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51

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 21, 2014, 04:54:09 pm »

How do you play Antima Comet?

Before the latest patch, Comet was a pretty strong rush card for P2, with DD DDC DDB Comet WEEEEEEEEEE being at least halfway viable on almost any board. Now that it costs 3RGB, it's more of a tactical mid-game unit, because the investment to rush it is much larger, so you're usually right to put it off.  And indeed, as you say, countering Comet with Comet is pretty dreadful.

The thing about Comet is it's a big tempo play: you buy yourself a turn or two to work on whatever is important while your opponent defends. Maybe that's droning, or maybe it's getting out four Tarsiers and an Amporilla behind your big pile of Engineers. But you rarely break your opponent with a Comet, just slow him down, so you need a follow-up plan. In your game, it looks like that plan was an Asteri, which seems fine.

The counter-play to Comet is often to defend efficiently, with Walls or other blue super-walls, while not getting too far behind in economy. Building attack is usually not a huge priority, because your opponent can defend it comfortably for a long time. Once you've gotten your economy established, and whittled down your opponent's Engineers, then you can consider a counter-Comet, to let you catch up on whatever it is you need tempo for.

52

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 18, 2014, 03:15:07 pm »

Oh, that's weird. Eventually everybody will be in tier X then! So cool... Meet you there!

Well, it's supposed to be pretty hard to progress in tiers unless you are actually improving; you can't just grind out wins like you can on the Hearthstone ladder, for example. It seems a lot easier to lose points than to win them, once you are near the top of a tier, because you are mostly being matched against people ranked lower than you, so you need quite a high win percentage to sustain your tier progress.

53

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 17, 2014, 05:16:29 pm »

Pretty proud of this one: http://play.prismata.net/?r=ivZnR-aAkrr

Bahahahaha those Cluster Bolts. Well played.

One note, though: you usually don't need/want to build the Engineers on the same turn as your built your Antima: you can just float the gold and buy them next turn. And once you've made that realization, you can cut two of your Engineers for Walls, one on each turn. Wall is $5 to get 3 hit points; if you have to defend with the Engineers it costs you $6 for the same amount of health, without actually adding any damage. The $2 you save there lets you squeak out one extra Engineer compared to your actual play.

54

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 17, 2014, 04:47:11 pm »

Lost a game to the "stealth" update. Didn't notice that Deadeye costed more, and didn't notice that now it can attack.

You probably want to check the news for the other changes if you had started getting acquainted with the units.

It's only a stealth update if you don't read the subreddit, though, which I do recommend reading: there's interesting stuff there, from the devs and from everyone, and it's not so high-traffic that following it is a lot of work.

55

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 17, 2014, 04:42:53 am »

I guess, it's really worth it to try this game yourself if you're just a little interested.
I've started yesterday, I quite enjoy it.

I played a couple of games against the weakest bots before noticing that after the first five tutorials, there's also a second page of tutorials.
Can anyone help me with this newbie question about "Defense training 3"? (not the advanced one, actually the "normal" third one?)

I'm pretty sure you want to keep those units with the largest hitpoints and you want to kill enemy attackers that deal the most damage compared to their hitpoints when breaching. So while I'm trying this, I'm killing enemy Tarsiers first. The AI attacks with Gauss Cannons and Tarsiers himself. I'm losing my Engineers first, keeping my walls. But in the end, my walls are gone and I can't kill his Gauss Cannons fast enough.

Is that actually winnable, or do I have to think outside the box somehow? I tried to do something different, like trying to save an Engineer early on instead of the second Wall, or to attack the enemy Gauss Cannons earlier, but the only thing I've noticed was that I'm losing faster.

A general tactic you can apply to these defense puzzles goes like this:

• First, figure out the right order to attack the enemy units. Here, it's easy: Tarsiers, then Tarsier+Gauss, then Gauss forever. Count up how many turns this will take to kill him. Here that's 9 turns.
• Next, list how much he is attacking for on those 9 turns. He'll attack for 4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 1, 1.
• Finally, figure out how to budget your defense to survive the attacks he'll be making.

