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851

Dominion Articles / Re: pulling the rug out from under your opponents: 7 tips about 3-piling.

« on: February 09, 2015, 04:36:15 pm »

3. You should play an engine, if things are close, especially with 3+ players. If you aren't reliably playing +buy cards or gainers,  you won't be able to control the ending of the game. A card like University is often a trap, and it's difficult to know when to go for it. As a tiebreaker, if a three-pile looks possible, you're going to be the one who has control over whether it happens or not, and University is great for that. Again, this is a tiebreaker. If there's no card draw, then it's probably just not an engine board. University is still a trap, and it doesn't matter if you have the ability to cause a three-pile ending if you won't be ahead when that ending happens.

The advice to weight engines more heavily in 3+ player games because of ending the game considerations seems backwards. When an engine is up against two or more non-engine players, the engine player has less control than in a 2-player game. To state an obvious example, while a single Big Money (without +buy) opponent can only buy one Province between each of the engine player's turns, the two opponents might buy two Provinces. That means that the engine player needs to leave 3 Provinces in the supply to guarantee an additional turn in 3 player. The problem is far worse for the engine player in 4 player games since there are only 3 Provinces per player in the supply to begin with.

852

Dominion General Discussion / Re: More data mining: Answering Dominion questions with data

« on: February 07, 2015, 02:03:07 am »

In his data set as a whole, which I believe was games involving top 100 players, P1 won 57-43.

853

Dominion League / Re: Unrated games?

« on: February 06, 2015, 04:15:17 pm »

I mean, I don't think anyone is doing this in the league, but you think that there's no reason to cheat? For some people winning is really important, and they'd seek unfair advantages even in unrated non-league games (see, for instance, the Pirate Ship / King's Court setup board that someone or other plays over and over in Casual games).

Leck is the one who has played hundreds of casual games against human opponents on that Pirate Ship pin/trap board (and presumably hundreds more against bot opponents so that he's on top of the casual "leaderboard").

AKA: The Pertinax Board.

Leck, Pertinax, and presumably others have helped to ruin the market for Casual games by cheating in this way.

This is one reason that a Salvager feature that showed the string used in the Kingdom generator to create a game (for unrated/casual games) but hid the Kingdom itself would be useful. For example, suppose you want to exclude Scout (or include Black Market), but not see the Kingdom in advance. Then other people could see that you hadn't preset an exact board designed so that you'll almost always win.

However, the advanced kingdom generator leads to relatively complicated strings to modify card frequencies, which could make seeing the string less informative. If the advanced kingdom generator were also a built in feature (3x: "Black Market", 0.33x: "Scout"), that would be ideal.

854

Game Reports / Re: Wonder if I did good or made some mistakes!

« on: February 03, 2015, 08:26:04 pm »

Maybe you can explain why I'm wrong in thinking JoaT doesn't usually work in engines. I'd be happy to learn. And I'm not being sarcastic. I'm puzzling over this.

Adam has an enthusiastic article about Jack in an engine here: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=10755.0

855

Dominion League / Re: S5 Champion match: Sunday February 1, 20:00 UTC

« on: February 02, 2015, 03:11:06 pm »

Glad to see that three of the kingdoms I submitted got played! Congrats to both Mic and Stef for their consistent high level of play in the league these past seasons.

Game 2 Log submitted by JW

Fortune Teller, Market Square, Armory, Death Cart, Trader, Baker, Bazaar, Council Room, Jester, Tactician

Provinces/Estates. This has strong engine components but it's tough to make it work because all the key components cost $5 and Trader is weak trashing. Double Tactician looks tempting but is a trap because there's such weak trashing.

Game 4 Log submitted by JW

Embargo, Loan, Oasis, Tunnel, Woodcutter, Caravan, Golem, Duke, Vault, Witch

Colonies/Estates. Embarrassingly, I lost this one to Lord Bottington, who opened Loan/Potion, hit $4P for Golem on his next shuffle, and picked up Tunnels which Golem turned into Gold machines. I wanted to see how the best played it because there are so many options.

