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?
As a human, I understand this. But you're missing my point, which is that the generator doesn't understand this.It seems crazy to me to be talking about how the generator doesn't understand it. The generator doesn't understand anything and doesn't have to. It can do what it's told. And we don't need to let people tell it to do impossible things. Again, completely outside of your program, the user picks a selection method and picks set biases. At that level there's some decision about how many cards to include from each set based on what they picked. Inside your selection method code, you know you need 5 from Prosperity and just deal with it.
That's a fundamental extra layer on top of the existing code, and, as I said, it's substantially more work and I don't have the next few weekends free. So, yeah, please don't be too disappointed if it doesn't show up quickly.I don't need any work from you here ever. I don't mean that in an unfriendly way. Why would I need you to do this? Pure random is awesome and we have that already. If you feel like writing something, man, have fun, I don't mind.
Maybe it's more important to the user that cards are uniform, and the Prosperity restriction was an unimportant "try to do this if you can" rule.This seems extremely unlikely to me. I think anyone saying "5 from Prosperity" actually wants 5 from Prosperity, that's more important to them than whatever other criteria. They want to play with Prosperity.
Regarding the problems with Hans im Glück and RGG, I think Hans im Glück won't publish the German version of Guilds right?Last I heard HiG was out of the picture. I don't know where things stand. I don't know who is publishing Guilds in German. I bet someone will be doing it.
If this is true, can you say something about if there's already a replacement publisher found for the German version?
Because it's 3 boxes sold together, not one box containing 1000 cards.It is not three boxes sold together, it is one box containing 950 cards plus playmats and tokens. http://tabletopgeeks.com/files/2012/03/DominionBigBox-650x487.jpg
I think it might be worth doing a 5th/10th/Whatever-th Anniversary edition of the base set, where you streamline the wordings (say "Copper" instead of "Copper card" etc), and put a "may" into Throne Room. It wouldn't change all that much, and most players wouldn't feel that they *needed* to pick it up, but they would know that Dominion now works by this second edition where Throne Room has a "may." That would really be the only change.Throne Room isn't the only one of those in the main set, but I don't think nonessential functional wording changes are on the table.
What about adding Stash to the (online) main set? I don't see any problem with this:I don't imagine springing whatever interface Stash gets on new players will be ideal, but whatever; giving people Stash means not having it as a thing to play through campaigns to get. They already wish they had more promos.
By the way, I'm not even sure if it will lead to any problems anyway, Carcassonne had a major rule change after getting SdJ and my copy (2009 RGG edition) still has the logo on it.I don't know the details there, I just know it's an issue. Maybe the SdJ people would say, sure, swap out a few cards. That would be a necessary step though. We had to change the rulebook to match the German one, back when, in order to use the logo.
Will it be so much expensive? Looking at Dominion products that include only cards, we have:Looks like main set plus Prosperity plus Alchemy is $100: http://www.amazon.com/Rio-Grande-Games-RGG-425/dp/B003Y737CO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358271977&sr=8-1
- 150-cards Alchemy and Cornucopia: MSRP $30,
- 300-cards Hinterlands: MSRP $40,
- 500-cards Base and Intrigue: MSRP $45.
I think a 1000-cards box would have MSRP of $60. $65 if some extra things like tokens or mats are included.
I am trying to think of how to approach this without having any issues. I don't want to try to sell people overlapping products. I am not sold on the idea that Goko's audience will exceed Dominion's; it's nice to aim high though. Currently I think most people just buy everything, so any re-sorting of cards wouldn't make a difference there anyway; what you want is a veto list.I got better at making sets after Intrigue. I can believe that people playing the base set by itself might feel like it needs something. There are some duds, and those duds reduce strategic options. The base set has done great anyway, but you know, there's room for improvement.Why not use this room? Doing 2-3 changes to the Goko base set (taking out duds, adding a better but still simple card from another set which would both improve the base and preview later sets, maybe adding one new card if you can talk Jay into releasing it as a promo for people playing with RL cards). If Goko really succeeds, then the clear majority of Dominion players in the world have not seen the game yet, it's not too late for small changes if they're going to improve the experience a lot.
