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A place for the wisdom of top-tier players
AdamH:
You know who they are -- the big names, the celebrities of the Dominion world.
I've been really focusing on my play this year and I've noticed significant improvement. I've climbed up to around Isotropish Level 40 and hover around Rank 50, and for the first time in my life, I finally feel like I deserve the title of "one of the top players in the world." But I'm not one of those people.
How do I know? Because every time I play one of them I know I'm probably going to lose before the game even starts. If I lose a game with one of them I can usually tell after shuffling three times (and they've shuffled like 7 times), but if I win a game, it's a battle that came down the very last turn of the game, and up until the final moment where I've ended it on a win (by one point) it could have gone either way. I feel like I've never actually outplayed any of them -- the best I've done is "something similar that worked out for me in the end, probably due to luck."
If I'm ranked #50 in the world, I still feel like I have miles of improvement to make before I can really compete with them. So how do you make that improvement? Well of course you play more Dominion, but also maybe this thread.
So maybe this can be a place where they post the secrets to how they are so amazing? I have one topic to get the discussion started:
High-variance vs. low-variance strategies
Do you prefer to play more aggressively, where you over-terminal yourself and it's amazing when everything lines up just right, but terrible if it doesn't? Or do you prefer to play a more consistent strategy that will do fairly well most of the time? Yes, this is a very complicated question that depends on a lot of things: what factors into this decision for you? Play Style? Percent chance of winning the game overall? Other stuff?
Terrible example: BM+Smithy vs. BM+Envoy. BM+Envoy can be really really good when you get good draws. Like you can take down 4 Provinces in 11 turns or something ridiculous. Other times you can't even get there by T17 if your Envoys miss all your shuffles and other terrible things happen. BM+Smithy is much more consistent. It can't do T11, really, but you'll never be sitting there on T17 without 4 Provinces in your deck, like ever. Which do you play? What if the simulators couldn't tell you the percentages, then what would you play?
Davio:
Isotropish ranks me at #33 and Goko ranks me at #16, but I don't consider myself one of the top players in the world, well, I'm not ever going to give myself that title anyway, that's for peers to decide, but I feel there's still so much to learn, even as I'm getting better.
The main thing which has helped me the last couple of weeks, which may seem silly, is to not panic and have faith in my strategy. If my opponent races to two Provinces before I get one, good for him, but if I feel my strategy is still able to beat him, I'm not going to switch it up. Maybe earlier in my "career" I might have gone for Duchies or something to just try and close the gap, but that is such a sad and bad move. Now I just wait for him to inevitably stall and hope to make a comeback just in time. Without crucial accelerators like the Remodelers/Apprentices etc. you have a bit more room to manoeuvre.
I think I play neither high-variance nor low variance, I just try and judge every situation as it comes up. If I feel I'm lagging behind, yeah, I may go for a hail-mary pass, but not from the get-go. I just try and play whatever strategy seems right to me.
It's no rocket science either, there are no secrets, it's just a skill you hone with every game you play. I don't think any of the players above me do some super secret stuff I've never heard about, they probably do the same stuff, just executing it better.
shark_bait:
This post is asking quite a bit. Just look at the article section, the wiki and the game report section to see the breadth of knowledge that is present for this game. Distilling your play is really a difficult thing to do. But here is my attempt. I hereby define a new term, yes, a new term for dominion.
This term is called Domintuition.
It encompasses one's innate knowledge of the game. Sample questions that are covered by Domintuition are as follows:
In a BM game, with $6 in hand do I want a Gold or a Duchy? Relevant factors include players scores, VP remaining in supply and position of next reshuffle.
In an engine game, do I need more draw or more villages? You've got to be able to recognize what your deck needs to function smoothly.
At the start of the game, how fast is a given engine? Knowledge of speed is incredibly important in gauging play.
During the mid-game, by what mechanism will the game end? Is this a 3-pile where you just need a single Estate? Are you going for half the VP? Is there alt-VP that you can afford to build more? Is TfB available such that the Province pile can be depleted exceptionally rapidly?
Domintuition is not a simple concept. In its essence, it can not be taught. There is not a formula that is right for each situation. Domintuition requires an intimate knowledge of what questions to ask and how to answer them.
SCSN:
If you keep experimenting, keep practicing and keep learning, one year from now you can be better than any player is today.
Titandrake:
I'm not a top player by any means (around Isotropish level 38), but I'm going to claim that endgame control and tactics are topics that this board doesn't talk about enough.
One of the bigger takeaways from streams that I've taken is the amount of decision making that goes into deciding what cards to buy when the game is going to end in a few turns. In a big money game, it's more straightforward, but in an engine game it's ridiculously hard to make the right call. You have to consider whether your buys can make ending the game easier for your opponent, which means you have to decide between VP and going for one last turn of building. You have to understand your deck, whether it's limited by buys or money for obtaining VP, the limits of your opponent's deck to figure out if they can put in a situation where if you buy any VP, they can end the game, and you have to plan things out so much further in advance.
As for tactics, that's more about deciding what order to play actions and how to play them. Doing this correctly is underrated, since playing your deck correctly usually involves reshuffle management, tracking your deck to know what cards are left in it, using the current pace of the game to inform your actions, etc.
The problem, is that both of these are very hard to describe, and you have to learn it through play. There are too many different scenarios for both to write a decent article on it, besides that you should think through your options very carefully each turn.
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