Game 6 Log submitted by JW

Stonemason, Lookout, Wishing Well, Mining Village, Moneylender, Procession, Governor, Rogue, Wharf, Grand Market

Provinces/Estates. This was my favorite submission. It's an incredibly powerful and complex board with every card potentially being useful, lots of draw, and tons of mid-turn gains with Stonemason, Procession and Rogue.

856

Dominion General Discussion / Re: More data mining: Answering Dominion questions with data

« on: February 01, 2015, 07:12:14 pm »

Do those stats take into account that the number of cards you draw depends on how you open? So Silver-Silver is drawn less than Silver-smithy because your smithy might help draw your silver?

It simply looks for if you played one or both of the cards you opened with on or before T4. So, for example if you open Smithy-Silver, you're guaranteed to play both.

If you open double terminal and they collide, that's not the same luck of the draw as having one miss the shuffle. And another factor is that you might choose not to play a drawing action you opened with so that it doesn't trigger a bad shuffle.

Side note, you aren't guaranteed to see both Silver and Smithy if smithy is at the bottom of your deck.

857

Dominion General Discussion / Re: More data mining: Answering Dominion questions with data

« on: February 01, 2015, 04:28:10 pm »

Do those stats take into account that the number of cards you draw depends on how you open? So Silver-Silver is drawn less than Silver-smithy because your smithy might help draw your silver?

858

Game Reports / Why Do Stef and Wandering Winder Buy Noble Brigands Here?

« on: January 30, 2015, 07:25:32 pm »

Code: [Select]

Fool's Gold, Pearl Diver, Chancellor, Scheme, Fortress, Noble Brigand, Treasure Map, Duke, Rabble, Hunting Grounds
Log: http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20150130/log.50b20dc3e4b0c9ce0cf27eb3.1422638461568.txt

Provinces/Shelters. Stef is first player and opens Silver T1. Wandering Winder opens with Fool's Gold on T1. Stef responds by buying Noble Brigand on T2 even though there is nothing that he can hit. On turn 2, Wandering Winder buys Noble Brigand even though Stef only has one Silver in 12 cards to potentially hit (this seems the most reasonable to me). By turn 4, Stef has bought Hunting Grounds and Scheme and on T4 Wandering Winder buys a second Noble Brigand even though Stef still only has one Silver to hit. What's the reason for these Noble Brigands?

Could a preemptive Noble Brigand be an effort to head off a Silver-based Duchy/Duke strategy? It seems like it would be worth waiting until your opponent had a Silver that you could potentially hit to get a first Noble Brigand, and to wait for your opponent to get multiple Silvers before you go for multiple Noble Brigands. As a junker against a no-trashing engine with Scheme, Noble Brigand seems extremely weak because the chance of not hitting any treasure will be low for a long time. And while Stef once uses Noble Brigand after seeing that he'll be able to give out a Copper based on Rabble, those uses seems extremely marginal.

In the actual game, Wandering Winder gets Fool's Golds with 2 Noble Brigands and some Fortresses and 1 Rabble while Stef builds a reliable Scheme-Fortress-Rabble engine that slows Wandering Winder with small hands so that Stef can buy 6 Provinces over 8 turns to win.

859

Dominion General Discussion / Re: More data mining: Card "strength"

« on: January 30, 2015, 07:13:13 pm »

Pawn stands out too. I'd attribute this to the fact that this is a data set of Top 20 players who win most of their games and are better than most of their opponents. In games where Candlestick Maker and Pawn are gained, it is more likely to be an engine-friendly board on which higher skill players excel (Candlestick Maker is not a strong Big Money card to take over Silver, for example, but is a good source of +buy for an engine). These also have a high gain rate due to being nonterminals costing $2 (for example, the lowly Pearl Diver is bought on 51% of boards, vs. 62% for Pawn and 79% for Candlestick Maker).

Candlestick maker is very not-spammable.

The first one is great, the second one ok, the 3rd one bad and from there on they're all terrible.
I win a lot of games because my opponent just keeps buying them.

