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Messages - Asklepios

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51
Game Reports / Re: Taking the Road Less Traveled
« on: October 16, 2012, 06:56:58 am »
Please take the below post as constructive critique rather than an attack. I've added a +1 to your post as these were amongst the most enjoyable game reports I've read in a while

Game 1: YN 29 - 45 Mergus. Cards in supply: Cache, Caravan, Crossroads, Golem, Herbalist, Mine, Moat, Potion, Stash, Tribute, and University.

Funky set there.

Personally I would have gone for multiple Caravans and one Mine.

Something like this:
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201210/16/game-20121016-034618-6c5beb5d.html

Might be lacking complexity, but for me its where my instincts go: find a way to frequently draw that terminal action, and race towards $8 and provinces as quick as possible. University and Golem usually look like distractions to me unless there are strong $5 cards present, and Tribute is just too random to be consistently useful in most games.

Love of simplicity is probably why I'm a mid-tier player. I can play a consistent strong game that will beat weaker players, but I don't build those genius complex decks that the top players have mastered.

Game 2: YN 42 - 30 noon. Cards in supply: Coppersmith, Fishing Village, Haven, Jester, Mining Village, Philosopher's Stone, Potion, Tactician, Vault, Venture, and Wishing Well.

Interesting! I would have gone a similar route to your opponent, minus the Jester, as it was rarely going to be worthwhile, given that you WANTED copper, and had telegraphed your intentions by opening Coppersmith. My opening of choice would be silver/silver, as awesome though fishing village is, its less likely to hit $5 early than silver, and the key early acquisition is Tactician, regardless of approach.

Something like this:

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201210/16/game-20121016-035427-59c1eb9c.html

3 provinces by turn 11, 5 provinces by Turn 14, which against your play as is would have been 5:3.

Obviously solo games aren't entirely comparable, though Jester is weak enough here to mostly disregard, IMHO. To me, your opponent slowed himself down by buying Fishing Villages first over Silver, and wasted Turn 3 and Turn 10 on a Mining Village when Fishing Villages would have served him better, and on Turn 12 was insane to buy a Jester when he could have got a Duchy, or if the game hadn't got the tempo it had, another Vault.

As to Coppersmith/Tactician, I think thats extremely solid, though its less consistent than Vault/Tactician because you have to draw the Tactician off a five card draw, whereas with Vault/Tactician you have a 12 card draw to find the Tactician.

52
Vineyards and Alchemists.

I agree entirely.

2, for Alchemists, if here is a +buy. If there isn't a +buy, I generally won't be playing Alchemists.

For Vineyards, I'll almost certainly get 2 potions, and I might get more than 2 potions, with a slow deck cycling speed. The key factor in Vineyards games seems to be the Vineyard split, and I think most people start getting Vineyards slightly too late, in my experience. The game decider in a Vineyards game is often the turn when you have 2 buys and 2 potions, and get 2 Vineyards. After that, its just a slow grind to the 3-pile

53
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Copper, Silver, Gold
« on: October 16, 2012, 04:42:37 am »
Nice set!

My instinct here though, would be straight Hunting Parties + 1 gold --> Provinces, with no frills, though Trader/Feodum is damnably tempting, and on a 5/2 opening I'd go Embassy, with a view to getting 1 or 2 Tunnels and a second Embassy instead.

Guess that makes me a gold-centred player then.

Brokoli's set is tougher, but I reckon Trader / Feodum keeping it simple for me.

54
Dominion Articles / Re: Dark Ages: Scavenger
« on: October 15, 2012, 01:59:13 pm »
Combo: Scavenger/King's Court

That's one of those exceptionally clever combos I would NEVER have thought of! Very cool!

Any idea how competitive it is to build towards this combo? I worry that - like so many cool ideas - it may not be faster than straight BM.

I'm also thinking that Kc/Scav/Platinum would be good too in Colony games, and possibly it being a colony game would mean more time to set it up, even if the components are even more expensive.

55
Dominion Articles / Re: Farmland (draft)
« on: October 15, 2012, 01:54:23 pm »
Lovely to be quoted, as if I have any sort of game wisdom! My rank seems to be plummeting recently, so I'd take anything I say with a dose of scepticism.

b) Just use it for the 2 VP.

Weak. If this is what you plan to do with the Farmland, it better be last ditch.

I'd actually say that this "weak" reason is my number one reason for acquiring Farmlands.

That is, in games where 2VP makes a difference, I'll acquire it.

For example, if the (2 player) game is 3 provinces apiece and moving towards a 4/4 Province split, and I have Silver/Silver/Silver/Copper, I could either buy the Duchy, or buy the Farmlands and make a Duchy.The latter would be my preferred option, as now my opponent needs a Duchy and 2 extra VP from somewhere to get the 4/4 split back to a draw. Sure, if he manages to get the Provinces to 5/3, then I've wasted my time, but generally losing that silver doesn't slow me down enough for him to get both provinces, and generally that extra 2VP is enough of a pain to force him to start observing PPR, even after he's bought a Duchy in reply.

