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3251

Feedback / RSS

« on: February 07, 2012, 02:13:01 pm »

Does anyone else use the RSS feed on this forum?  Is anyone else having problems with it?  Or am I just imagining things?  On my Google Reader, it won't display new posts unless I actually click on the feed itself, and then it will display 5 recent posts and that's it.

3252

2011 / Winner of the Kingdom Design Challenge

« on: February 05, 2012, 02:15:09 pm »

In a close vote, Wingnut wins the prize as the submitter of set #6: Menagerie, Tunnel, Ghost Ship, Governor, Inn, Monument, Worker's Village, Grand Market, Goons, Adventurer



Submitters of the final sets:

Insomniac   
Razzishi   
WanderingWinder   
Thisisnotasmile   
Qvist   
Wingnut   
papaHav   
Geronimoo   
16hp   

The full breakdown of the kingdom submissions:

• The final sets
• the 16 final candidates
• all submissions
• statistics

Full post to come.

3253

General Discussion / Re: Math Nerds...

« on: February 03, 2012, 04:25:01 am »

Isn't there a similar problem in electrical engineering?  All the signs are backward, and people have learned to deal with it, but if we had a time-travel machine obviously everyone would prefer it to be the "right" way even though it doesn't matter so long as you're consistent. 

3254

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Greatest Isotropic Moments of 2011

« on: February 03, 2012, 04:18:31 am »

Taking screenshots is the trickiest part, since I can't do that at work.  The writeup is finalized already and the screenshots will come as soon as I have an hour or so uninterrupted at home.

3255

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: The Most Thematic Turn

« on: February 01, 2012, 06:27:59 pm »

What does the last sentence refer to?

It is actually a direct quote from base Dominion's back-of-box game description.

3256

News and Announcements / Server issues

« on: February 01, 2012, 02:10:22 pm »

As you may have noticed, we seem to be having server issues today.  The forum and councilroom.com are hosted on a machine in Rob's apartment, which occasionally suffers from bad Internet. 

It's usually not a big deal, but we're thinking about moving this site onto dedicated hosting if this persists.

3257

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: The Most Thematic Turn

« on: February 01, 2012, 10:25:11 am »

I sat brooding in my castle.  I was engaged in a bitter war against my archrival.  While he annexed the neighboring provinces and duchies, I constructed throne rooms all over my castle and offered nobility to every able-bodied man that entered.  But despite my noblemen, my rival had an edge: he had cornered the market on beautiful women.  With offers of gold and silver, he had lured every woman in the kingdom to join his harems.  The only women I could find he had swindled away from right under my feet: the horror, when I visited my secret bedchamber, only to find they had been transformed into a pack of hired goons!

But all of a sudden, inspiration struck!  I ordered my ironworks to immediately begin production on a gang of thieves.  Once complete, noblemen from my watchtowers summoned the thieves to my throne room, where I issued them a royal decree: go forth and plunder!  Plunder all the beautiful women you can, and be sure not to accidentally steal any copper!

Twice they struck, and twice they brought me the women I sought.  Cackling with glee, and standing atop the bridges I had built in my throne room, I purchased eight beautiful homes.  With no more estates, women, or noblemen left in the kingdom, my rival had no choice but to concede defeat.  My grandparents, on my mother’s side, were delighted.

3258

General Discussion / Re: Demographics of F.DS

« on: January 31, 2012, 01:53:51 pm »

I have edited the poll after educating myself with this informative Euler diagram on the differences between England, Great Britain, United Kingdom, and British Isles.

3259

Other Games / Re: A few acres of snow ?

« on: January 31, 2012, 08:55:03 am »

Sorry for double post, but I'm not that great with the cutting and pasting...

[..]

His plan is to "keep changing the rules", which is the "only way" to fix 2-player wargames.  He analogizes it to Dominion, where you keep playing with new sets.

That's a really poor argument, but I think he's being irrational because he's under fire at the moment. He sure must've been proud of his game when it first came out and rightly so. Apparently, it was a pretty good game. But now the cat's out of the bag and his pride must have suffered a big dent.

This is not the way to fix it, though. Dominion doesn't have new sets released because its broken, it gets new sets because people like it and want to buy more of it so they can put together even more different sets.

To clarify, I think what he meant was, each time you play Dominion, you have a new set for which to figure out the "best" combo.

This of course means he's implicitly admitting that when you buy A Few Acres of Snow, what you're really buying is the equivalent of one Dominion Kingdom set.

3260

Other Games / Re: A few acres of snow ?

« on: January 31, 2012, 08:27:26 am »

I just relistened to the podcast (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgamepodcastepisode/73675/episode-152-a-few-minutes-of-show-with-martin-wall around 43:00), and his exact quote is "All 2-player wargames are broken at some level."  Chess, for instance, "must have an optimum strategy".  He says his fix is good enough for bad players, who won't realize that the game is broken. 

