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Author Topic: Rats?  (Read 23368 times)

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petegeo

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Rats?
« on: January 26, 2015, 01:36:48 pm »
0

Can Rats be any good in a two player game? and if so. Which card is recommend to play it with?
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #1 on: January 26, 2015, 01:40:07 pm »
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There are various threads and articles about it, but the answer is yes, and the most obvious combos are with trash for benefit cards like remodel or salvager.  A copper is worth 0, rats are worth 4.  You get more out of trashing the rats, not to mention a bonus card draw.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #2 on: January 26, 2015, 01:47:07 pm »
0

Can Rats be any good in a two player game? and if so. Which card is recommend to play it with?

Yes it can, however it needs a useful way to get rid of the rats after you buy them (or your deck becomes just rats, which is bad).
The best uses are probably with Trash for Benefit cards, as replacing $0-2 cards (copper/estate) with $4 cards (rats) is usually good. For instance, you can Forge 2 rats into a province, which can be good.
Also, certain decks where more actions and less non-actions is better (like Scrying Pool or Vineyards) can be good with rats.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #3 on: January 26, 2015, 01:48:05 pm »
+2

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #4 on: January 26, 2015, 01:49:18 pm »
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When I think of cards that make me want to buy Rats, these are the first ones that come to my mind:

Upgrade
Watchtower
Scrying Pool (kinda)
Apprentice
Knights

Three of those are non-terminal trash-for-benefit cards (if you count Watchtower's reveal-ability as non-terminal and the on-trash benefit of Rats+actual thinning as benefit). If you need help convincing yourself that Rats is not a bad card, look for these synergies.

Of course, if you don't see any of these cards, that doesn't mean you auto-ignore Rats. Other trash-for-benefit cards have synergy with Rats that can be useful. Even if you don't see those, Rats are better than Curses, so if it's a heavy junking game and the only trasher is Rats, you should probably pick one up in the early or mid-game.

Some cards that I thought might be good with Rats that aren't really all they're cracked up to be include:

Governor
Vineyard
Procession
Rogue/Saboteur

That doesn't mean they're bad, it just means you have to be very careful and don't expect Rats to be a rock star like it would be with that first list of examples.
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pacovf

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #5 on: January 26, 2015, 02:12:59 pm »
+5

not to mention a bonus card draw.

A bit of a misconception. Rats is card draw neutral.

Let me illustrate: assume you start your turn with whichever TfB card, a card you want to trash from your hand, and a cantrip, and two other cards. The two cases would be:

-without rats: you play the cantrip, then the TfB on the card you want to trash. You end with 3 cards in hand.
-with rats: you play rats on the card you want to trash, draw the gained rats with the cantrip (perfect shuffle luck!), then trash it with your TfB. You end with 3 cards in hand.

The +1 card on trash of rats is just to compensate for the fact that rats is ultimately a dead card.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #6 on: January 26, 2015, 02:23:42 pm »
+1

One of the more straightforward rats games I've played was against Stef. The important cards were hunting party, rats, and butcher. Each turn we wanted to draw cards with the hunting parties, play a rats to trash something and gain a rats, and butcher a rats to gain a useful card like hunting party or gold. It didn't need many rats, just one or two in the deck at a time. It was quite clearly advantageous to butcher the rats rather than butcher a copper.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #7 on: January 26, 2015, 02:25:49 pm »
+1

not to mention a bonus card draw.

A bit of a misconception. Rats is card draw neutral.

Let me illustrate: assume you start your turn with whichever TfB card, a card you want to trash from your hand, and a cantrip, and two other cards. The two cases would be:

-without rats: you play the cantrip, then the TfB on the card you want to trash. You end with 3 cards in hand.
-with rats: you play rats on the card you want to trash, draw the gained rats with the cantrip (perfect shuffle luck!), then trash it with your TfB. You end with 3 cards in hand.

The +1 card on trash of rats is just to compensate for the fact that rats is ultimately a dead card.

It's still one card more in comparison to trashing a copper.

pacovf

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #8 on: January 26, 2015, 02:34:42 pm »
+4

not to mention a bonus card draw.

A bit of a misconception. Rats is card draw neutral.

Let me illustrate: assume you start your turn with whichever TfB card, a card you want to trash from your hand, and a cantrip, and two other cards. The two cases would be:

-without rats: you play the cantrip, then the TfB on the card you want to trash. You end with 3 cards in hand.
-with rats: you play rats on the card you want to trash, draw the gained rats with the cantrip (perfect shuffle luck!), then trash it with your TfB. You end with 3 cards in hand.

The +1 card on trash of rats is just to compensate for the fact that rats is ultimately a dead card.

It's still one card more in comparison to trashing a copper.

... but you still lost a card when you trashed that copper to gain that rats you are now trashing.