Or as Stef alludes to, another explanation for why Candlestick Maker is so high up is that the top players know not to buy too many, but everyone else buys far too many Candlestick Makers and thus loses to the top players disproportionately on Candlestick Maker boards (in which the top player buys a judicious number of Candlestick Makers). This could help explain Squire's stats too. Just because it's easy to use Squire to get two more Squire doesn't mean that you want so many non-drawing cards.

Squire:   90.2   4.6%   81.5%

860

Dominion General Discussion / Re: More data mining: Card "strength"

« on: January 30, 2015, 04:19:50 pm »

I'm pretty shocked that Candlestick Maker is so high.

Pawn stands out too. I'd attribute this to the fact that this is a data set of Top 20 players who win most of their games and are better than most of their opponents. In games where Candlestick Maker and Pawn are gained, it is more likely to be an engine-friendly board on which higher skill players excel (Candlestick Maker is not a strong Big Money card to take over Silver, for example, but is a good source of +buy for an engine). These also have a high gain rate due to being nonterminals costing $2 (for example, the lowly Pearl Diver is bought on 51% of boards, vs. 62% for Pawn and 79% for Candlestick Maker).

CandlestickMaker:   90.3   5%   79.3%
Pawn:   77.9   4.3%   62.4%

Similarly, a card like Beggar has a very high Adjusted Win % of 5.3% because the sloggy boards where the top players buy it are complicated, but Beggar isn't bought that often because it's not a strong card most of the time. Possession is another card where if it's bought, that's an indication of a complex board and a high adjusted win %, but top players buy it on only 37% of boards.

Possession:   60   6.3%   37.3%
Beggar:   55.5   5.3%   32.7%

861

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Tournament-Province Reveal

« on: January 22, 2015, 06:06:25 pm »

The Inverse question goes something like this, You have 2 or more Tournaments in hand. You play the first Tournament and your opponent reveals a Province. Is there ever a reason to not play the next Tournament from your hand?

The only obvious reason that comes to mind is TFB you might burn the Tournament card with, also Diadem.

You are about to play a Madman and want a bigger hand. Discarding to Cellar or Storeroom are also possibilities.

862

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Rebuild

« on: January 17, 2015, 08:34:26 pm »

Welcome to the boards! You played it correctly. In a mirror buying even a third Rebuild before the Duchies run out is usually incorrect.

See the Rebuild mirror article, for example, which has similar advice. http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Rebuild#Mirror_Strategy_Article

863

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Easy Puzzles

« on: January 14, 2015, 09:20:09 pm »

On some previous turn played Prince and set it aside with Woodcutter. At the start of your current turn several things are happening, and you're supposed to choose the order. Then you realize playing the Woodcutter first is a mistake. Why?

My answer:
You've also Princed Poor House and see that you've drawn a hand of 5 treasure cards.

864

Game Reports / Re: Don't buy that province

« on: January 08, 2015, 09:33:57 pm »

At first I think I have the much better strategy, but after some misplays (also due to some bad early draws?) I fall behind a lot.

Can you describe where you think you misplayed early? Getting Merchant Guild on turn 5 over Throne Room? On turn 6 you know that the top card is an Estate, would it have been worth triggering the shuffle with Apothecary to trash it to Bishop?

865

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Will it ever be enough?...

« on: January 02, 2015, 02:12:44 pm »

Doesn't Walled Village also require a Google+ login?

It says that it does, but in actuality you can buy it with any login.

866

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Openings that are better for P1 or P2

« on: January 02, 2015, 01:09:14 am »

It's easy to see why Tournament Ambassador had extra player 1 advantage: junking attacks favor first player who can reshuffle before junk cards end up in your deck. Also Tournament favors first player because if you buy province you can use it to block opposing tournaments so your opponent may not even get to province, plus the race to prizes that you mention.

