free zaps to zero. The goal is to maximize the joy of playing these levels (shy of them actually making all of the intended improvements); that joy is maximized by having zero free zaps. Your nonfree zap total is not relevant, those are just fun-sapping things that have no merit beyond letting you deal with being bad at beating a level (in this situation; with no mod they let you have an awful pointless game on your way to grinding to get promos, rather than an unwinnable game). You get as many tries as you need, the bots are not great, eventually you will win that level; and if not you can get some nonfree zaps at that point (for free as it happens, since they just cost playing dominion) and make it easier.

It just does not matter that your supply of hard-earned nonfree zaps goes down, that's the way I see it. Maximize joy.

Alternatively, Salvager could try to adjust the number of zaps the server says you have.  In the example above, the client goes on to Base 1.3 and the server reports that the user has 19 zaps available.  Salvager could adjust for the two free zaps on Base 1.2 and tell the user than he only has 17 zaps available.  But making that adjustment consistently over multiple sessions could be challenging.

I would stick to the lower-effort straightforward zap-wasting fix. We are still hoping that these guys, who looked promising back in January, will somehow get around to fixing the adventures, at which point this will all no longer apply.

If you are worried people will be sad to lose nonfree zaps, you could make this change optional.

4563

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: May 10, 2014, 07:34:16 pm »

Sorry, I could google the reference but I only listen to Bon Jovi or Prince

And Prince only listens to Prince. But what does Bon Jovi listen to?

4564

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: May 10, 2014, 04:42:06 pm »

So in theory this feature could have two modes: "fair" and "just give me the promos, I wish you'd let me pay with money instead of time"   The latter would just always maximize zap usage, I'm not sure how Goko/MF or Donald X would feel about that though.

I would stick to stuff that isn't antagonistic! Remember they can really hose the mod if they want to. And you can personally buy zaps (with meaningless coins gotten from playing Dominion) and heavily-zap the levels yourself.

They have agreed to fix the adventures, which includes making the levels all fair; so getting there ahead of time isn't unfriendly.

4565

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: May 10, 2014, 04:39:18 pm »

We can't do anything about the 2 free zaps.  Actually, the whole operation is still going to consume the same number of zaps as if the user clicked the cards himself.  Example: I can run Base 1.2 with your code and give myself 3 Silver, 4 Copper, 3 Estate.  After the game, my zap total is reduced by 1 (3 Silvers less the 2 free zaps).

On the bright side, people could use this feature even if they don't have zap stockpiles, since the server doesn't seem to mind if you've used more zaps than you have.  I just gave myself a 7-Silver, 3-Duchy starting deck on Base 1.2 on a test account that has no zaps.

I am not sure why you can't edit free zaps after the fact like the hands. It seems like it will just be something like this.zaps = 0 in the same routine that's editing the hands. I mean it's copying the information from campaignData and that's some of the information. The change wouldn't affect how many zaps got eaten by the server-side part, but it would affect how many you could use yourself, which is the point.

I would def. lower free zaps to 0 if possible; again the idea is to make the levels fair/fun, not for me to use two zaps every game because I have them. If the free zaps would have gotten you there but zeroing that variable means it uses up your purchased zaps to make the level fair, I am okay with that, we are making zaps meaningless anyway.

4566

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: May 10, 2014, 04:14:28 pm »

Do you ever feel like one of those 80s bands that attempts a come back tour in the 2000's and go through their new album.

But really everyone just wants them to play thier classics.

I don't. And for the record I like Indie Cindy. Greens & Blues and What Goes Boom are both great. I think way too many people are rating their disapproval of Black Francis using the band name rather than judging how good the music is. I don't mind what he calls the band. Doolittle is one of his best albums, but not the best; that's easily Teenager of the Year. And the idea that Indie Cindy is somehow embarrassing next to Bossanova is preposterous.

4567

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: May 10, 2014, 06:28:51 am »

Aha, very interesting. Prosperity 1.8 works, and successfully starts a game where everyone has a standard starting deck. And if I "cheat" the starting deck to instead be 5 Coppers and 5 Estates, then Prosperity 3.20 loads, but Base 1.2 doesn't. So it seems fair to guess that they're validating whether your starting hand is something you could have achieved using zaps, based on the cards you're supposed to start with?

Okay, sweet. We can basically make the levels fair then, though it's more complicated. Zaps can turn Shelters into Duchy or Curse, and Curse to Estate, but can't turn things into Shelters.

Do each side separately. Count the number of treasures.