EDIT: let's word this differently. Rats is a cantrip that transforms a card you want to trash in your hand into a different kind of card you want to trash in your discard. You'll need to draw that card again to trash it, so the extra card on trash is just compensation for the initial handsize decrease (unless you trash it with watchtower, lookout, hermit or doctor).
« Last Edit: January 26, 2015, 03:11:46 pm by pacovf »
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #9 on: January 26, 2015, 03:01:44 pm »
0

Don't let these people fool you.  Rats are the worst!!!!
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #10 on: January 26, 2015, 03:11:54 pm »
+1

Rats are awful. However, there are enough edge cases where it's excellent that the card is pretty decent.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #11 on: January 26, 2015, 03:15:27 pm »
+1

When I think of cards that make me want to buy Rats, these are the first ones that come to my mind:

Upgrade
Watchtower
Scrying Pool (kinda)
Apprentice
Knights

Three of those are non-terminal trash-for-benefit cards (if you count Watchtower's reveal-ability as non-terminal and the on-trash benefit of Rats+actual thinning as benefit). If you need help convincing yourself that Rats is not a bad card, look for these synergies.

Of course, if you don't see any of these cards, that doesn't mean you auto-ignore Rats. Other trash-for-benefit cards have synergy with Rats that can be useful. Even if you don't see those, Rats are better than Curses, so if it's a heavy junking game and the only trasher is Rats, you should probably pick one up in the early or mid-game.

Some cards that I thought might be good with Rats that aren't really all they're cracked up to be include:

Governor
Vineyard
Procession
Rogue/Saboteur

That doesn't mean they're bad, it just means you have to be very careful and don't expect Rats to be a rock star like it would be with that first list of examples.
There are a lot of other cases where rats can be good, but of your examples, scrying pool is way more than a 'kinda' and knights and vineyards should be switched.
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WanderingWinder

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #12 on: January 26, 2015, 03:17:44 pm »
0

not to mention a bonus card draw.

A bit of a misconception. Rats is card draw neutral.

Let me illustrate: assume you start your turn with whichever TfB card, a card you want to trash from your hand, and a cantrip, and two other cards. The two cases would be:

-without rats: you play the cantrip, then the TfB on the card you want to trash. You end with 3 cards in hand.
-with rats: you play rats on the card you want to trash, draw the gained rats with the cantrip (perfect shuffle luck!), then trash it with your TfB. You end with 3 cards in hand.

The +1 card on trash of rats is just to compensate for the fact that rats is ultimately a dead card.

It's still one card more in comparison to trashing a copper.

... but you still lost a card when you trashed that copper to gain that rats you are now trashing.

EDIT: let's word this differently. Rats is a cantrip that transforms a card you want to trash in your hand into a different kind of card you want to trash in your discard. You'll need to draw that card again to trash it, so the extra card on trash is just compensation for the initial handsize decrease (unless you trash it with watchtower, lookout, hermit or doctor).
You didn't lose a card when you trashed the card with the rats. You had 5 cards before rats, 5 cards after. In your second bullet point in the post I quoted, you don't end with 3 cards, you end with 4 (unless you've drawn your whole deck, in which case, who cares?)

Now, with your edit, I see what you're saying. You draw an extra card, but you have one extra draw card in your discard pile. However, I really really don't think that makes it card neutral (drawing-wise); having an extra junk in discard is not equivalent to having one fewer card in hand AT ALL.

Also, if I'm misunderstanding, and you're saying it's neutral in terms of number of junk cards in your deck, then yes, I agree - as does every post in the thread. So maybe I'm a little confused.


Edit: Yeah, so this is wrong, I clearly wasn't thinking very straight. But it is worth noting that these things are split apart, and as we generally know, imbalance is very often good.
« Last Edit: January 26, 2015, 03:36:29 pm by WanderingWinder »
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #13 on: January 26, 2015, 03:29:54 pm »
+1

You didn't lose a card when you trashed the card with the rats. You had 5 cards before rats, 5 cards after.

Wait, what?

• Start with 5 cards in hand.
• Play Rats --> 4 cards.
• +1 Card;+1 Action --> 5 cards.
• Gain Rats --> 5 cards.
• Trash a non-Rats card from your hand --> 4 cards.

You have 5 cards before Rats, 4 cards after.
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WanderingWinder

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #14 on: January 26, 2015, 03:35:22 pm »
0

You didn't lose a card when you trashed the card with the rats. You had 5 cards before rats, 5 cards after.

Wait, what?

• Start with 5 cards in hand.
• Play Rats --> 4 cards.
• +1 Card;+1 Action --> 5 cards.
• Gain Rats --> 5 cards.
• Trash a non-Rats card from your hand --> 4 cards.

You have 5 cards before Rats, 4 cards after.
Righto.

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #15 on: January 26, 2015, 03:42:08 pm »
0

Edit: Yeah, so this is wrong, I clearly wasn't thinking very straight. But it is worth noting that these things are split apart, and as we generally know, imbalance is very often good.

Only not in this case. "Most" trashers have heavy handsize decrease associated with them (2+). So you are losing a card now, from a "normal turn", in exchange for getting an extra card in a future shuffle turn with "low handsize". That's twice the opposite of what you want to do.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #16 on: January 26, 2015, 03:44:08 pm »
+1

Specifically, in this case it's not imbalance. Imbalance is like Tactician where, in the most extreme case, you go from 5/5 turns to 0/10 turns. This is going from 5/3 to 4/4, which is actually balance.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #17 on: January 26, 2015, 03:49:25 pm »
+1

Edit: Yeah, so this is wrong, I clearly wasn't thinking very straight. But it is worth noting that these things are split apart, and as we generally know, imbalance is very often good.

