Regarding promos/campaigns, will it be possible to get all the promos by completing all the campaigns?Yes.
Firstly if they enjoy the campaign they have a clear option of buying the super pack they enjoyed straight after. Secondly (well kinda following from the firstly point) it's likely to appeal to Goko, so they'd probably be happier to put the content in knowing it's essentially advertising a big product they have.I don't know how it will work but I wouldn't assume it will work this way. Probably you will need the expansions to play the campaign. I mean as it stands expansions cost money and campaigns cost dominion coins. I put a few expansion cards in the new main set campaign that may one day show up, but just a few. Anyway I'd assume they have to have the expansions.
This is not officially sanctioned by any means, other than a few off-hand comments by Donald X. We do not have any particular influence to get them to do things some fancy different way other than what they've done, and nor do they have a particular reason to believe that we have a good grasp on their target audience. Start with the basics first, and if this turns out well we can try to do more fancy things later.They want more campaigns though. Don't worry about them not wanting them. They have other things to do that have prevented the Hinterlands etc. campaigns from going up, and the fixed base set campaign; and then the other changes to allow more exotic campaign scenarios will surely only come after that stuff, they are lower priority. So you don't want to do exotic stuff now. You should expect that it will one day be available but see what you can do with what's already there for now.
And that's all, though I played them many times. I can't say what are the differences between Defender, Conqueror, Warlord Bots and Lord Bottington. Are the general guidelines those bots use available somewhere?I have no information there. You could ask them in their forums. From the name I bet the warlord is attacky.
Challenging to beat their bot, or challenging for the bot to win? What was the deck?Challenging to beat two Lord Bottingtons at once (I beat them up and then they said the AI update hadn't gone out yet). It's a classic pure-Cornucopia thing; if you have played a bunch of Cornucopia you will know how things will go here.
Does the deck builder work for anyone? I can't save a deck and I can't actually edit a deck unless I go the the multiplayer screen first (the page hangs after I hit add deck)I'm not checking it today, but a few weeks ago I put in a set of 10 they said was challenging to beat and it worked fine.
i would be willing to pitch in, though i am more interested in working on a strategy focused campaign. tossing some ideas around, i am quite curious on what potential tools we would have available to us. specifically, are things like this plausible?You should assume you have zero options beyond what's already there in the existing campaigns, which you can look at. The set of 10 and starting decks vary, though they're always 10 cards. In the future more tools may become available but they are not there now. Games have to be played against one or more bots, basically any question about "can you do something that the existing campaigns don't do," the answer is no. You can list such stuff as suggestions for tools you'd like in the future. I tried to give them a list of all obvious basic things to muck with.
- adjusting the kingdom size, most likely to potentially make the kingdom smaller.
- adjusting buys/gains allowed. ie could we theoretically turn off plus buys or plus gains or even your starting one buy?
- adjusting size or composition of your starting deck?
- do games have to be played against a bot, or can we just allow N turns or some other target end condition? i'm thinking along the lines of the solo challenges you see on the forum.
- turn to turn changes to game state or buy conditions or something like that? ie, could we force a megaturn by not allowing a player to buy provinces until after say the 15th turn?
i'm sure i could cook up a few more scenarios over time. i think that with a lot of flexibility we could put together a really informative strategy campaign.
I didn't say "no politics". Cyclades, for instance, has a lot of decisions inflicting harm to a specific opponent (being overbid can be cruel). Yet politics does not dominate the game to an extent where you could as well play Mafia.Let us avoid a pointless endless argument over exactly what people mean with words. I don't need to convince you that any particular fraction of published games have whatever level of politics, and don't wish to spend time analyzing the data.
Definitely, but I didn't have the games in mind that didn't stand the test of time when I said "most games".
