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Messages - gman314

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1
GokoDom / Re: GokoDom II: Round 3 Discussion Thread
« on: August 29, 2013, 06:09:23 pm »
Stef beats gman314 3.5 - 1.5

1. http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130829/log.50b20dc3e4b0c9ce0cf27eb3.1377802383235.txt gman314
We both get a 5-2 opening, which I use for Stables against his Bazaar. We both get a Jack, and do some trashing, with some Market Squares getting a couple of Gold. I go more for a big draw approach with Stables, while he gets small hands and draws back up with Watchtower. At the end, I have two Provinces to his one, and stare at things for a while to look for a 3-pile, which I find with Bazaars, Stables and Stonemasons.

2. http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130829/log.50b20dc3e4b0c9ce0cf27eb3.1377803321935.txt stef
We both trash down and go into an engine with Markets, Highways, and Conspirators. He wins the Highway split and wisely keeps his Necropolis which gives him the stronger engine, and then he piles out the provinces.

3. http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130829/log.50b20dc3e4b0c9ce0cf27eb3.1377804804413.txt draw
I get 5/2 to his 4/3, so I go for big draw/cycling with Catacombs to make up for the delay in my trashing. Then, I get a Steward to trash down a bit and get a minor Bazaar/Catacombs engine going. He opens Remake/Silver, and then heads into Hunting Parties. With no +Buy, we're both just buying Provinces, stalling, and buying Duchies. I really think my second Vagrant should have been an Estate, which would likely have given me an opportunity to more strongly pursue the win rather than end up playing for the draw.

4. http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130829/log.50b20dc3e4b0c9ce0cf27eb3.1377805705758.txt stef
We both use Counterfeit to trash down some Coppers, and then go into Cultists, with Cities for +Actions and Altar to trash some Ruins. He gets a Procession, which really helps him deal with leftover Cultists, and is able to pile out with full-power cities.

5. http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130829/log.50b20dc3e4b0c9ce0cf27eb3.1377806924777.txt stef

I open Marauder/Silver, and though it's probably not that strong, he told me that my opening scared him away from Courtyard/Silver into Courtyard/Marauder. We both go for a Bazaar/Wharf engine, but I make a mistake in going for Haggler and then Trading Post. We discussed afterwards that the other order is probably better, as I play TP only once, and Haggler is really only great for Province-Engine part on this board. But what really makes me kick myself is that after my last turn, he pointed out that I could have bought Estate/Wharf/Ruins to 3-pile and win. Instead, he ran out the provinces for the win.

Good games Stef! They were all quite tight, and most came down to opportunistic 3-piling.

3
General Discussion / Re: Games with hidden loyalty
« on: August 23, 2013, 11:20:51 am »
I haven't tried it, but someone recently told me that the trick to making Saboteur work well without the expansion is to play with a group of cutthroat players, and then play to something like 10 or 15 gold. Then, everyone wants to play somewhat sub-optimally when they're a good dwarf, so that when they're a Saboteur people don't notice when they play somewhat less sub-optimally.

4
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card
« on: August 23, 2013, 11:10:54 am »
Eight dead cards clumping together into a single hand is not usually bad luck.

Then we better include the part of the graphic that shows that he's drawn his whole deck at this point (and has no Island mat or anything either)

OK.  That's even better!  It suggests that he just had a string of high quality hands before his dead hand, rather than after.

I took it to mean that he drew his whole deck including discard pile... which means that he had 9 cards in his deck, which were 4 Provinces, 4 Curses, and a Crossroads. Which is probably More bad-at-Dominion Brian than Bad Luck Brian, but Perhaps he's been on the receiving end of a really massive Knights attack?

He was using something like Apprentice or Salvager to get what he had, but then was hit by a massive Knights attack.

5
Dominion General Discussion / Re: WW's Power Rankings
« on: August 21, 2013, 04:32:38 pm »
Oh man it's the "City Level" discussion all over again!

I'm pretty sure that one was actually more heated. It generated its own 6 pages of discussion and a poll which ended 69 - 63 in favour of 1/2/3

6
Dominion General Discussion / Re: WW's Power Rankings
« on: August 21, 2013, 03:41:48 pm »
I would call Death Cart a TfB - trashing a card gives you the benefit of keeping your Death Cart.

I would also consider Altar a TfB, as Bishop is also a TfB with the edge case of getting points without trashing anything.