- If it's 7, make them all Coppers and make the other cards Estates, except leave Shelters alone.
- If it's 6, make them 5 Copper and one Silver, and make non-Shelters Estates.
- If it's 5, make them 3 Copper and two Silver, make non-Shelters Estates.
- If it's not 5-7, leave it alone. Dunno if this is relevant but no need to risk anything here.

If it's obvious where it is in the file, I would also set free zaps to 0, because hey, the idea is to make levels fair and enjoyable, not for you to always have a 2-zap advantage.

We (you) could balance the 5-Estates advantage by giving the opponent Duchy-Estate-Estate; it's potentially more complicated than that, because the opponent might not have a starting Duchy (and you can't zap your opponent up), so I wouldn't worry about it. I guess also sometimes it may give you Curses, and we could keep one and have 4 Estates 1 Curse. Same deal, does not seem worth the effort.

4568

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: May 10, 2014, 05:51:19 am »

Hopefully one last less controversial question.  Which do you think is more skilful 2 player or 3 player dominion?  Do you ever think people get a bit blinkered by only considering cards in the 2 player game?

Well skill matters more with 2 players, obviously. That doesn't mean there's less skill with 3 players, it just matters less - more games will be decided (relative to you) by luck. This may be tricky but you know, skill and luck aren't opposed, as previously discussed somewhere.

I don't know if uh, if the amount of things to learn to be maximally good at 3-player Dominion is more or less than that for 2-player Dominion (I hope that's a clear enough way to put it). I would guess that it's more.

There's no concern with only looking at cards as they play in 2-player games, if you only play 2-player games. For sure many cards play differently as you vary the number of players.

4569

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: May 10, 2014, 05:38:22 am »

I experienced the same behavior as Andrew: after installing this hack, Prosperity 3.20 got stuck at the loading screen. However, your suggestion of Base 1.2 loads just fine. I also tried modifying the data in campaignData as well, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

I don't have nearly as much experience as Andrew here, but his claim that the client is waiting for a message that the server isn't sending seems semi-plausible. I don't actually see any messages going from the client to the server that appear to talk about the starting decks; on the other hand, the only obvious activity is waiting for websocket messages from the server, so something seems to have gone wrong in that area.

What about say Prosperity 1.8? The number of treasure vs. vp slots is different for some levels, including probably Prosperity 3.20, but is normal for that one.

The fact that Base 1.2 worked suggests that it's verifying that the starting cards are correct later, which makes no sense, because again, zaps. Furthermore it would have to be verifying using campaignData from the server rather than whatever copy you can access, because in the past they changed the starting cards just by changing campaignData, and yet you don't get anywhere by changing it. So uh it doesn't all add up, but then I don't know how these things work or the language or any of it.

4570

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: May 10, 2014, 04:38:36 am »

This doesn't work for me.  Everything looks right Adventure pre-game screen where you would normally apply zaps.  You see your deck and your opponent's each with 7 Copper, 3 Estates.  But when you click Play, the client hangs on the loading screen.

There's no message in the Javascript log when it hangs, but it looks a lot like the error that happens if you try to create a kingdom that uses cards from expansions you don't own.  I'd guess that in both cases, the client is waiting for a response from the server that never arrives, maybe because the server is refusing or is throwing an error.

Damn. Does it happen on uh Base set act 1 level 2? Since that level has 7 coppers 3 estates already. If so then that means changing campaignClient is the issue, and well how could it be anything else? I can't see them verifying the starting hand later, especially since you can zap it.

Can campaignData be changed directly?

4571

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Pillars of Dominion

« on: May 10, 2014, 02:37:45 am »

If you wouldn't call a game with that element but no bad parts from Risk "Risk-like," that's fine, but that's what I meant.

I guess my point is, the things you don't like about Risk are what define it as a game, I mean, no one loves risk because it has dice-rolling and continents. So, of course you're not going to get a risk-like feel if you don't include them. If you're philosophically opposed to certain sets of rules that's fine, but whether it would work or not as a game mechanic is another story.

So again, you wouldn't use the term "Risk-like" the way I did, you would use different language. You think this is important to stress and are repeating it even though it was utterly clear. Well two can play that game - but only ages 12 and up.

4572

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: May 10, 2014, 02:32:49 am »

I don't know how exactly the mod works or what exactly you can change, but I am optimistic there, so, cross-posting from Making Fun. Maybe at least people with the mod can play the adventures.

