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1
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.

2
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.

3
Game Reports / Just made a buy phase engine...
« on: April 10, 2020, 03:32:02 am »
So I'm just getting back in to this game and was playing a free game online against the bot, and I made a buy phase megaturn engine...

Man, things have changed since I last played this game.

Anyway, the board had chapel (to get rid of everything), inventor (for the megaturn), scepter (for the buy-phase engine), market (for +buy), smithy (for draw). But no other source of +actions besides scepter and acting troupe. The megaturn ended up being one where I play scepter (on my one inventor) to gain another scepter, do this three times, play scepter (to play smithy) and draw up the scepters I just gained, repeat for more scepters/inventors... It ended up being a 5-province turn.

Perhaps there was a more conventional engine here, it was my first time playing with acting troupe and scepter so I wasn't quite sure how to put those things together. But I figured I only needed to 'village' enough to get one copy of a few different actions in play, and from then on scepter could be every other card in the engine, and all during the buy phase.

4
Rules Questions / Band of Misfits as Hermit?
« on: May 28, 2013, 02:49:24 pm »
Just checking - if you play Band of Misfits as Hermit, and then don't buy anything, should the BoM-Hermit be trashed at the end of the turn and gain you a Madman? Because on Goko it doesn't, and I *think* that's a bug, but Band of Misfits is weird enough that I thought I'd check here before posting it on getsatisfaction.

5
Goko Dominion Online / Goko rating system
« on: April 29, 2013, 02:43:51 pm »
They posted some stuff about the rating system, reposting it here. It was originally at https://getsatisfaction.com/goko/topics/summary_of_rating_calculations .

Quote from: jqs
Each player gets a rating between 0-10,000.  All registered players are rated the same way, including bots.  The system for calculating ratings is complicated and depends on many factors:
 * Ratings are adjusted based on what place you came in, rather than how many victory points you won by.  If you resign a game, it is treated as a loss.

 * Ratings are also adjusted based on the ratings of your opponents. Beating a higher-rated opponent will help your rating much more than beating a lower-rated opponent.

 * The system is conservative with its calculations, so that is reasonably sure you deserve the rating before it awards it to you.  In other words, your rating may be low when you haven't played many games and rise as the system gains more confidence that you deserve the higher rating.

 * Your rating will fluctuate more when the system has little data about how skillful you are.  As you play more, the system's confidence in its estimate grows and your rating will be affected less by results. Unexpected results, such as a win over a much higher-rated opponent, affect ratings the most.
 * Your rating will fluctuate more with results against players with very established ratings

Also responded to some questions, including why you could sometimes lose points after a win:

Quote from: Lord Humanton
>So why exactly can you lose points by winning?
 The purpose of a rating system is to estimate your skill so it can be used predictively, not to make you feel good about winning.  Suppose you have played one game, losing to a 6000 player.  The rating system has to assign you some rating arbitrarily lower than 6000, say it picks 5000.  Now suppose in your second game you beat a player who has a rating of 2000.  Your overall data is:
 * loss vs. 6000
 * win vs. 2000
 From that limited data, a logical guess for your rating would be right in the middle: 4000.  That's all mathematically fine, but to the player, all he sees is that he just lost 1000 points (from 5000 to 4000) by winning.  This is an extreme example and very simplified compared to what actually happens, but it illustrates the principle, which is a feature of most rating systems.

 That said, we no longer allow you to lose points by winning.  Instead, we're perverting the rating system a little to prevent this, only because it upsets players who have a hard time believing it's the best thing to happen in order to model their ability.

 >Can't you just give us the exact formula you use?
 Sorry, it's too complicated a system to plop into a formula, otherwise we would. But you shouldn't stress out over ratings or their calculation. It's better to understand the above principles if you're curious, use ratings as an aid to matching up opponents, and then just go out and enjoy playing the game!

