Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Elanchana]

So this happened.

We both opened the same way and had really similar strategies - I swear by the turn 8-10 range we had almost the exact same deck composition. But then things went downhill. I almost never drew my Villages and Smithies together - it was normally either all villages or all terminals. My opponent, on the other hand, got a kajillion awesome turns and beat me no sweat. I couldn't figure out what was happening, since she was a lower level than me AND I got my own back after capitalizing on her lack of experience with Chapel, so today when GokoSalvager finally came back up I looked at the log and I found... she hadn't bought a single Bridge that game. Is that what killed me? Aren't Bridges supposed to be amazing in Village engine games? Did my deck just have it in for me or what?

[Hydrad]

So I'm still pretty bad at this game and at work so I can't go super into deatail and could be horribly wrong! But heres my judge on this game.

I don't know if bridges are that good here. Usually you want to use them to get a mega turn with 8 played and buy out all the provinces. But in a colony game unless you get all 10 out you can't buy them all out. Not having 9-8 should still be enough to win the game but it makes it a bit harder.

Second difficulty is you don't have any way to trash you first 10 cards. So it makes it much harder to draw into your mega turn.

also I think fishing village is better then village almost all the time? I could be wrong there though. but its really good.

third if your going for bridges mega turn I would stop buying things like silver and plats and even green cards because your whole goal is to just have one turn where you win. Buying those other cards just makes it harder to hit.

So I might try to do something like fishing villages/villages/smithy/bridges and almost no other cards and just wait until i get a turn with 8/9 bridges and then buy everything.

[eliegel34]

The first thing that jumps out at me in this kingdom is that there is no trashing in this kingdom. Smithy gives you pretty good draw, but you have to be careful about the number of cards you have to draw. I would not by any money in this game except Platinums, since money will really clog up your deck. Mine can be nice in a Colony game, but its much better play the same one a lot than to buy more than one. Bridge is key to building the engine, but only to reduce the cost of Fishing Village/Village/Smithy/Cellar.

So I would open Mine/Cellar on 5/2 or FV/Bridge on 4/3. From there you want to build up a lot of Smithys and Villages. You can get pretty good money from Mine, and worry about buying Platinum once you are drawing your deck. You want between 2-4 Fishing Villages and 2-3 Cellars add reliability to you deck. Once you can draw your whole deck, build a little money, and start buying Green after you can at least double Colony.

Here is an example game I played vs. one of the bots. There play isn't real reflective of what a good player would do, but its something. http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?/20141109/log.50775a4a0cf28ed55d9d6fd3.1415590587683.txt

[Awaclus]

third if your going for bridges mega turn I would stop buying things like silver and plats and even green cards because your whole goal is to just have one turn where you win.

This is actually true only if KC is present and sometimes with TR or Procession too. You're expecting to have 5 of the Bridges in a 2-player game where going for the Bridges is the optimal strategy, and that's not enough to win the game in a single turn so you also need other sources of $ and multiple turns.

Also, the following isn't relevant in this game, but sometimes it is: even in a Colony game, the game ends when the Province pile is empty so you don't have to buy a single Colony as long as you can grab all of the Provinces fast enough. Therefore, 7 Bridges is still enough to win the game in a single turn, as long as you can get at least 7 Bridges.

[Hydrad]

third if your going for bridges mega turn I would stop buying things like silver and plats and even green cards because your whole goal is to just have one turn where you win.

This is actually true only if KC is present and sometimes with TR or Procession too. You're expecting to have 5 of the Bridges in a 2-player game where going for the Bridges is the optimal strategy, and that's not enough to win the game in a single turn so you also need other sources of $ and multiple turns.

Also, the following isn't relevant in this game, but sometimes it is: even in a Colony game, the game ends when the Province pile is empty so you don't have to buy a single Colony as long as you can grab all of the Provinces fast enough. Therefore, 7 Bridges is still enough to win the game in a single turn, as long as you can get at least 7 Bridges.

wait in colony games the game ends when colony or provinces are out? I didn't know that.

[assemble_me]

I think both you and your opponent got way distracted with the available actions on this board.