867

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Openings that are better for P1 or P2

« on: December 26, 2014, 04:33:27 pm »

It's kind of surprising that with this many games, it's still possible to lack statistical significance, but there are so many possible openings that most of the openings don't have enough data to really be sure.  Even so, I took the data and looked at wins/losses using the binomial test for p-value with 0.57 and 0.43 the expected values for wins and losses for P1 (and vice-versa for P2).  Here are some things that we have enough data to say with 95% confidence (p < 0.05):

Here P<0.05 only means that if the true expected rate were 0.57/0.43, that you would get a result "this extreme" less than 0.05 of the time. Since you presumably tested many hundreds of different hypotheses (the win rates for each opening, both overall and for Player 1/player 2 separately), we would expect about 1/20th of them to fall outside those bounds even if all openings had a 0.57/0.43 expected win rate. 

This isn't to say that I think Mountebank isn't a good opening . But when testing many hundreds of hypotheses, p<0.05 isn't strict enough to avoid many false positives.

One correction (the Bonferroni correction) that minimizes the chance that multiple comparisons lead to false positives is that if you apply a 0.05 threshold for the p-value a single comparison, for N comparisons apply a 0.05/N threshold.

868

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Openings that are better for P1 or P2

« on: December 23, 2014, 06:16:22 pm »

My script for calculating these correctly handles coin-token openings (e.g. a Gold-Chapel opening is only counted as available if Baker is on the board and the player gets a 5-2 split).  It currently doesn't handle Nomad Camp openings correctly, which I'm going to try to fix before I post the full list.

Presumably Doctor could also cause difficulties in the analysis. If I open Doctor-Tournament, that might be Doctor on $3 and Tournament on $4. Or I might have had $5, overpaid for Doctor trashing 2 estates, and then drawn 2 coppers and 1 estate, shuffled, and drawn 2 more coppers.

Those openings shouldn't be compared to each other. Also, in the latter case I could buy Tournament on turn 2 after buying Doctor for $5 on turn 1 only because of good shuffle luck in hitting two estates with Doctor. So buying Doctor on turn 1 with $5 won't be as good as the Doctor ($5)-Tournament opening's stats make it seem.

Edit: One way to deal with this would be to include the amount paid for Doctor on turn 1 but not the card bought on turn 2 in Doctor openings. However, this loses some information.

869

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Openings that are better for P1 or P2

« on: December 23, 2014, 05:35:10 pm »

Echoing some others here, I'm pretty sure that the player advantage ones are likely just due to the small sample size. If we look at a lot of openings and assume they're all really 50/50 (or 57/43), we're bound to get some that stray one way or the other. Someone better at stats than I could calculate how likely it would be to find, say an opening with >60% win rate for P2 from the given pool if all openings were 57/43.

Only the original poster could answer this question exactly because no one else knows the details of the pool of openings he has analyzed.

But here's a sample calculation that is much simpler: if there are 400 openings that have 50 games each, and in actuality P1 wins 57% for every opening (with no ties), the chance that at least one of those 400 openings would have >=60% win rate for P2 is about 95%.

Details: The standard deviation of P1's win rate for each opening is about 7%, so (by the central limit theorem for simplicity) the chance that each of the 400 openings has a <=40% win chance for P1 is about 0.76%. So the chance that at least one of the openings has a <=40% win chance for P1 is 1-(the chance that none of the openings have this). Assume that the results of games with one opening doesn't depend on results from other openings (not quite true, because each game will be counted twice since each player has an opening) and you get to 95%.

870

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Openings that are better for P1 or P2

« on: December 23, 2014, 03:50:39 pm »

This is exactly what I am saying. I would expect it to be on the order of maybe 10 times less frequent, so I am surprised that it is almost half as common.

Tournament/Ambassador is a stronger opening than Oracle/Silver or Swindler/Silver, so usually people go for it on Tournament/Ambassador boards while there are plenty of alternatives to Swindler/Silver and Oracle/Silver.

This presumably would be an interesting calculation from this top 100 players vs. each other data set: on Tournament/Ambassador (and probably exclude Baker) boards, what % of the time do players with a 4/3 split go for Tournament/Ambassador. And then the same calculation for Oracle/Silver on boards with Oracle (but not Baker), and so on. That would tell you how frequently top players go for each opening when it is available.

871

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Openings that are better for P1 or P2

« on: December 23, 2014, 03:42:10 pm »

One thing that surprises me: Why are two card openings like tournament-ambassador almost half as frequent as normal two-card openings like swindler/silver or oracle/silver?