6
Goko Dominion Online / Let's try to make a Goko campaign!
« on: January 15, 2013, 10:17:40 pm »
So Donald X suggested that in a post:

Obv. there are campaigns, and new players do gravitate towards them; the important thing currently is, man, replace the main set campaign with a better one. And then that's uh 60 games so there you go.

However! I believe Goko wants more campaigns. Specifically they want multi-expansion campaigns. There may be nifty tools available for spicing up levels, but let's say for the moment that there aren't, that all you have to work with is the set of 10 and the starting decks. And the number of players and which bots they are if that's relevant and the paragraph of flavor at the start. And how many zaps you get. Possibly I'm forgetting something.

So anyway. You, Beyond Awesome, and your pals at dominionstrategy.com, could make just such a campaign. Pick two or three expansions and only use those cards (expansions meaning the published ones, so Prosperity and Cornucopia and so on, I am just clarifying that I don't mean the half-sets like Bigger and Better). Tell your story, such as it is. Try to make the levels fun. Maybe 20 levels? Since that's what the others are.

And I mean if you produce this thing and offer it to them, directly or through me, then odds are they will put it up when they get to fixing the campaigns.

I think that's would be interesting to try and make. I'd try it solo, but it would probably turn out better with more than just me!

Anyone interested in collaborating?

7
Is there anything to be done about the redlinks for all the artists? Because right now, looking at "wanted pages" just gives you a list of all the artists for Dominion cards. http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Special:WantedPages is basically not usable because that's all that's visible.  I don't think putting in bios for all those people is relevant to dominion strategy... at least, I ain't gonna be the one to do it :)

8
Dominion Articles / Bandit Camp
« on: November 14, 2012, 11:31:03 pm »
OK, so I've been going through trying to make sure there's at least some content on each card page the new wiki, and I came across Bandit Camp. It hasn’t been discussed much here on the forums and there's no article for it.  I thought I'd give it a shot because I like the card and I think I have ideas for how it can be used. Usually, I've been filling in missing strategy articles with just a few quick sentences summarizing "common wisdom" and obvious things without anything controversial, but for Bandit Camp I want to do better; I've had a few good games with it, so I'd like the community's input on this draft of a Bandit Camp strategy article!

1) So what does Bandit Camp do?

Bandit Camp has two separate effects. The first is the same as a vanilla Village - +1 card, +2 actions. Simple, but far overpriced at $5. Now, a Village is a good thing to have, but you need to match it up with some terminals, and you're gaining Spoils which will get in the way of that; you'd think that in an engine, you don't want every Village you play to gain you a treasure! Sometimes, you just want a village, any village, and you'll even be willing to pay $5 for it. But that's rare.

The second effect is gaining a Spoils - gives you a one-shot Gold to use later. Gaining Spoils is pretty nice, and that brings us to point (2): Bandit Camp in Big Money.

2) Bandit Camp in Big Money.
 
In a BM-like Game, Bandit Camp should be thought of as a delayed Gold; it might as well have said "+1 card, +1 action, Gain a Spoils" or even "+1 card, +1 action, trash this and gain a Gold" and had usually the same effect. On the first shuffle after you buy the Bandit Camp, it does nothing for you, but replaces itself; on the second shuffle after you buy it, you have a Spoils (one-shot gold) and a Bandit Camp that replaces itself in your hand and refreshes your Spoils. Basically like having a Gold - except with a little more flexibility, since there are ways to be clever with Spoils and save them up at the right times. (That may be outside the scope of this article, and is better served discussed on the Spoils article specifically; always playing Spoils when they get you to a higher price tier is probably not optimal, and sometimes saving your Spoils and buying a Silver may be better than spending your Spoils and buying a Gold.) 