I don't want to spoil it with too much detail, but I think if you apply this plan and think about it, you can come up with the answer. And if you have trouble, here's a hint: the only interesting decision happens during your very first turn defending.

56

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 16, 2014, 11:57:19 pm »

So I just played a really fun game. First time I won with Zemora, even though I'm sure I played suboptimally. Really close and it came down to some really tricky defensive tactics. Any thoughts on how to improve?

AvgIm-R9O5s

The Blastforge into Flame Animus is a little questionable: you will want to build a lot of Tarsiers, and against an opponent who is trying to build this much economy, you'd like to apply pressure quickly, and a real Animus lets you get more Tarsiers sooner. You'd have to cut a drone, though, so the Flame Animus seems okay. The turn after that, though, I don't like building two drones or an Electrovore. I'd cut the drones for an Animus: three Tarsiers per turn is a lot of pressure for just a little money, and your economy is already pretty big; you just need to do short-term things now to help you survive until Zemora arrives, not invest in more gold income.

I'd also switch the Electrovore for a Tarsier: your opponent can get rid of all your Engineers in a big hurry if he wants to, and the Tarsier will deal damage. On the other hand, you did well to just accept this by defending with your Electrovore immediately, so maybe you got a great bargain by building a 4R Rhino.

On turn 9, I don't like the Forcefield. Just build a Barrier, and be prepared to sacrifice a Steelsplitter in the unlikely event your opponent attacks with everything. When you Forcefield, you commit to losing the Drone regardless, while your opponent gets to keep some units back on defense.

On turn 10, the second Animus is very bad: are you really hoping to spend over $20 on red in a single turn? There aren't even five Tarsiers left in the supply. Cut it for a Gauss Cannon or something, and put up a Barrier as well just to increase your defensive flexibility. As it happens, when he attacks for max the Barrier will go unused, but that's not a big deal: you will be wrecking him quite soon, and can afford an insurance policy as cheap as 1G.

On turn 11, you overdefended by one, because he can't possibly keep enough Engineers to fire all his Electrovores, even if he sacs the Wall instead of absorbing. Cut a Forcefield and replace it with Barrier.

None of these mistakes really cost you anything, because your opponent had a very bad plan: you can't just drone up against Zemora, you have to apply pressure to win before Zemora can save the day, or sometimes you can do okay getting your own Zemora. Overall I would say the mistake you made the most often was underutilizing Barrier: you have a giant pile of green available, which means that Barrier's cost is practically just a single gold. Often, you built a Forcefield when a Barrier would do; even two Barriers only costs one more gold than a Forcefield, while saving you a Drone and adding defensive flexibility.

57

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 16, 2014, 03:47:24 pm »

I just played a super epic game that I somehow managed to win, and I feel so stupidly proud of myself that I am going to share the replay.

Woah, that's a lot of conduits...

I heard that and loaded up the replay, expecting to say "Well that's a Zemora game for you...". But no, apparently it is a Chieftain/Venge Cannon game? I think this was a few too many Conduits.

58

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 15, 2014, 11:03:38 pm »

Temron and I will be doing a stream tonight at 8:00 Pacific time (5 1/2 hours from the time of this post) intended to be accessible to Dominion folks. So if you're interested in the game but haven't tried it, or have played but are having trouble beating the bots or whatever, please stop by http://twitch.tv/amalloy and check it out. We'll be playing a slow-paced game with plenty of explanation and answering viewer questions.

Maybe we'll even commentate on some viewer games and/or coach if you want to join us on Skype? Who knows, sky's the limit! Let us know what you want to see.

Due to some technical difficulties, we're at http://www.twitch.tv/azizqistemron instead. Starting now!

