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51
Dominion Articles / Re: Request: Philosopher's Stone
« on: April 30, 2012, 09:37:05 pm »
One situation I've found for Pstone that is very powerful is on IGG boards
open Potion Silver
buy 2 or 3 Pstones, and as many IGG as you can get, always take extra coppers every time you play IGG, and even if you loose the curse war, when ur both rushing the duchy's pretty much every time you get a hand with Pstone, boom Province.  which should more then make up for a possible extra curse or 2 if your opponent opens silver/silver.

Someone mentioned this on the previous page, but I'm skeptical.  I threw together a quick-and-dirty IGG bot that options Potion / Silver and prefers PStone over IGG until it has at least two PStones.  It loses badly to straight IGG, roughly 2:1.  The simulator doesn't take Coppers unless it needs them, but my gut says taking extra Coppers doesn't help the situation much.  Taking unnecessary Copper is sub-optimal in IGG, so it may even make things worse for PStone.

That said, I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

52
Dominion Isotropic / Re: First player bias
« on: April 30, 2012, 04:37:13 pm »
Anymore gems? :)

-Use classic proposal instead of auto-match with point counter turned off.   (Ben Warden)
-Propose these games against players that are higher level than they should be. (Ben Warden against me haha)

I was just about to put up a separate post on that.  It's annoying but ultimately fine when that happens.  Yesterday, though, I had an auto-match game proposed, declined, proposed again, declined, then a direct invite from the auto-match player with point counter turned off.  Again, the burden was probably still on me to notice that and not just click "yes" to every proposed match.  What got my goat is that the guy denied doing it when I asked him about it.  I assumed the best, then returned to the lobby and noticed that I indeed had point counter enabled so I have no better explanation.

I assume Ben Warden is above board with it.  He probably just likes to pick his opponent, rather than waiting for auto-match.  There's at least one other player, though, who uses it to gain a cheap advantage.  Annoying.

Anyhow, didn't mean to derail.  I'm still fuming just a little.

53
Not a bug.  If you use Throne Room or King's Court on a duration card, it will get set aside with the duration card.  Only the bottom-most one, though, so KC-KC-Haven would only set aside one KC.

54
Game Reports / Re: How I was almost crushed by a n00b with $1 Banks
« on: April 30, 2012, 02:40:46 pm »
Its an online card game (with no overall winner) I think I would respect someone much more for pointing out obvious strategic blunders midway through a game than for having level 30+ skill level.

Obviously my respect isn't actually 'worth' anything, but thought I would share that.
On the other hand, some people lose a lot of respect for you if you arrogantly tell them how to play the game like you're the be-all and end-all of dominion.
Now, there's some middle-ground here, but it's not so clear-cut as you're implying, and it's certainly a line drawn in different places for different people.

Edit: Just so we're clear, I know that's not your intention. But there are people who take it that way.

Says the guy with the Dominion YouTube channel  ;D

But you're right.  As I said before, I got told off for telling a guy that revealing a Trader would not gain 4 Silvers in addition to a Province.  A lot of people react poorly when you point out their mistakes.  Since then, I'm pretty wary of offering unsolicited advice even when it's obviously needed.

55
Dominion Isotropic / Re: First player bias
« on: April 30, 2012, 01:59:11 pm »
Interesting.

I have a 2:1 win/loss ratio in 750 games, but I've only started from P2 28 more times than P1.

Does auto-match try to make people play others in the same pool to even things out?  Or perhaps most people only play 1-2 games after logging in, so the just-logged-in pool is big?

56
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Why do you enjoy Dominion?
« on: April 30, 2012, 01:44:53 pm »
Isotropic.

It takes practically no time to find a game, and just a few minutes to play a game.  So I actually get to explore all the possibilities everyone else is talking about, and I don't have to commit myself for more than 10 minutes at a time.  I own a couple of sets of the physical cards, but there's no way I'd have played 3000 games in 6 months without Isotropic.  I'd have been lucky to play 100, which wouldn't even scratch the surface in terms of strategy.

57
Dominion Isotropic / Bug: auto-match showing players as level 0
« on: April 30, 2012, 01:18:43 pm »
This usually works fine, but I've seen the bug twice now.  I've now played against two people listed by auto-match as being level 0 who are actually around level 40+ (chwhite and theParty).  I mentioned it during both games.  chwhite thought it may have been because he hadn't played in a while, but I had played theParty and seen his level just a few games earlier, so I'm pretty sure lack of play isn't the cause.

