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26

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Creating Dominion

« on: September 01, 2016, 10:19:18 pm »

The sad thing is that given equal programming skill, you are much more likely to be hired as a programmer if you majored in science, or if you got a diploma from ivy league.

27

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Creating Dominion

« on: September 01, 2016, 10:13:34 am »

For current physicists: I admire what you do.

For perspective physicists: beware that your career path will start to get narrower and narrower once you are into graduate school. The sad thing is that you can't really learn all that much physics without at least trying for a PhD for a couple of years.

(This is from a ex-postdoc in theoretical physics.)

I don't think playing dominion is like programming all that much. Programming (messy things aside) is like, thinking about the best way for the computer to do things. Playing Dominion is like actually doing those calculations. Yeah developing a good framework to think about it (especially if the rules are heuristic) will be a good first step; but to really be good there still needs to be calculations and that's how simulators are handy if we want to be really good.

Designing a good board game, on the other hand, I think have more in common with designing a good program. And lots of extra.

28

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Creating Dominion

« on: August 30, 2016, 06:33:55 pm »

Whaa? Where does that number come from? Without moving into management type roles, or perhaps one some super-rare technologies for which there's only a handful of experts in that field, it's more like $125K tops. The other exception might be working as a consultant for hourly rates, in which case you might get close to 200K (though with no benefits or anything).

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Senior-Software-Engineer-Salaries-E9079_D_KO7,31.htm

Stats on the web aside, my friends in tech companies like google, facebook, and apple are all considering buying houses in the bay area, with a single income for the family mostly. I figure they need to earn 200K+ in order to do that.

I did not clearly state that that I can afford it, and cannot afford it. As SCSN notes, if it was as easy as forking over $50K, we would have. We thought it would be that easy and planned to do so. We were even willing to pay twice the amount we'd taken in, turning every dollar gained into a dollar lost. Then we found out the actual numbers.

I do not see what is lame about "my contract just lets RGG sub-license digital Dominion to other companies and gives me half of what he gets for it, and yet due to how that played out I am giving up some amount future profits to give people a year of online Dominion." But what have I done for you lately, right?

My other digital game is Kingdom Builder. Queen didn't ask me to playtest it or make campaigns or whatever, so I haven't had any involvement with it. If people were mad about the KB game and wanted money back beyond what I got, do I owe them there, for having been so foolish as to have a contract that let someone make digital versions of my game? If not, what's the difference? The amount of work I foolishly did for the online Dominion people?

I must have misunderstood. When you said you don't need to work for a living I thought that must mean a couple of million in the bank!

It's all about perspective. I certainly do think it is a nice gesture. But then I did not buy online dominion.
And what he was complaining is true. From a end customer point of view, I can accept that the company can go down and stop providing service; but I would expect that if it is at the request of the publisher, then the publisher should take care of the current customer. at least that should be the spirit when we started with Goko, when you endorse the product with this one time sale concept.

Seriously I think it should be entirely fine and will not get anyone pissed, using the current scheme, and have someone unsatisfied dealt with on a individual basis. Basically the complicated situation is that one might argue he thought he bought the thing for good and therefore did not get the full value out from it as if he bought it as a subscription. There should be server data we can mine and see how many games played since when and decide what amount should be refunded etc.

29

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Creating Dominion

« on: August 30, 2016, 02:29:30 pm »

Essentially, Donald is already paying for a year of service for all these players.  How is it reasonable to suggest even tentatively that paying for eternal service would be "the thing to do", especially when he wasn't really party to the contract with the guys who made the impossible promise?

That' not what I suggested. What I am saying is that he can reimburse the difference as if the buyers bought the subscription service in the first place starting from whenever the purchase is made. The total amount would probably end up similar.

The question is not whether he ought to do the reimbursement or not; from the law perspective he clearly need not and from a standard business perspective it is not his responsibility either.

It is all about passion. He clearly stated that he can afford it; he also said that he is willing to work on projects without obvious income down the road. It really sounds a bit lame, trying to explain that oops sorry, we did not foresee this and that? Or, yeah, I did endorse goko back in the days, but what else do you expect me to do?