Only not in this case. "Most" trashers have heavy handsize decrease associated with them (2+). So you are losing a card now, from a "normal turn", in exchange for getting an extra card in a future shuffle turn with "low handsize". That's twice the opposite of what you want to do.
That's not necessarily true at all (in terms of judgment; in terms of mechanics, you are right).

The reason has to do with how engines work. You want to be converging on "I'm drawing my deck", and going backwards from that early is fine if it helps you get there late; once you are very close to that, it usually doesn't matter so much if you are going down a turn. Certainly if the future hand really is low-handsize, things aren't going well for you. Hopefully, you'll be putting some draw together by then, though.

Overall, for anyone looking from a bird's-eye-view the biggest point is you Trash For Benefit, where the $4 cost is better than what you'd otherwise have. It usually isn't going to be a super dramatic change from this, due to specifics, with the biggest exception to this being Watchtower (which not only has draw-to-X property, but lets you trash rats you would gain from playing other rats).

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #18 on: January 26, 2015, 09:03:08 pm »
0

Rats can also work out well just to trash curses, use a Rats 3 times on curses and it is now a cheap Duchy (with optional trash a card to draw a card, say if you whiff on your engine late game and can spare a copper to fish for a village). Sure most other curse trashers are generally better, but if you have only money trashing (e.g. Spice Merchant) or no other trashing but will see the Rats often enough to clear out your curses, Rats is a good buy.

For instance say I lose the curse split 4:6 but we are both using Xroads, Village, Hunting Grounds, and Witch to draw deck. The game is getting to the point we need to buy Duchies. You buy the duchy, I buy a rats. Turn 0 I lose 3 points. Turn 1, I trash a curse, now I've just lost 2 VP relative to you and my deck was 1 card more space efficient. Turn 2, I trash 2 curses and that means I'm now even with you (+3VP for duchy vs - [-3]VP for curses -> Rats). Turn 3 I now trash 3 curses and now I'm up 3 VP net on you. All the while I have been having a slightly more robust engine. Rats is unusual as a late game "get rid of curses" option in that you can burn through an exponentially increasing number of curses (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32), not terribly useful often, but it does increase the span of time where you can easily pair them up with curses vs when you just want the Duchy points now.

Moral of the story is any trasher can be good when it is the only thing to ditch curses. However you need to be able to play it enough to buy it instead of estate or duchy and you have to consider the three pile setup (e.g. I may get more VP using Rats on Curses, but just piling estates ends the game faster). Even though Rats leaves you with ultimately dead cards they still don't cost you VP and for a while they aren't wholly dead (you have some non-zero chance of drawing them with a curse to trash).

In like fashion, some on-trash effects can be strong enough to merit using even Rats as the only trasher. Market square is the obvious example. If you have enough overdraw you swap say an Estate for 2 golds & a Rats. Do this three times and you have on net +1 dead card and +6 golds. While not close to overpowered, it is something to consider if draw is cheap and you find yourself with 2 or more Market square for whatever reason (e.g. 1 for a +buy, 2 because your engine currently does better with another Mrksqr than silver at some point mid-game). You might try Squire (e.g. Rats trashing Squires into Rabble is a net +2 cards after the initial Rats), but its utility is limited. On the other hand even Rats can be useful to pinata open Hunting grounds late game when you can gain actions easily (e.g. Haggler), but lack +buy & lack other action trashing (relatively rare, but fun when you can surprise people with a late game sprint of a Province & Duchy a turn).
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #19 on: January 26, 2015, 11:21:20 pm »
0

There are a lot of other cases where rats can be good, but of your examples, scrying pool is way more than a 'kinda' and knights and vineyards should be switched.

I mean, this is what a lot of people would say, but my experience has been that Scrying Pool+Rats isn't nearly as awesome as people make it sound (it's a lot like SP as a counter to Ruins. Yeah it's OK but it's not really THAT great -- actual thinning is much, MUCH better for SP and I would only go for Rats if there was no other actual thinning available whatsoever). Hey, it still made the good list  ;)

With Vineyard, if you're actually enabling Vineyard with Rats then it was probably already an amazing Vineyard board to begin with and Rats isn't the rock star it is like with my first list. That's why I put it there.

