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26

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko ratings drift -- Now with data!

« on: June 14, 2013, 11:09:12 am »

I was in the 4-5k range and stopped playing for about a week and a half over frustration with the constant freezes. I logged in today to play with Guilds, and my pro rating had dropped to around 1k. So yes, you get pummeled for not playing constantly.

27

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Guilds is here!

« on: June 13, 2013, 10:46:53 am »

Photos on this twitter stream
TAXMAN
Cost 4
Action - Attack
You may trash a Treasure from your hand. Each other player with 5 or more cards in hand discards a copy of it (or reveals a hand without it). Gain a Treasure card costing up to $3 more than the trashed card, putting it on top of your deck.

STONEMASON
Cost 2+
Action
Trash a card from your hand, Gain 2 cards each costing less than it.
-----
When you buy this, you may overpay for it. If you do, gain 2 Action cards each costing the amount you overpaid.

PLAZA
Cost 4
Action
+1 Card
+2 Actions
You may discard a Treasure card. If you do, take a Coin token.

SOOTHSAYER
Cost 5
Action - Attack
Gain a Gold. Each other player gains a Curse. Each player who did draws a card.

MASTERPIECE
Cost 3+
Treasure
$1
--------
When you buy this, you may overpay for it. If you do, gain a Silver per $1 you overpaid.

MERCHANT GUILD
Cost 5
Action
+1 Buy
+$1
--------
While this is in play, when you buy a card, take a Coin token.

CANDLESTICK MAKER
Cost 2
Action
+1 Action
+1 Buy
Take a Coin Token

ADVISOR
Cost 4
Action
+1 Action
Reveal the top 3 cards of your deck. The player to your left chooses one of them. Discard that card. Put the other cards into your hand.


Already known:
BAKER
Cost 5
Action
+1 Card
+1 Action
Take a Coin token.
---------
Setup: Each player takes a Coin token.

DOCTOR
Cost 3+
Action
Name a card. Reveal the top 3 cards of your deck. Trash the matches. Put the rest back on top in any order.
-------------
When you buy this, you may overpay for it. For each $1 you overpaid, look at the top card of your deck; trash it, discard it, or put it back.

JOURNEYMAN
Cost 5
Action
Name a card. Reveal cards from the top of your deck until you reveal 3 cards that are not the named card. Put those cards into your hand and discard the rest.

BUTCHER
Cost 5
Take 2 Coin tokens. You may trash a card from your hand and then pay any number of Coin tokens. If you did trash a card, gain a card with a cost of up to the cost of the trashed card plus the number of Coin tokens you paid.

HERALD
Cost 4+
+1 Card
+1 Action
Reveal the top card of your deck. If it is an Action, play it.
-----------
When you buy this, you may overpay for it. For each $1 you overpaid, look through your discard pile and put a card from it on top of your deck.

28

Power Grid General Discussion / Re: Map Comparison Article

« on: June 11, 2013, 06:36:14 pm »

Now that we have some data, are there any discoveries that should influence how I play? I'm not sure what to do with these graphs. Don't get me wrong—they're quite pretty. I just don't know how they impact the ideal playstyle.

29

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Preview #4: Butcher

« on: June 06, 2013, 11:28:46 am »

Get an early Province. Butcher it for coins. You're draining the Province pile and simultaneously building up coins for a massive remodel of (less than $5)->Province.  Butcher provides a really interesting form of endgame acceleration.

You get two coin tokens when you play the butcher but you do not get coin tokens per 1$ the trashed card costs, you just remodel the card and add the amount of coin tokens you pay to the maximum cost.

Right. You Butcher Province->Province, which results in your deck being the same, the Province pile being one less, and you having an extra $2 in coins. Next time, you can Butcher $4->Province. Or, you can drain another Province, and the third Butcher play upgrades a $2 (!) to an Province.

This is like a Salvager with a Remodel effect that you can save up. That's massive for endgame acceleration.

30

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Preview #4: Butcher

« on: June 06, 2013, 10:56:37 am »

Get an early Province. Butcher it for coins. You're draining the Province pile and simultaneously building up coins for a massive remodel of (less than $5)->Province.  Butcher provides a really interesting form of endgame acceleration.

31

Power Grid General Discussion / How much do plants get bid up?

« on: June 05, 2013, 10:58:15 am »

This is a survey-type question rather than a strategy question. My group doesn't have a ton of experience with Power Grid, and so we're not sure if the way we're playing is typical or not.

Leaving aside endgame bidding in which winning a specific plant decides the game, how much are contested plants typically bid up? Is it unusual during a game to see a plant go for 10 more than its face price, or would you be shocked to see a game where plants aren't regularly bid up at least that much?