Used this way, Bandit Camp will typically be better than a Silver. If you open Bandit Camp/Nothing, that's like guaranteeing a Turn-3 Gold - pretty good. However, you have to be wary of a few things:
a) In the late game, the extra shuffle to wait to get the benefit from the Spoils might be too long. If you only use one Spoils from the Bandit Camp, having a Silver twice might have been better! Use your judgement.
b) If you're playing Terminal Draw Big Money specifically, such as with Smithy, Envoy, Embassy, etc... then the analogy of Bandit Camp to a delayed Gold no longer holds, since it can be drawn dead. (Bandit Camp+Wharf plays far more like an engine, it's still great.)
c) It antisynergizes with discard attacks -  With a hand of {estate, bandit camp, silver, gold, spoils} you would probably discard the Bandit Camp and buy a Province but then you don't get the spoils for the next shuffle.

Of course, in a Money-heavy game without terminal draw, such as with Merchant Ship or Monument, or filled with cantrips, feel free to get Bandit Camps at $5 to your heart's content.

2) What about an Engine? Don't the Spoils and Village effects anti-synergize?

To see when the effects don't anti-synergize, imagine a simple thought experiment - you have a 5-card hand with a Bandit Camp and some cheap cantrip, perhaps a Pearl Diver. You play a Bandit Camp, get +1 card to bring you back up to 5 cards in hand, gain a Spoils. Then you play the Pearl Diver and lets say you draw that Spoils. You're still at 5 cards in hand, one of which is a Spoils, and you have 2 Actions.

So if you draw the Spoils on the same turn you gain it, it's almost as if the Bandit Camp read "+0 Cards, +2 Actions, gain a spoils in hand!" And hey, that not-really-Bandit-Camp card would be pretty good. It immediately suggests a comparison to Festival, which gives +0 Cards, +2 Actions, +$2 and +1 buy; a Spoils in hand is +$3 (but doesn't combo with Watchtower/Library/Menagerie), so you're up a coin and down a buy compared to a Festival.

But the real Bandit Camp is even better than the thought-experiment one. You get +1 card NOW, and the Spoils gets left in your discard, to be picked up later in the turn. So if you're running a sleek engine, Bandit Camp makes your deck turn out perfectly - Villages and Smithies on the top of the deck, with the Spoils on the bottom, to be picked up by your last Smithies.

3) Bandit camp in a deck-drawing engine

So in an any engine where you expect to draw your whole deck, Bandit Camp is a better source of coin than Gold is. While your engine is running, the Bandit Camp is a Village and keeps things running smoothly; and then when you've picked up all of your engine components, you'll find that you now have a discard pile made up of only treasures, a number of Spoils equal to however many Bandit Camps you had in your deck, lined up perfectly for your Smithies to draw. Why would you get Golds which you might draw early and which would gum up your Village/Smithy chain before you've drawn everything you want to draw?

4) But the good times can end

However, Bandit Camp only seems so great when you maintain the ability to draw the Spoils on the same turn you gain it. If your engine collapses, it becomes harder to get it running again. If you've played a bunch of Bandit Camps, but have let your engine choke on green, and you don't get a chance to draw those Spoils you've gained... then you're in trouble. You don’t have enough to spend this turn because you didn’t draw your Spoils, and next turn, you're going to have an even harder time getting your engine running and you’ll have to make do with a mixed hand of green, Spoils, and probably an engine component or two that don’t go together. Oops!

5) How to use Bandit Camp - ideal case

So, that leads to an obvious strategy for using Bandit Camp.
Build an engine, and make sure you can draw your deck.
Build up your buying power by adding more Bandit Camps, not Treasures - your engine will stay reliable because you'll always draw your Bandit Camps first and your Spoils last.
Make sure you keep drawing your whole deck while greening, because once you stop, it'll be hard to start back up again.

6) Less perfect use cases

OK, but you can't always expect a card to fit into its niche, sometimes the rest of the board just isn't there. So how do you use Bandit Camp then?

In the less-than-perfect case, if you don't draw your deck all the time, you can still use Bandit Camp to good effect. If you aren't drawing your whole deck, but as long as you are using up the Spoils at the same rate you're gaining them, then you have still saved yourself several Gold purchases, allowing you to snag the additional engine component. Even if the Spoils show up at the wrong time - it that any more likely to have happened than if you bought a Gold, or any more damaging? It isn't as awesome as the best case, but it is a good way to have both Villages and Coin to spend.