59

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Themed "challenge" boards

« on: December 15, 2014, 10:53:04 pm »

Okay, if I ignore potion cost cards, it's pretty easy for me to make overpowered/underpowered challenge boards if I take the top two cards from each ranking list. How would you guys play these?

Tops board: Chapel, Fool's Gold, Masquerade, Ambassador, Sea Hag, Tournament, Mountebank, Rebuild, Goons, King's Court
(Junking or streamlining? There's so much conflicting stuff and the only unassisted village is in the prizes.)

Bottoms board: Secret Chamber, Duchess, Chancellor, Woodcutter, Scout, Thief, Counting House, Harvest, Adventurer, Farmland
(Slog city, although those sifters/discard-for-coins cards could be useful. Again, no villages.)

I'd build a KC/Masq/Goons engine on the tops board. Not the pin because it doesn't work if your opponent has enough junking, and it's definitely possible to have enough junking on this board. It's super important to get the engine going as fast as possible, because being on the receiving end of Goons+Masq is extremely awful on this board. I'd open Tournament/Masquerade, but Tournament/Chapel and Tournament/Ambassador are good too. If it starts looking like your opponent is doing something that can't stop the pin, it's always possible to change your plan spontaneously, since the pin and the engine play very similar early games.

On the bottoms board, you open Chancellor/Silver and play big money with no other Action cards.

Is Thief actually okay against this?

60

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 15, 2014, 05:36:56 pm »

Temron and I will be doing a stream tonight at 8:00 Pacific time (5 1/2 hours from the time of this post) intended to be accessible to Dominion folks. So if you're interested in the game but haven't tried it, or have played but are having trouble beating the bots or whatever, please stop by http://twitch.tv/amalloy and check it out. We'll be playing a slow-paced game with plenty of explanation and answering viewer questions.

Maybe we'll even commentate on some viewer games and/or coach if you want to join us on Skype? Who knows, sky's the limit! Let us know what you want to see.

61

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Themed "challenge" boards

« on: December 15, 2014, 04:43:51 pm »

Wait, I'm pretty sure Village is the strongest card in Dominion.  The top board should be: Native Village, Village, Fishing Village, Farming Village, Mining Village, Walled Village, Worker's Village, City, Border Village, and ...uh ...Bureaucrat.

Or, if you want to go outside the official rules for the real ultimate board, swap out Bureaucrat for a pile of Ruined Villages.

I think this is a Bureaucrat/BM board. Instead of Bureaucrat, try adding Throne Room for the real village-only board. Or even Shanty Town: if you only buy one action, it's a village that's as good as a Moat!

62

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 14, 2014, 09:17:09 pm »

Auric impulse is sort of like a drone that costs 5G instead of 3G1E that you can sell back on any turn by just not buying it again.

That's a really cool way to think of Auric Impulse. I've been thinking of it as more like "a way to avoid committing to building a Drone", because you can buy it, then build a Drone, which has the same effect as just building a Drone to begin with, except that you can change your mind about droning if something else becomes more urgent.

the way I see it (I could be wrong), auric impulse is never really part of a strategy, unless you define it in a lot of detail, which will mostly not be possible, because you have to react to your opponent. It's just something you do whenever you have 5 gold that you aren't going to spend anyway, which does happen sometimes. But it's not an interesting unit, because it doesn't really change strategy very much.

You're mostly right that Auric is not much of a strategic unit, being rather more tactical in that you usually buy it opportunistically to increase short-term flexibility. But there are a couple units that synergize well with Auric Impulse, enough that its presence might sway your overall plan towards them: Antima Comet and Iso Kronus. Both of these units have the unusual property of encouraging you to save up money rather than droning: with Iso, you want as much gold as possible every other turn, so you can grow your Iso stack while keeping it in sync; and with Antima, you want to build as many Engineers as possible next turn, meaning you can afford to float ten or fifteen gold for one turn. In both cases, a Drone would be much worse than an Auric Impulse, because it costs you two gold for the critical turn, and the returns you get back on future turns may not be worth it.

