Dominion Strategy Forum

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1
Introductions / Re: Hello again
« on: June 03, 2020, 01:35:33 am »
Hmm, don't think I lasted very long this time.

I realized anonymous online competition is just a bit stressful; usually that's outweighed by Dominion being fun, but right now with the nationwide wave of police brutality life in general is pretty stressful, and I just can't spare any energy for laddering.

Well, maybe I'll be back again at some point. The game's fun. Competition of any kind just isn't for me right now though.

2
Dominion General Discussion / Events are pretty awesome
« on: May 24, 2020, 07:10:15 pm »
So I came back to Dominion after a big break, and after playing a bit (up to level 53/mu=0.95 - no idea where that is in relation to the community) and I just have to say, Events make the game so much more interesting.

I've now had at least two kingdoms that looked like a boring BM+X, but events made BM+X actually have interesting strategic thought throughout. One had Save, so even with no +action and no useful cantrips, there was a lot more managing what to get which shuffle, rather than just playing through. And another one was a BM+Council room (seriously, weak as heck kingdom actions...) which had Pursue and Alliance, where I spent the whole time tracking where in my deck my Golds and Council Room(s) were to set up big council room turns.

3
Rules Questions / Re: New Inheritance with new Embargo
« on: May 24, 2020, 03:43:34 am »
Yep!

4
It is basically impossible to construct a realistic example in which somebody would be down to 1 card in hand while having the -1 Card token on their deck.
You would need a discard for benefit that does not draw to start. They are terminal so you also need Villagers or a splitter like Festival that does not draw instead  plus Relic.
It's pretty easy... your hand is hunting lodge and 4 nonterminal actions that don't draw, you start with the -1 card on your deck. There's lots of those.

The keys to this are hunting lodge, any strong trashing, relic (for the opponent), any disappearing money. In those cases a draw-up-to-5 engine with hunting lodge seems like a plausible strategy. Might be a bit unreliable because you need to make the engine keep firing with 5-card re-draws, but hey, that's what the strong trashing is there for, and anyway the situation might come up regardless of whether this is a good or bad strategy.

Hunting Lodge+Festival. Hunting Lodge+Minion. Hunting lodge + Fishing village + any terminal $ source. It just needs strong trashing.

5
Introductions / Re: Hello again
« on: May 10, 2020, 11:32:40 pm »
Nah, I think I'm good. I'm playing online D&D which also requires long posts online. And I'm not even playing that much Dominion.

6
Rules Questions / Re: Tunnel + Set Aside
« on: May 09, 2020, 03:53:39 pm »
If it's been exiled, and is now being discarded from exile.

7
Dominion Articles / Re: Tempo Challenge (Puzzle/article hybrid)
« on: May 09, 2020, 03:37:30 am »
Haha! Just found this old post, it was fun. I totally surprised myself by getting it on the first try. Guess I'm not that bad at this. Or I got good shuffle luck. Opened Masq/Poacher, figuring that I wanted a bit of economy to hit $5 for my first bridge troll soon, and didn't want to add another stop card.

Definitely got good shuffle luck though, for most of the game I kept exactly one fewer village than I had terminals, and never had dead draw/terminal collision.

8
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Interview with Donald X.
« on: May 05, 2020, 12:30:27 am »
I remember this discussion about VP trackers from, I think, 2011 or 2012. Or something like that. Some things never change...

9
Dominion Articles / Re: Combo: Animal Fair & Way Of The Butterfly
« on: May 03, 2020, 06:10:04 pm »
Another potential synergy - 2-cost actions. It's pretty easy to draw a hand of, say, Animal fair, CCEE. It'll be a lot faster if that turn gets you a province and a cheap action, rather than just the province.


How fast have you found it? I just did a few spitballed games vs bot and found that without any support, it's not really much faster than an okish BM, which isn't that great. Maybe I'm not playing it right.

10
Silly combo of today - Flag Bearer and changeling... you can buy the flag bearer and get the flag, and then get a changeling instead of the flag bearer so you don't have a stupid flag bearer in your deck.

11
Dominion General Discussion / Re: DeepMind for Dominion
« on: April 28, 2020, 11:00:58 pm »
It is probably still harder to learn than Go though, because one bit flip in the game state...seems to have a much more severe impact than replacing one stone on the Go board

Hi, Go player of six years here. I get the point of what you're saying, but there are tons of times in an average game of Go where flipping a bit would change the outcome of the game. (I guess you can compare it to skipping someone's turn in a game of chess, since each non-empty space in Go was someone's turn).

I don't know Go at all, but in chess it's pretty easy to see that "changing a bit" (the color of one piece) could trivially make the game change completely (change a black queen to a white queen!) ...or moving a piece by one square in one direction can pretty obviously make the difference between a clear win and a clear loss. I'm completely unsurprised that it's like that in Go too.

I think the fact that those sort of subtleties matter is pretty universal among interesting games. If they didn't, those games would quickly stop being interesting and would quickly become solved!