I think I get the gist of Richard Garfield's argument here but I have seen few games in which diplomacy is so dominant (the Werewolves/Mafia type of games come to mind but they don't deny that it's all about persuading). Most games are of the sort that someone should be able to trailblaze multiple paths to victory that cannot be blocked by everyone else. Your pet peeve Risk is not of the sort, that's why it takes ages to complete.That's not Richard's argument, that's my argument: "I don't remember how he actually argues this, but it seems to me that..." Possibly you can dig up one of his old Duelist articles online. I know he explained the "chip-taking game," which is a very simple pure politics game.
I like the idea of DA campaign with Alchemy for Act 1, Cornucopia Act 2 and DA for Act 3. I was also thinking long term and if this campaign turns out well, we might want to do them for other combinations like Seaside/Prosperity, etc. I think a good starting point is using Donald X.'s recommended kingdoms for Alchemy, Cornucopia and going from there. Assuming, he is fine with that. Just thinking that might save us a little time. 60 levels is a lot of levels to program. But, if we are to do it the Goko way the first 3 levels tend to introduce some cards and then the boss battle has the cards we introduced. I don't know if we are going to do it that way or not.It's fine if you want to use recommended sets, but you should know that if I had a way to use them in the existing campaigns then I already did. You should probably think of every 4th level as being in some sense a "boss level," however you are not introducing cards, they have all been introduced, so there's no reason to match how the existing campaigns go.
Since GeoLib has asked your opinion of Diplomacy, I need to ask your opinion of Axis and Allies. My boy Timothy insists.I have not played Axis and Allies and do not even have much of a notion of how it goes.
Name, reaction, and artwork of Horse Traders synergise very well. I find this card very thematic.Bazaar has that name because there was unused art from the main set that needed to be used - specifically, unused art for Market.
Bazaar should have been a Village. Every card which looks like a market should net a Buy.
You've said that you avoid politics in your games, and something that I appreciate about Dominion over say, Settlers of Catan, is that you avoid all the robber placement nonsense and one person feeling like everyone is ganging up on them. At the other extreme is a game like Diplomacy, where politics is most of the point. Perhaps counter-intuitively, it's one of my other favorite games (though I play it orders of magnitude less often due to the difficulty in getting 7 interested people together for a whole day). Have you played Diplomacy, and do you like it? Based on playing it, or perhaps what you've heard, do you think politics works in this sort of situation where it becomes the focus rather than an annoyance.I have not played Diplomacy. I have played other political games, like Risk and Settlers.
In reference to the massive, time-consuming game aspect, do you design your games to be quick because you, personally enjoy quick games more or because you think that they have broader appeal and people get to play them more often? Same with the politics: do you avoid politics because you like apolitical games better or because you think it makes them more fun for consumers?Being fast does a lot for you.
Fast games are good because there are more opportunities to play them, players get more of a chance to win a game over the evening, and you get more variety of experiences over your evening.I have made longer games, but they're less likely to get published. I make shorter games because 1) I like that for several reasons, 2) other people like it, 3) we get in more plays, 4) they are more publishable.
Can we fiddle with endgame conditions?There is a list of proposed features, but for this one I recommend just making do with what it already does. There can be more campaigns later.
No, I'm calling us all insensitive people who don't encounter enough retards in your life. I know I certainly don't encounter enough retards in my life, considering how awkward I tend to act around them.Maybe *you* don't encounter enough - *I* have internet access. Boom swish.
I give you a list of 9 cards already chosen. Your job is to pick the 10th and final card. However, here are the desiderata:The routine I was describing only handles #2. If you want it to pick a Prosperity card you only give it Prosperity cards to pick from. To get the uniform card frequencies we use the previously discussed algorithm outside of this routine. This routine just picks a fun card to add, given a set of cards already chosen and a set of cards to pick from to add.
(1) The set of 10 cards should have 5 Prosperity.
(2) The set of 10 cards should be "fun".
(3) Each card that isn't already part of the 9 should have an equal chance of getting picked.