32

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Preview #3: Journeyman

« on: June 05, 2013, 10:13:53 am »

This seems like it would be strong in alt-VP as well as BM. Going for Duke/Duchy? Name Duchy, and suddenly you've filtered half of your green. Or in slogs, name Curse/Estate.

This was mentioned yesterday, but Ruins are going to make these cards fairly weak. On the flip side, someone who's learned to track their deck is going to have a massive edge with these cards. Like, cheat code massive.

33

Power Grid General Discussion / Re: Endgame Plants: When to buy them/getting them early (draft)

« on: June 04, 2013, 01:02:47 pm »

Thanks Adam, that does help.

So, do you often spend turns firing fewer plants than you could afford simply because the lower efficiency plants that you already have aren't worth it? What I've done is always expanded my city network and powered more cities, rather than having a higher efficiency plant powering the same cities that my two lower efficiency plants did the previous turn.

34

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Preview #2: Doctor

« on: June 04, 2013, 10:52:43 am »

Fair enough, but it's also much, much worse than Spice Merchant for trashing Copper.

Something something Warehouse's existence means Cellar is bad.

Doctor really does occupy a different niche than Spice Merchant. Spice Merchant is money trashing, like Moneylender. Doctor is (on play) weak trashing and (on buy) mediocre early game trashing and/or top-deck manipulation. Doctor has a couple of advantages over Spice Merchant: trashing anything, trashing multiple cards, cycling, and being able to get the effect in the shuffle that you buy the Doctor. Oh yeah, and Doctor only costs $3 if you just want the on play effect.

35

Power Grid General Discussion / Re: Endgame Plants: When to buy them/getting them early (draft)

« on: June 04, 2013, 10:42:15 am »

I've now played four or five games of Power Grid and plant buying is absolutely killing me. I'm playing three player, and it seems like getting 6 plants over the course of the game is incredibly hard.

What usually happens is that on the first turn I'll get a plant that powers 1 city. Then, I need a plant that powers two the next turn. Then there's a bunch of junk plants and finally something shows up that powers three whole cities, and since that doubles my capacity I need to get it. But now the resource costs from those first two plants are killing me and so I need to get something more efficient, but there's nothing that powers four or more plants and even the stuff powering three is bad, so I try for a really efficient two-city plant. At this point, I've bought four plants and I still don't have a single endgame plant.

How should I play differently? Do I just need to be comfortable with only powering three cities for a really long time?

36

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Preview #2: Doctor

« on: June 04, 2013, 10:23:47 am »

This could potentially be a really nice counter to top-of-the-deck attacks. Sea Hag is substantially less brutal since you can trash that Curse. Rabble risks becoming helpful to your opponent because it nicely puts those Estates on the top of the deck where the Doctor can find them.

37

Help! / Re: Hoping to get some discussion

« on: May 30, 2013, 10:47:07 am »

Geronimoo, does the optimal strategy involve a Militia at any point, or does the wasted gain slow down the engine too much?

I tried injecting a Militia at different points in the game, but they always made the win rate drop.

I find that amazing. WM sifting + Wharf is strong enough to outrace Militia even on a board when $5s are key. This game keeps surprising me!

38

Help! / Re: Hoping to get some discussion

« on: May 30, 2013, 10:19:06 am »

Geronimoo, does the optimal strategy involve a Militia at any point, or does the wasted gain slow down the engine too much?

39

Game Reports / Re: Getting destroyed by adventurer

« on: May 29, 2013, 09:19:58 pm »

Wow, that was unexpected. WM cycles and helps connect Adventurers, and Adventurer+Tunnel gives great action-based coin. I guess it makes sense.

I would worry about deck clogging. Playing WM cleans up the top of the deck, but Adventurer leaves it uncertain again, so I don't know how that works out. He only had one Crossroads, so you'd think at some point he'd draw a Tunnel/Copper hand and stall. But obviously I'm wrong about that.

On the flip side, I don't think Junk Dealer plays well with Stables--you want the Coppers around so Stables doesn't stall, and there's not a ton to be gained from trashing your shelters because you don't have a card that benefits from playing a lot like Monument or an attack.

40

Help! / Re: Hoping to get some discussion

« on: May 29, 2013, 01:14:54 pm »

The first $5 should be Wharf, no question. After that I'd go Highway, Highway, then Wharfs and Highways.

Reasoning: the Wharf is key, but Highways are really important for making the Ironworks able to gain Highways/Wharfs and making Wharf's +Buy more useful.

Counterfeit and WM play a similar role in this setup, because WM helps connect action cards and Counterfeit provides slight deck thinning to connect actions. I lean towards WM rather than Counterfeit simply because Highway is such a huge card here and the Wharves/Ironworks covers the +gain. I'm willing to be persuaded on this, but the more I think about it the more I think Counterfeit is just too slow here, plus it risks losing the Highway split.

