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26
Help! / Re: Base game kingdom with no trashing
« on: May 22, 2018, 02:43:24 pm »
Trashing just means you don't need to draw so many cards. In this case, it's not a problem to draw a lot of cards so it's not a problem if trashing isn't there.

And yeah Drowning Skull is Burning Skull's alt.

Thanks, this is an interesting heuristic. So whenever I see +3 or better draw, and something that gives +actions, I should be thinking about how to make a +draw/+action engine work even without trashing (or with weak trashing) on the board? (See also my question to DG below; there are some overlapping concerns.)

Just looking at the kingdom, there is laboratory, market, artisan, cellar, merchant, throne room, council room, gardens, festival and library. What's bad about an engine here is unreliability. The coppers and estates slow you down. What's good about an engine here is fast gaining of many engine cards each turn using artisans, possibly throned, plus plenty of money and buys too. All those gained cards can help the engine. The draw is good too with laboratory and cellar. Cellar is really good when you have big hands to play with.

Against a money player, the only limit on how big you can build this engine is emptying three piles. Apart from that, you can build the engine up as large as you can with merchants, labs, markets, thrones and then play 4 throned artisans to empty the gardens on the last turn and buy up whatever vp and coppers you can to score a win. The garden scoring suits the engine player perfectly.

Is this fast enough to beat someone just playing council room + money, I'd expect so. In multiplayer you get two problems though. There will be less engine cards for each engine deck if more players use the engine. Council room + money gets faster when more than one person does it in multiplayer. So in multiplayer the money option looks somewhat safer.

Thank you for this breakdown. I'm mainly concerned about the 2 player game in the following questions, though I appreciate the comment about multiplayer.

So, the tip off for the engine here is the good draw, gaining, and presence of cycling?

(Quick question about cellar: is it mostly wrong to have more than 2 or -- for a quite big deck -- 3? This is the impression I get from watching people play.)

If the gaining were not there, it seems an engine would be worse because assembling the components would take much longer. Is this intuition correct, and would we prefer CR-BM in that case?

Skull wins without needing to do gardens tricks. If gardens were not there and you had to rely on provinces, would the engine still be fast enough most of the time?

Also, a question for anyone reading: I'm looking at the "suggested sets" in the back of the rules of both the base set and some expansions, playing through them with friends, and attempting to find the best build on them. I have some questions about most of them, since I don't know the expansion cards very well. I assume it would be unwelcome to create a new thread for each setup, since it would clog the forum. Would a "suggested setup strategy megathread" be OK? (Perhaps one per expansion?)

27
Help! / Base game kingdom with no trashing
« on: May 22, 2018, 06:49:12 am »
Hi, I'm new to the game and trying to learn to construct engines.

In the following YouTube video, Burning Skull builds an engine on a 2nd Edition base game kingdom that entirely lacks trashing. This is somewhat surprising to me, since often I've heard the advice that engine building is typically bad without trashing (or a way to exchange the starting cards for more useful ones).

The deck operates by chaining laboratories and merchants. This seems like it would be unreliable and slow but ends up working. However, while he manages to pull it off, I don't think his opponent provided very stiff resistance.

I'm wondering the following: Does his engine strategy beat a big money strategy based on council room? If so, is it more or less the optimal strategy on the board? If not, is big money optimal, or is there something better?

Thanks in advance for your help.


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