Bandit Camp is also excellent as an opener with Chapel, if you happen to draw 5/2. In that case, you don't mind having the Spoils come a little late, to find your Chapel and trash faster.

8 ) Comparisons to similar cards:

Bandit Camp should be compared to Bazaar and Festival, the other 5-cost villages that give coin. They often play somewhat similarly - they both face the same problems that other expensive villages have, namely that it takes a long time to accumulate both the expensive villages and the expensive terminals that you want to play with them.

Bandit Camp provides more coin than Festival (a Spoils is 3 instead of 2). It gives a separation between the "+1 Card" up front and the "-1 Card, +$3" later in the deck. This can be an advantage if you have good control over when you draw the spoils, but a disadvantage if you don't. Bandit Camp also does not provide a +Buy, which it desperately needs. (It also does not combo with draw-up-to-X engines or Menagerie, obviously).

Compared to Bazaar, Bandit Camp offers a major advantage - $3 for spoils instead of +$1 - but also a major disadvantage, since to get the +$3 you have +0 cards total, whereas Bazaar gives +$1 AND +1 card. This makes Bazaar better when your card draw or trashing is weak, but worse if you're not worried about draw power and want more buying power.

9) Unusual cases playing with Bandit Camp:

As with many Dominion cards, there are non-obvious niche cases that crop up with Bandit Camp

A) Running out of Spoils

What happens if you're running a Bandit Camp deck and you run out of Spoils? You're dead in the water, that's what.

This won't happen often in a standard 2-player game; 15 spoils for 2 people means you'd have to have about 7 spoils in each player's deck before they affect anything - that's a lot of Golds that are sitting there unused, almost three Provinces worth per player.

But as you add more players, it becomes easier to run out the 15-card spoils pile. At 3-player, that's 5 spoils per player, still a lot. In 4-player, that's less than 4 spoils per player - if the players save up spoils between turns even a little, you'll soon find that you can barely buy a single Province with the Spoils you can get. It only takes a few King's Courted Bandit Camps to run down the pile. And if other players start deliberately trashing the spoils, then watch out - your economy will be dead in the water in no time.  Forager and Spice Merchant seem like they'd be the most likely culprits for such gimmicks, since they give you +Coin and +Buy for trashing the Spoils.

Other Spoils-gainers can also interfere. If there are four players and a few of them are Pillage-happy, then it only takes one King's Courted Pillage from two of them to leave you without any economy.

Black Market can provide cute tricks to save you from Spoils depletion, letting you play the Spoils mid-turn, then gain them back.

B) Bandit Camp as a cantrip gainer.

Hey, sometimes you just need fodder for your Altar, Forager, Spice Merchant, Junk Dealer... or even your Expand or Remodel. Bandit Camp is a cantrip which gains you a card, and that's actually very rare. Sometimes that's what you need.

10) So, to conclude:

Works with: heavy trashing. Since it's best when you draw your whole deck, heavy trashing is a good way to do that. Engines of all sorts - as long as you're aiming to hold your whole deck by the end of a turn.

Also, works best with +Buy - since the spoils go away on use, you want to make the most of every single one, and that means having +Buy to spend all the cash you can. Otherwise, you'll either have to waste spoils, or let them accumulate and clog up your deck.

Also works with fickle engine components like Throne Room, King's Court, and Procession, ones which are much more easily disrupted by having a handful of treasures when you're just starting out, since the Spoils can go away and not get in the way.

Works with Counterfeit, since Spoils/Counterfeit work well together in general. Adding a counterfeit to an overdrawn Spoils deck adds $4 and a buy, more than adding a Bandit Camp.

Even if Spoils are near-depleted, Black Market  can let you do cute tricks with playing Spoils and re-gaining them.