41

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Best curse trashers?

« on: May 29, 2013, 10:57:32 am »

Hermit and Masquerade have to be the top of the list for me.

Masquerade has been discussed already, but I can't shake the memory of how powerful it was in a tournament game against Mountebank. The fact that it can handle different types of cards at once (pass one card, trash something else) and restores your handsize makes it even better than Ambassador in most situations.

Hermit is phenomenal because it can trash from the discard. Not having to have the curse in hand is So. Huge.

Jack is great as a response to cursing attacks, but I wouldn't rank it God tier for pure "trashing curses." The reason is that it has a smaller search space than Hermit and Masquerade (depending on how the spy effect plays), and there's a slight anti-synergy between the spy effect and the trash effect if you reveal the curse. Also, the Silver flood from Jack makes it progressively less likely that you'll find the Curses to trash, a problem Hermit doesn't have. Again, to be clear, Jack is awesome in cursing games, but for the pure "trashing curses" effect I put it in the "Beatified Saint" tier rather than the God tier.

42

Power Grid General Discussion / Re: "Power Grid takes less than an hour to play" (second draft)

« on: May 28, 2013, 09:54:46 am »

I just played my first game of Power Grid last night—after about 2 and a half hours we were at 10-12 cities each. It was a five player game and we had four new players, although all of them are experienced gamers, and we also had an experienced person cracking the whip.

After reading through this article again, I don't see how our game could have sped up enough to get it to an hour. We were pretty fast at going through the bureaucracy phase, with money (mostly) precounted and one person refreshing resources ASAP. We had someone managing the plants and another person handling the bank.

Things we didn't do from the article: using poker chips, and peeing. Several of us ended up preplanning our turn in a slightly different way—dividing our money into piles for what we were going to do that turn.

I wish I could explain better where the time went so you could improve your article. But, even though our session was going to be long because of the number of new players, I don't think I expected it to be that much longer, and I'm really struggling with imagining how this game can be played so quickly.

43

Dominion Articles / Re: Combo: Urchin + Torturer

« on: May 13, 2013, 11:12:09 am »

I think the impact of Mercenary can't be overlooked. While Mercenary is useful for trashing curses gained in hand to Torturer, I think Mercenary actually makes Torturer even more brutal.

Mercenary forces the discard to 3. If played before a Torturer, then you're in curse-giving territory. If played after a Torturer chain (and the opponent has taken some curses), then the opponent is faced with the worst-case scenario of having taken curses and having to discard them so they can't be trashed (unless he/she draws the whole deck).

If there are villages around, I think Urchin->Mercenary + Torturer is going to be brutal.

44

Dominion Videos and Streams / Re: Qvist jumps on the bandwagon...

« on: May 09, 2013, 11:04:03 am »

I like the new video setup. I think the single play area + log is a little better than the two play areas, but both of them are huge improvements over the normal dueling video method of using two different recordings.

Adam, would it be possible for you to make a Quickstart Guide for how to splice the videos together, kind of like the guide someone wrote up a while ago about how to do YouTube recordings?

45

GokoDom / Re: GOKODOM I: Round 4 Results and Discussion

« on: May 08, 2013, 01:07:01 pm »

YouTube videos from the philosophyguy/Watno match are now available:

I apologize for the occasional NSFW language.

46

GokoDom / Re: GOKODOM I: Round 4 Results and Discussion

« on: May 08, 2013, 10:09:27 am »

Watno beats philosophyguy 3-1

http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130508/log.50ad02dae4b0fb8e18c1ae6b.1368018906211.txt
Courtyard, Vagrant, Market Square, Woodcutter, Alchemist, Marauder, Procession, Scout, Margrave, Wharf
Watno 0-1, 29-44

Marauder/Wharf mirror, mostly. I dip into a Procession to clear out the junk and spike a late couple of extra Wharfs, which I think win the game.

http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130508/log.50ad02dae4b0fb8e18c1ae6b.1368019430132.txt
Hamlet, Sage, Scheme, Feast, Nomad Camp, Worker's Village, Cultist, Haggler, Ill-Gotten Gains, Upgrade
Watno 1-1, 17-6

Somehow I miss that Haggler is really good in IGG games. He sacrifices a turn of tempo getting the Haggler and then proceeds to destroy me with the extra gain.

http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130508/log.50ad02dae4b0fb8e18c1ae6b.1368020371643.txt
Duchess, Chancellor, Forager, Storeroom, Philosopher's Stone, Feodum, Band of Misfits, Altar, Grand Market, Forge
Watno 2-1, 33-31

He opens Forager/Forager and uses BoM as Storeroom to win the GM split. My Feoda aren't enough to counter, and his deck doesn't clog quickly enough for me to sneak back.

http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130508/log.50ad02dae4b0fb8e18c1ae6b.1368021645120.txt
Fishing Village, Masquerade, Feodum, Procession, Spy, Golem, Graverobber, Mountebank, Pillage, Grand Market
Watno 3-1, 30-20

He builds a Graverobber/Pillage engine, and my Mountebanks can't slow him down enough.