It's because to have a Tournament/Ambassador opening, both Ambassador and Tournament need to be in the Kingdom. To have a Swindler/Silver opening, only Swindler needs to be in the Kingdom. So even though it's more common to open Ambassador/Tournament in a Kingdom that has both of those cards than it is to open Swindler/Silver in a kingdom with Swindler, Kingdoms with Swindler comes up much more often than Kingdoms with the two card combination of Ambassador and Tournament.

872

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Openings that are better for P1 or P2

« on: December 23, 2014, 02:28:59 pm »

Of course, Dominion has a strong first-player advantage built in, so those results aren't especially interesting.  What I find much more interesting is that there are openings that are substantially stronger for P2 than for P1.

Small sample size. It's not surprising that if you have hundreds of openings with 50-100 occurrences, that for some of those openings player 2 will win substantially more games. There is no way that a Rebuild-Silver (Baker-board) opening by both players is actually more favorable for player 2 than player 1.  Regular tests of statistical significance will miss that there are so many openings to test, some are bound to come back with P2 doing better than P1 just by chance.

That said, it might be less of an advantage to be P1 with Rebuild-Silver than with, say, a Junker-Silver opening because junkers have more first-player advantage, and Rebuild can be played very frequently with good shuffles. However, that doesn't imply that you would (or wouldn't) want to take Rebuild-Silver over, say, Cultist-Silver, as either player 1 or player 2.

Edit: I would be interested in statistics on the general first-player advantage. For example, in your entire data set (or, ideally, just pro, non-bot, 2-player games), what percent of the time does the first player win the game (and tie the game)?

873

Dominion Articles / Re: Prince

« on: December 22, 2014, 02:25:38 pm »

Prince is usually not worth getting. Still, Prince of +cards seems much stronger than you make it out to be, with Smithy as the stand-out.

You also don't mention Outpost, which can make Prince much stronger. Sample game where Stef gets a bunch of Princes of cantrips and Outpost and wins even though there's only terminal draw and no villages. http://gokologs.drunkensailor.org/static/logprettifier.html?20141204/log.51201cbee4b04e88c8da4f9a.1417729808871.txt

874

Help! / Re: Help

« on: December 20, 2014, 05:24:56 pm »

There's a powerful Highway/Market engine to be build here, but you need to trash your cards that don't draw cards aggressively. Sea Hag can't compete here with Lookout, Jack and Upgrade for trashing curses.

Here's a sample. The bot buys 2 Sea Hags, but 2 Lookouts, Jack, and 2 Upgrades handle the curses easily, and I can build the engine and eventually buy 7 Provinces in a turn to end it (it's made particularly easy because the bot does not contest highways or markets). http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?/20141220/log.516ce511e4b082c74d7a526a.1419113947228.txt

875

Game Reports / Ambassador, Duke, Gardens and Vault confusion

« on: December 08, 2014, 07:34:31 pm »

Code: [Select]

Embargo, Ambassador, Fishing Village, Scheme, Armory, Gardens, Quarry, Duke, Vault, Venture
Provinces/Estates. I played this kingdom with three players. I’m curious how people would play it in both 2 and 3 player games.

In the game I played, I fought the Ambassador war with another player while the third player picked up Fishing Villages, Armories, a Vault, 2 Golds and then Gardens with a province or two from Vault/Gold hands. The Gardens player had 6 point gardens by the time the game three-piled on Estates, Schemes, and Armories. The other Ambassador player and I had no chance towards the later stages.

If only one player buys Ambassador (in a two or three player game), the Ambassador player can get a thin deck with 2 Ambassadors and give out all 10 curses. However, that can help a Gardens strategy. While Armory is a poor Gardens enabler, it guarantees a gardens if drawn and gets around Embargo. Additionally, the engine only picks up VP slowly because of no +buy.

I was before the Gardens player in turn order so once Estates ran out I needed to return 2 estates to give one to the other Ambassador player. That isn't a factor you need to consider in two player.

Does Duke have a role? Thoughts appreciated.