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3826
Dominion Articles / Re: Deck Control
« on: June 14, 2011, 12:16:51 pm »
I think the (not!) triggering of the reshuffling is especially important when playing Actionchains with some discard-for-value (Minion, Warehouse, Cellar, Vault, Hamlet). When your chain really works and you get through your whole remaining Drawpile, but don't have a chance to also get through your discard pile, you better don't trigger the reshuffle. You would spend the next 1-2 turns with hands of all the crap you just discarded, mostly Estates, Coppers, maybe Curses, and without all the actions you just played.
My favorite Possession trick ever!

3827
Game Reports / Re: High Score
« on: June 14, 2011, 09:04:03 am »
The title of this thread clearly should have been Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour.
I am tempted to install a thumbs-up-thumbs-down mod for this forum just to thumb this post.

3828
Game Reports / Re: High Score
« on: June 13, 2011, 08:55:21 pm »
I wonder what's the highest VP/turn ratio anyone has pulled off, in a non-show-off-set-up game.  20VP/turn seems pretty nice.

3829
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Best/Worst Openings discussion
« on: June 13, 2011, 08:48:12 pm »
That does sound persuasive, but it seems like you'd run into major buying power issues if you can only keep playing Ambassador.

I guess it depends on whether the $5's help Ambassador.  Laboratory or Hunting Party, I can see Silver / Ambassador >> Ambassador/Ambassador.  But guided once sold me on how Ambassador / Silver / Ambassador beats Ambassador / Ambassador ... he'll have to show up here and explain why :)

3830
Other Games / Re: What other games do you enjoy playing?
« on: June 13, 2011, 08:46:30 pm »
I met rrenaud on TeamLiquid, back when it was a Brood War site rather than a SC2 site.

I have to admit, that's not what I would have expected to hear on this forum. :)  Either of you play SC2?  (I don't have time to practice at SC and so mostly stay away from it except for the campaigns.)
I do not play SC2, and I do not think rrenaud does either.  I took BW pretty seriously ... stayed up and watched Korean pro games, gamed on PGT and WGT and ICCUP.  Certainly I don't have time to do any of that any more.

3831
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Tournament + Black Market
« on: June 13, 2011, 08:43:58 pm »
It probably depends on when you get it out of the BM.  Your situation (early on, in a Colony game) seems basically the worst case possible scenario.  In Province games, by the time you get it out of the BM, chances are it is too late for Prizes to make a huge difference.

3832
Dominion General Discussion / Re: First player advantage
« on: June 13, 2011, 08:42:43 pm »
The long and short of it is that first player advantage is an advantage, but not enough to justify an across-the-board rule change.  There are far more luck-dependent factors in Dominion: you can have first player every time if I get to determine how Turns 3 and 4 play out.

The problem really is that you can't identify how big the firstplayer advantage is ex ante.  Maybe it means 1VP win on pile exhaustion + 1 Estate; maybe it means a total VP blowout because they're the first to activate City/Wharf.  Maybe the Militia advantage turns out to be huge, maybe it's a wash.

If it's a huge concern for you guys, bid VP for first player.  I think in 99% of sets, ex ante, I would bid 0.

The real way to solve it is just to play multiple games...

3833
There are different kinds of advanced ... what MIT mathematicians find simple might not be so simple for lowly lawyers :P

3834
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Beginner Game Flow + Strategy
« on: June 13, 2011, 07:54:26 pm »
For me, the single biggest early improvement in my game came when I realized two things:

1) Treasure is important, very important, and you should default to buying Silver: i.e. you need a good reason to deviate from Silver, not the other way around.
2) Cursing attacks are ridiculously strong.  Witch is an unbelievably important card, and you need to get it ASAP.  There is no way to counter it without getting one of your own.

Of course, both of these principles change later on, but they're very good early leapfrog tactics.

3835
Dominion Articles / Re: Hunting Party
« on: June 13, 2011, 07:50:46 pm »
I think Hunting Party might be one of those rare good cards that is still underrated.  Its drawing power is incredibly useful when you have one particular card in your deck you need to hammer over and over again.

3836
Well, I would like to see the derivation, just to see how over my head it is :)

Say t = 2 and n = 10, 15.  What is p?

Could you graph that as well?  Graph n vs p, and have different curves for each t.

3837
Other Games / Re: What other games do you enjoy playing?
« on: June 13, 2011, 06:12:25 pm »
I used to play starcraft a lot.  It was basically my religion in high school.

Before I switched to Dominion, I was pretty good at Race for the Galaxy.  I definitely recommend RftG if you have a competitive friend and Dominion is feeling stale.
I met rrenaud on TeamLiquid, back when it was a Brood War site rather than a SC2 site.

I also played RftG, but never quite was at rrenaud's level, who won back-to-back-to-back WBC RFTG championships.

The other main games I play are Twilight Struggle and Tichu.  I think Twilight Struggle is the greatest game ever made, in fact.

3838
Feedback / Re: Forum: Cannot upload avatar pic
« on: June 13, 2011, 05:45:43 pm »
Some suggest that there might be a problem if there's a space in the URL if you are doing a remote hosted avatar.  Could that be it?