Poor House can also fit well into the sleek decks that Bandit Camp likes, and Bandit Camp decks can guarantee that you draw your just-gained Spoils AFTER your full-strength Poor Houses.

Bandit Camp works well enough in Big Money without terminal draw, such as Monument - if you happen to draw $5s at the right time.

Conflicts with: middling engines. You know the type - where you 're not quite aiming to draw everything and are content with maybe connecting a Village with two terminals. Where you've had a reason to buy a bunch of terminals, and then some Villages to smooth them out, but you always have a bunch of stuff in your discard, so those Spoils will always seem to get drawn at the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe then you'd rather have a Gold up-front than a delayed one, and a Walled Village instead of a Bandit Camp.

Sifters, a little. Warehouse and Cellar are great, but don't work with the Bandit Camp mentality - at the end, you'll wind up having drawn all your engine parts, and with your spoils AND your sifted-out cards in the discard. You have to draw them all, or else you have no treasure now and an unreliable hand later... that's not to say Warehouse won't help your engine, but be mindful that green you discard might come back to bite you the same turn again.

Some engines prefer coin on actions rather than via spoils-gaining; in those cases, Bandit Camp is inferior to Festival and Bazaar. These include Minion engines, draw-up-to-X engines, Golem engines.

Discard attacks can make Spoils less effective - the aforemented hand with both Spoils and Bandit Camp which gets hit by a Militia.

If there are other spoils-gainers, good reasons to trash spoils instead of playing them, or multiple opponents, you have to beware of Spoils pile depletion.

Rush strategies of course have no particularly good time to pick up a Bandit Camp. Terminal draw Big Money don't like Bandit Camp either (they don't like much of anything, really). Wharf is a special case, with the huge hands and super-fast cycling to find your Spoils naturally facilitating a transition to a more engine-like game.

--------------

So what do you think, guys? Am I right about how to play Bandit Camp? Are there cases that I’ve missed? Comments/questions/concerns?

9
Dominion General Discussion / kingdom selection methods
« on: September 19, 2012, 09:24:55 pm »
OK, so I wanted to start a thread to talk about the different ways people generate what cards to use!

On Isotropic, the default is to independently and randomly select 10 kingdom cards, then determine whether to use Plat/Col by randomly selecting one and using Plat/Col if it's a Prosperity card.

But that's not really the only way. The rules say that you can select the kingdom cards any way you want, and only say that you should pick Plat/Col and Shelters "based on" the number of Prosperity or Dark Ages cards, which leaves open a pretty wide range to pick.

I used to do pure random, but now I do biased random.

First, I take the top card of the (shuffled) randomizer pile. Then, I set aside cards until I've got two MORE from the same set; those two I keep, the rest I set aside. Then I take the next 7 cards from the randomizer pile. This effectively puts in a small bias towards one set in any particular game, by ensuring that the first 3 cards picked are from the same set, and the rest are random. I shuffle the 10 cards I selected and flip two, if either one is Prosperity then I use Platinum and Colony. (I'll also use the same 2-card selection for Shelters, once I've played enough IRL Dark Ages that I don't feel like including Shelters every game).

So, do any of you out there use other ways of picking a setup? I'm looking to hear some suggestions, and maybe I'll adopt one that I like!

10
Dominion: Dark Ages Previews / Knights vs Rogues!
« on: August 16, 2012, 04:55:56 pm »
OK, so we have a "rate the knights" poll, so I figured I'd make a "Knights vs Rogues" topic!

 Rogue
 $5
 +$2
 If there are any cards in the trash costing from $3 to $6, gain one of them. Otherwise, each other player reveals then discards the top 2 cards of his deck, and trashes one of them costing from $3 to $6.
  Action — Attack

Knight: (each has a unique name)
 $5 (except for one of them)
 (minor bonus: +$2, or +2 cards, or +2 actions, or +1 card +1 action, or +2 buys, or "worth 2 vp", or "when you trash this, gain a gold", or something else I think)
 Each other player discards the top 2 cards of his deck, and trashes one of them costing from $3 to $6. If a Knight is trashed by this, trash this card.
  Action — Attack — Knight

 
They both have a trashing attack, but Rogue prefers to gain things that were previously trashed and Knight only trashes. Rogues give a consistent bonus whereas Knights are unpredictable.

