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426

Dominion General Discussion / Re: how strong is the card passing of Masquerade

« on: September 23, 2013, 10:12:43 pm »

10 villages, right? You'll need to play those Beggars too! And either two more Scrying Pools, to draw through the 0-2 copper that will be left in your deck, or a sixth Masquerade and another village to trash it at the end of each turn.

Still, seems easy enough.

427

Game Reports / Re: A simple-looking board

« on: September 22, 2013, 01:24:13 am »

I've been reluctant to post in "Help!", because it says not to post questions about games I won. But of course misplays can sometimes end in victory, and I'd still like to improve even if I happened to win against someone who played even worse. If Help! is the right subforum, I will definitely move there.

428

Game Reports / Re: A simple-looking board

« on: September 22, 2013, 12:37:06 am »

The intention of my post was "help me learn to play better", which seems pretty far from "Show off your epic wins, or laugh at your epic fails", which is the topic of the Game Reports forum. I don't mind posting there instead, but if that's the right place for this then perhaps the topic should be adjusted?

429

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Log Search Engine

« on: September 21, 2013, 05:43:27 am »

I just played this game - note the Asian characters in my opponent's name. When I see it in the log-search page, it comes out garbled. I haven't dug into the details, but the log viewer sets charset=UTF-8, and the log search doesn't set a charset at all, so I assume my browser is interpreting it as Latin-1 or some similarly silly thing.

430

Game Reports / A simple-looking board

« on: September 21, 2013, 05:29:46 am »

This kingdom included Colonies, but not Shelters. What do I do here? I think I've played enough to recognize plausible strategies, but I don't really know how to tell which will be better/faster. There are very few plausible choices here: the only ones I can really see are (a) Rebuild (with Count?), (b) BM with Labs and probably Council Room.

But how can I figure out which one will work better? Remake or Familiar also might feature into either of those plans, but I can't tell whether the time investment will be worth it.

I went for BM/Lab, starting off with Remake to get rid of Coppers and get some early Silver; my T4 Horse Traders feels pretty questionable, but I thought I needed a +buy, and discarding/coins would be more useful than drawing until I had sorted things out with Remake. I skipped Familiar, figuring I couldn't afford to spend any early buys on it, and with Remake/Count present, either player would be well-equipped to trash curses.

As it happens, my opponent went for Rebuild and lost, but I think he played his deck pretty poorly, so that doesn't really tell me much about whether Rebuild is better here.

431

Help! / Why did I win this?

« on: September 17, 2013, 01:00:59 am »

I played a kingdom recently that had me completely stumped as to the right approach:

I know Jack and Chapel are both strong cards, and I usually can do okay when I open Chapel, but I don't have enough experience with Jack to know what goes well with it (or how to play such decks). Chapel/Jack felt like too-aggressive trashing, and I didn't think I could put together enough of an engine to justify opening Chapel, but other than that I really had no idea what to do. As you can see from the log my early buys didn't really go together well at all (Shanty town, Jack, Silver, Feodum, Upgrade); I was just sorta buying things I could afford and hoping for the best. At some point I realized I was getting a lot of silvers and could probably make Feodum work, but I don't know if that really made sense.

So, what should I have done and why? Somehow I collected 4 Provinces and some hefty Feodums, but I don't understand why it worked out, or if what I did was even a viable plan or just very lucky draws or something.

432

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko Dominion Salvager Discussion

« on: September 15, 2013, 07:51:00 am »

The point counter did not count the same as goko, in this (non-menagerie) game:

http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130915/log.516d31dbe4b082c74d7b3391.1379245119510.txt

Not sure where the fault lies, at Gokos or the point counter Maybe it has something to do with the tunnels?

I was the opponent in this game; the log linked above lists the score correctly, but the in-game VP counter did not: it listed Alan Malloy as being ahead 27-25. I think the error is clearly at https://github.com/aiannacc/Goko-Salvager/blob/master/src/ext/vpcounter.js#L79, which counts reactions like Tunnel as if they were actions when scoring Vineyard. I'll put together a pull request shortly.

433

Rules Questions / Re: Wandering Minstrel's revealing

« on: September 13, 2013, 09:21:58 pm »

Knowing if you have a Horse Traders in hand next turn is important.

I think you want to play almost any attack regardless of whether he has HT in hand. The only general exception I can think of is a dead Sea Hag. There are of course countless specific exceptions, but their co-occurrence with a Minstrel revealing a HT + playing another cantrip is so rare that I don't expect to run into it once during the rest of my life.

I have Militia and Scavenger in hand, with no village or draw; I would prefer to attack you but if you have Horse Traders I will settle for looking through my discard pile. That is, even if it's true that I always want to play an attack, it doesn't follow that I don't care whether you have HT: I might want something else too, and have to choose between them.

434

Dominion General Discussion / Which rush to play?

« on: September 08, 2013, 04:31:06 am »

I just played a kingdom for which I thought I had found the obvious strategy, but my opponent opened something else that I hadn't noticed but is also clearly strong. So I'm wondering which was the better choice.

I saw Fool's Gold and Market Square, and thought: "Great, a cheap +buy to gain multiple FG, this looks like a great way to hit Province very fast." But my opponent opened Feast/Estate and focused heavily on Rebuild. I think he would have beaten me if he had gotten a third Rebuild on turn 9 instead of going exclusively green: later on it became hard for him to draw a Rebuild, which gave me the time I needed to get Provinces.

Is it well-known which of these ploys will win most often? I assume if we had started with Estates instead of shelters Feast->Rebuild would be clearly better, but I'm not sure here.

435

Dominion Videos and Streams / Re: Looking for opponents

« on: September 07, 2013, 05:47:43 am »

I'd love to play, and am available most of this weekend, and if you can point me at some free recording software I'm happy to contribute my POV (and Skype would be fine too).