9avQ6-Yds9Q is the most recent game I played, in which I happened to use Auric Impulse effectively against Awaclus: I built two of them on the turn before my Antima hit, effectively gaining a free Engineer (and a free damage) that I couldn't have gotten without Auric Impule. I could even have gotten one more damage out if I'd build another Auric on turn 4 instead of Engineer+Drone. Maybe that's right, I dunno; it gains me an Engineer and a damage, at the expense of a Drone. Seems close, but in real life I didn't even think of it until I was writing up this post.

63

Other Games / Re: Prismata: Alpha Key Giveaway! (Magic-Chess-Dominion-Starcraft hybrid game)

« on: December 14, 2014, 05:02:24 pm »

As a note -- I'm red-green colorblind, and I can't tell the lines on the endgame econ/damage graphs apart at all. Is there a color toggle somewhere I'm missing, or is that a planned feature?

I bet if you filed a bug request in game (the Feedback button), they'd figure something out pretty quick, especially if you left a suggestion like "dashed vs solid" or whatever the usual thing is. Colorblindness is something it's easy to forget to design around, but there are enough colorblind people that it's pretty important not to.

64

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 14, 2014, 05:59:15 am »

The equivalent of Big Money (a baseline that uses only units from the base set) is to buy all the Tarsiers.  I find it helpful to think in terms of whether anything forces me to deviate from this strategy.

Seems like a good thing to think about, but even in just base set, you can't "just" build all the Tarsiers: you need Walls or something to defend them.

Ossified Drone I've never bought, and it doesn't excite me because you rarely have spare Red and if Drones are being attacked you're in a bad shape anyway.  I'm sure it's useful occasionally though.

Ossified is my favorite Drone. Vivid is "exciting" in that it enables other strategies well by accelerating your economy, but it's frankly boring: you just mindlessly open Vivids and then have more money than if you didn't. Ossified, on the other hand, keeps things interesting throughout a lot of the game by letting you juggle your leftover red, and defend efficiently with a giant pile of free red "Forcefields". http://www.reddit.com/r/Prismata/comments/2p1yyn/ossified_drone/ is a semi-recent reddit post asking what the heck Ossified is any good for, with a lot of good answers and a link to a recent Ossified game of my own.

Centrifuge, the resource pinata, is really good if you're not in danger of being rushed.

I'm not so sure about this. Building a Centrifuge takes a long time, and the amount of Drones+tech you have to cut in order to get it out means you often get the unit you were aiming for *later* than if you just teched and droned normally. It's most often useful if there's one or two big units that you really want, but don't want to commit to the tech for all game. For example, it's nice to Centrifuge into Defense Grid with just one Blastforge, rather than having to get three Blastforges and waste a bunch of blue for the rest of the game. But if there's something you want to use a lot of consistently, eg Drake spam, it's better to skip the Centrifuge even if you're not being rushed.

65

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 13, 2014, 11:47:27 pm »

I'm hearing a lot of new players struggling in here. I'm no expert, but I've been playing for several weeks and winning more than I lose, with a rating in the low 1400s; I'd be happy to help out. Would anyone like a coaching session on Skype, streamed on twitch for anyone else who wants to ask questions or just listen in? If so, PM me your Skype name and we can set up a call. I'm available for the next several hours tonight, at least.

66

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 13, 2014, 09:20:43 pm »

The loading animation is, by the way, pretty fascinating. It's impossible for me to see it for what it really is all the time, no matter how hard I try to.

It actually made the front page of /r/gifs last week, and Elyot gave away the source code for anyone who wants to play with it: http://np.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/2on8si/connecting_to_server_so_mesmerizing/cmow0sz

67

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 13, 2014, 04:51:23 pm »

What's the standard kingdom size for vs.?  Base plus 5, plus 8, or grandmaster? I wanna practice vs. bots using the most relevant setting.