One play of Rogue cancels out one play of Knight, but Knights can whiff and give Rogues a chance to counterattack.

Which is better?

 

11
OK, so I've been meaning to post this thread, finally decided to just do it.

So, Dark Ages previews are going to start up today! And, we've all played a lot of Dominion, we're going to be able to guess exactly how the cards will play out just from reading them. ...well, not really. But it's fun to try and, in a few months, to look back and laugh at how clueless we were.

So here's my idea for this thread. If you're interested, make a post in this thread. As card previews come out, edit the post with your prediction of how that card will play - is it a power opening or a trap? Good for engines or BM+X? What will it combo with?  For the full experience, make the post after reading the card but before reading the rest of the community's analysis of it, so you can take full credit for being right or wrong. Though obviously I'm not going to be enforcing anything.

Then, when we all have played with Dark Ages, we can come back here and see how misguided we were (or pat ourselves on the back for things we got right!).

I mean, we'll obviously go to the previews thread and chat and argue there, but I thought it would be convenient to have a spot where it'll be easy to look back on it later - one post per person, with all the cards, without anything else around.

Previews start in just a few hours!

PLEASE KEEP JUST ONE POST PER PERSON IN THIS THREAD.

Discussion and argument can take place in the preview thread. Here is just a place to post your initial thoughts, in one post, so that later we can look back and be amused.

12
Council Room Feedback / councilroom player pages down?
« on: July 13, 2012, 12:11:50 am »
I'm getting an internal server error when I try to access http://councilroom.com/player?player=ftl . Is that just for me? Or is something down?

13
Simulation / Ranking BM+X terminals
« on: May 11, 2012, 03:55:21 am »
[edit 5/11: added baron, militia, goons, and a comment about bot optimization]

So, this is something I've thought about for a while, and slowly built up. I know a lot of popular BM+X options - Smithy, Envoy, DoubleJack, Wharf, etc. But I didn't really have a handle on how good they were relative to each other - if I have a board with Envoy or Vault, what do I pick up? What about Rabble or Margrave?

So, I tried to answer this question using the sims! The goal was to produce a linear ranking, worst to best, of common BM+X options. I included all of the above and some others. Didn't include cursers, since nearly all of the time those would necessitate some sort of response, leaving simulation results pretty useless. I didn't include any of the lab variants (Stables, Lab, Hunting Party) since they live or die by what terminal you add. I used Geronimoo's simulator. I mostly used existing optimized bots when I could find them, either ones labeled in the simulator as 'optimized' or ones from the 'Optimizing BM+X' thread. For some of the terminals I had to roll my own, I mostly used the same structure as the BM+Smithy bot but with the +cards card instead of Smithy and with the numbers tweaked.

I'm presenting a table, with the results ordered roughly in order from worst to best; I say roughly, because since I included some attacks or interactive cards, there are some rock-paper-scissors results, and some mis-ranked ones. Table attached as a spreadsheet! Each row/column box has what percentage of the games the row-card wins. Colored blue if the row-card won and orange if the column-card won. Linear rankings copy/pasted here:

Bureaucrat
Moat
Explorer
Militia
Baron
Library
Oracle
Council Room
Merchant Ship
Smithy
Envoy
Rabble
Embassy
Masquerade
Vault
Torturer
Noble Brigand
Margrave
Monument
Courtyard
Goons
Ghost Ship
Jack of all Trades
Wharf


Comments:
Bots weren't optimized against each other, so any BM+X card that is somewhat interactive should really be ranked slightly worse, since an opponent can respond. So Oracle, Council Room, Rabble, Vault, Torturer, Noble Brigand, Margrave, and Ghost ship are probably overrated to various degrees. Oracle is probably underrated, since proper Oracle play probably involves picking whether to draw or discard the top 2 based on what's left in your deck and what you want to buy. 
 