To your alogorithm: I don't see by what method you put which randomizer cards in piles X/Y. Also randomly? If deterministicly, you have the problem that cards that are in X never show up with cards in Y. If everything happens uniform at random, this should also be perfectly uniform. A quite complicated method to uniformly draw 10 out of 25, but I haven't followed the thread close enough, I suppose there is a reason why you just don't draw 10 out of 25, but instead preprocess to draw 10 out of 13/12The method for putting cards into piles is the old method - all cards are weighted by what they do, so that a set of 10 is more likely to get a village if it doesn't have one yet and less likely if it does, and so on. So with this new algorithm you get some amount of the old idea of "sets are more fun with a village" but with much less "so every set has Bandit Camp."
Divide the number of cards the player owns by 10. Prepare to generate that many sets-of-10. Pick a random starting card for each one. Now go through and pick a 2nd card for each set out of the cards remaining, using your existing algorithm. Then pick a 3rd card for each set out of the cards remaining, etc. Eventually you will have used every card, while doing a certain amount to increase the chance of "fun" via how the cards are grouped. Now just pick one of the generated sets at random and there you go. You can use the other generated sets later or not.
If the number of cards they own isn't a multiple of 10, then for perfect results we would have to generate ten times as many sets, using ten copies of each card but of course not allowing duplicates in a set. There is a chance that you will end up with a duplicate left at the end - the card that has to go in this slot is already in this set. I don't know how common that would be, but there are things you can do there, depending on how much work you want to do vs. how much you care about a small amount of compromising card frequency or fun.
So, I now have an option for generating Uniform sets! It's inspired by an idea from Donald. Here's a simplified example to show how it works:Sweet.
In other words, "I want at least 5 Prosperity cards" is incompatible with "I want each card to be equally likely to show up", and I gotta choose one of those to prioritize. "Equally likely to show up" is a global constraint, so it wins.Well obv. you could manage this if you wanted.
I don't want to see Margrave more often than Noble Brigand, etc., that's just making the sets worse for me.I feel the need to hammer on this point. As it stands, Margrave shows up more often than average and Noble Brigand less often (for example), because Margrave has +3 Cards and +1 Buy and Noble Brigand just looks good in leather. But that means that with this randomizer, I play more games with Margrave and fewer with Noble Brigand. That cannot possibly be making games more fun; attacks in particular are a place where variety is crucial. Discarding down to 3 every turn is much more tolerable when you aren't doing it game after game. And the flexibility of Margrave gets it purchased in more games that it's present in; maybe we didn't even buy Noble Brigand that game it came up. So Margrave extra-dominates.
Well, how about this as a proposal: Initially the pure unbiased randomizer will be listed as the top one. We implement a rating/approval system for kingdoms that players can give after they play a game. The order of randomizers will be re-sorted based on whichever randomizer has a higher (Bayesian) rating.For sure I would not have the order of a list of options change over time, that would obv. suck. You could change which radio button is the default, but only for players who haven't played yet - for people who've ever seen this screen, it should retain what they previously picked. Aside from those things, if for a completely-new-to-Goko player the default radio button is the method most people are upvoting sets for, that's fine. Of course a lot of the time they will just join a game someone else started, without even seeing that list of options.
That way, in the long run, whichever randomizer, yours, mine, unbiased, generates the better kingdoms, as determined by the players, becomes the UI default for new players who have decided to use a randomizer for the first time.
Zaps were always buyable with Dominion coins since the store first opened.I confirm.