- The most important action is Bridge, but you also have to get that draw up, and you usually want to do that first.
- All actions you really ever want cost 4$ or less here, so Ironworks is a worthwhile opening. Maybe you could skip it, because you can have extra gains from Bridges, but Ironworks is pretty good because it's non-terminal if you take actions, and you want to take actions until the very end (and then you probably have plenty of actions and plenty of Bridges and can Ironworks for Colonies!). So I guess you want at least 1 Ironworks, maybe more, but then the other cards (Smithy/Bridges) are probably more important
- You should never take a Vanilla Village here unless Fishing Villages are out. Although FV doesn't draw it is far superior and especially in an untrimmed deck it helps a lot to have that +Actions available if you have only terminals in your next turn's hand.
- Trashing is really lacking, but as said FV helps somewhat, and there's also Cellar which is nice, although I don't think you need that many.
- Mine is generally better in a Colony game, but you overvalued it a lot. I think you should skip it completely here, the other components are too important.
- Always remember, that you don't have to take a 5$ on a 5/2. Like here, opening Mine seems pretty bad. Maybe opening Festival could be okay, but I guess I'd cry into my pillow opening Ironworks anyways.

How I'd play this, probably still far away from perfection, though (It's pretty hard to give complete instructions and a lot depends on how the game is going):
Open Ironworks/FV on 4/3, Ironworks/Cellar on a 5/2. If you didn't open FV, get a FV asap. Get a Smithy and a single Bridge. Don't buy Silver, rather get more FVs. Don't buy Gold. Get more FV and Smithies. If your opponent doesn't seem to follow on Bridges like yours did, get another Ironworks. Get a few Cellars. As soon as you can get through your deck well, get a bunch of Bridges and sufficient Villages to play them. Maybe you have to fight them a bit earlier to not lose the Bridge split too heavily. Maybe a late Platinum can help if you split Bridges and neither can get through their decks well enough or if you have to buy Colonies, but this should be your last resort. Maybe you can't wait to pile out Provinces because 3-piling is imminent with lots of +Buys and Ironworks gains around, but you should delay going for green as long as you can.

/E: Seems like eliegel disagrees with my approach due to the lack of trashing. I guess I'd try it this way anyways. Maybe you can't get that mega big turn but I feel like you could do better than two Bridges.

[SCSN]

I agree with assemble_me that you should skip Mine, it upgrades junk into slightly less junky junk at the expense of an additional card that takes up a terminal slot in a deck that has a hard time attaining reliability. If you want to play the engine, you want cards that speed you up, not slow you down. Sometimes Mine can be good in an engine (e.g. weak trashing + GM), but on this board it's really in conflict with it: if you think the engine is fast enough to outrun a Mine-BM strategy (and it surely is), starting to build a few turns earlier should be a big enough advantage to outrun the long-term benefits of a Mine opening.

Maybe opening Festival could be okay, but I guess I'd cry into my pillow opening Ironworks anyways.

I'd open Ironworks for sure, feeling pretty good about it and reserving those tears for the time this board shows up again, but now with Ambassador instead of Cellar

[DG]

The way I'd look at this is to picture the finished engine deck. Is it going to have something like 6 smithys and 6 bridges? Are there enough villages? Will it draw the deck? Well there is probably enough in this kingdom to make it work as there are so many villages available and the cellars will help to draw through the deck. The engine doesn't have to be reliable, just good enough to bring in that big final turn. Anything extra you put into that deck will just clog it up and be discarded by cellars to draw the good stuff.

The details are a little tricky and I think there is a case for starting with a few fishing villages and then buying normal villages. When drawing such a massive deck the extra card is important. There might be a place for a festival if it helps you get enough buys. When ironworks and bridges are together there can be a tricky decision between using an ironworks to gain the bridges or being more direct and buying the bridges with bridges. Here though the lack of trashing might make the ironworks better, particularly for a 5/2 start.

[Polk5440]

Yes on Ironworks for sure. It gains you great stuff at all stages of the game. Even in the end if you get 4 bridges in play, you get to Ironworks a province.

[dondon151]

I'm not certain that you always want FV over Village here. Village's +1 card is actually significant in a deck without trashing. You definitely want, like, 4 FVs in your deck just to make sure that you always start turns with +actions, but I would start taking Villages before the FVs run out.