Or, more classically, if I have three golds and naught else, then a Farmlands plus trashing to Province might be better than a straight Province if I'm not expecting to see a reshuffle, or if I#m expecting my opponent to buy the last province before I can.

For me, the 2 VP is the entire point of the card. Farmlands is a card that worsens my deck, but increases my score. In that way, its pretty similar in play principles to a late game Duchy, the only difference being it costs a dollar more, scores a point less, and if I'm lucky, offsets its deck-weakening a little with its on-buy effect.


56
Dominion Articles / Re: Explorer
« on: October 15, 2012, 01:43:06 pm »
King's Court is a card that works badly with Explorer, generally, I'd say. Several reasons for this:

1) The more you activate Explorer, the less likely King's Court is to draw with it. Also, it makes King's Court less likely to draw with other action cards. Or to put it more simply, King's Court is mostly an engine card, Explorer is mostly a money card.
2) Explorer is great at getting you to $8 on a consistent basis, but weak at getting you the megahands that let you buy multiple provinces in a turn. In any game where you're not planning to buy multiple provinces/colonies in a turn, King's Court needs to be looked at very carefully to see if its actually better than gold / province.

I'd agree that the real benefit of Explorer comes in alt-VP games.

I'd also add that Explorer works well in games that have the pace knocked out of them. Mountebank, Sea Hag, maybe Cutpurse - these cards slow down a game a lot. In these games, getting Explorer means more medium-strength hands in the long slog, and a dilution of the curses and coppers. Its unusual for Explorer to not get you at least a $5 hand as well, so it can help get those critical Duchies in those sort of games.

57
Dominion General Discussion / Re: What would make Scout better?
« on: October 11, 2012, 08:53:30 am »
Personally, I'd say that a better long term fix to Scout and Counting House would be to add cards that work well with them.

So for Scout, an expansion full of new functional victory cards: Maybe some cards like:

Really Great Hall
$4 Action/Victory card
+1 action for each action you have played this turn, including this one.
+1 card for each victory card you have played this turn, including this one.
Worth 1 VP

Land Tax
$4 Treasure/Victory card
Reveal your hand: +$1 for each Victory card in your hand.
Worth 0 VP

For Counting House, some ways of rapidly sifting coppers into your discard, or placing it in the deck optimally:

Forward Planning
$3 action
Reveal a card from your hand, put it anywhere in your deck.

Scheming Chancellor Tactician Bloke
$7 action
Discard your deck.
During cleanup choose up to five cards you played this turn, put them on your deck.

Desperation Funding
$2 action
+1 action
Discard any number of cards, gain that many coppers.

58
Dominion Articles / Re: Chancellor/Apothecary
« on: October 10, 2012, 10:51:26 am »
Decent enough combo, in that its a circumstance when adding Chancellor to the deck makes it better, which is a fair rarity.

59
Dominion Articles / Re: Possible Combo: Scrying Pool - Secret Chamber
« on: October 08, 2012, 07:47:15 am »
I'd say you need trashing too, to get any sort of pace out of this.

To get the combo going you need to have the deck in such a place that you can guarantee Scrying Pool drawing the whole deck when you play it. I'd agree that Worker's Villages are great with this combo as every element of them helps: +buy to make use of the money, +actions to feed Secret Chamber plays and +card to help move towards the full deck draw. I'd also flag Hamlet as a nice addition, as its cheap enough to acquire multiples of quickly, and once the engine is running you can carefully make sure that you're only discarding actions to it, so as to draw back with Scrying Pool again.

The main problem with getting this engine up and running, in my experience, is the potion cost of scrying pool. Generally it takes a while to get to the critical mass of Scrying Pools for the deck to activate, and getting a second potion means having to get one more Scrying Pool for full deck draw later.

Hence trashing is the third part of the needed support here.

60
Game Reports / Re: Won with 10 curses.
« on: September 21, 2012, 06:59:31 pm »
Yeah, honestly I wasn't concentrating for the first half of the game, multitasking. When he bought embargo I woke up and thought "oops didn't see that" and started paying attention!

61
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Pronounciations and plurals
« on: September 21, 2012, 12:46:58 pm »
According to the dictionaries I checked just now, "arete" (in English) is pronounced either like "irate" but with a schwa instead of the I (American Heritage Dictionary and Merriam-Webster), or like "barrette" without the B (OED).

So even after being corrected by a pronunciation pedant all those years ago I'm STILL pronouncing it wrong? :)

Hah!