The presence of Rats is, a lot of times, enough of a reason to make me (and my opponent) not get Knights, which is one of the biggest victories imaginable since I don't like Knights. So maybe I'm biased on that one  :P

But anyways, my lists were just things I thought of without putting that much thought into it. It's my opinions, colored by my actual experience with the cards, and I realize people may disagree. I'll +1 your post  :)
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #20 on: January 26, 2015, 11:26:05 pm »
+1

Had a recent game where there was no way to trash treasure and victory except rats, and no way to trash actions except Death Cart.  Since Goons was on the board to heavily encourage a thin deck, I think Rats was correct there.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #21 on: January 27, 2015, 12:27:05 am »
0

You're simply putting cheap junk away and replacing it with expensive junk. That's it. If it's a slower game, and there's Bishop or Remodel, I'd consider it. I mean, that's not terrible at all. But most times, this card is going to be Chancellor or Scout on the board. :p
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #22 on: January 27, 2015, 07:12:29 am »
+1

You're simply putting cheap junk away and replacing it with expensive junk. That's it. If it's a slower game, and there's Bishop or Remodel, I'd consider it. I mean, that's not terrible at all. But most times, this card is going to be Chancellor or Scout on the board. :p

Rats isn't a slow card; it's just combo-dependent. Bishop is certainly a slow interaction, but others like Apprentice and Forge are not.

According to the data mining, Top 100 players pick up Rats about 34% of the time. So not on most boards, but on a level a ways above Chancellor or Scout for sure.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #23 on: January 27, 2015, 08:31:23 am »
+2

rats are great with ambassador because they have the same name as the other rats. this is true even though ambassador doesnt let you incur the +1 card benefit.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #24 on: January 27, 2015, 10:14:06 am »
+1

rats are great with ambassador because they have the same name as the other rats. this is true even though ambassador doesnt let you incur the +1 card benefit.

Hmm. On that note, I wonder if they might get along with Doctor and Journeyman. Not so much if you're just clearing out Coppers and Estates, but those cards can have issues with Ruins, and sweeping those all up into one card type along with your starting junk would make it easier for those cards to just name Rats. This also applies to a lesser extent with Curses, which Rats already increase your VP by trashing, although if you already have Doctor that might not be worthwhile. A lot of this could slide into the sort of Tunnel case of "yes this makes the card do SOMETHING but it's not actually worth doing".
« Last Edit: January 27, 2015, 10:25:26 am by TheOthin »
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #25 on: January 27, 2015, 10:30:25 am »
+5

A lot of this could slide into the sort of Tunnel case of "yes this makes the card do SOMETHING but it's not actually worth doing".

The Doctor/Journeyman idea has got to be even farther into that class than most wacky Tunnel things. In fact I think even "buy Rats just to trash Curses" is already in that camp.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #26 on: January 27, 2015, 12:57:33 pm »
0

rats are great with ambassador because they have the same name as the other rats. this is true even though ambassador doesnt let you incur the +1 card benefit.

Are you sure just ambassadoring the junk itself isn't better?
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   Quote from: sudgy on June 31, 2011, 11:47:46 pm

AdamH

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #27 on: January 27, 2015, 03:14:26 pm »
0

A lot of this could slide into the sort of Tunnel case of "yes this makes the card do SOMETHING but it's not actually worth doing".

The Doctor/Journeyman idea has got to be even farther into that class than most wacky Tunnel things. In fact I think even "buy Rats just to trash Curses" is already in that camp.

+1 for this. I've only ever bought Rats to trash Curses in super-heavy junking games, and I've only ever been happy with that buy once.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #28 on: January 27, 2015, 05:12:56 pm »
0

A lot of this could slide into the sort of Tunnel case of "yes this makes the card do SOMETHING but it's not actually worth doing".

The Doctor/Journeyman idea has got to be even farther into that class than most wacky Tunnel things. In fact I think even "buy Rats just to trash Curses" is already in that camp.

It isn't that wacky, you add one dead card to your deck in exchange for say gaining 6VP (6 curses -> Rats). That is exactly what you do when you buy a province. Except of course that Rats costs $4 less and isn't dead if you draw it with a curse. Sure better trashing means this isn't your first option, but seriously its "wacky" to say "if you have no other curse trashing"? If you have 6 curses in 20 cards it is pretty much impossible not have Rats beat a duchy before game end which is not exactly a bad buy in a lot of slog setups. If you'd buy duchy over silver you are likely getting close to where you want Rats over silver as well when you have Curses.



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popsofctown

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #29 on: January 27, 2015, 09:01:48 pm »
+1

The difference is you can wait to buy a Province and forfeit a gold buy when it's the appropriate time to green.  If you buy Rats with the same timing as when you would buy a Province, you're not going to have time to trash six curses. 

It's kinda like opening Great Hall/Great Hall in terms of the timing issue.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #30 on: January 27, 2015, 09:59:52 pm »
0

rats are great with ambassador because they have the same name as the other rats. this is true even though ambassador doesnt let you incur the +1 card benefit.

Are you sure just ambassadoring the junk itself isn't better?

Yeah, I don't understand the concept of Ambassadoring Rats at all.
Even though Rats do help consolidate Ruins, I just think there's way too much opportunity cost to make it worth it.

I think there's also this wrong-headed notion that putting a Rats in your opponents deck means that your opponent will soon be drowning in Rats.
Well, yeah, that works if your opponent is a poorly programmed bot or a naive new player, but against an experienced opponent it is less harmful than just sending in a Curse, and maybe even helpful in some cases.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #31 on: January 28, 2015, 01:46:06 am »
0

I could see Rats being worth it with Ambassador on a Shelters board where you really need that thinning. The downside is that then your opponent can do the same and he doesn't have to waste a $4 buy on Rats.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #32 on: January 28, 2015, 06:57:09 am »
0

rats are great with ambassador because they have the same name as the other rats. this is true even though ambassador doesnt let you incur the +1 card benefit.