See the problem? Those first nine cards may have already lost you the chance of succeeding at (1) and (2). And even if you still have a chance, your hands are bound by (3) anyway. You can't favor any card to help (1) or (2) unless you give up on (3).
What this means is that the routine of "here's a list of cards already chosen, now pick one more with calculated biases" is insufficient to be the only basis of a full-fledged kingdom creator. There has to be some more stuff overseeing the whole thing and making sure that it all fits together to give the desired result.Okay yes, you need the meta-algorithm, and #1 and #3 are in the meta-algorithm rather than in the routine I described. I was just saying, if that #2 routine exists then prioritizing Prosperity sounds easy to me. You call the routine using just Prosperity cards for 5 sets, rotating as previously discussed. You pick a set of 5, there's your 5 uniform fun Prosperity cards. Then we call the routine using just non-Prosperity etc.
Barbarian sounds really cool. A candidate for a Dark Ages card in the Treasure Chest set?Barbarian got plenty of testing.
(I know you've said that if there was going to be anything after Guilds, Jay would rather have it be something new than a set with more Durations/VP token cards/etc so I guess that really makes my question did it get substantial play testing, or did the decision to drop it come before it got very much?)
Wow. My initial reaction is that I like that a lot. It trashes an opponents card worth $3-$6 and then gains a $3-$6 from the trash. Effectively a thief for "everything else".It was not too powerful.
Why did you change it? Was the trash and gain too powerful (or bit powerful enough, hense the +$2?)
Going with this analogy, I believe that puts you in the "power user" bracket as far as ordering food is concerned. I agree that as far as restaurant ordering is concerned, most people are at the "power user" level. An example of someone who wouldn't be is, say, a mentally-retarded person who has been trained to always say "I want duck". When the waitress says "we don't have any duck," he gets agitated and repeats: "I want duck." For this customer, bringing turkey because it's the closest is actually a better solution, because the customer won't get agitated and in all probability it won't make that much of a difference.Dude, are you calling us all retards?
I have an idea. We should have a contest on Dominion Strategy to try and come up with 50 fun casual kingdoms that Goko will implement. After players play through those 50 kingdoms, then, they can play full random. I don't know. Just a thought.Obv. there are campaigns, and new players do gravitate towards them; the important thing currently is, man, replace the main set campaign with a better one. And then that's uh 60 games so there you go.
Right now, there is no way to tell the generator to do all four of these, even though it is theoretically possible:My feeling is that "include 5 from Prosperity (etc.)" is going to be an option that users are vastly more interested in than any other specifics of card selection algorithms. Again I would have the game-instance-generation screen give a choice of algorithms and a choice of expansions. Your algorithm would be called knowing that it was expected to include exactly 5 from Prosperity. To be an algorithm on the list it would have to handle that.
A) I want 5 Prosperity cards.
B) I want each Prosperity card to have an equal probability of being picked.
C) I want each non-Prosperity card to have an equal probability of being picked.
D) I want the generator to be biased towards "balanced" sets.
Well yes, but Bandit was different. It didn't make +$2 but both attacked and gained-from-the-trash in the same turn.Previously he grew up to be a bandit. That made more sense. It didn't work out because sometimes you would want to fight Bandit by buying some and you couldn't, you had to upgrade Urchins.
Also, Bandit is now Rogue, I think?
On the topic, are there any other card names you are particularly proud of? I like City a lot.City was called Boomtown when I passed the file on to Jay. There was a sketch for it I was commenting on and I was saying how the name suggested wild west but of course we wanted medieval, and Jay said oh uh maybe we should rename it. City is a great name for it so that all worked out.
Oh I got a real life legit question for once!As a kid he's an urchin, he grows up to be a mercenary. He gets taught the ropes by another attack card. Even if it's just another urchin he learns a thing or two.
Urchin -> Mercenary
Whats the thought process behind that?
If your street urchin gets attacked he grows up to be a big bad mercenary?
Or its a mercenary posing as a street urchin in order to trap unwary thugs?