62
Game Reports / Won with 10 curses.
« on: September 21, 2012, 08:07:04 am »
If there isn't an achievement for winning with all the curses in your deck, there ought to be!

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201209/21/game-20120921-050455-3e0c18ed.html

And no, it wasn't a Goons game.

In retrospect, I suspect that if my opponent had opened Remake/Embargo, or indeed Remake/anything with an earlier Embargo, I would have been in big trouble. As it was, I was extremely please with the way his Embargoes allowed my three pile to occur on the exact turn I bought the last Duke.

63
General Discussion / Re: A joke thread
« on: September 18, 2012, 07:11:16 pm »
Maths jokes then.

An experiment is performed involving two cats, and an inclined roof.
The two cats are very nearly identical; same gender, mass, breed, eye and fur colour.
The scientist places both cats on the apex of the roof and releases them at the same time.
One of the cats fall off the roof first.
So obviously there is some difference between the two cats.

One cat has a greater mew.

===

There are 10 kinds of mathematicians. Those who can think binarily and those who can't..

===

Two men are sitting in the basket of a balloon. For hours, they have been drifting through a thick layer of clouds, and they have lost orientation completely. Suddenly, the clouds part, and the two men see the top of a mountain with a man standing on it.
"Hey! Can you tell us where we are?!"
The man doesn't reply. The minutes pass as the balloon drifts past the mountain. When the balloon is about to be swallowed again by the clouds, the man on the mountain shouts: "You're in a balloon!"
"That must have been a mathematician."
"Why?"
"He thought long and thoroughly about what to say. What he eventually said was irrefutably correct. And it was of no use whatsoever..."



And as I'm a doctor, not a mathematician (dammit, Jim) a joke for doctors:

What's pink and hard?
An ECG on an orthopaedics ward.

64
Dominion Articles / Re: All-around cards
« on: September 18, 2012, 09:24:49 am »
I'm not sure what you mean exactly, but a card in the style of Jack is bureaucrat.  Has 3 small effects (gain silver, your next hand is better, opponent's next hand is worse) that is mainly useful only for big money.

Or for Feodums.

Even more so. Bureaucrat is not really strong in BigMoney. It's better than nothing, but there are way better alternatives. Bureaucrat is strong in "SmallMoney", when your target are $4-$5 cards like said Feodums or other alternative Victory cards, or Duchies.  Or if your deck is a mess anyway, because there's a SeaHag around.

I agree with you, though I'd say that Bureaucrat+money beats pure BM to Provinces. It gets demolished by draw+BM, of course, but sometimes in weak kingdoms Bureaucrat+BM is the best option.

65
Dominion Articles / Re: Request: Rabble
« on: September 18, 2012, 09:20:14 am »
I have definitely felt the power of the rabble engine myself, most of the time being on the wrong end of it. So when it's there, is there any way to prevent being pinned down by it other than going for the rabble engine myself?

Farming Village, Venture, Adventurer, Island, Native Village, don't buy Victory cards (e.g. Goons).

And Golem, and to a lesser degree, Counting House.

Also, victory cards that do something useful are nice to have.

But on a more general basis increasing your draw and decreasing the %green in the deck will help.

Crossroads seems an excellent specific counter, and can be bought pretty cheaply too.

I understand what you're saying about buying estates, and that provinces are the most important card, but I feel like after I had 7 green cards in my deck, once that engine kicked in, I was playing two-card hands the rest of the game, which all but eliminate the possibility of ever buying a province for the rest of the game (only possible way I can think of is to draw 3 greens and a rabble, play rabble, draw three more greens, pass, then draw enough treasure to buy a province next turn).

...and it doesn't seem to matter if his engine starts breaking from too much green, I still feel like once we've gotten to that point, he has as many turns as he needs to catch up, +Buy or not. I felt like if I didn't have 44 points by the time I was pinned, that I had lost.

...are you saying that if I buy silvers after I've been pinned, that one day I'll eventually be able to province again?

I could be wrong on this, but that's how it felt... admittedly, Rabble tends to throw off my reads, so...

Re: this, I'd also agree that Estates were a mistake in your situation. Even copper would have been better.

Maybe the problem came a little earlier though - when you were 3-0 provinces up, and you saw your opponent acquiring lots of Rabbles, it might have been worth spending some of those $6 on gold rather than provinces, purely to avoid the later lock. Maybe, maybe not. Not sure.

66
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: My first attempt at a fan card
« on: September 17, 2012, 04:03:13 am »
…Transmute…

nah, Im kidding

An interesting take on this could be:

Crystal Shop
Cost: 2P

+1 Action
+1 Card
+ 5 Buys
All cards cost 1 less this turn, but no less than 0.
                                           
While this card is in play, you cannot buy crds with a cost of 0.