7
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Custom Base + Intrigue Travel Set
« on: August 21, 2013, 01:31:58 pm »
One thing you could do is choose several cards from Base that you don't want to take, and then find cards from Intrigue that fulfill similar roles and use those cards as replacements.

8
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Custom Base + Intrigue Travel Set
« on: August 21, 2013, 01:31:00 pm »
I would keep all the cards used for the "first game" kingdom, it's a good kingdom for beginners. I really like Stealth Tomato's suggestion of keeping a couple of recommended kingdoms and then adding another. I think that Awaclus' suggestion of cards to remove is really just about the opposite of what you want to do. There are cards in his list which either got weaker with more sets, or get stronger with more players, and a lot of players here only play with 2.


9
General Discussion / Re: Dominion Cards that put songs in your mind
« on: August 20, 2013, 11:17:22 am »
My friends and I say that almost every time that Mine's in the game.

10
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Goko-log-watching-extreme?
« on: August 18, 2013, 07:10:58 pm »
In my oppinion isotropic had an intelligent system. You can see the last 1,5 turns. The rest you have to remember just like in real life.

I thought that you could scroll up through the previous turns on isotropic.

11
Rules Questions / Re: Goko : Highway and Hermit
« on: August 18, 2013, 06:53:07 pm »
Yes, it is a bug, assuming that you tried to choose something like Smithy which now says $3 beside it. It wouldn't be a bug if you tried to choose something like Highway which now has a $4 beside it.

12
Rules Questions / Re: Counterfeit + spoils
« on: August 18, 2013, 06:50:52 pm »
Spoils doesn't get returned to the pile unless you play it. When you Expand it, you don't play it so you trash it.

Counterfeit says "When you play this, you may play a treasure from your hand twice. If you do, trash that treasure." So, you play Spoils which says "When you play this, return it to the pile." so the Spoils gets returned to the pile. Then you play it again, and then Counterfeit tries to trash it, but can't because the Spoils isn't in the play area where Counterfeit expects it to be.

13
General Discussion / Re: Juggling
« on: August 16, 2013, 03:48:20 pm »
Actually, come to think of it, I'll juggle one ball with one hand sometimes.

Sometimes I'll reverse-juggle.  Instead of just me juggling a bunch of objects, a group of us get together in a group and juggle a single ball.  Sometimes we split into teams for some competitive juggling.
I think that's called hackeysack

What if we use a football?

Well, if it's a Canadian/American football, it's probably rather unpredictable.

14
Goko Dominion Online / Re: Does this mean anything (good) for us?
« on: August 16, 2013, 11:36:15 am »
Yeah, I was surprised too!

15
Game Reports / Re: Strange Kingdom. Two games
« on: August 15, 2013, 04:46:03 pm »
I think I would probably go for some sort of Masq-BM strategy with maybe some Shanty towns, but also a couple of Urchins to make Masq hurt. Buy Mystics over Silver on $5, but don't really pursue them. Maybe buy some knights opportunistically if some good ones come up or reactively if your opponent goes for them.

16
Simulation / Idea for an AI - state evaluation
« on: August 15, 2013, 12:10:23 pm »
A big problem for any attempted Dominion AI is that there are a lot of possible options on each turn, and it's hard to tell what's the best one. This is particularly true of Buy options; generally it's fairly easy to play a given hand in the best way. Since playing is relatively easy, the rest of this discussion will assume that the AI has good play rules and will focus on buy phase decisions.

My idea for an AI is one which imagines putting one card into its deck and determines what its likelihood of winning is. It does so for each possible card it could buy (you can probably cut some cards - For instance why consider Copper when you can get Silver?) and then buys the card that gives it the highest likelihood of winning. Now, how does it evaluate a state and all the hypothetical states? To evaluate any game state, it uses some sort of (basic) strategy to play out the rest of the game and determines its own probability of winning. For instance, the play-out strategy could just be to follow BMU buy rules for the rest of the game from whatever deck it now has. It also assumes that the opponent uses the same play-out strategy from its current deck.