Thanks for the games! YouTube videos to follow later today.

47

GokoDom / Re: GOKODOM I: Round 3 Results and Discussion

« on: May 02, 2013, 04:42:54 pm »

DG 3-2 over philosophyguy:

http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130502/log.50ad02dae4b0fb8e18c1ae6b.1367522030248.txt
Poor House, Beggar, Trade Route, Monument, Count, Explorer, Junk Dealer, Market, Outpost, Stables
DG 0-1, 45-51

We both open Monument/Silver and begin building Stables engines. I end up getting a second Monument, and the extra VP give me a slight edge so that he can't safely break PPR.

I was thinking about Outpost in this game, since Stables is potentially decent drawing power. The Outpost would choke badly at the end of the game, but it could get a couple extra Monument plays in. I think skipping it was the right choice, but I'm not certain.

http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130502/log.50ad02dae4b0fb8e18c1ae6b.1367522964790.txt
Native Village, Tunnel, Alchemist, Cutpurse, Moneylender, Sea Hag, Counterfeit, Harvest, Witch, Forge
DG 1-1, 34-18

Lots of attacks makes this a rough set for second player. He spikes a Forge which does some serious work for him. I have rotten luck to have my Harvest collide twice with my Sea Hag and then to be the very bottom of the deck (missing the reshuffle) a few more times. Plus it never hits my Tunnels. Not sure how I could have improved my play here.

http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130502/log.50ad02dae4b0fb8e18c1ae6b.1367523917539.txt
Pearl Diver, Oracle, Watchtower, Familiar, Gardens, Horse Traders, Ironmonger, JackOfAllTrades, Wandering Minstrel, Mint
DG 1-2, 48-63

I open a 5/2 split and think it's GG, but somehow I catch up to him with my Jack/Ironmonger mix. He goes for Gardens really early, which I think is a serious mistake—Jack has great staying power and Ironmonger is strong in money decks.

http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130502/log.50ad02dae4b0fb8e18c1ae6b.1367524926198.txt
Oasis, Village, Warehouse, Woodcutter, Spy, Graverobber, Harvest, Highway, Ill-Gotten Gains, Farmland
DG 2-2, 28-19

An IGG match. He opens Woodcutter/Silver; I go Oasis/Oasis. I think Oasis should be stronger than Woodcutter here, but the Silver was probably a good call. I dip for Duchies first but he buys a Farmland and then gets to Farmland it into a Province three turns later. Then he lines up IGGs for another Province, and it's over.
 
http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130502/log.50ad02dae4b0fb8e18c1ae6b.1367526419517.txt
Courtyard, Warehouse, Wishing Well, Alchemist, Fortress, Cartographer, Council Room, Ghost Ship, Horn of Plenty, Nobles
DG 3-2, 49-27

A true engine board, and I misplay the buildup pretty badly. We're both going for a Council Room/Ghost Ship engine into Horns, but he does much better in getting his deck together. An early $6 tempts me into a Nobles, which was probably a mistake, and then I fall behind as his deck gains from his HoP while mine is stuck dealing with his Ship attacks.

Thanks for the games, DG! These were very close—I thought I was slightly better tactically in the first, much better in game 3, and much worse in the last, with the other two too close to call. I look forward to playing again!

EDIT: videos are here. This is my first time doing Dominion videos, so any comments on the actual recording (as well as strategic comments) are welcome.

Posted

48

Goko Dominion Online / Re: System Update 5/1/13

« on: May 02, 2013, 02:09:35 pm »

So Goko, whose entire pitch was "we can do HTML5!", is subcontracting the HTML5 work. Awesome.

49

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How do you guys not get bored?

« on: May 02, 2013, 11:28:59 am »

FWIW, when ooksoo posted the develop log against Snorkelbite, that Snorkel said was one of the most epic combos he's seen executed, ooksoo said that was his gf playing.

50

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What is your favorite village?

« on: April 25, 2013, 02:54:54 pm »

I just used Wandering Minstrel for sifting in a no trashing, heavy junking game (Young Witch into Mountebank). Surprisingly, I was able to build a powerful engine with Rabble, Mountebanks for cash, and Pawn for +Buy.