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Puzzles and Challenges / Best buying strategy
« on: January 23, 2020, 01:31:06 am »
Another pick-your-kingdom-and-maximize-your-VP problem.  But in this one, you only have one turn.  And you have just trashed the last card in your deck.  You have no cards in your hand, no cards set aside, no cards on a Tavern mat, no cards on a Native Village mat, no cards on any mat, no cards at all.  You have not purchased any projects or events.  But you do have one million coffers!  How will you spend them?

Pick any legal kingdom except it cannot contain Innovation, Villa, or Mission.  They would allow unbounded VP gains by allowing actions to be played.  All stacks in the kingdom are infinite and never run out of cards.  Split piles will have their normal contents repeated.  For example, the Catapult/Rocks pile would contain 5 Catapults, then 5 Rocks, then 5 Catapults, etc.  You can choose the makeup and order of the Ruins pile.  Assume solo play.

Clearly, Travelling Fair will help the task of buying many cards.  Canal is a good prospect as well.  Will you buy Colonies?  Dominate?

How about Obelisk on Forum?  No Travelling Fair needed since it comes with an extra buy.  You could buy 200,000 Forums for 400,000 VP.  Not so great.  Of course you are not limited to purchasing from a single pile and there are many non-victory cards you can add to your kingdom to help.

As an example, I’ll share the best strategy I came up with for purchasing Castles just to get you thinking and also so you don’t have to analyze it yourself for comparison.

Action cards: Stonemason, Watchtower, Cultist, Castles, Forge
Landmarks: Tomb, Obelisk on Stonemason.
Events: Travelling Fair, Ferry, Alms, Ball, Salt the Earth, Triumph
Project: Canal

All purchases are proceeded with buying Travelling Fair.

Buy Canal.  (All cards are 1 coin cheaper.)
Buy Ferry for Stonemason.  (Ferries are free.)
(Ferry can’t be applied to Castles since it is not an action supply pile.)
Buy Alms for a Watchtower.
Buy Salt the Earth, trash a Cultist, draw Watchtower into hand.
--- start of Castle buying loop ---
Buy Ball, gain Humble Castle and Crumbling Castle.  Topdeck both.
We will be topdecking all Castles, discarding all Stonemasons, and trashing everything else.
Next Castle in the rotation is Small Castle which is an action.
Buy Stonemason, overpay by 4, gain Small Castle and Cultist.
Reveal Watchtower, trash Small Castle, gain Haunted Castle which comes with a Gold.
(We trashed Small Castle, because it’s on-gain effect is to gain the next Castle.  We effectively skip over it and rotate through the stacks faster, gaining more of the better Castles.)
Reveal Watchtower, trash Cultist, discard -1 card token from Ball, draw two Castles into hand.
Buy Stonemason, gain Opulent Castle and Forge.
Buy Sprawling Castle, gaining 3 Estates.
Buy Grand Castle.  This comes with a bonus of 1 VP per Castle in our hand.  We have two.  Next iteration, we will have four, etc.
Buy King’s Castle.
--- repeat a total of 19,607 times ---
We have just enough money to do an additional partial iteration up to buying Opulent Castle, then use our last buy (without Travelling Fair) on Triumph which leaves us in debt.


We will have gained 137,253 Castles worth 294,105 basic VP.   Our 19,608 Humble Castles are worth 1 VP per Castle gained which is 2,691,256,824 VP.  19,607 King’s Castles yield 2 VP per Castle for 5,382,239,142 VP.  Grand Castles yield bonus VP for Castles in hand which accumulated 384,454,056 VP.  The Stonemasons yielded 78,428 Obelisk VP.  Tomb also yielded 78,428 VP.  We gained 58,822 Estates.  And triumph gave us 313,724 VP for a grand total of 8,458,773,529 VP.

EDIT:  Oops.  Salt the Earth cannot trash a Cultist.  Instead, to get the Watchtower in hand, buy a Blessed Village and receive the Sea's Gift as a boon (+1 card).  This does not change the VP calculation.

EDIT 2:  Singletee has pointed out that I also made egregious errors with Ball and Small Castle.  I'm not going to recalculate the significant reduction of VP that this would cause.  Just ignore the example.  Thanks singletee.

This is not the best possible kingdom or strategy.  Let’s see what you come up with.



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Game Reports / Quickest turnaround?
« on: September 16, 2018, 06:06:52 pm »
The kingdom contained Mint, Noble Brigand, Tactician, and mostly uninteresting action cards.
It was a Platinum, Colony kingdom.
Events were Wedding and Borrow.

I reasoned that I wanted to get Mint as early as possible after getting a Gold.  Tactician was probably going to be the quickest way.  The Noble Brigand didn't interest me, as offensively, it is rather weak.  And it was worthless against Platinum and I expected to be minting a lot of those.
I had a 3/4 split.  I bought a Silver, then with my four coin hand, I went for Borrow and bought a Tactician.
Due to Borrow, I only drew four cards for my next hand, and I couldn't believe my amazing luck:  Tactician plus my 3 Estates.  Obviously play the Tactician.
This allowed me to draw all of my treasure into my next hand.  One Silver and 7 Copper yields 9 coins and two buys.
And this is where I execute a brilliant strategy.  I buy a Mint and a Wedding!
Now my deck is just Tactician, Mint, 3 Estates, and a Gold.
I'll be minting Gold till my debt is repaid and then I'll buy a Platinum and start minting those.  With Tactician hands filled with Platinum and Gold, I'll surely kick ass.
It is now turn five and I draw my entire deck other than my Gold.  Well, that's unlucky since I won't be able to mint a Gold this turn, but this will only delay my victory by a turn.  I was convinced that I was going to win.
Then my opponent buys a Noble Brigand.
I resign.

(The Noble Brigand nicks my Gold leaving me treasureless and still in debt from Wedding.  I cannot even buy Copper.  It is impossible to win.)



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From http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Throne_Room:

When you play Throne Room and choose to target a Duration, the Throne Room stays out in play with the Duration that it affects. If you Throne Room a Throne Room which affects a Duration, the top-level Throne Room does not stay in play and gets cleaned up during the Clean-up phase of the turn. However, if the targeted Duration won't do anything next turn on its second execution (for example, if it is a Tactician), the Throne Room doesn't stay out.

From http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Duration:

When you use a Throne Room variant on a Duration, it stays in play, even if multiplying the Duration's effect is not meaningful, such as Throning a Tactician, or Throning an Archive with 3 or fewer cards remaining in your deck. With Procession specifically, Procession remains out even though the Duration has been trashed, and remains in play until the Duration would have been discarded (if at all).


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