This approach will obviously learn a strategy on any board, as its approach is independent of the cards available. BMU is an obvious play-out strategy, because it's a baseline available on any board, although other strategies are possible, including more complex options. In the case of difficult play decisions, this approach can be used as well, by imagining playing out the hand several ways with a random deck and determining the one which is the best according to some evaluation (possibly most $, but also possibly the play which yields the best possible deck state by some evaluation - this is important for TfB as you may want to Remodel a Gold or something like that). In the case of a turn with multiple buys, it can just use the buy determination model several times, with the available $ decreasing with each iteration. Here it is important to allow the bot to buy nothing, as it could otherwise end up getting a bunch of Copper by deciding that buying Copper was better than buying Curse.

Major downfalls of this approach are that it will likely skip some good strategies. For instance, since Ironworks isn't good for BMU, it would likely ignore something like Ironworks-Gardens if BMU were its play-out strategy. Also, I would be very interested in seeing what kinds of decks it builds. It may skip Villages entirely because they don't help BMU, but it may also take an approach of getting some terminals like Smithy and Militia and then discovering that maybe it should pick up a Village and then get into some sort of engine. It might also completely underrate +Buys for similar reasons.

A nice upside of this approach is that it will likely automatically play PPR, as this is  just part of playing out the state to consider the effect of buying a Province when there are two left.

17
Dominion General Discussion / Re: WW's Power Rankings
« on: August 14, 2013, 03:03:02 pm »
In Geronimoo's simulator, unoptimized YW beats Jack.

Not if a card like Oasis, Fishing Village, Forager, Hamlet or Warehouse is the bane, they are all pretty well with jack and some nice against curses

Yeah, but the simulation which is being discussed is based on just Jack. The Jack player ignores the bane, I believe.

18
Dominion General Discussion / Re: WW's Power Rankings
« on: August 14, 2013, 02:23:31 pm »
I played a game on iso once, where Trading post gave me a really dense treasure-based deck, so I was totally cool discarding Silver with Stables, knowing that I had a good chance of getting even better cards.

19
Dominion General Discussion / Re: A Kingdom for Beginners
« on: August 14, 2013, 01:44:55 am »
And you left Cellar in the new set, which the OP does not have.

Yeah, I totally meant to put Warehouse there. Messed up on that one.

20
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card
« on: August 14, 2013, 01:43:55 am »


Ever since I saw that movie, I've wanted someone to make that image.

21
Dominion General Discussion / Re: A Kingdom for Beginners
« on: August 13, 2013, 04:54:34 pm »
Yeah, the original question has been asked and answered. Whatever. Here's my approach to the problem:

Let's assume that the "first game" kingdom is good for beginners and that in that set, each card fits some sort of role. Now, from those assumptions, we can claim that a mix of roles of that sort is good for beginners. Then, we can identify the roles filled and find replacements for each:

Roles:
Moat - Stops attacks
Cellar - Sifting
Village - Play multiple terminals
Workshop - Gainer
Woodcutter - + Buy
Smithy - Terminal draw
Remodel - Trashing for more expensive cards
Militia - Attack
Mine - Trashing treasures (you could argue that it's a remodel-type card, but I don't want 2 of those)
Market - Cantrip

Now, a possible replacement for each, going for fairly simple cards is:
Attack Stopper - Lighthouse
Sifter - Warehouse
Village - Worker's village
Gainer - Armory
+Buy - Trade Route
Terminal draw - Catacombs
Remodel-style trashing - Expand
Attack - Cutpurse
Treasure Trashing - Loan
Cantrip - Peddler

Despite many of the cards being simple, the board actually looks a little more complex, with some good potential for a WV - Catacombs engine, with trashing from Loan and some Peddler support. With an aggressive player, this board could be quite punishing for new players, but in a game of all newbies, or with any experienced players just playing Catacombs - BM, I don't think it would get much more punishing than the first game.

22
GokoDom / Re: GokoDom II: Round 1 Discussion Thread
« on: August 12, 2013, 06:56:10 pm »
On game 5, there is a very good chance that had I not had a 5/2, I would have also gone for Remake. That's one of the weirder differences between 5/2 and 4/3 splits.

23
GokoDom / Re: GokoDom II: Round 1 Discussion Thread
« on: August 12, 2013, 05:56:20 pm »
My overall takeaways from my match with Joseph: Butcher is awesome! Steward is really good! Cursing is powerful. Do it unless you have a good reason not to. Remake isn't great on a Poor House board.