12
Hi! I'm basically in the same boat! *waves* and I think I even remember your username from way back then!

I haven't jumped in to competitive play, just mostly been messing around with the bot... figure before I play real people I should at least get to the point where I can read some cards and understand what they do, instead of reading cards and having to go "wait, let me check the FAQ, how does that work again?"

13
Dominion General Discussion / Re: DeepMind for Dominion
« on: April 27, 2020, 11:04:21 pm »
By the way, this thread led me down a rabbit hole of reading about how AlphaGo and AlphaZero work. I don't really know what resources are the best, but it was fun to google and read about, I would recommend anyone who thinks thinking about AI is cool go down that rabbit hole for a bit.

Really puts into perspective that for a real AI, questions like how to decide "BM or Engine" or "What card to topdeck with Harbinger" just aren't the sort of questions the AI designer is going to be thinking about, it's all about how to set up the problem so that ML techniques can be applied to learn the answer to *all* those decisions in the same way.

14
Dominion General Discussion / Re: DeepMind for Dominion
« on: April 27, 2020, 10:49:29 pm »
I guess it comes down to what level of AI you expect. I think a hobby project could come up with an AI that is challenging to the average Dominion player, perhaps even to the average player on this forum.

I think at this point, there's just so. many. cards. that even a halfway competent AI is beyond the scope of a hobby project. There's just a lot of weird interactions that aren't hard to program but take time. Just implementing the rules of all the cards - and getting them to work right - is nontrivial. It's even more work than it seems because they have to be implemented in a way that they can be manipulated and reasoned about, even for simple internal questions like "if I play this card, will it trigger a reshuffle".

There is a heck of a lot of work that would have to go into an AI where the "AI" part of it is absolutely minimal, just a bot that picks one BM+X strategy per board.

And that stuff is "table stakes", so to speak. Price of entry, before you actually get to the interesting questions.

15
Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Logs
« on: April 27, 2020, 09:13:02 pm »
Since coming back to Dominion a few weeks ago, every time I read a wiki article or old forum post and it references a game, the link is broken -_-

If there's anywhere where game logs are being stored - even current ones from Shuffle.it - it would be nice.

16
I think there's a bug in Cargo Ship. The cards gained with cargo ship in play don't seem to make it back into the deck, they never get drawn.

17
Random bot game which ended with me having more provinces in my deck than non-province cards at the end.

(A game with Counterfeit, Apprentice, and Border village where over the last 2 turns I cannibalized all my engine components and buying power to get to the last few provinces.)

18
Dominion General Discussion / Re: DeepMind for Dominion
« on: April 24, 2020, 10:14:13 pm »
At this point, with the number of different things AI's been made to do, I think it's highly likely that you could make an AI to do Dominion too.

"But at what cost" is the relevant question. A hobbyist tinkering at some code on the weekends - yeah, probably not. Google gives the project $50 million dollars and a team of AI PhDs? Sure, of course, I don't see why not.

I have no idea whether Google's "DeepMind" is the AI to do it or if you need a different one, I don't really have enough technical know-how about how exactly DeepMind works to judge how well it would fit Dominion.

19
Rules Questions / Re: Moat, Sheepdog, and Gaining
« on: April 19, 2020, 03:10:32 pm »
It is blue, and card-shaped (at some scale)!

20
Rules Questions / Re: Moat, Sheepdog, and Gaining
« on: April 18, 2020, 03:51:40 pm »
Yeah. You can use moat to be unaffected by witch; in that case, you do not gain a curse, and cannot activate sheepdog (because you did not gain anything.) Alternatively, if you DON'T use moat, you gain a curse, and can react to that with Sheepdog.

But once you've gained the curse, you can't un-gain it retroactively by revealing a moat.

21
Dominion Articles / Re: Combo: Stockpile/Gamble
« on: April 18, 2020, 03:44:51 pm »
Hah! That turn-4 game-end with stockpile, gamble, and donate is hilarious.

Interesting way of setting up a three-pile ending. Set up an deck-drawing engine, then buy/gain two stockpiles - then next turn you're threatening a three-pile no matter how far away you were from one before. Game probably ends next turn, I don't think you would usually want to use an "About $20 and $20 buys" turn to set up a "$9, single-province buy" next turn, you'd want to end the game immediately.

22
Simulation / Re: Bot uses Bank wrong
« on: April 14, 2020, 05:47:14 pm »
Probably makes sense to post this at http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?board=24.0 , it's the official forums for the online dominion implementation, the subforum about AI bugs?

23
Introductions / Re: Hello again
« on: April 10, 2020, 09:37:12 pm »
Not recently! I remember playing Forum Mafia here back when I was in grad school, though.

24
Introductions / Hello again
« on: April 10, 2020, 02:04:14 pm »
I'm not new, but I hadn't been here in a while. Maybe I'm back for a bit now! For quarantine time, at least. I'll try to stick around after that too.

25
Game Reports / Re: Just made a buy phase engine...
« on: April 10, 2020, 03:34:02 am »
Is there any way to get the log of the game now that it's over?

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