I was curious what grandmaster was and googled it. It's just one specific set, apparently they want to see what happens if they pick one set and let people play that a long. how long will they need to figure it out completely? at least I think that's the reason, it makes a lot of sense.

so, it can only be either +5 or +8. I'm strongly guessing it's +8. I only play that, because it's just more fun.

The top players all seem to play both +5 and +8 competitively. My understanding of the way they play out is that +5 is actually more likely to be won by the most-skilled player, because there is usually a dominant strategy that's not hard to see, and then the stronger player's superior execution matters a lot. In +8, there are more viable strategies, which may have some rock/paper/scissors interactions or whatever, increasing the variance.

I heard a rumor that the grandmaster set was an experiment that failed, in that nobody is playing it at all, and will be removed in a future version.

68

Other Games / Re: Change the name of this board?

« on: December 12, 2014, 02:37:03 pm »

I'm with Kirian here: I think the name already does include other card games. I know Hanabi isn't a "board game", because it has cards and no board, but nobody would blink if you brought it with you to a local board-game night: it's the same kind of game, even with different physical bits. If you broaden the name to something wider than "board games", do you want it to include stuff like LoL? I'd be against that, myself: it's such a different type of game than what's currently in this forum. And if you don't want it to include that, the current name is fine already.

69

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The list of Donald's fake cards

« on: December 11, 2014, 07:32:27 pm »

I think Strict Peddler could use some self-synergy: You may make optional abilities mandatory for this turn only.

70

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 08, 2014, 07:41:35 pm »

This game is deep, but intuition will get you a long way.

Is there a better way of using a stack of freezing units than clicking each of them individually?

For most things you can do multiple times, holding shift does it as many times as possible. Clicking stacks, buying units...probably some other stuff I can't think of.

71

Dominion League / Re: season five is alive

« on: December 08, 2014, 04:28:11 pm »

Posting here so I can get notifications.

There's a Notify button to let you get notifications without replying.

And an Un-Notify button to do the opposite, which I will now be pressing.

72

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 08, 2014, 03:03:35 pm »

I've played it a lot over the weekend. It is quite addictive once you start seeing the quirky cards.

I had a funny game against the bot where I let him breach me three times in a row and still won. It involved Trinity Drones (for 2 coins and one conduit, a 5hp non-blocking drone that produces three coins per turn) and the Voidbringer (you can pay 8 conduit for 8 attack and 8 coins; takes 6 turns to build). Basically, because all my units had high health, I was quite impervious to breaches. Once the Voidbringer went online, my opponent had to start devoting most of his economy to defending himself, while I was earning far more money than him.

It probably wouldn't have worked against a human opponent though. The master bot prioritized my gauss cannons during the breaches, he should have gone for the blastforges and then the conduit instead, I think (with Voidbringer, every conduit is effectively a +1 attack, +1 coin unit, and they only have three health).


I am winning most of my games against the master bot now, it doesn't seem to understand some cards. I've easily won every game with scorchilla, for example. I don't really have that much free time, so I will have to pass on the alpha for now...

The resource you pay to build things is generally called "green": the conduit makes the resource, it isn't the resource itself. Mostly this doesn't matter, but I'm bringing it up because it can cause some confusion, especially if you start calling blue "blastforge": there are some cards that consume an actual blastforge unit, rather than just a blue resource. (The colors have actual names somewhere, but everyone just calls them red/blue/green).

73

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 05, 2014, 11:29:02 pm »

Since a bunch of folks here seem interested, I thought I'd stream some practice games with Temron on Skype. We're live now at www.twitch.tv/amalloy - feel free to stop in and ask questions, or just hang out and listen.

Edit: Stream over.

74

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 05, 2014, 06:32:51 pm »

I don't know why I'm so bad.  I feel like when I start off attacking, MasterBot just puts up a wall and then builds his own attack overrunning me.  But when I try to do that, he overruns me and I'm just nonstop building walls and can't afford any offense. 

