This seems backwards. If you're buy-limited, copper/silver/gold is expensive because that's 3 buys! It's also 3 stop cards, which is a big deal if you're building a thin engine that can play 5 highways consistently. Finally, it doesn't do a thing to end the game, which is extremely important in a megaturn mirror game. Are you saying this actually happened in a game you played, and that it was the best move?6 Bridges is a free province worth of points
Or 6 Bridges is, you know, 3 actual Provinces.
You don't say? And here I thought it was 3 Provinces and 3 Duchies which is even more points.
You will note that I did not say it was two free provinces worth of points, though that is an option, precisely because I assumed you would want all the provinces you can afford.
The point is, that because you are looking at your VP being spread over mutliple cards, the premium for cost reduction is larger. Likewise, once you hit some critical mass of cost reduction, you become +buy limited and on a lot of cost-reduction boards that means you really can score more VP with treasures than with Provinces. E.g. 5 Hwy is around the critical point for making golds +buy limited rather than $ limited; thus a setup of Hwy/Kc/+buy is pretty easy to get to more VP in a turn from treasure than are in the province pile. Getting to the critical point for provinces is around 7 Hwy and that is far more difficult if the pile is remotely contested.
And that is what will make the rare Palace game totally warped - when the marginal value of +buy starts to beat out the marginal value of $. That is when you can Palace for the big stuff.
Pawnshop (Action) $4Pawnshop lets you trash copper and gain nothing--but only if you have debt. Was that intentional? Seems interesting, although weaker than Salvager.
Trash a card from your hand. If you have no Debt, gain a card costing up to $4 more than it. For each $1 that it costs more take 1 Debt.
unfortunately does not combo with opponents' mountebanksBut it does combo with opponents' Swamp Hags!
Alas, the point about provinces will have to wait for the Let's Discuss Basic Cards threads.The question, "How early do you go for those Battlefield VP?" is analogous to the question, "How much do you bid on Mountain Pass?" If you bid too low, I can win by bidding just a bit higher than you (that is, I green a few turns earlier than you, receiving 4-8 more VP). If you bid too high, I let you fill your deck with junk, and then win. If we bid about the same, we split the VP.
I don't know how far this bidding analogy really works. By the same reasoning I might argue that when to buy the first Province in a normal game is also a form of bidding, and soon we arrive at a point where bidding doesn't really mean anything anymore, since every single decision is some kind of bid.
Sacred Urn: I'm not sure this card is any good without Copper trashing. You sacrifice a lot of buying power in the early game to only potentially hurt your opponents. Unless I'm missing something, this card isn't any better than Silver, and thus overpriced at $4. Yes, opening with two of them for your opponents would suck for the other players but it would suck for you as well because you're not getting anywhere. I don't think this card would be fun.Not sure if this is something you missed, but one neat thing about Sacred Urn is that you don't top-deck a card unless you have at least 4 cards in hand, not including the Urn. If you can manage to reduce your handsize by just one, it's almost as good as Relic. But I think I agree that double-Urn is a bad opener.
- I tried several cards that cost a lot but let you go into Debt, that tried to look impressive and in the end were too impressive. First up, a new extra-turn card. I also had double your $ in Fortune, and I felt like, double your $, with +1 Buy, was like an extra turn but way way faster to resolve.
I feel like you have some misconceptions that are very obvious from my end. Like, conflating the competitive value of a game with how easy it is to pair up people in 50/50 matches. Or, that there is some fixed amount of skill + luck, and since the skill "cancels out", if you have lots of luck you have lots of "game" left over.Yeah, it's hard to understand. Fundamentally, the problem is that "How much luck is there in Dominion?" is an ill-posed question. Philosophers disagree on whether this kind of question makes sense at all.
If I'm honest, I actually don't understand your conclusion at all.
Yeah pretty much. I think it goes to show that in a competitive game, you actually want lots of luck. Because what you want is people who are equally matched, and when people are equally matched, luck is what you have.Never mind, I just figured out the problem with my math.I think what you've got here is a statement about the A league and not a statement about Dominion.
An individual game of Dominion is 88% chance. That means that the more skilled player loses 44% of their games (ignoring ties). In a 6-game match, the more skilled player wins 47% of the time, and ties 30% of the time.
Caveats: this is only true of the A division of the Dominion league in the first 10 seasons. When players are more evenly matched (ie the Dominion League is doing its job well), the more chance is involved. Also, my model doesn't account for the 1st player advantage, and it shows. In the tournament, tied matches occur about 35% of the time, whereas my model predicted 30%.
Two equally matched players of Foo split the games 50-50. Some people point at that and say "Foo is all luck." But in fact Foo could be chess or whatever. Once you subtract skill, luck is what's left.
By looking at just matches between A division players, you are subtracting lots of skill. (Yes I suggested looking at that data.)