How does that feel?  Your game's designer is telling you that if you enjoy his game it's because you're too dumb to have figured out how to solve it.  Dominion and Chess and Twilight Struggle are similarly "solved", but unlike AFAoS, they are fun because any theoretical "solution" to those games is far too complex for a human to process.  Whereas the AFAoS algorithm is basically summed up in the title of the famous BGG thread that started it all: Can France Beat Britain's "Settle Halifax, Besiege Louisbourg, Besiege Quebec" Strategy?

His plan is to "keep changing the rules", which is the "only way" to fix 2-player wargames.  He analogizes it to Dominion, where you keep playing with new sets.

3261

Other Games / Re: A few acres of snow ?

« on: January 31, 2012, 08:18:12 am »

I assume he was referring to an asymmetric 2-player game.

3262

Other Games / Re: A few acres of snow ?

« on: January 31, 2012, 07:50:44 am »

The AFAoS BoardGameGeek forums are amazing to read, even though I've never played the game.  Warning: if you are Captain_Frisk or someone else who doesn't want to hear this whole story (which may ruin your AFAoS experience), don't read below:

===

Timeline:

* AFAoS is made
* Soon after, someone discovers that the British has an unstoppably strong strategy.  From what I understand, it is basically the realization that trashing is good for your deck in this game.  How no one thought of playtesting a deck-thinning strategy in a deck-building game I cannot understand. 
* Lots of flamewars, with tons of Martin Wallace zealots insisting to the end that there is no way the game could be imbalanced
* out4blood goes 64-0 online playing nothing but the strategy.  People continue to defend Martin Wallace.
* After months of silence, in a rather snarky post, Martin Wallace releases a "fix" that he claims is just a "variant scenario" for the game, while denying that there is anything wrong.
* The fix does not help.  British continues to be unstoppably strong. 
* Martin Wallace admits the game is flawed and believes there is no way to remedy the balance issue except by introducing more "variant scenarios" every now and then, which is equivalent to P1 always wins in Dominion, but let's just keep releasing new sets of 10 cards so that P1 always ends up winning a little differently. 
* Martin Wallace also claims every single 2-player wargame ever made is just as broken as his.  Which is hugely insulting, speaking as someone who writes a Twilight Struggle blog.
* Flamewars continue forever.  out4blood is now 105-0 as British.

I ended up losing a lot of respect for this guy after reading through all this.  He released a fundamentally broken game without playtesting the most basic strategic principle of deckbuilding games.  He was mute for months while the debate raged and refused to engage the community on the issue.  Eventually, while passive-aggressively criticizing his customers that complained about this issue, he releases a fix that doesn't solve anything.  And now he's given up on the game, while claiming that every single two-player wargame ever made is similarly broken. 

3263

Simulation / Re: Dominiate: a Dominion simulator that runs on the Web

« on: January 31, 2012, 06:14:56 am »

How should I redefine the Tactician play rule?  Right now it seems to discard it at any opportunity.  How would I set it to discard only after playing everything else (so long as one card is left) and there is < $X in the hand?

Also, when I had buggy code (for example, I had requires: ["Tactician, Tunnel"] instead of requires: ["Tactician", "Tunnel"]), it didn't tell me, but instead just weirded out and ended up reverting me back to BankWharf.

3264

Dominion Isotropic / Re: Attention-whoring thread.... I did it!!

« on: January 31, 2012, 04:18:45 am »

Is this an appropriate place to brag that DS hit 1.5M views this morning?  Our first half-million views came after ~8 months; the next half-million took ~4 months, and this half million took ~2 months.  Thank you Dominion Christmas presents.

f.DS is approaching 500,000 views per month, but unlike the main site, this counts our own visits, so that eliminates, like, 499,000 of those.

3265

2011 / Re: Final Voting: 2011 DominionStrategy.com Kingdom Design Challenge

« on: January 30, 2012, 06:01:19 pm »

I did not.  I don't know if rrenaud did.  I felt that playing a single game or two on each set would bias me to a conclusion that I didn't really have sufficient evidence to support.  It was impractical to play more than that given the 100+ submissions, and it's difficult to simulate a lot of these sets in the simulators.

3266

2011 / Re: Final Voting: 2011 DominionStrategy.com Kingdom Design Challenge

« on: January 30, 2012, 05:41:13 pm »

Here's a description of some of the stuff I considered in selecting sets.  It turned out to be considerably harder than I thought.