3839
That's actually one of my big weaknesses: I tend to write off University, Workshop, and Ironworks, but sometimes they prove critical (like here).  I should focus more often on when such cards are essential to maintaining an engine: kudos!

3840
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Duke Analysis?
« on: June 13, 2011, 03:16:23 pm »
I'd try to snipe some Duchies and return to focusing on Provinces.

I think Salvager really hurts the Duke/Duchy player.  I'll buy your Dukes, then Salvage them into +$5.  Sounds like a good deal!  Similar to how Bishop can crush Gardens players.

3841
Rules Questions / Re: Black Market Deck
« on: June 13, 2011, 03:14:52 pm »
I've had a lot of fun using one of the expansions as the black market deck.  Prosperity is especially fun, but it works well with Seaside or Intrigue, too.
That's a pretty good idea.  Leads to a nice flavor for the BM, and easy setup.

3842
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Duke Analysis?
« on: June 13, 2011, 11:36:14 am »
Suggestion for a Duke article noted!

I very rarely succeed in a hardcore Duke/Duchy strategy from the outset, and when I do it's usually with Hoard.  Usually I treat it as a backup strategy if I fall behind 2-0 on Provinces, but I usually get stopped by an alert opponent who snipes my Duchies.

3843
Wow.  That is crazy!  I don't usually play heavy KC action decks, but every so often I just get totally burned by those decks and HoP and make me wish that I bought more KC's.

And yeah, I've never run into a KC & Diadem game, but a $20+ treasure would be unreal.

3844
Dominion General Discussion / Best/Worst Openings discussion
« on: June 13, 2011, 09:29:11 am »
rrenaud has updated the Best and Worst openings page: http://councilroom.com/openings

I, for one, am shocked at how well Tournament/Ambassador does.  In retrospect, it makes sense, since Tournament's additional buying power is going to be pretty important in a drawn-out Ambassador game, and the fact that it keeps cycling your deck means you can keep up in the Ambassador race.  Still, I'm surprised it does better than Caravan/Ambassasdor.

I am also consistently surprised by how well Ambassador/Ambassador does, since I have always believed that Silver/Ambassador with a second Ambassador later is superior to Ambassador/Ambassador -> Silver.  Perhaps the stats for Silver/Ambassador are tainted with too many games of people falling behind in the Ambassador race because they didn't respond to Ambassador/Ambassador with a second Ambassador.

3845
Game Reports / Re: Bishop's tiebreaker points
« on: June 13, 2011, 09:25:33 am »
I think you're right.  I think I was hoping to really purge my deck with a big Tactician draw and subsequent Chapel, but didn't realize how fast the game was going to accelerate.  I didn't really have time to do what I was hoping, which was build up to a double Province Tactician turn.

3846
Hmm.  I know what you're talking about: when all you really want is to hit $3/$5 for Fishing Village/Wharf and you keep running into $2/$6 and you don't know if you should be buying Courtyard/Gold or continuing with your engine.

The answer, I think, is to play along with your draws.  Usually, I tend to shape my strategy around what I end up buying, so that I make the most of what I have.  In other words, I identify cards that I want to prioritize, and then as the game goes on see how I can use what I've been buying to form a coherent deck.  If I get too much money, maybe I'll modify my deck into a Smithy-Big-Money type deal.

The problem, of course, is that sometimes the engine cards are more important than what you're doing, and you need to be underbuying and accepting the fact that you will have suboptimal engine buildup.  This is the cause of many of my losses.  Sometimes it's pretty obvious: you hit $6 on Turn 3, you need to buy Mountebank instead of Gold.  But it's usually more subtle, like, oh, all of a sudden, my opponent's Fishing Village/Wharf combo has caught up and decimated me and my Golds.  (It's like the Beyond Silver article, except applied to Golds...) 

My solution -- that I've been trying out for now -- is to stick to my guns (refuse to underbuy and just adapt my deck instead), but with a few exceptions for auto-win engines, engines that have no real competition because they are so good.  Torturer engines, Wharf engines, stuff like that, I will underbuy in order to make sure I can get into that engine.

Does that make sense?

3847
Feedback / Re: RSS feeds
« on: June 13, 2011, 09:13:20 am »
Also done!

3848
Feedback / Re: RSS feeds
« on: June 13, 2011, 08:11:57 am »
Done.  The link is at the bottom of the forum.  You should also be able to put it into most RSS readers and have it auto-discover the feed.

3849
Feedback / Re: Forum: Cannot upload avatar pic
« on: June 12, 2011, 10:50:13 pm »
Should be fixed now.  Try again?

3850
Game Reports / Bishop's tiebreaker points
« on: June 12, 2011, 10:37:40 pm »
I think this game is a good example of how Bishop's drawback is meaningless in heavy trashing games, and how the VP gained from the Bishop makes for an near-insurmountable tiebreaker.

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20110527-095859-c4c4429c.html

The Saboteur was sort of a last-minute desperate gamble, which did not succeed.  I think this is the most difficult type of situation to recover from: when you know you can't split the Provinces 4-4, but there's no real easy way to get to 5 Provinces and there aren't viable non-Province source of VPs.

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