Kind of counters itself. Keeps the general premise,bit has an effect that warrents a Potion Cost.

Man, that would have been a good submission for the Potion Cost challenge. :P

Thats cool! A kind of unstable bridge! Rope Bridge?

67
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Riddle I came up, but have no solution of
« on: September 17, 2012, 03:59:31 am »
Hold on, I assumed that "assign themselves" means they get to pick their own number. This becomes a lot more achievable if they are assigning themselves a random number.

68
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Riddle I came up, but have no solution of
« on: September 14, 2012, 08:39:00 am »
This sort of reminds me of this problem [ to which I have yet to come up with a solution ]:

http://www.acritch.com/media/math/Self-assigned_student_numbers.pdf

"Consider an isolated group of n students. They wish to assign themselves unique student numbers from 1 to n (no repetitions!) in such a way that each student will know his own student number, but each student should have no information about any other student's number."
[ further details / clarifications in the pdf ]

Ooh, interesting. The clarifications help.

I think I suck at this. I can't come up with a solution that doesn't involve computers or handguns.

69
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Riddle I came up, but have no solution of
« on: September 12, 2012, 06:53:47 am »
I came up with the circle and coin flipping solution too, but that kind of fails with no chair moving stipulated. So here's my new solution:

Progress around the room taking blood samples from each victim. Uh, person, I mean.

Sequence their DNA individually, then use a computer program to translate each persons unique sequence into a unique musical tune playable on a pentatonic scale. Teach each person their tune, and equip them with sufficient singing skills that they can sing it perfectly.

Next randomly create your own tune, based on the same scale but derived from the length between the nose and tail tip of a random sample of household canines.

Next have each person sing their tune into a recording device, and calculate who is closest to your tune, in order. Then randomly allocate different colours to each chair, and paint each chair that colour.

Finally, match the colours to different tunes based on intuitive reasoning methods and inner genius and chi.

If this method results in someone being matched to their original chair, then begin the process again, but alter the parameters of the original computer program that turned DNA into music. Repeat until no-one matches their original chair.

Simple, huh?

70
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Pronounciations and plurals
« on: September 11, 2012, 04:30:52 am »
Just to clarify, how do you pronounce Mountebank? I never saw the word before Dominion, and our play group has been saying "mount'i'bank".

I'm expectign we're wrong. We played the Mage: the Ascension rpg for about five years before a new player pointed out we were saying Arete wrong. (we were saying areet, rather than airt-ay, which was kind of embarassing)

71
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: My first attempt at a fan card
« on: September 11, 2012, 04:14:44 am »
As a further thought, this'd be excellent as part of a fan expansion centred around the idea of three-piling.

Maybe to go with this card:

Bauble
($1 Treasure)
Worth $1
When you gain this card +$1

Factory
($5 Action)
Reveal a non-Victory card from your hand. Gain a copy of that card from the supply to your hand.

72
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: My first attempt at a fan card
« on: September 11, 2012, 04:10:49 am »
I like the card concept. Very intriguing!

Not sure how I'd find use from it though... especially with the PP cost.

I think I'd just cost this at $3.

Also not sure of the name. Why Crystal Shop? As in a shop made of crystal, or one that sells crystals? Either way, I don't get it. Trade Fair would make more sense to me, or Souk.

73
Dominion Articles / Re: Duke
« on: September 11, 2012, 04:03:10 am »
Explorer --> Duke is a favourite of mine. It means sacrificing your first $5 buy for the Explorer, but it more than pays back for itself in time cost. Its not a killer combo by any means, and not as good as Horse Trader --> Duke, but its still pretty consistent

74
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Shelters exacerbate 5/2
« on: September 04, 2012, 04:06:48 am »
....nope, I still wouldn't buy the estate.

Keep in mind the Province question is not the only relevant one here. You can also, say buy a duchy earlier than you would have if it'll trash your hovel.

Hadn't considered that... Yeah, I think that tips it the other way for me.


75
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Shelters exacerbate 5/2
« on: September 03, 2012, 04:34:51 am »
Also, I think the right question is: In a non-Shelters game, when you buy your first Province, would you trash an Estate from your hand if you magically could. Since we're used to Estates games, this phrases the question that way - it's not as much about taking a free Estate as freely trashing an Estate (or not).

I agree with this.

There's often a psychology amongst non-beginner non-expert players that estates are universally bad and should always be trashed when you can.

But as the end of the game approaches, a single VP might be the difference between victory and loss, for example in a 4:4 province split.

In my opinion, you generally SHOULD be trashing that Hovel for an Estate if you have $2 and nothing better to spend it on. Essentially, its 1VP gained for no slowdown of the deck now, versus a one-card deck trimming that comes in the mid to late game. In the mid to late game, the effect of trashing is far less beneficial than in the early game.

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