I think obv. the stability issues are more important. In the meantime I would make the incredibly quick fix of changing every campaign level to "7 coppers 3 estates" on both sides, with 0 default zaps (still letting people use zaps because hey maybe someone gets stuck somewhere). This would make the campaigns all *playable* and just involves changing the starting hands. It seems easy and worth taking the time for because, as we speak, new players are trying to make it through the awful campaigns, and people are grinding through them to get the promos. Just fixing the starting conditions makes the levels fun; they are games of Dominion against a bot with a specific set of 10 cards. I mean failing this simple fix of 7 coppers 3 estates, I would turn off the adventures for the time being; until they are worth making fun, they are not worth having. They make this implementation of Dominion look bad, they are embarrassing.

This post was from January! After that came February and then March and then April and as we speak it's May.

I understand the Adventures not being a priority. It is clear though that the correct move, to maximize success, was to put in the placeholder fix for the campaigns that just sets starting levels to 7 coppers 3 estates on both sides. Call me a pessimist but this is still the move.

Programming is hard. I'm there for you. You can make this change in the file campaignClient.js. It has a routine that looks like:

Code: [Select]

// Set player and main bot opponent hands based on the campaign data
root.CampaignClient.prototype.setHands = function () {
var gameData = this.campaignData[this.avatarWorld][this.avatarRegion];
if (gameData) {
this.myHand = $.extend(true, [], gameData.yourCards);
this.otherHand = $.extend(true, [], gameData.opponentCards);
}
};
Instead of loading the starting hands from campaignData, just use ["copper", "copper", "copper", "copper", "copper", "copper", "copper", "estate", "estate", "estate"]. That means we won't have Shelters in the Dark Ages campaign and well, baby steps, you have to crawl before you can walk.

4573

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Pillars of Dominion

« on: May 10, 2014, 01:33:10 am »

A good example is, I wanted Kingdom Builder to sometimes turn into a Risk-like game, but it just didn't work out. And then the one way to make people lose settlements (in the Nomads expansion) is the one thing that many people just choose not to play with. You have to keep the game working, and have to keep it similar enough for the same people to like it.

The real game of risk is politics, the real mechanic is escalating destructive power, and zero-sum victory conditions. I'm not sure you can make anything 'risk-like' without that.

I didn't mean Risk-like as in "awful in the many ways Risk is awful," I meant Risk-like as in "there are dudes on a map and fighting." If you wouldn't call a game with that element but no bad parts from Risk "Risk-like," that's fine, but that's what I meant.

4574

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.

« on: May 09, 2014, 10:04:54 pm »

I also had a version of Pearl Diver that had you look at the bottom and choose to put it on top or not.

This is the published version of Pearl Diver. Or by "or not" you mean something else? Like, the option of discarding instead of leaving on the bottom, would be too powerful? It would self-synergize a lot more.

Oops sorry, I meant the other way. Look at top, may put it on bottom. I also had, take the top and the bottom, put one on top and one on the bottom. I did not test versions that involved discarding one of the cards.

There's probably room there for another card, but I had Pearl Diver, and it's no star, so it's not like I was looking to do something especially similar.

4575

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Pillars of Dominion

« on: May 09, 2014, 06:47:35 pm »

The four pillars of Dominion as espoused by Donald X are Witch, Chapel, Gardens, and Thief. They are "pillars" because of the way they make you change the way you play. [For example, see this post on Chapel.]

Now that Dominion and all of its expansions are out, what cards represent the pillars of Dominion strategy for you? They do not have to be from the base set and you don't have to pick four.

The idea is that the game should be different from game to game, that changing the 10 cards should actually give you different experiences. In my early days as a game designer I liked to think that things could really drastically change, but it turns out they can't so much. A good example is, I wanted Kingdom Builder to sometimes turn into a Risk-like game, but it just didn't work out. And then the one way to make people lose settlements (in the Nomads expansion) is the one thing that many people just choose not to play with. You have to keep the game working, and have to keep it similar enough for the same people to like it.

Anyway I still want to shake things up as much as is reasonable. It's always a concern and especially with the main set, where cards are simpler. When you add in later sets, so many things pull you in different arbitrary directions.

The pillars in the main set are themed around size distortion (the name for the recommended set that includes all of them). Chapel lets you have a small deck; Gardens lets you have a big (winning) deck; Witch makes other decks bigger; Thief makes other decks smaller. They thus all interact with each other, compounding the degree to which they shake up the game; Witch plays differently with Chapel, with Gardens, even with Thief.

The pillars weren't supposed to differentiate basic strategies or any such thing; they change the game significantly and in ways that relate.

For different strategies I first go to "how do you deal with the one action per turn limit" - play with only a few actions, play with +1 action stuff and treasures, play with Villages, play with Remodels/Vaults, play a deck that lives with clashes. So like, Smithy, Lab, Village, Remodel, Gardens. There are of course other ways to look at strategies.