I mean, sure it is Goko and MF in the end that leads to all the trouble, maybe Jay and Donald have lost some money due to this contract mistake as well. But hey, it is negotiated and signed by them. End customers like us really has no say, and I tend to think most of those buying into these products are because it is the official product, in other words, supported by the game developer and publisher. So it is sad to hear that when bad things happen, they did not pick up as much responsibility as people like (especially if they can.)

30

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Creating Dominion

« on: August 30, 2016, 01:23:08 pm »

Pretty interesting discussion, made me feel I want to chime in.

I find myself sympathizing with chrisjwmartin more. I did not read every post of his but at least the ones that Donald replied to.

Thing is, business is business, contract is contract, that I understand. However if we are also on the ideal side of things, speaking from passion with board games perspective, it starts to sound bad.

Like saying, you know, most board game makers don't really make that much money, but I do.
and sadly, even though I have cash sitting at home so that I don't need to work for a living, those money aren't from making fun or goko so I can't pay for your loss. Thanks for your interest in the game! Oh by the way, if you don't feel like it don't buy it. I won't force anyone.

I think, from a idealistic perspective, it is not really about how much the loss is involved and whether one should care about that or not.
There was a promise for the thing to last forever. If the company is no longer there to keep up with the promise, someone should take over. At least someone with passion should.

From a quantitative perspective also, I think Donald is certainly competitive enough to be hired as a software engineer. For a senior position say he can make 200K a year at that job. That is 50K for 3 months. Now he can give up all this money by doing an expansion that sells almost for nothing, but why can he not spare the same amount of money to reimburse those people that have bought into Goko or MF's product (discounted by the expected subscription price times number of months used?)

Not saying that is what I think should be done, but that would be the thing to do from a passion perspective, and the thing I would really appreciate as a fan.

31

Dominion: Empires Previews / Re: Empires Previews #3: VP Tokens

« on: May 11, 2016, 03:58:56 pm »

Groundskeeper is probably most dominant in megaturns. Just need an engine and several +buys.

32

Dominion: Empires Previews / Re: Empires Previews #3: VP Tokens

« on: May 11, 2016, 12:45:49 pm »

Temple is nearly as good as Chapel, the VP thing is just a bonus.

Is the marginally different background color on Temple intended?

I think it is quite a bit weaker. It can at most trash 1 estate and 1 copper, and the other card you bought in case they collide.

33

Dominion: Empires Previews / Re: Empires Previews #3: VP Tokens

« on: May 11, 2016, 12:34:37 pm »

Groundskeeper is sort of the most exciting alt-vp card in a while! The other 2 card seems marginal on their own, but with some enablers they can be quite interesting.

34

Dominion: Empires Previews / Re: Empires Previews #2: Split Piles

« on: May 10, 2016, 01:35:11 pm »

Pretty interesting concepts here. It seems the mechanics is to introduce some power creep into the game but at the same time constrain them by make them not getting their full power early game. In addition sometimes if your opponent can stop those card from functioning by not following suit. Kinda like Cities actually, but with more flavor.

35

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Is Expand superfluous?

« on: May 05, 2016, 09:10:26 am »

While having fun is important, winning whining is what makes it fun for some.

FTFY

36

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Base Set Cards: Smithy

« on: April 19, 2016, 12:53:19 pm »

Smithy's main niche is increasing your handsize by 2 while costing less than 5. You can count on one hand the number of cards that do that*. Hence it combines well with stop card villages while being gainable with Ironworks & friends.

One interesting question is how it compares to the weaker draw 3s for 5 - Rabble, Journeyman, Catacombs. How much extra value are you getting for the 4->5 jump in cost for each of these cards and is that jump in cost significant when you want to buy the terminal draw?


*Menagerie, Envoy, Ranger - not counting Beggar/Scout

This question is usually irrelevant, in the vacuum without other kingdom cards.

If there are no better 5s in the kingdom and I know I am likely going to draw 5 and I know I only want one terminal draw, then yes I might buy silver instead of smithy when I have 4 in hand. The same thing, when we have a better $5 we want to mass then I'll prefer to spend 4 on smithies.

So it is not so much how these draw 3 cards card compare to one another. It is how do they compare to other cards at 4 and 5 costs.