24
GokoDom / Re: GokoDom II: Round 1 Discussion Thread
« on: August 12, 2013, 05:49:27 pm »
Joseph2302 2-4 gman314

Game 1: http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130812/log.5062f3dc51c3843e7939eb9f.1376333297553.txt
Game 2: http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130812/log.5062f3dc51c3843e7939eb9f.1376333979722.txt
Game 3: Forgot to Get Log, but gman314 won
Game 4: http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130812/log.5062f3dc51c3843e7939eb9f.1376335112544.txt
Game 5: http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130812/log.5062f3dc51c3843e7939eb9f.1376335750535.txt
Game 6: http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130812/log.5062f3dc51c3843e7939eb9f.1376336340009.txt

Game 1: We both go for a Bishop-BM type of strategy, he gets the Bishop as an opener, but I get one later. We each also pick up a Scavenger (me as an opener). He focuses more on Bishop, while I go for more BM, and he edges me out by 3 points for the win.

Game 2: This board has Torturer and some good Villages (WM and WV), but with Witch, Torturer seems like a no-buy. Or does it? After picking up a Witch, I start getting some Torturers for the bigger draw, and to force him to discard during the build-up phase. He goes for more Witches, which he later Salvages for big turns. I also trash my Witches, and end up with the win.

Game 3: I won. I forget what happened though.
Edit: Now I remember! This game had Steward, Young Witch, Haven, Wharf and Workshop as the bane (which neither of us bought). We engaged in a YW war, while I trash down with Steward and he with Lookout. He goes for more Wharves than I do, since my deck has an extra terminal and is slightly thinner, and I think he's got it when, on a Wharf turn, I'm able to take the last Province and win.

Game 4: We both go for a sort of Butcher-BM approach here, but I open with a Hermit, which I don't think helped. Also, I made some other mistakes, and he played well, tying up the series 2 - 2.

Game 5: This was a really fun one! He opens Remake/Silver, but with Poor House on the board, Remake's not so hot. I open Butcher/Poorhouse and move into an Alchemist-based deck with some Mining Villages that plays a Storeroom to discard the Coppers and then plays several $3 - $4 (dependinf on if I have my Potion) Poorhouses, and gets big turns with 2 Buys and some Butchers. I fall behind, but on the last 2 turns am able to get 5 Provinces for the win.

Game 6: I need a tie or better in this one to win the series, and I'm confident going in, but towards the end of this one, I really thought I had messed it up. The board had Familiar, Soothsayer and Marauder, and I rationalize that I can Maraud my way to a Soothsayer, and build a treasure-based deck (with lots of Fool's Golds) that can outlast Familiars (Especially with Steward's trashing). With Curses and Ruins flying, Cities become powerful, and when he wins the curse split 8 - 2, I'm pretty sure I'm hooped. I really should have got a second Steward earlier, maybe it would have helped me actually trash a curse! But with all my Fool's Golds and a few real Gold my deck is able to outlast and then when my Cities clump on a turn I'm able to get a Province and take the last FG, finishing off the 3-pile that he had set up for the win.

Good series Joseph and good playing! Hope to see you around Goko from time to time and good luck in the rest of the tournament!

25
Help! / Re: Difficult Power Cards Kingdom
« on: August 10, 2013, 07:02:30 pm »
Well, obviously you can't do everything, especially because there are no Villages. I'm with you in the Apothecary/Hermit camp; it seems quite strong. You can use Hermit to pick up a few Lighthouses if your opponent gets Ambassador or Mountebank, but not too many. You probably can add a Tournament to this deck fairly easily to get some Prizes (Trusty Steed would be very useful, as you plan to be drawing lots of stuff with no village.) This strategy doesn't want an Ambassador, but can pick up a Mountebank if your opponent doesn't get Ambassador.

Ambassador/Tournament is one of the more straightforward strategies here. This would probably be quite strong, but that's not really the kind of strategy I typically play, so I can't really theorize more on it.

Mountebank I don't think is all that great here, because of Ambassador and Lighthouse. Procession also seems a little weak here. My first thought is to use it on Lighthouse and Tournament cards to play multiple terminals, but that's really not sustainable, and you want those cards. Apprentice isn't really great here because you can't easily get lots of expensive fodder. But even so, it can be quite useful. Duke would basically be something like a Mountebank/Duke strategy, with maybe a bit of Hermit or Workshop gaining Silver. I don't really like it myself.

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