Example: http://play.prismata.net/?r=o8pnF-zZY6U

I start off aggressive and he just puts up a wall and ignores me, eventually overrunning me.

I'm no expert (you can find some on /r/prismata), but Tesla aggression looked like a reasonable counter to his heavy-economy opening. The execution looked non-committal, though: you kept droning, when you already have enough to churn out Teslas and Engineers forever; and then you built an Animus: you don't really have the economy to support all that tech. All this diversification takes off the pressure of your Tesla rush, giving your more-economic opponent plenty of time to outpace you.

Suggested changes: on your turn 3, you built BDD, leaving you with 13 gold for turn 4. That means you won't be able to afford Tesla+Conduit, which is what you really need to be able to Tesla forever. I'd recommend cutting a Drone, just building BD, so that you can Tesla+Drone on turn 4, and then follow up with more Tesla+Engineers. This is enough aggression that your opponent really can't make use of all the tech he's built: he has to defend himself. He can maybe get out two Tarsiers, but those are slow enough that you can just build a Wall once you've got enough Tesla pressure.

Some elaboration on this advice: somewhere in the tutorial or a new-player guide, it's recommended to, in most games, build like 10-15 Drones, and then stop droning: building up an "economy" of attackers can be much more efficient than a real economy of Drones, in that it forces your opponent to spend money every turn to defend.

For example, in this game, your first Tesla Coil isn't very effective: it costs you an Engineer per turn, and your opponent an Engineer per turn because he can absorb the rest on his Wall. But every Tesla Coil after that is very valuable: he has to build a Wall per turn to defend, while you just have to build an Engineer to keep it powered. So each Tesla Coil is, in a way, worth as much as three Drones and a Blastforge: it lets you spend 2 gold each turn in order to cost your opponent 5 and a blue, for a net gain of 3+B. Efficiency like this is how an aggressive strategy defeats heavy economy; trying to catch up on economy yourself is not nearly as effective, because you're not positioned to do so.

Once you get your third Tesla Coil up, your opponent probably has trouble even treading water, and then you can put off the fourth Tesla to diversify: build a Wall if he's gotten some attackers, or maybe drone up, or get that Animus you've been looking at, to add in Sentinels; or switch into Chieftains since you've already got the tech for it. The important thing is to do all this only after you've put some real pressure on your opponent: one Tesla Coil is no pressure at all, but three is a lot.

75

Other Games / Re: Prismata

« on: December 05, 2014, 03:02:11 pm »

I don't know why I'm so bad.  I feel like when I start off attacking, MasterBot just puts up a wall and then builds his own attack overrunning me.  But when I try to do that, he overruns me and I'm just nonstop building walls and can't afford any offense. 

Example: http://play.prismata.net/?r=o8pnF-zZY6U

I start off aggressive and he just puts up a wall and ignores me, eventually overrunning me.

I'm no expert (you can find some on /r/prismata), but Tesla aggression looked like a reasonable counter to his heavy-economy opening. The execution looked non-committal, though: you kept droning, when you already have enough to churn out Teslas and Engineers forever; and then you built an Animus: you don't really have the economy to support all that tech. All this diversification takes off the pressure of your Tesla rush, giving your more-economic opponent plenty of time to outpace you.

Suggested changes: on your turn 3, you built BDD, leaving you with 13 gold for turn 4. That means you won't be able to afford Tesla+Conduit, which is what you really need to be able to Tesla forever. I'd recommend cutting a Drone, just building BD, so that you can Tesla+Drone on turn 4, and then follow up with more Tesla+Engineers. This is enough aggression that your opponent really can't make use of all the tech he's built: he has to defend himself. He can maybe get out two Tarsiers, but those are slow enough that you can just build a Wall once you've got enough Tesla pressure.