436

Help! / Re: Confused about how I lost this one.

« on: September 04, 2013, 05:53:10 am »

I'm a little confused, but take advantage of the new rats to clear out my coppers and estates and stuff, it's pretty handy.

This is the thing that stood out the most to me: I'm not terribly experienced myself, but you were definitely not taking advantage of the Rats: they were taking advantage of you! Trashing your Coppers and Estates is generally good, because it thins your deck out so that you get fewer bad cards and more good cards in your hand. But if you trash them with Rats, you get more Rats back, so your deck gets worse instead of better! Instead of drawing a marginally useful Copper, you draw a completely useless Rats. The main way to use Rats effectively (other than giving them to your opponent!) is to trash them for benefit, with something like Bishop, where trashing Rats is worth 3VP but trashing Copper would have only been worth 1VP.

And without warning, the game suddenly ends after my turn 30, with me losing? Not really sure what happened.

You ran out the Rats pile, and the Wishing Well and Curse piles were already empty. It looks like there was only one Estate left, as well, so the game had been almost-over for quite a while, but your opponent kept greening instead of just ending it while ahead.

437

Dominion General Discussion / Bad plan, bad tactics, or bad luck?

« on: September 03, 2013, 12:29:29 am »

I tried my first moneyless deck recently, and just barely lost against an opponent who went big money hoard. i'm hoping to find out where I went wrong.

Was my entire strategy wrong? I felt like I had a little trouble finding my poor houses, so perhaps I needed a kingdom with better draw, or perhaps poor house is just less suitable in a colony game.

Did I play the deck wrong? I thought I should get a couple bishops with my spare buys so they could trash mediocre cards for VPs, and that sorta worked, but I think they clogged things up more than they helped, and that more poor houses would have helped me connect a lot more. I'm also not sure about the number of fishing villages I had: with no draw cards, each one was a card gone from my hand, but I needed them to play poor houses. Bishop-trashing the colonies to keep my deck thin felt right, but that could also have been a mistake.

Or did I just get unlucky? Hitting all three of my bishops together at a time when almost anything else would have been a win felt pretty unlucky, but really I think I probably brought it on myself.

438

Dominion General Discussion / Re: When to green

« on: August 23, 2013, 04:46:56 am »

The big one is--don't practice too much against bots. Really, they don't prepare you for the real thing very well.

I'd prefer to practice against humans, but goko's multiplayer lobby just makes it so frustratingly difficult to find a game that I often fall back on the bots. If you know a better way to find humans, please let me know.

439

Dominion General Discussion / When to green

« on: August 23, 2013, 03:57:09 am »

I was practicing against a bot, and although I won, and felt I was playing well, I realized later by looking at the score graph that I may have made an important mistake; I'd like to see if you all agree with my assessment. Incidentally, is this the right sub-forum for such questions? I don't want to clog up the "general discussion" forum if there's a better location.

Basically I tried to build an engine with festival/laboratory/smithy. I added a throne room  for flavor/flexibility, but I'm not sure it was a good choice. I was a little cautious about taking this approach because the lack of a chapel meant I'd have ten junk cards in my deck to overcome, but I think the other engine-friendly cards available still made this better than big-money. Does that sound right?

Anyway, I noticed that I picked up my first province on turn 11, but the game didn't end until turn 16, and I wonder if I should have built up a little longer. Obviously the first two provinces slow down my later turns, and I might have been able to double-province multiple times, or perhaps even triple-province, if I had skipped them. I think I was afraid the game was about to end, because my opponent was buying provinces, but given his big-money approach I should perhaps have realized he wouldn't be able to keep buying them forever. How do I know when to say "enough is enough" and start trying to grab provinces?

Thanks in advance for your time!

440

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Newcomer strategy question

« on: August 22, 2013, 04:38:32 am »

Also, if you had 3 Provinces, you probably built up your economy somewhat. Those Buys could have probably been better spent either buying Potions or actions. The fact that you only had 3 Vineyards is telling.

Thanks - I think this is the biggest mistake I made, and it didn't even occur to me afterwards, until you pointed it out. I hadn't really thought about the possibility that there are decks/strategies where I don't want to build up my economy, at least a little. I knew I had too few vineyards (and probably too few actions), but didn't really realize how I could have gotten more; I think this makes it clear.

441

Dominion General Discussion / Newcomer strategy question

« on: August 22, 2013, 01:58:14 am »

I've only been playing for a month or so, and mostly against friends who've played even less. I've noticed that I try to build an engine in every game, which is obviously wrong but a lot of fun. Anyway, tonight I played a kingdom that I'd like some feedback on.

• Vineyard
• University
• Watchtower
• Golem
• Apprentice
• Council room
• Venture
• Royal seal
• Library
• Counting house

Three player game, no shelters or colonies, and I'm last to play with 3 coppers. I thought I'd try my first vineyard game, with the general idea of using golem to play many universities, and libraries or council rooms to help me draw more golems, with a couple apprentices to pick up the slack when I can't draw enough, and then grab vineyards once I have all that working. I later realized I needed council rooms for the +buy, and my libraries were basically useless.

• Does that seem like a viable plan? It seems like a few too many different cards to work together well.
• If the plan is viable, how do I play the first few turns? I tried watchtower/potion, hoping to draw 4p earlyish, or maybe topdeck a university; but maybe silver/potion would be better, or maybe I should have built up something else for a while before trying for golems?
• How would you have approached this kingdom instead?

For the record, this worked once I switched to Council Room, but only barely: 1st player got the last province, ending the game tied on VPs but with one more turn taken than me. No log since it was an offline game, but I ended with 1 Estate, 3 Province, 3 Vineyard, some treasure, and 13 action cards that I was using for my engine.