58
Game Reports / Re: How I was almost crushed by a n00b with $1 Banks
« on: April 30, 2012, 12:38:54 pm »
Normally I err on the side of helping the other guy out in the case of rules misunderstandings, but there's one big thing here that would make me hesitate:

Code: [Select]
Genau plays a Bank.
... which is worth +$1.

It's written right there in the log.  I remember doing that when I was starting out.  Once.  After the first time, you say "WTF, where's all my money?" and you don't do that again.  In this case, all of the numbers are right in front of you: the value of the Bank, the number of treasures in hand, and the number of coins you have once all is said and done.  Further, Isotropic tries to help you play things in the right order.  If you're not paying attention enough to to notice that you're coming up $13 short (turn 16), it goes beyond a simple rules understanding and into player error territory.  In a just world, that should be a game-deciding blunder.

I do help people when things are confusing.  I played a guy who kept revealing Traders after buying Provinces.  I assumed the first time was a misclick, and pointed out the rules after the second time (and got told off for doing it, after which point he continued to do it, sigh).  In that case, the rules can be confusing and it's hard to notice the mistake in-game.  In the case of Bank, it's hard not to notice the problem, which shifts the burden in my mind.

59
Dominion Articles / Re: Request: Philosopher's Stone
« on: April 30, 2012, 12:11:18 pm »
6. Adventurer/venture. These conflict a good bit as you need to clear out the copper to really make it viable, but for some limited setups it can be viable. Something like remodel/decent 2 coin card/P stone/venture can hit a province every turn even if you are getting hit with curses from followers (or another late game curse giver like something out of the BM deck or IW/masq); any source of +buy can also allow you to tuck away a few tie breaking estates as well.

+1 for the rest of the list, but I'm not sure I understand this last one.  I would think Venture conflicts pretty badly with PStone.   With Venture, you like lean decks, and you really like it when a good percentage of your treasures are Ventures.  The ideal is to play a Venture, causing other Ventures to be played.  PStone likes bloated decks and doesn't like having lots of cards in play, since those cards reduce the deck + discard count.  Also, it seems like the Potion would end up getting in the way of Venture a little.

The up-side is that Venture will play the Potion more often, so you get the chance to acquire more PStones.  I'm not sure whether or not that makes up for the conflict.

60
Goko Dominion Online / Re: Where's the official app?
« on: April 30, 2012, 12:00:04 pm »
I don't understand why you all have alternate accounts on Isotropic.  It doesn't bother me, I'm just curious as to their purpose.  Clean CouncilRoom profile?  Experimenting with crazy strategies and/or 3p-4p?

I play an alternate account exclusively now.  I switched because I was worried about my level too much on my main account and the game stopped being fun because of it.  I was less willing to try interesting things and just have fun with it.  Unfortunately, now I'm worried about my level too much on my alternate account, so that was only a temporary fix.

I also had a new name that I really wanted to use, but I didn't want to release my old name because it's associated with my posts here and my CouncilRoom history.

61
Enough.

62
Dominion Articles / Re: Request: Philosopher's Stone
« on: April 30, 2012, 11:03:08 am »
Yeah, well, I don't think PStone with IGGs are by any means dominating. But anyway, I don't mind losing the IGG split if I have a better way to get points than my opponent. Well, if you get horribly crushed by Cursing, than its impossible to do that, but it's worth falling behind in the IGG rush to pick up cards that will help you eek out badly needed Provinces--like Expand, Salvager... and I suspect, PStone. But maybe not.

The problem is that in an IGG rush, you usually have no reliable +buy, so every card you acquire costs 1 turn.  Buying the Potion costs a turn.  Every PStone costs a turn.  If somehow you're unlucky and end up with $2p, that costs a turn, too.  If you don't want to spend a turn buying a PStone at the moment, you're stuck with a dead card in-hand, which hurts when your average money per hand is low to begin with.  The last thing you want to see is $4p when you're racing for Duchies.

The cards that are good to pick up in an IGG rush tend to be ones that let you get more than one card out of a turn.  Salvager and Expand both let you gain an additional card when they're played and make use of relatively weak IGGs in-hand.  PStone is the opposite.  It costs more than one turn to acquire and still only affords you one card per hand.