37

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Creating Dominion

« on: April 13, 2016, 03:43:43 pm »

The easy solution to the subscription model would be that people can register a free account and say get 1 game free a day up to 30 games. Should be plenty for casuals.

If being stricter one can even limit their right to join games, not creating games. 

38

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Creating Dominion

« on: April 13, 2016, 10:19:48 am »

Haven't logged in for a long time, but time to say it's finally the time for me to consider buying dominion online.

I assume they have a good enough demo to get the contract. So I don't worry about their implementation ability. On the other hand I am glad to see that finally the engine/interface is designed by someone who plays thousands of games.

39

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Eliminating the obvious self-destruct aspect of game?

« on: September 11, 2015, 01:19:53 am »

I'm not here to yell at fans; play the game however you want. I disagree strongly enough with your approach, and the OP suggestion of 2 actions, to report on mine.

Hmm. I guess the discussion in this thread took a strange turn when I was absent.

My proposal was not meant as a way to teach people the game. It was meant for my own enjoyment when playing with casual players. I think with such help their "naive" play without as much consideration of terminal collision is more effective. Certainly on the rule side there is drawback (more complicated) but that was not the concern.

But yeah, I agree with Donald's way of teaching the game. What I usually do is that if there is enough people I'll teach the game and watch them play. It's just that I do not enjoy as much playing among them this way. I can pursue a certain interesting strategy for my own satisfaction, but I don't want my friends to have the feeling that I am intentionally playing suboptimally.

40

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Eliminating the obvious self-destruct aspect of game?

« on: September 05, 2015, 05:07:07 am »

@pops: you can sig anything you want.

@SCSN: it is not that complicated. Maybe it is a subjective thing? Playing with casual friends, I also just want to enjoy the game in a casual way. Usually the way to casually enjoy the game for me is to play loosely and not worry as much who's going to win (while not letting my opponents know.) But the game becomes very boring if I play a big-money-ish loose deck without really counting how many treasure or terminals or VPs I have and I still win because my friends all screw up their deck.

@MicQ: yeah maybe, at the greatest scale of things, the skill differentiation is larger. That is, the player with the highest skill can obtain the highest win percentage vs. some refenence skill player. But I guess I am more interested in the win ratio between some moderate-ish play and mediocre. In this case I think for a lot of boards with 2 starting actions the win ratio will get closer.

41

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Eliminating the obvious self-destruct aspect of game?

« on: September 04, 2015, 11:17:32 am »

It's more from my own perspective though. They may be enjoying it, but I am not as much.

@Mic Qsenoch: I don't think it is obvious why it is going to exaggerate the difference. For example if you play base, now you certainly won't be able to play big money-smithy and win. And while play both your bureaucrats probably won't help you all that much, playing one and a smithy will. Also you probably are an expert if you buy two bureaucrats early. Most of the novice I see tend to buy different cards.

42

Dominion General Discussion / Eliminating the obvious self-destruct aspect of game?

« on: September 04, 2015, 10:17:06 am »

Haven't played IRL for a while. I suddenly realize that it is because to play with casual friends, this game takes some serious time to setup, yet it is pretty easy to for them to screw themselves by buying random things, especially too many terminal actions.

Here's some simple thought: what if the game does not punish as severely too many actions in your deck? Does the game become more interesting or not?

Two ways I come up with:
1. every turn start with 2 actions.
2. At the start of your buy phase, you may set aside action cards from your hand, whenever you set aside a card, draw a card from your deck.

43

Dominion: Adventures Previews / Kingdom card count

« on: April 07, 2015, 08:41:06 am »

With so many interesting new mechanics, I wonder if the game will in average be more interesting, if we increase the kingdom card count to be, say, 15?

(I think one certainly does not need 15 useful kingdom cards, but enlarge that number may make a random game more interesting, especially if the cards are drawn among all expansions.)

Or, it becomes more boring because there is more likely always to be a village, and a +buy somewhere, and some draw?

44

Other Games / Re: Probability applied to one aspect of "luck vs skill"

« on: November 30, 2014, 04:20:46 am »

Yeah that is pretty much what I mean. Zero variance is an idealization though; there are still choices in game whose mean difference are hard to measure yet can lead to significantly different results. It's also possible that a strategic choice can directly lower your expectation in a single board yet may increase your overall expectation for the whole match via psychological effects. In this case it's probably like rock-paper-scissors (but with different expectations for each) such that the optimal strategy needs intrinsic randomness and thus variance.