Are you sure just ambassadoring the junk itself isn't better?

you start by ambassadoring the junk and then shift to ambassadoring the rats when you draw two rats and not two junk. I'm not sure, but I think it's better than amb/amb, say. More so if there's shelters.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #33 on: January 28, 2015, 07:18:34 am »
+1

Buying rats as a "better duchy" is usually a losing proposition. You need to line up rats with curses 3 times; this isn't all that likely to happen on your first three shuffles, but even if it does, if your deck is so clogged, you aren't going to get through it very fast, in which case, you probably aren't likely to even get through 3 more reshuffles. Moreover, when you do, it may be better than duchy, but you would never want to buy duchy in that case - the game isn't ending soon enough.

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #34 on: January 28, 2015, 09:17:18 am »
+1

A lot of this could slide into the sort of Tunnel case of "yes this makes the card do SOMETHING but it's not actually worth doing".

The Doctor/Journeyman idea has got to be even farther into that class than most wacky Tunnel things. In fact I think even "buy Rats just to trash Curses" is already in that camp.

It isn't that wacky, you add one dead card to your deck in exchange for say gaining 6VP (6 curses -> Rats). That is exactly what you do when you buy a province. Except of course that Rats costs $4 less and isn't dead if you draw it with a curse. Sure better trashing means this isn't your first option, but seriously its "wacky" to say "if you have no other curse trashing"? If you have 6 curses in 20 cards it is pretty much impossible not have Rats beat a duchy before game end which is not exactly a bad buy in a lot of slog setups. If you'd buy duchy over silver you are likely getting close to where you want Rats over silver as well when you have Curses.

Errrmm, that scenario you described will never happpen. 6 curses in 20 cards when there's no other trashing = somehow gaining 6 curses by turn 4. If the game is as sloggy and trashless as you suggest, that's not going to happen until about turn 10.

To Wandering Winder's point: statistically speaking, on average it's going to take you about 15 turns just to clear out three curses*. $4 for a Duchy that takes 15 turns to realize its value does not seem like a good value proposition.

*based on a 1,000,000 game naive Monte Carlo simulation, assuming no trashing or additional cycling.


« Last Edit: January 28, 2015, 09:26:51 am by TheExpressicist »
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #35 on: January 28, 2015, 06:09:38 pm »
0

Errrmm, that scenario you described will never happpen. 6 curses in 20 cards when there's no other trashing = somehow gaining 6 curses by turn 4. If the game is as sloggy and trashless as you suggest, that's not going to happen until about turn 10.

To Wandering Winder's point: statistically speaking, on average it's going to take you about 15 turns just to clear out three curses*. $4 for a Duchy that takes 15 turns to realize its value does not seem like a good value proposition.

*based on a 1,000,000 game naive Monte Carlo simulation, assuming no trashing or additional cycling.

Ugg. As I noted, this works best in a setup where you have some trashing (e.g. Spice Merchant) and preferably some draw. In the situation where you are drawing your deck, in 3 turns you can trash a total of 7 Curses for one dead card. 6:4 is the second most common split for curses. Going light trashing -> cursing -> engine is good. So the question then becomes would you ever buy a duchy with 3 or more turns left to play? Absolutely. It can be the correct move to buy the duchies before ever grabbing a province.

So what about non-engine setups? Well there are a number of cards that allow for a dramatic increase in pairing odds e.g Courtyard, Haven; and even there a simple search isn't going to tell you a lot unless you account for gaining additional rats.  I grant these do take a long time to beat out duchy, but they are also boards where you have a lot more turns. For instance, I ran a very simple Dominionate matchup of Double Witch vs Double Witch; duchies were being bought 15 turns before game end on a few of the spot check (~12 turns before game end appeared to be the average point to start buying duchies).

The difference is you can wait to buy a Province and forfeit a gold buy when it's the appropriate time to green.  If you buy Rats with the same timing as when you would buy a Province, you're not going to have time to trash six curses. 

It's kinda like opening Great Hall/Great Hall in terms of the timing issue.
So let me make sure I understand this. We are playing gainer (e.g. Workshop), draw (e.g. Smithy), village (e.g. Walled Village), copper trashing (e.g. Moneylender), Rats, and Young Witch. We both go Young Witch/Engine (the bane is something horrid like Chancellor). You lose the curse split 6:4 (sorry, you were P2). You won't workshop a Rats anytime to kill the curses? After all with deck drawing, you will hit clear all 6 in just three turns. You will instead grab another village or draw card so I can three pile that much easier?

I get, you don't want to buy Rats to kill curses too late in the game - you won't see your Rats often enough. You don't want to buy them too early - the extra card is not yet worth the VP. You may face too high of an opportunity cost (Rats vs Wandering Minstrel is likely a lose); but I really just don't see the numbers working out. Do you really expect to always buy your provinces within the last 3 turns of the game? That seems highly sub-optimal.
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TheExpressicist

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #36 on: January 29, 2015, 06:49:27 am »
+1

Okay, that's fair - I didn't notice the "no curse trashing" distinction. And also, I agree that it certainly makes sense to buy Duchies earlier than 3 turns before end-of-game. But let's be clear that what you are talking about is an extreme edge case. For your scenario to happen you need 1. Rats. 2. Non-curse trashing (AKA: Counterfeit, Loan or Spice Merchant).  3. Viable curse attack (Young Witch, Mountebank, Sea Hag, Witch). 4. No other curse trashers.  You're looking at about a 1 in 10000 chance of getting a board with those four components.

But to make matters more difficult, you're looking at 10 dead cards in your deck at minimum: 6 curses (soon to become 7 rats), 3 estates. And then you still need your light-trasher, and at minimum $4 worth of coin. So that's really somewhere between 12 and 13 dead cards in your deck. You need a seriously beefy engine to be able to plow through all of that. Now, to be fair to Rats: if you want to speak of best case scenarios - if you're drawing your entire deck, you can actually clear out all your curses in one turn.

Re: non-engine setups, if you lose the Province split, those extra VP aren't actually going to help you all that much because you will still be forced to buy 6 Duchies in order to win. (5 province + 3 duchies + curses still beats out 3 province + 5 duchies + no curses). Even with cards like Haven or Courtyard, it will still take 3 reshuffles on average to equal a Duchy. And until it does, you've added an extra dead card to your deck; a dead card which you will see a minimum of 3 times. Which makes it a lot more likely you'll lose the Province split.

 
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jomini

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #37 on: January 29, 2015, 02:57:57 pm »
0

Okay, that's fair - I didn't notice the "no curse trashing" distinction. And also, I agree that it certainly makes sense to buy Duchies earlier than 3 turns before end-of-game. But let's be clear that what you are talking about is an extreme edge case. For your scenario to happen you need 1. Rats. 2. Non-curse trashing (AKA: Counterfeit, Loan or Spice Merchant).  3. Viable curse attack (Young Witch, Mountebank, Sea Hag, Witch). 4. No other curse trashers.  You're looking at about a 1 in 10000 chance of getting a board with those four components.

But to make matters more difficult, you're looking at 10 dead cards in your deck at minimum: 6 curses (soon to become 7 rats), 3 estates. And then you still need your light-trasher, and at minimum $4 worth of coin. So that's really somewhere between 12 and 13 dead cards in your deck. You need a seriously beefy engine to be able to plow through all of that. Now, to be fair to Rats: if you want to speak of best case scenarios - if you're drawing your entire deck, you can actually clear out all your curses in one turn.

Re: non-engine setups, if you lose the Province split, those extra VP aren't actually going to help you all that much because you will still be forced to buy 6 Duchies in order to win. (5 province + 3 duchies + curses still beats out 3 province + 5 duchies + no curses). Even with cards like Haven or Courtyard, it will still take 3 reshuffles on average to equal a Duchy. And until it does, you've added an extra dead card to your deck; a dead card which you will see a minimum of 3 times. Which makes it a lot more likely you'll lose the Province split.
Let's be really clear. Of the copper trashers you've neglected to include Moneylender and  Mint as well as possible psuedo-trashing in Island and Native Village that don't eliminate the -1 VP (e.g. Turn Curse into Rats -> Courtyard -> Nv allows your to both clear a dead card from the deck and not score -1 VP).

Let's also remember that a "viable cursing attack" includes Familiar (where your Pot may also be a dead card mid game), Swindler, Jester, Soothesayer, Torturer (if you don't forefeit as soon as the other guy reliably hits his Torturer chain), and Followers. Also you can get some situations where buying through an Embargo token is viable with the curse (e.g. your opponent embargos Province after they've bought the first one).

And let's not forget the fun of the Black Market deck. Your opponent may get both the trasher and the curser that was in the Bm, so yet another possible option.

But you have to draw 10 dead cards? So what. That is just barely more than 3 Hunting Grounds/Village pairs. Or maybe 4 Border villages/Smithies. Wharf, Envoy, Adviser, Embassy, etc. all work for quickly pushing through a big stack of dead cards. Drawing 20 cards (curses, estates, and coins) is perfectly viable on a lot of boards (like say anything that can do a normal Engine and then add Warehouse as a kingdom card.)

So let's quit with this garbage. The single biggest restraint isn't needing light trashing (that's one possible option), sifting (e.g. Warehouse, which is a second) - it is having a board where you don't have another trasher (even Trade Route is better than Rats for this barring more rare setups) and you have a viable setup for fast cycling. The odds of having Rats + cursers + no curse trashing + engine is just a bit more common than any specific 2 card combo (e.g. Hermit/Market Square or Nv/Bridge or Pstone/Herbalist).

In non-engine setups you are assuming 2 player, this is not always the case (granted it the game tends to end more quickly in 3er) and no possible alt-VP or VP tokens from Goons/Monument. I'm not saying that these setups are common, but that they are possible. More importantly, you are ignoring the possibility of 3-piling. Curses typically exhaust so we have just two more piles. Depending on what else gets bought down (e.g. Haven), I may well expect to clear enough curses and pile out long before we even care who wins the province split. Remember in near mirrors you should expect at least a third of games to end on three piles (e.g. if we both follow the PPR we can stall on 6 provinces), optimized Big money variants should end a LOT of times on piles.

But even that isn't the biggest thing. All the arguments about losing the province split also apply to duchy, except that with Rats you non-zero odds of them NOT being a dead card (play them to trash a curse). Of course Rats may not find itself competing against Duchy, but Silver or Estate. Which drops our shuffle count lower before payback. Again, neither of these are common, but in aggregate, using Rats to get rid of curses is likely a good move more often than playing Pstone/Herbalist simply because Rats/Curser is so much more common than Pstone/Herbalist.
« Last Edit: January 29, 2015, 03:01:59 pm by jomini »
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TheExpressicist

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #38 on: January 29, 2015, 05:17:09 pm »
+4

My point was never to say that Rats is never good as a curse trasher. It was to say that it's very rarely good. You can introduce edge cases all day long. But each additional constraint you add just lowers the odds even further that it will actually happen in real life. 

Remember, according to you, you need: 1. Rats, 2. Curse attack, 3. No curse trashing, 4. Light trashing, and 5. Strong engine components. Even if you count all of your additions (most of which I personally consider to be real stretches) among the possibilities, you're still looking at about a 1 in 1200 chance of all those pieces coming together. The notion that it's "just as likely as any two card combo" (which is 1 in 400) is just patently false.
 





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werothegreat

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #39 on: January 29, 2015, 11:38:34 pm »
+2

My point was never to say that Rats is never good as a curse trasher. It was to say that it's very rarely good. You can introduce edge cases all day long. But each additional constraint you add just lowers the odds even further that it will actually happen in real life. 

Remember, according to you, you need: 1. Rats, 2. Curse attack, 3. No curse trashing, 4. Light trashing, and 5. Strong engine components. Even if you count all of your additions (most of which I personally consider to be real stretches) among the possibilities, you're still looking at about a 1 in 1200 chance of all those pieces coming together. The notion that it's "just as likely as any two card combo" (which is 1 in 400) is just patently false.
 

I blame you for the half hour I just spent figuring out the formula required to find the probability of getting a d-sized combo in a k-sized sample from an n-sized set.  For your information, it's k!(n-d)!/(n!(k-d)!) .  Which, for a 2-card combo in a 10-card kingdom (ignoring Banes because fuck that) from a set of 206 kingdom cards is exactly 9/4223.  Which rounds to 1/400.

EDIT: Fun fact!  With the release of Adventures (30 kingdom cards), this will decrease to ~1/550 !!!  :D :D :D ALL OF OUR TIME HERE IS WORTHLESS
« Last Edit: January 29, 2015, 11:41:39 pm by werothegreat »
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #40 on: January 30, 2015, 12:33:44 am »
+1

My point was never to say that Rats is never good as a curse trasher. It was to say that it's very rarely good. You can introduce edge cases all day long. But each additional constraint you add just lowers the odds even further that it will actually happen in real life. 

Remember, according to you, you need: 1. Rats, 2. Curse attack, 3. No curse trashing, 4. Light trashing, and 5. Strong engine components. Even if you count all of your additions (most of which I personally consider to be real stretches) among the possibilities, you're still looking at about a 1 in 1200 chance of all those pieces coming together. The notion that it's "just as likely as any two card combo" (which is 1 in 400) is just patently false.
 

I blame you for the half hour I just spent figuring out the formula required to find the probability of getting a d-sized combo in a k-sized sample from an n-sized set.  For your information, it's k!(n-d)!/(n!(k-d)!) .  Which, for a 2-card combo in a 10-card kingdom (ignoring Banes because fuck that) from a set of 206 kingdom cards is exactly 9/4223.  Which rounds to 1/400.

EDIT: Fun fact!  With the release of Adventures (30 kingdom cards), this will decrease to ~1/550 !!!  :D :D :D ALL OF OUR TIME HERE IS WORTHLESS

This is why I computer science:

Code: [Select]
import random

cards = range(206)
count = 0
trials = 1000000

for i in xrange(trials):
kingdom = random.sample(cards, 10)
if (1 in kingdom) and (2 in kingdom):
count += 1

print float(count)/float(trials)

0.002133

off by <0.1% :P
« Last Edit: January 30, 2015, 12:35:47 am by GeoLib »
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werothegreat

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #41 on: January 30, 2015, 12:41:12 am »
+9

Yes, well, *I* have an elegant answer derived from a theoretical understanding of the material.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #42 on: January 30, 2015, 01:35:46 am »
+1

I blame you for the half hour I just spent figuring out the formula required to find the probability of getting a d-sized combo in a k-sized sample from an n-sized set.  For your information, it's k!(n-d)!/(n!(k-d)!) .  Which, for a 2-card combo in a 10-card kingdom (ignoring Banes because f*** that) from a set of 206 kingdom cards is exactly 9/4223.  Which rounds to 1/400.