One thing that surprised me is that Noble Brigand is, well, really good when playing against  a pure or mostly pure BM+X. Really really good. This may be partly simulator error, perhaps because the sims don't re-buy silver and gold once they're greening, or for some other reason. But still. It gets crushed by the top-tier of Wharf and Ghost Ship, but beats even stuff like Masq or Courtyard. Not quite sure what the right way to incorporate NB into a BM deck is, but I bet that if done right it can give a huge edge.

Merchant Ship is actually a pretty good BM+X. On par with Smithy. It benefits a lot more from optimization than some of the ones around it, since the larger number of Ships and the duration effect allow for earlier greening.

Jack is heavily, heavily overrated because of how well it does against some of the discard-attack BM+X options - specifically, Goons and Ghost Ship.

Since I picked up optimized bots from various sources, they may be at different levels of optimization. None of them had PPR, but for different BM+X options, stuff like that may have a different effect. So, as with all sim results, treat this with the appropriate caution.

So, what do you guys think? Any more comments? Terminals I should add to the table? Ways to make this more interesting or useful?

14
Introductions / An intro! From SoCal!
« on: April 22, 2012, 05:15:51 pm »
Sure, I might as well introduce myself! I'm not anyone famous or anything, though. Oh well.

I'm a bioengineering grad student at UCLA, I spend most weekends down in San Diego with my girlfriend though. Got introduced to Dominion and got hooked soon after I found the blog.  I don't actually play on isotropic much - I tend to play a bunch for a few weeks and then not go back on iso for a few months - but my girlfriend and I typically play 2-4 games of Dominion each weekend. We run games days on occasion, I have a small collection of other euro and non-euro games. Dominion is awesome and so is this site :)

15
Game Reports / Whine about IRL Game - KC-pawn is the worst thing EVER
« on: April 08, 2012, 03:22:04 pm »
Augh! Had a terrible game yesterday! The key cards that made it terrible were KC, Pawn, Minion, Colony. Because there wasn't ever anything worth buying below $5, we both ended up getting a bunch of pawns on early bad turns or with +Buys, and we found out that KC-pawn is the WORST THING EVER. We had to get out the VP chips and pirate ship tokens just to have tokens to keep track of how many coins and buys we had, and turns took FOREVER.

That's the whine for the day. Done now.

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Okay, so recently I had a game where I saw scout and great hall on the board and used them to put together a nice draw engine that would let me cycle my deck, play my witch pretty often, and buy a bunch of provinces without slowing down. I thought I was pretty clever, and I'd done it before too. (Both were IRL games, I haven't played at all on iso lately.)

Since I hadn't read anything on these forums or the blog about when something like that is worthwhile, I tried to play around with simulators or figure it out - how fast is it, when it's wortwhile, or something. I knew that it wasn't good very often, and that the best way to play Scout is usually "don't", but I suspected that going for a Scout/Great Hall drawing engine would be worthwhile if:
1) There's a powerful attack around, like Witch, worth building a cycling engine for
2) There's a way of gaining Great Halls quickly so you don't spend too many buys on them (ironworks, upgrade, remake, maybe workshop or remodel or bridge)
3) Trashing, so coppers don't get much in the way.

But even using those things, simulator kept telling me that BM+ was better. But the simulator don't play Scout that well. But maybe it's good enough. So I figured I'd make this post.

Are there situations where it's worth getting a bunch of great halls and some scouts for a drawing engine? Does it require two dual-type victory cards in the Kingdom? What sorts of Kingdoms are there where Scout+Great Hall is clearly better than BM+? Did I just get lucky the times I went for Scout+Great Hall and thought it turned out well?

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