63
How about just an official box that's well-constructed to accommodate the weight, space efficient, and has slots for all the cards, mats, and tokens?
I have to agree with Donald that there's little business sense to this.  If you put it in a board game store, it weighs too much to carry out of the store and takes up lots of space, where the store might want to put other items.  Many people buy expansions gradually or already have expansions so they're not potential consumers.

I meant an empty box where I can store the cards I already have.  It seems like there's enough fan interest in this that we get posts on DIY projects every couple of weeks.

64
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card
« on: April 29, 2012, 10:22:07 pm »

65
How about just an official box that's well-constructed to accommodate the weight, space efficient, and has slots for all the cards, mats, and tokens?

66
Dominion Articles / Re: Request: Philosopher's Stone
« on: April 29, 2012, 08:41:48 pm »
Philosopher's Stone is decent with Ill-Gotten Gains. You are gaining so many Copper that having a sufficiently large deck for PS isn't a problem. Sure, you won't get to play your PS very often but it basically just becomes an automatic Province buy whenever you do have it--and buying Provinces can be tough with IGGs, as you usually end up just aiming for Duchies.

The problem is that any time you see $3p, you could have bought an IGG or Duchy instead (if you bought a Silver instead of a Potion).  My gut says this would lose the split pretty badly and that the Potion would start feeling more like an additional Curse by the end of the game.  I'm not sure how much the possibility of buying Provinces makes up for that.

67
Game Reports / Re: Well-supported Vineyards vs well-supported Duke
« on: April 29, 2012, 08:25:58 pm »
Pawn seemed like a decent buy for its versatility.  You can take the money and buys to load up on action cards or you can play it as a cantrip to cycle through to Potions faster.

Lighthouse is better for the economy, but it does nothing for cycling and lacks +buy for gaining more action cards.  What would you done after Lighthouse?  Haggler / Walled Village?

I don't have a great feel for how Vineyards should be played on this board.  Too many options.

68
Game Reports / Re: Let me take care of that for you
« on: April 29, 2012, 08:19:15 pm »
Playing both Masquerade and Curse attacks always feels a little self-defeating to me.  You hand your opponent Curses only to turn around and exchange them for Coppers and Estates.

This is perhaps the funniest illustration of that idea I've seen.

69
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Possession, a poll!
« on: April 29, 2012, 12:05:44 am »
I really hate this card in two circumstances in particular:
1) When playing in real life because the time factor is more noticeable than on isotropic and as anyone except the player doing the possessing, you get a lot of downtime. While in theory everyone should do just as much possessing, it sometimes feels like whoever buys it first plays it much more.

2) When I don't notice it. This is particularly true when Chapel is on the board and I don't notice Possession. What tends to happen is I will make a strong engine and then my opponent will start playing my turns and getting provinces on them.

I don't think everyone does as much possessing in theory.  There's a pretty massive advantage to the first person doing the possessing.  Each Possession play is an extra turn, so that person is a turn ahead in terms of buys.  Further, it's a huge blow if that player possesses the other player's first Possession hand or worse, his first $6p hand.

70
Game Reports / Well-supported Vineyards vs well-supported Duke
« on: April 28, 2012, 05:14:28 pm »
This game came up yesterday:

Chancellor, Duke, Haggler, Hamlet, Horse Traders, Lighthouse, Mining Village, Pawn, Potion, Vineyard, and Walled Village

The game was impressively close, and ended with the lead trading back and forth and neither player being comfortable letting piles get too low.  It could have gone either way in the end.  Vineyards won, but the Duke player had $5 in-hand to buy an 8VP Duke the next turn, which would have given him the lead.  It's rare to see such divergent strategies end up that close.

I can spot a few mistakes on both sides, and I'm still not sure whether one strategy is better.  Thoughts?

71
Simulation / Re: Simulator API
« on: April 26, 2012, 04:35:28 pm »
I've looked in this direction as well. Some thoughts:

Geronimoo's simulator is ridiculously fast.  Currently the code is fairly tightly coupled to the UI and card play rules, but I don't think it'd be too difficult to extract a jar that you could send XML files to and have it play the games with bots specified in those files.