[assemble_me]

I'm not certain that you always want FV over Village here. Village's +1 card is actually significant in a deck without trashing. You definitely want, like, 4 FVs in your deck just to make sure that you always start turns with +actions, but I would start taking Villages before the FVs run out.

Yeah, I tried to play it a bit and I'm most likely wrong about the "until they're out".

[Elanchana]

Thanks for all the advice and stuff, but I'm getting the feeling that the general consensus is that I had the better deck? So it was just bad draw or...?

[Mic Qsenoch]

Thanks for all the advice and stuff, but I'm getting the feeling that the general consensus is that I had the better deck? So it was just bad draw or...?

You did not have a better deck than your opponent. You both had decks which were pretty incoherent (he manages to get 4 Mines!!), but a 6-2 Colony split tells me your opponent probably had the better deck. Bridge is definitely worth it here, but if you don't build the deck correctly then you'll end up with a deck that is a lot worse than a deck that has several Platinum. For most of the game you have way too many terminals (Monuments are a waste of a terminal) compared to Villages. You have too many Cellars, just because you can afford a Cellar off an extra buy does not mean you should take it. The use of Cellar on this board is to filter bad cards for good after playing Smithies, but you really only want 1-2 to do that.

It's a bad mistake to think "Bridges are good here, I bought Bridges, so I played better." If you really want to get better you have to worry about the details.

[dondon151]

I agree with Mic Q. Your final deck state doesn't say too much about how you got there, and obviously the problem is how you built your deck. Monument and Mine are worthless in a Bridge megaturn deck. They are terminals that at the very minimum could be Bridges instead. Bridge's effect scales quadratically - playing 1 of them is barely better than playing a Woodcutter, but playing 7 of them will let you end the game instantly.

If the goal is to megaturn with 7 Bridges in an untrashed deck, then you have to develop the appropriate infrastructure to draw such a deck. You will have at least 17 stop cards (cards that don't draw more cards) in the form of your starting cards plus 7 Bridges, which means that 5 Smithies is probably not enough to draw them all even with the help of Cellars to sift out Coppers and Estates. But suppose that your deck has 7 Bridges and 5 Smithies as its only terminals - you need 12 actions to play them all, and 11 of them have to come from Village variants. If you have more Smithies, then you need more Villages. Festival is not so good in this type of deck because even though it provides +action, it's also a stop card, and its +$ is not very helpful once you can consistently get 2 Bridges in play.

We (by this I mean other users in this thread) had a brief discussion earlier over whether it was beneficial to go for Fishing Village. In general, FV is considered to be better than Village because it gives +2 actions across 2 turns and greatly helps with consistency. In this type of deck, they are not amazing because they are stop cards, but the consistency they confer is welcome because in a large deck, a dud hand of terminals without Villages is not at all unlikely. So you definitely want a few Fishing Villages early on over Village because their +$ can be useful.

[liopoil]

I don't think this is a bridge megaturn kingdom. Certainly bridge is worth getting here and will always be a better choice than monument or mine, but I don't see a megaturn. Just build an engine that gets up to double province or colony turns, no need to get them all in one swoop.

[dondon151]

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?/20141110/log.516d4fd3e4b082c74d7b96c1.1415672434559.txt

So here's the thing. It's definitely possible to Bridge megaturn if your opponent doesn't mirror. If your opponent mirrors, then the game will probably end on piles. I'm a bit rusty, but I think 61 points in 14 turns is pretty fast.

EDIT: If the opponent also goes for a drawing engine without a Bridge megaturn, the the game will still probably end on piles. In that case, having a deck that can grab a handful of green at a time is likely better, since without most of the Smithies, it's pretty hard to play 7 Bridges.

[liopoil]

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?/20141110/log.516d4fd3e4b082c74d7b96c1.1415672434559.txt

So here's the thing. It's definitely possible to Bridge megaturn if your opponent doesn't mirror. If your opponent mirrors, then the game will probably end on piles. I'm a bit rusty, but I think 61 points in 14 turns is pretty fast.

Yes, I was assuming a mirror