You want to encourage unorthodox play, to reward creativity.  Some of these sets do that -- Set #8, for example, has a neat hidden trick that olneyce exploited (though not to its fullest potential).  But you can't make every set a gimmick set, and even the "gimmick" sets have to be about more than who spots the gimmick.  So Set #3, the KC/Goons/Masq set, has a little rock-paper-scissors going on depending on how you deal with the pin.  In Set #1 (and 9), the obvious play is not necessarily the wrong one.  It's just not actually the obvious best move like it usually is.  And in Set #2, the play general idea is obvious -- but how do you implement it?

You want to try to reward building super complex decks.  But the problem with this is, 1) these tend to be a bit swingy, and 2) real Dominion is about more than just engines: there's Big Money too!  This was the hardest to balance: I am not really satisfied that any of the final 9 sets allows a money strategy to compete.  Some of the ones in the 16 final candidates had money as a viable candidate, but then you run into the danger of both players deciding that money would be faster and seeing a championship game devolve into who drew their Envoy/Big Money better.

You want to try to boost unpopular cards.  But we didn't include a Kingdom with Thief, because either you make the Thief play incredibly overpowered (i.e., 9 Treasure Kingdoms + Thief), or Thief still just sits there unused.  It's really, really hard to make truly bad cards an integral part of someone's deck.  I think Set #4 does a good job of integrating Oracle, though I am told Oracle is not actually that bad.  Set #8 puts Secret Chamber to good use: that's probably a better example.

You want to try to accurately represent Dominion as a whole.  I touched upon this a little bit in how Big Money doesn't get a fair shake here.  Well, neither do many attacks, because Sea Hag doesn't really affect your strategy so much as it sits on it.  Of course, we do have attacks, but you have to balance it against ...

You want the sets not to be too swingy -- within reason.  It's not an accurate representation of Dominion if you try to make it no-luck: I used to play with !attacks for a while, and boy let me tell you that was boring.  The key is to try to work in ways to counter the attacks, such that the game is not just who spams the attack more, but still make the attack worth getting.  Most random sets don't allow you that option.  Here, Ambassador was a big problem, but eventually we decided to include it.  olneyce won Game 8 even though he was behind in Ambassadoring.  Torturer in Game 1 was another one that could be managed.  But there's no Sea Hag, for instance, since either it shows up with Jack/Masq/etc., or it doesn't, and neither makes for an interesting game.

You want to balance the sets between each other.  Maybe Ironworks/Gardens is a really good measure of skill, but man you do not want to see that in every game.  I think we went a little overboard with Grand Markets/megaturns, as you all have pointed out.  But overall I'm satisfied of the mix between slogfests and explosive games.  There's more variety in megaturn games.  You can only have so many Set #2's. 

You want to balance Colony vs non-Colony.  We ended up with much more Colony than you'd expect if you chose randomly, but this community likes Colony games, and at least we kept it around 50%.

So I ranked all the cards as "yes", "maybe", and "no".  rrenaud gave them numbers.  We tallied together and took the highest combined score sets, as well as a couple others that one of us liked a lot, and assembled a list of 16.  Honestly, all 16 of those could have been final sets.  But these 9 happened to complement each other well.  I then ordered them to try to have some game-to-game diversity (for instance, no Gardens back-to-back, mix up Colonies).  And though the games at the end are less likely to be played, you also don't want game 9 to be a swingy set (e.g., Governor/Goons).

3267

2011 / Re: Final Voting: 2011 DominionStrategy.com Kingdom Design Challenge

« on: January 30, 2012, 05:04:41 pm »

Here are corrected stats.

In terms of submissions, every single Dominion card was featured.  Yes, that's right: even Possession and Saboteur got one set each.  The most common cards were: Gardens 28, Tunnel 26, Hamlet 25.  (Like, by a landslide.  There is a continuous stream of cards up to 18 appearances each, and then a sudden jump to these three.)  The least popular were:

Bazaar   2
Laboratory   2
Nomad Camp   2
Smugglers   2
Spy   2
Trading Post   2
Transmute   2
University   2
Possession   1
Saboteur   1

Yes, I'm just as surprised as you are.

In terms of the 16 final candidates, 100 Dominion cards were featured.  The most common cards were: Grand Market 5, Gardens 4, Ironworks 4, Worker's Village 4.

In terms of the 9 final sets, 69 Dominion cards were featured.  The most common cards were: Grand Market 4, Worker's Village 4, Goons 3, Ironworks 3.

All of this data will be made public when the voting closes.  (Currently this is all tied to who submitted each set, and rather than strip all that data, I'm just going to hold off on releasing it until the voting finishes.)

3268

2011 / Re: Final Voting: 2011 DominionStrategy.com Kingdom Design Challenge

« on: January 30, 2012, 03:16:44 pm »

Why so many Grand Markets?