45

Other Games / Re: Probability applied to one aspect of "luck vs skill"

« on: November 25, 2014, 06:03:31 am »

That part is implied. When you finesse you also play your ace/king first. Otherwise the percentage difference is not that small (~12.5% more difference)

46

Innovation General Discussion / Re: Tournament?

« on: November 24, 2014, 02:57:47 am »

I am not happy, since I don't play echoes and cities.

47

Other Games / Re: Probability applied to one aspect of "luck vs skill"

« on: November 22, 2014, 03:19:22 am »

Very interesting, lots of insights.

I think there is one more kind of "randomness" which helps discriminating games between high-skill players, yet gives accessibility.

It is actually pretty similar to your idea of "trap choices", being probably only quantitatively different. It is just that this "trap choice" need not be that inferior to the optimal choice, and the variance is inherent but cancelled by the same choices among experts.

I am thinking in terms of duplicate bridge. For simplicity let me talk about a very easy example: if you have a 9-card suit without queen, experienced players know the percentage play is to play the Ace and king hoping to drop the queen. A slightly inferior play will be to take a finesse. However, the success chance difference is small (less than 5%), so you can say the chance for each play to win out is pretty much 50-50. This means large variance and assessibility: an expert has no way to guarantee a win against a newbie via this strategic choice. On the other hand, if both players are experienced it is very likely that they will make the same optimal play, and completely cancel this large variance.

The difference between this and the "trap choice" is just that, the suboptimal choice is not drastically worse, which also implies there is higher intrinsic variance, which is avoided by optimal choices. To get to the 80-20 or any desirable accessibility bottomline, just have a few choices like this in a single match.

48

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How do you play this kingdom?

« on: August 24, 2014, 04:16:55 am »

It seems to me that these points are saying how "enginey" strategies will tend to fail in this situation, which I certainly agree. However, I don't think in this situation swindler itself is the best card to get. For one thing, silver is better if you are afraid of the terminal overloading problem. Also, "some control" of card gaining sometimes is a negative thing, say when you hit an Estate or Province for example.

In this particular kingdom, under this situation, I think Torturer+BM is better than Swindler+BM. While +3 cards can give you less than $2, cycle through those cards are important, too. Swindler+Governor is probably also better, but I think Governor strategies (even though becomes a lot less stable) can also work with other terminals.

49

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How do you play this kingdom?

« on: August 22, 2014, 04:33:17 pm »

Yeah, maybe I am biased, but what you are saying here is called groupthink.

Is there a valid argument how Swindler becomes stronger with more players? Sure it swindles more cards, but that is the same as Witch which dishes out more curses. And we KNOW that witch actually becomes weaker.

Even in the case you mentioned, isn't it pretty obvious that if I know others are going swindlers, I am better off getting silvers so that I can alleviate the terminal overload issue (+that everyone is swindling so it doesn't hurt as much that I am not)?

50

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How do you play this kingdom?

« on: August 21, 2014, 05:58:02 pm »

Yes, the card itself becomes more powerful due to the cumulative effect, but that does not mean that one would like to get more swindlers, or should be in favor of swindler instead of other cards.

For example, take the defense effect you mentioned about swindler trashing swindlers. The effect of playing a swindler in the hope of trashing another swindler is actually not better in a 6p game comparing to a 2p game; yes you are more likely to trash some swindlers but per opponent the expectation value of swindlers trashed is the same. And this defense is actually less effective because their swindlers can trash each other. To make this explicit, consider a 2p and 3p game. In a 2p game, if you have no swinder, you cannot get rid of your opponent's swindler. In a 3p game however, assuming that both of your opponents go swindler, then half of the defense is automatically done for you. So the difference of having a swindler in your deck in this aspect of defense is halved. This is pretty similar to how you can want Moat more instead of Witch in a 4p game.

Long story short, yes, the effect of swindlers in the game is there. Your deck will be constantly changing and you will be poorer. However, these are given facts and does not have to do with whether you have a swindler or not. And I don't think the best response here is to get a swindler yourself.