Dominiate is much slower.  Since bots are CoffeeScript programs, I think it'd be much easier to implement EC algorithms using the simulator, but it will spend a longer time crunching numbers.

Neither is all that great when it comes to tricky cards like Menagerie and Possession.  For that reason, and for EC in general, it will be much easier to pick a well-defined problem.  Something along the lines of optimizing Big Money + X, what sequence to buy victory cards vs money, etc.

For two similar bots, the margin of victory for one over the other can be pretty low.  You may need thousands of games to be sure you're looking at signal and not noise in the win/loss percentages.

I've personally looked into implementing a pure Dominion API for this type of thing (also for bot competitions), but I'd want it to be something that both Dominiate and Geronimoo's simulator could use, and Geronimoo's is just too damn fast to replace.

72
Goko Dominion Online / Re: Where's the official app?
« on: April 26, 2012, 12:25:53 pm »
Do you think it's really that hard to make user AIs possible?  rspeer basically did it in his hobby time in a few days.

If you design the system well, a human player is just some thing that takes a (rendered) game state and makes a decision.  A user AI is a thing that takes an (encoded) game state and makes a decision.

I'm aware of that (and have contributed code to that).  I think there are a lot of practical aspects that make it tricky for the official game, though.  First of all, the official game supposedly runs on every platform under the sun, so you have to expose something that allows user-created AIs to run on every platform as well (possibly including web, which is a big headache).  The user-created AI language needs to be a real programming language, but it needs to be isolated from the rest of the system for security reasons.  You can't just let users run arbitrary code on each others' machines.   It also needs to be isolated from the game's internal API so people can't cheat or monkey with leaderboards or anything.  You probably also care a little about enforcing performance so your app doesn't gain a reputation for being slow or a battery drain because of user-created content.  Then you need some interface for allowing users to publish and find the content.

You could accomplish all of that by carefully embedding a scripting language (Lua or whatever), being careful about which APIs you expose, and ensuring said scripting language works consistently on all available platforms.  It's absolutely doable, but it's a question of cost and time balanced against benefits of the feature.  Is it something that's worth delaying the release for?  Would enough people care to use it?

The AIs themselves would be a lot different than the Dominiate AIs as well, since I assume they couldn't be specific to a couple of key cards.  Writing one would therefore be a lot more work, and the best ones would probably still be pretty bad at the game.

73
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card
« on: April 26, 2012, 12:04:59 pm »
Talisman, a card that duplicates cheap cards is in the Dominion set with all of the super expensive cards.

There is a meme there somewhere.


74
Goko Dominion Online / Re: Where's the official app?
« on: April 26, 2012, 11:09:32 am »
...
Mostly agree with this. But I don't think there was ever a post about player-made AIs. There was a post about AIs, but I got the impression that it was going to be a built-in AI.

I was referring to this: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/8421729#8421729.  Given the wording and knowing the practical aspects of implementing such a thing, the feature probably won't make it into the game, but it would be very cool if it did.

75
Goko Dominion Online / Re: Where's the official app?
« on: April 26, 2012, 10:42:00 am »
As my 9 month old says, "Blah blah blah."

My original post wasn't meant to be a complaint but an inquiry, and certainly didn't need to start a flame war.  I'm glad that Donald X. chimed in, even if it was to say that we're getting no more info.  I understand that he's not the right person to ask, but as far as I'm aware, he's the only one who visits this forum who even knows who the developers are, so naturally we do plead with him to be the liaison.

I'm not particularly eager for Isotropic to shut down for a pay option, but I will almost certainly buy the game and I'm eager for details about the game and when I can expect it.  Dominion eats up a lot of my spare time, so I want to know what the future holds.  Further, there was a post mentioning about player-made AIs.  As a nerd, this excites me.

I write software for a living.  I understand that deadlines are pretty fluid with this stuff, but we always have a general sense of what the target date is and how far along we are (even if we're proven to be way off).  I've liked the very few details I've seen, and I wish we had many more details, but barring concrete details it'd be nice to have a general sense of how far along the game is.  Is it several months away?  Is it coming out tomorrow?

I'm personally just a fan wanting some information on the game, or at least an explanation of why there's no information or why previous information has proved unreliable.  I'm not trying to complain.  I am a little frustrated, though, that a simple inquiry is greeted by essentially "Tough luck" followed by a flame war.

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