Huh, that's cool. I thought they were great already, but I'm very curious as to what the further changes would be.I'm just talking about the starting decks and the act 3 rule. The sets-of-10 are correct (I believe) - only the main set is missing my sets-of-10 (I didn't actually pick every set-of-10, many of the act 3 ones for Intrigue / Seaside / Prosperity are theirs; I picked them for the other sets and most of acts 1-2; I got sucked into that because they were introducing the new cards extremely slowly, all these levels of one Seaside card and nine main set cards).
Question #2: The Intrigue and Dark Ages campaigns have been fixed. I can recommend them. The Base Set campaign is pretty dull, and the Seaside and Prosperity campaigns still require silly numbers of zaps. Hinterlands and Cornucopia don't even have campaigns yet.I gave them new lists for the base set but they haven't used them. They have the lists for Hinterlands and Cornucopia (and Alchemy).
I think Adventure mode has been on the back burner for several months now. I do wish they'd fix up the starting hands for Seaside and Prosperity. That seems like a trivial change.
A lot of comments I've seen, some from DXV, seem to imply thatMan. Is this really the way you want me to spend the time I have for you guys?
a) the game creator doesn't have any power to create errata to fix the game and/or
b) even if he did, it's not necessary, because the cards explain themselves, and the FAQs only provide "clarification" (is the word I think I've seen).
Okay, maybe I'm stupid here, but... why is there a bonus for cards costing 5?I imagine this comes directly from me, saying, $5's are important (it goes further: $5's that you can load up on are even better, and you will notice an emphasis on them in the later sets).
Look at Hinterlands, where Margrave is sitting happily at 4th place (he's got a +Buy and he's worth 5). Probably it would go up more if I tried boosting the Interactive field more.But this just makes me think, it picks Margrave because Margrave has more going on, what with the card-drawing and +buy, and then that makes it less likely to pick the other attacks because the set of 10 has an attack already, it has Margrave. The presence of an attack that fits multiple slots lowers the frequency of all the other attacks. This in turn makes your player interaction tend to come from the same cards over multiple games, when it's more fun to mix that up.
So maybe what's going on is that Pirate Ship and Embargo (and to some extent, Sea Hag) have a "playing with toys and evocative" fun factor that I'm not catching here. That's a bit hard to quantify. Or maybe I just need to boost the Coinage attribute.I think it's okay that say Pirate Ship fills no slots other than attacking and making coins. That doesn't make it a bad card to include in sets of 10. It remains an important card because it provides interaction, and for sure it's best if the interaction varies, if it's not a ton of Ghost Ship and Ambassador games and not many Pirate Ship or Sea Hag ones.
OK. So you want your tool to be a magical wand, not a hammer. People should use it without having a clue how it works.I think a magic wand will be better for most players, beginners or not. It's not that it should be uh non-clue-giving; it should be clearly titled, "Engine-heavy" or "Wacky" or whatever it is. A mass of options is no good, it's for computer programmers. A small number of big toggles is fine, or just, picking a selection algorithm from a list. It's fine if the mass of options is hidden away somewhere but man I do not think the average player is messing with it. They are here to play Dominion, not to learn what "splitter" means and then consider how many of those they want.
It's my understanding that when playtesting in real life, this is more or less how Donald and company would play; take cards from 2 or 3 expansions rather than from all of them. So the idea has certainly been thoroughly tested. In my opinion, it's a good compromise.Most of my testing IRL has in fact been, 5 cards from expansion A, 5 from expansion B, otherwise random. For the next game I would rotate out 2 of each rather than replace all ten. I have also done a fair amount of 10 cards from one expansion.
You're saying using a word like "another" doesn't mean anything, I'm saying it does.In most situations, how am I repeating this yet again, you are in fact getting "another" card. Talisman's FAQ says "another" in the same way that Smithy's FAQ says "Draw three cards." The fact that you can't always draw three cards does not require a ruling from me personally.
So, there should be choices. Full random, full engine, full money, other possibilities, mixes between them.I broadly categorize decks by how you deal with the "one action per turn" rule:
