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251

Game Reports / Playing Ghost Ship on 15/20 turns after opening

« on: July 12, 2011, 04:16:08 pm »

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201107/12/game-20110712-114808-72cd2357.html

Summary:
1. buy Ghost Ship
2. buy Haven
3. buy Loan
4. play Ghost Ship, buy Loan
5. Loan trashes Copper, buy Mining Village
6. play Ghost Ship, Loan trashes Copper, buy Haven
7. buy Worker's Village
8. play Ghost ship, Loan trashes Copper, buy Mining Village
9. Loan trashes Copper, self-trash Mining Village, buy Ghost Ship
10. play Ghost Ship, Loan trashes Copper, buy Haven
11. play Ghost Ship, buy Quarry (which gets played every subsequent turn)
12. play Ghost Ship, Loans trash last 2 Copper, buy Council Room
13. Loan trashes 2nd Loan, buy Mining Village
14. play Ghost Ship, buy Worker's Village & Haven (self-trashed Mining Village and bought another)
15. play Ghost Ship, self-trash 2 Mining Villages, buy Gold
16. play Ghost Ship, buy Silver & Worker's Village
17. play Ghost Ship, buy Gold
18. play Ghost Ship, buy Gold & Mining Village
19. play Ghost Ship, buy Platinum, Mining Village, Worker's Village & Haven
20. play Ghost Ship, buy Colony & Council Room
21. play Ghost Ship, buy Colony, Mining Village & Haven, emptying latter 2 piles.
22. play Ghost Ship, self-trash Mining Villages, buy Colony, Duchy & 3 Worker's Villages, emptying 3rd pile.

What you can't see from the logs is exactly how I used Havens to move cards between hands, so all I can say from memory is that almost every turn I was using Haven on a Ghost Ship and a Village to keep my draws smoothed.

I don't know if this strategy would have been fast enough had my opponent been playing optimally (he went for Philo stones and Ironworks in the first half-dozen turns), but for the latter half of the game he was starting on 3 cards every turn without the ability to discard any dead cards.  He apparently spent much of the game putting his own Ghost Ships back on top of his deck.  He didn't acquire any Villages until turn 15, just after he reshuffled, and didn't manage to reshuffle again until turn 21 and thus never drew one.  I suppose on turn 14 he didn't think he'd be getting Ghost Shipped every turn until the end of the game.  He noted that it wasn't very fun for him, and I agree.  It was the nastiest thing I have ever done in any game probably, and I'm very sorry that he had to endure it.

252

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Is an official Dominion App coming out anytime soon?

« on: July 09, 2011, 11:00:22 am »

I severely dislike when people see "hissyfits" in things that I feel passionately about just because the reaction might be, to them, out of proportion, because all they see is the reaction and not the thought process behind it.  I did not "freak out", I didn't go into a panic, I merely expressed a concern due to my recently acquired knowledge about a smartphone app for Ascension.  In no way did I ever mean to imply that I thought it wasn't going to be available for PC.  I'm sorry if I came across in that manner, but what was going through my head was that this entire discussion seemed like it was about smartphone apps and I wanted to be sure to have my voice felt on this manner.  If my concern is unwarranted given the reality of the situation, then that's great; I just have no way of knowing that, and was highly concerned that some developers were only interested in smartphone apps and not in PC software that would likely require a higher level of polish.

253

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Pearl Diver

« on: July 09, 2011, 02:00:37 am »

The one thing I know and am sure about it is that this has nothing to do with quantum mechanics.

Heh.  I admit it's a bit of a stretch, but it's what sprang to mind as I was considering the benefits of the card. 

One thing from I've learned playing Magic is that people don't really understand that the contents of their deck might be physically fixed after they shuffle, but they are logically a probability distribution until observed.  When an effect looks at or does something to certain cards of your deck that were as far as you knew equally likely to be any card in your deck, one should logically ignore any facts regarding where the cards physically came from.  It doesn't matter in the least that the cards were physically once on top of your deck, because from a logical perspective the top cards of your deck only change in probability distribution due to the names of cards that were once in the deck being observed, not due to there are physically different cards now sitting on top of it.  If you were to remove cards from the top of your deck face down and you receive no information as to what cards they are, the top cards of your deck did not change (in probability).  Looking at the removed cards at any time after they were removed would change the probability distribution of the top cards of your deck (in probability) even though the observation did not change the cards physically.  This causes many players to overvalue cards that put cards from their opponent's deck into their discard pile, and agonize when the effects are used on them and they see the cards go by that they "were going to" draw.  From a physical perspective that may have been true, but from a probabilistic perspective it was uncertain what was going to be drawn.

Thus, for Pearl Diver, one can easily underrate the ability by saying that it didn't do anything when there was a bad card on the bottom of your deck.  But before you played Pearl Diver you didn't know that bad card was there; now you do and can plan around it as appropriate.  And as mentioned, for the first copy in absence of cards like Courtyard, you can pretend you actually were looking at the top card and moving it to the bottom.  And moving a dead/bad card to a hand where it's likely to miss a shuffle is a good thing; if you wanted it in your next hand in order to be more likely to trash it with the Chapel or whatever you know is coming up, you should have moved(/kept) it there!

254

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Is an official Dominion App coming out anytime soon?

« on: July 09, 2011, 01:06:55 am »

I really, really, really hope that if something causes isotropic to shut down that I as a general Internet user am able to use its replacement.  If isotropic is asked to shut down because there's a competing product available to some people, it's effectively equivalent (to me) to saying "OK, now that people in Russia have access to a competing licensed product, we can't let you have this free program available to everyone.  No, we don't care that you can't possibly use our application because you have no interest in moving to Russia, we'd be losing potential business if we let people from Russia access it.  So we have to shut it down completely.  Unfortunately, it costs money to develop a program for platforms available in other nations, and so many of our Russian players would love to be able to play an official licensed version, so we went with them first.  Since our app is simple, it works well with the systems that Russians have that are less powerful and have smaller screens.  Sure, we could make something that works for a larger market, but they'd expect something so much more polished, and hey, it's easy to move to Russia and so many people have already that it's no big deal, right?"

Ok, buying a particular smartphone isn't as big of a deal as moving to Russia, but....I don't want to buy a smartphone just to play Dominion online.  Most apps for mobile phones are (or at least *should be*) simple games that work well with the given interface or productivity apps suited for the "go anywhere" nature of the smartphone.  No one should be porting games solely to smartphones just because they'd work there when people would gladly pay typical PC game prices for something equivalent to that smartphone app just because the intellectual property that the app represents is so awesome.  Maybe I wouldn't care much at all if isotropic weren't available, but it feels very wrong to let them exist while there's no competing product but force them to close because some subset of the population has access to a competing product.  Please have it be possible for everyone who can play isotropic now (ie, any internet user) be able to play whatever causes it to shut down.  Please. 

Please.

255

Dominion General Discussion / Pearl Diver

« on: July 08, 2011, 11:28:42 am »

Why the hate for the Pearl Diver?

I know it's a somewhat weak card, but it replaces itself in both card and action when played.  The only time that it takes up any room in your deck is when you have a terminal card-drawer that can't skip over it.  This includes Witch, Ghost Ship, Torturer, Wharf, Smithy, potentially Nobles, and probably some others.  It certainly will suck when you draw a Pearl Diver instead of a treasure when you play one of those as your final action, and certainly in such a case I can see ignoring it even if you have $2 to spend as the times it will be useful are relatively minor compared to times it will be dead. 

However, its effect is probably a bit stronger than some people realize.  I'm of the opinion that a single Pearl Diver improves your draws even when you don't move a card with it.  Quantum mechanics-inclined thinkers may look at it as collapsing the probability function of your deck into one that is slightly more advantageous for you.  Alternatively, with a single copy and a random deck it is nearly equivalent to "Look at a the top card of your deck.  You may move it to bottom of your deck."  Once you play it a second time during a shuffle without having moved the bottom card it becomes worse, and with Sea Hag, Ghost Ship, and Courtyard (and I guess Stash in theory) it isn't actually equivalent, but the only reason you'd be loading up on Pearl Divers would be for something like a cheap buy for Goons that helps you find other Goons, helping a Conspirator chain kick off, or loading up your Scrying Pool-based deck with more actions - all of which Pearl Diver fit very nicely in.  It also can do more than improve the quality of your future turns: if you have other card-drawing in hand, it will provide some useful information in planning your turn if you have some choices to make.  At very least, a single Pearl Diver bought with a 2 copper/3 estate hand may end up providing some help and rarely get in the way.  Multiples may provide a lesser effect, but if there's no terminal card drawing there's no drawback at all. 

Ok, the card is not great, I understand that.  Perhaps it's a newbie-bait card that people end up buying too many of when they should be buying other things, or have them stuck in hand after playing a terminal card-drawer.  But those are mistakes that could be made with pretty much any action.  Why is Pearl Diver specifically hated on to the extent that it is?

256

General Discussion / Re: Math Nerds...

« on: July 08, 2011, 10:21:02 am »

I have a master's degree in (pure) mathematics, although with no particular area of study.  I'd like to get a PhD, but it's not financially or emotionally feasible at this time.  In the meantime, I have kept studying "recreationally", looking for an area of mathematics I would really enjoy doing research in.  I have used Michigan's state-wide inter-library service (Melcat) to request textbooks from universities be sent to my local library to help do that.  In the past couple months I've been enjoying algebraic number theory.  It arrives at some truths about the natural number system that I find highly intriguing and sometimes quite profound.

257

Dominion General Discussion / Scrying Pool + discarding for cash

« on: July 07, 2011, 11:03:44 am »

Yes, the basic combo is pretty obvious, but I did much more than just discard a hand full of actions for cash: I discarded *only* actions and redrew all of them again with Scrying Pool!  This might not come up too often, but there's nothing unique except the Scrying Pool. 

Absolutely needed cards:
Scrying Pool
Secret Chamber or Vault
Some Village effect

Possible without in theory, but likely needed in practice:
Warehouse or Cellar
Some trashing

Helpful:
Some +Buy, as you will get scads of cash. Hopefully not a terminal unless there are lots of card-drawing villages around.
Other drawing effects as needed

Trash your deck down to mostly actions and attempt to draw your entire deck using as few cards as possible.  You'll probably end up with some non-action rejects from Scrying Pool in your discard pile; use Warehouse or Cellar to draw these rejects, discarding only action cards.  If you're using Vault, you can leave two blanks in your deck before playing it.  Then play Secret Chamber or Vault, discarding the rest of your action cards except for a Scrying Pool.  Then play Scrying Pool, drawing up all those actions you've discarded, as you'll reshuffle having only actions in your discard.  Repeat for however many sets of Village/discard for money/Scrying Pool you have left.  And of course on the last iteration, discard the rest of the crap in your hand for even more cash.

I managed to get this engine working on a board with only Salvager for trashing.  I messed up twice and could have had turns twice as big as I did if I just paid attention to what I was doing.  Once, I discarded the Scrying Pool I was supposed to play, stranding all my actions in the discard.  Another time I didn't draw the last card of my deck before Scrying (and I could have by playing Worker's Village), thinking that I'd pass by it with Scrying Pool and it would be out of the way to draw the rest of the deck; what actually happened was the green card got reshuffled with the actions and came back on top, again stranding all my actions.  Since the board had Vineyards, I was able to use my potions to snatch up enough VP without the monster amount of money I had expected to get and still won easily, but if I had to compete for provinces those would have been fatal errors.

Most attacks will mess with it, although as is typical the more trashing there is the more resilient you will be; if you can trash all your non-actions besides a potion (or two?) you can shrug off hand-size reduction as long as you have a Scrying Pool.  I don't know how viable of a strategy it is compared to the other options, but when I discovered what exactly I could do that game with cards that already worked well together, it was almost like reaching enlightenment.

258

Tournaments and Events / Re: Competitive Dominion?

« on: July 07, 2011, 01:19:49 am »

Dominion suffers from the problem that it does not have a good way of extracting from the consumer exactly how much money they are willing to spend on it.

We do not see this as a problem! Yes, the way to extract maximum utility from customers is to charge different people different amounts for essentially the same thing, such as via bonus tracks, or Magic's scheme. But it isn't necessary to bleed customers dry in order to be successful and make more games.

Oh I assure you it's not a "problem", and I applaud game companies that don't take this philosophy because it is an example of the nature of capitalism preventing certain outcomes due to them not making people enough money.  I don't mean any of it as a criticism of the game, but as a "problem" in the development of a high-level competitive scene.  In order to be able to leverage the advertising value of a funded tournament, there has to be a significant potential upside to make it worth the cost of holding the event.  Even if there's no significant prize, there's significant expense in renting the necessary space and getting staff members who can run it efficiently; a poorly run tournament held in a hell-hole may have a negative impact on players' brand perceptions.  In order to fund something with entry fees only not only might you run into legal issues, you have to get enough people willing to risk their cash.  Low level Magic events are immensely helped by having prizes in product or store credit; the value of such things to the players is up to twice the value of them to the organizer, making everyone feel like they are potentially +EV on the whole deal.  What sorts of things do you have to give away for Dominion that would attract people?

I certainly am not opposed to the idea of highly competitive Dominion play, but I don't think the game design lends itself well to it. 

259

Tournaments and Events / Re: Competitive Dominion?

« on: July 06, 2011, 11:49:30 am »

This is especially due to the fact that it's a non-collectible game that you can easily acquire, and it's not bogged down with too many things happening at once. 

Dominion suffers from the problem that it does not have a good way of extracting from the consumer exactly how much money they are willing to spend on it.  If I could buy a base set for $20 I probably would, but I don't want to spend $40 to get something playable when I have a friend with every set and can play online.  If I had $600 I was willing to spend on Dominion, both I and RGG would be sad because I can only spend around $300.  Magic has a very good sales model in this sense, as do movies: you can see a film as many times as you can afford on the big screen, and then buy the blu-Ray, then the special edition, and then the collectibles, etc, or you can just rent it for $1 two years later, each depending on how much you are willing to spend on it.

Chess has been around for hundreds of years, and there are massive numbers of books available on strategy.  The rules haven't changed in the last 300 years at least.  Nearly everyone intellectually minded at all in developed countries knows how to play.  The rules are so simple and in the public domain that you make sets of varying quality so that people can spend however much they want on one.

260

Tournaments and Events / Re: Competitive Dominion?

« on: July 06, 2011, 11:36:46 am »

As mentioned, CCGs are able to work well with a competitive scene because of the increased demand for more product that trying to build a competitive deck creates.  Having Dominion get really popular with competitive players really doesn't sell any more Dominion sets in the way that having Magic get popular sells Magic cards.  The best you can do is keep putting out new expansions, but not only is the average purchase per expansion going to be far less, I also believe the designer has pretty much said he has a limited number in mind after which the game will cease to officially expand.

There likely are other aspects to the game that I think make it difficult to work competitively, but everything I can think of has been handled by other competitive games in some way.  The major issue is the above.  The only traditional games that competitive scenes have sprung up for have had to first become extremely popular.  Holding a World Championship and GenCon is something it seems almost every game does, and hardly distinguishes oneself.  While Dominion is extremely popular with competitive-minded card players looking for a game deep in internal interactions, I find it quite amusing that among the Magic playing crowd I run with Ascension got a ton of buzz while I've only heard talk about Dominion amongst the most intellectual-minded and have not seen anyone actually playing it.  Ascension is a much easier game to get to run casually at a moment's notice, and is a much "better" casual game for certain definitions of "better".  I find it somewhat similar to Magic and the Vs. System card game, the latter of which had a competitive circuit created for it when it was first published and in most people's opinions was superior to the former as a skill-testing game; the problem was that it was so hard to beat good players that people weren't really interested in playing it casually. 

In my opinion, the only reason that chess survives as a competitive game is its extremely long history and surface simplicity.  Dominion with just the base set is far more complex on the surface; imagine chess where the rules for how the pieces move are so complex and varied they have to be directly printed on the pieces for people to remember them!  Sure, most of the cards we sorta just know by now, but the details are such that they could easily become confused if we didn't have them printed directly on them.  Also, compare them both to Go, which has in some sense simpler rules (one piece, one move, one outcome evaluation) and even a longer history, and for which tournament quality AI has not become a reality (to my knowledge). 

Dominion might be an amazingly deep and skill-testing game, but to get a competitive scene you need it to become very, very popular.  There's just no incentive for people to aggressively market it so it spreads by word-of-mouth - much too slow to get anyone but the board-game-geek crowd interested.   At least, that's my take on it.

261

Dominion Isotropic / Re: Decline of civility on isotropic?

« on: July 06, 2011, 12:47:03 am »

I had a quite interesting exchange with someone who was apparently not thrilled with their luck.

0:21 buddycthulhu: howdy
0:21 hatch coltraine: hello
0:25 hatch coltraine: jesus christ
0:25 hatch coltraine: how does it feel getting good shuffles?
0:26 hatch coltraine: because I wouldnt know
0:32 hatch coltraine: btw, where did you get the code?
0:32 buddycthulhu: what?
0:32 hatch coltraine: dont play stupid. the code

I end up finally managing to empty 3 piles after getting 2 do-nothing hands right before the last couple lines.  I then leave as he didn't seem particularly interested in civil discussion.  He then immediately proposes another game with me, and I accept thinking maybe he just wants a rematch.  Nope:

0:34 hatch coltraine: tell me where you got it
0:34 buddycthulhu: what?
0:34 hatch coltraine: if you wanna get kicked off isotropic, ask me "what" again
0:34 hatch coltraine: now where did you get it?
0:35 buddycthulhu: so I take it you think I'm cheating, or at least are going overboard complaining about your luck in the previous game
0:35 hatch coltraine: are you going to answer me?
0:37 hatch coltraine: or are you going to wait for the signal for me to resign?
0:37 buddycthulhu: so you didn't even want to play another game, you just want to "interrogate" me?
0:37 hatch coltraine: alright, then Rob will decide.
0:37 hatch coltraine has returned to the lobby.

His resignation timer had indeed come up, but I hadn't hit it.  He instead resigns without playing a card.  I don't even know what to imagine this person is trying to do, but it really frustrates me when people do bullshit like this.  Was he just thinking that he could scare some idiot into saying something they regretted?  It makes no sense, especially given that the guy is in the teens in level and so not just someone doing drive-by trolling.

262

Dominion Articles / Re: Making it to Level 42: Level 1- The Beginnning

« on: July 04, 2011, 01:16:18 am »

2. Dominion has a lot of luck- you CAN'T win every game.

The second thing you should understand is that you are not going to win every game. Dominion has a large element of luck. Sometimes you are just going to get unlucky. Even the BEST players on Isotropic lose 36% of the time. Sometimes your buys will be “dead” (I'll explain that in a later article), and so your draws will not be effective. That is simply how it works. Your skill can only take you so far.

3. Dominion has a lot of skill- you CAN win much of the time.

The flip side of the coin is that it is possible to win 64% of the time. Every time you play, win or lose, you should reflect on what moves you made and whether or not they can be made any better. Many times, I see players wrongfully attribute their loses to luck. When you play, you should first ask yourself what you could have done to have improved your performance, and never, blame it on luck. It is easy to blame luck, but rarely is it luck.

These numbers are terribly misleading.  Assuming you're talking about 2p games, if it were possible to win only 64% of your games, then 36% of your games you would have no chance of losing - even if you never bought a single card.  There's no magical way that some games will randomly roll for your opponent - they have to earn their victory through a reasonable strategy.  If their strategy is "Buy as many Pirate Ships as possible regardless of the other cards", they're going to have a poor overall winning rate even if every once in a while that strategy will be somewhat successful.  If they play straight Big Money regardless of the kingdom, they'll have a better win rate, and so on as they incorporate more good habits into their strategy.  There is a definite incline of playing skill wherein players make progressively better judgements throughout the game and reach, on average, better strategies.  It would be slightly more reasonable to say "The top ranked players have only a 64% win rate against players Level 1 or higher", but I'm not sure if such a statistic is available.  My personal win rate against un-Leveled players feels like it is much greater, and there have been numerous games against such players where I never felt I had a chance at losing.

In a large enough population wherein matchmaking is heavily based on rating, everyone's win rate is pretty close to 50% (except for the tail ends).  I'm unsure whether rating goes into how auto-match finds people, but I presume that at the top end the higher ranked players specifically seek each other out and there's at least a little bit of people declining matches against players of vastly different rating.  If the top ranked players on isotropic win 64% of their games, it really says that they're playing people against whom they have an average 64% win rate.

263

Dominion Isotropic / Reconnection counter, long games, and a crappy ISP policy

« on: June 27, 2011, 03:20:40 pm »

My ISP works very well with continuously-on connections, but has a nasty habit of closing connections that don't get used.  If my opponent thinks too long I might get my connection closed and I have absolutely no way to tell besides waiting.  I don't want to wait any longer than I need to, both for my own sake and for my opponent's sake if I actually am disconnected, so I often refresh the page or switch between images and text to see if the game is really waiting on my opponent or whether I've been disconnected.  I was just in a colony game with lots of +2 action cards that ended up going a bit long; we both had some long action chains going.  After a bit I got "5 reconnects remaining".  Not knowing what would happen if I ended up using all of them, I just continued doing what I was used to doing, trying to play the game at a reasonable pace.  I "used up" all the reconnects and ended up being booted and told to "stop abusing the server".  Well, I'm willing to do that, as soon as I can have a way of knowing whether I'm still connected when the game stalls for a few seconds; I don't want both of us sitting there waiting for each other. 

Any suggestions?