Funny note: in compiling the sets, I made a list of 16 final candidates.  In that list, 100 different Kingdom cards were included, with Gardens, Grand Market, Worker's Village, and Ironworks being in a 4-way tie at 4.

This one is actually technically slightly more diverse: still 4 with GMarket and Worker's Village, but 62 Kingdom cards represented (out of a possible ~90).

Wow my numbers are totally off.  Let me redo them.

3269

GokoDom / Re: IsoDom 3 Qualifier

« on: January 30, 2012, 01:23:40 pm »

Hmmm ... I had thought that I had sent Lionel a PM on the forum here, but I don't see it in my Sent Items.

If you read this Lionel, send me a PM so we can set up a time for our match. (I'll keep trying to send one, myself).

For whatever reason, by default PMs sent are not saved into the sent folder.

It isn't possible to change that? 

I found the option to fix this.  From now on, by default, all PMs sent are now saved to the sent folder.

3270

Dominion Isotropic / Re: Funny Things on Isotropic

« on: January 30, 2012, 12:55:15 pm »

I don't watch Simpsons. I don't get the joke. 

... probably. Don't have any sound here and am wodering why that's 10 minutes.  And hope that's english...

As funny as watching Simpsons in Spanish is, this is probably a better link:

3271

2011 / Re: Final Voting: 2011 DominionStrategy.com Kingdom Design Challenge

« on: January 30, 2012, 12:15:21 pm »

Is it just a coincidence that the only unplayed set is the one leading the poll?  I confess that I did not at all expect it to be as popular as the poll suggests.  Then again, the crowd is more reliable than the individual.

3272

Game Reports / Re: 5/2: Open Explorer?

« on: January 30, 2012, 10:16:37 am »

If you open Explorer, are you now vulnerable to a Pirate Ship counter from P2?

3273

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Why on earth do people...(feel free to add your own)

« on: January 30, 2012, 06:26:23 am »

Back to OPs, on the "why on earth..." topic, I'd like to know why on earth people waste their embargoes on embargoing the curse pile.

It's not uncommon to spend $2 on a one-time Silver, without any intention or desire of Embargoing anything.

3274

2011 / Final Voting: 2011 DominionStrategy.com Kingdom Design Challenge

« on: January 29, 2012, 05:15:12 am »

These are the nine sets that were scheduled for the final of the 2011 DominionStrategy.com Championships.  (The ninth set was unused, but is still eligible for this poll.)  Please vote for your favorite of these sets -- you may define favorite in any way you choose.  You may change your vote at any time.

Feel free to use this thread to discuss the sets, how olneyce and manzi played them, and whether you spot any alternative strategies that the players might have missed.

The winner will receive a Dominion expansion of his choice.  Voting will close in one week.

If you submitted one of the sets below, please do not identify which set you submitted until after the voting is concluded.  After the winner is announced, we will also release all the other sets submitted to this challenge.

Game 1: Moat, Tunnel, Bishop, Gardens, Ironworks, Young Witch, Tournament, Council Room, Torturer, Border Village
Bane: Hamlet
Colony: No

Game 2: Crossroads, Loan, Silk Road, Baron, Bureaucrat, Apprentice, Duke, Farmland, Harem, Nobles
Colony: Yes

Game 3: Haven, Great Hall, Workshop, Masquerade, Ironworks, Island, Throne Room, Tactician, Goons, King's Court
Colony: No

Game 4: Lookout, Masquerade, Oracle, Smithy, Worker's Village, Festival, Ghost Ship, Margrave, Mountebank, Treasury
Colony: No

Game 5: Embargo, University, Scrying Pool, Worker's Village, Remodel, Wharf, Rabble, Grand Market, Forge, Peddler
Colony: Yes

Game 6: Menagerie, Tunnel, Ghost Ship, Governor, Inn, Monument, Worker's Village, Grand Market, Goons, Adventurer
Colony: No

Game 7: Embargo, Scheme, Menagerie, Watchtower, Fishing Village, Remake, Haggler, Vault, Grand Market, Expand
Colony: Yes

Game 8: Crossroads, Secret Chamber, Warehouse, Loan, Ambassador, Caravan, Worker's Village, Bureaucrat, Merchant Ship, Grand Market
Colony: Yes

Game 9: Chapel, Fishing Village, Watchtower, Ironworks, Gardens, Bridge, Highway, Mountebank, Ill-gotten Gains, Goons
Colony: Yes

3275

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Why on earth do people...(feel free to add your own)

« on: January 27, 2012, 12:51:21 pm »

For instance, the "Golden Deck" works because you get down to Bishop - Gold - Gold - Silver - Province as your deck, and then each turn you trash Province and buy Province.  You're "losing" VP, but think of it instead as gaining 5VP a turn while running down the Provinces.