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   Quote from: sudgy on June 31, 2011, 11:47:46 pm

TheExpressicist

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #43 on: January 30, 2015, 05:33:49 am »
+2

My point was never to say that Rats is never good as a curse trasher. It was to say that it's very rarely good. You can introduce edge cases all day long. But each additional constraint you add just lowers the odds even further that it will actually happen in real life. 

Remember, according to you, you need: 1. Rats, 2. Curse attack, 3. No curse trashing, 4. Light trashing, and 5. Strong engine components. Even if you count all of your additions (most of which I personally consider to be real stretches) among the possibilities, you're still looking at about a 1 in 1200 chance of all those pieces coming together. The notion that it's "just as likely as any two card combo" (which is 1 in 400) is just patently false.
 

I blame you for the half hour I just spent figuring out the formula required to find the probability of getting a d-sized combo in a k-sized sample from an n-sized set.  For your information, it's k!(n-d)!/(n!(k-d)!) .  Which, for a 2-card combo in a 10-card kingdom (ignoring Banes because fuck that) from a set of 206 kingdom cards is exactly 9/4223.  Which rounds to 1/400.

EDIT: Fun fact!  With the release of Adventures (30 kingdom cards), this will decrease to ~1/550 !!!  :D :D :D ALL OF OUR TIME HERE IS WORTHLESS

Prepare to have your life ruined:

What is the probability of a d-sized combo where each card is interchangeable with x different equivalents in a k-sized sample from an n-sized set?
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #44 on: January 30, 2015, 07:47:07 am »
0

My point was never to say that Rats is never good as a curse trasher. It was to say that it's very rarely good. You can introduce edge cases all day long. But each additional constraint you add just lowers the odds even further that it will actually happen in real life. 

Remember, according to you, you need: 1. Rats, 2. Curse attack, 3. No curse trashing, 4. Light trashing, and 5. Strong engine components. Even if you count all of your additions (most of which I personally consider to be real stretches) among the possibilities, you're still looking at about a 1 in 1200 chance of all those pieces coming together. The notion that it's "just as likely as any two card combo" (which is 1 in 400) is just patently false.
 

Oh please. I have said you need light trashing or some other method to make the engine viable excluding things that trash curses. This can be any the many light trashers. It can also be a lot of sifters (e.g. Warehouse, Embassy, Cellar, Storeroom, etc.). It can also be some Alt-VP enablers for a really slow build (e.g. Fairgrounds, Vineyards). It can also be some attack that slows the end game heavily (e.g. Ghost Ship, Rabble). Yes you need engine enablers, but something simple like Rats/University/Familiar/Rabble would work. But also you could have a lot of other things.

I've been using strong card examples to illustrate the point. Quite often it will be a mix of things say you have Inn for sifting/setting up big draw turns early, Fairgrounds to make the game last longer, and Rabble to slow the other guy from piling out. Or it could be Kc/Inn/Oracle

Basically, according to you, any time you get cursed it is rare to build an engine unless you can trash. Yeah 5-6 extra cards to draw sucks; but on the other hand once you have an engine you get a lot more bang for your buck.


Even if we grant your laughably poor numbers of 1/1200 to 1/400; that means that Rats killing curses is potentially a thing 1/3rd of the time that Herbalist/P.Stone is. Of course, with the new expansion we should expect another curser or two and likely another light trasher and several sifters so even with your current numbers, the odds are going to change dramatically again.

I don't understand this on a board talking about dominion strategy, everyone wants to stop talking about dominion strategy. That's an edge case. Well yes, every single game of dominion is an edge case at this point. There are 3.5 EE 11 possible kingdoms. ANYTHING is going be an edge case. Even the collective play of everyone on the forum isn't going to hit 1% of the possible game states.

Now I know that there is degeneracy - Chancellor/Stash and Scavenger/Stash play fairly similarly. But whatever degree of degeneracy we allow is completely arbitrary. You may not think of Mint of as a light trasher, but Opening Smithy/Silver and hitting all 7 starting coppers makes it decent. Quibbling over probabilities that are within an order of magnitude is pathetic. EVERYTHING is an edge case these days.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #45 on: January 30, 2015, 08:52:51 am »
+1

The point is, Rats trashing curses is an AWFUL plan. It has nothing to do with probabilities of how likely it is to come up.

So, you say, you have a game where the only trashing is rats and some treasure trashing, and there's pretty heavy cursing, and there's card-draw pieces. Ok, I will give you that. Yeah, it won't come up often, but I don't really care, that is not my point, and I agree that it being a rare board isn't really relevant. So let's just assume we're on that board. Great.

You're saying there's a point where the correct move would be to buy rats. You're saying that some point after the curses are gone (I'll give you some flexibility to say, just before they're all gone, only most of them are gone). First of all, this is the exact kind of game where, most of the time, you shouldn't be building an engine, because just going for money will be both faster and, because of the high amount of junk (and lack of trashing), more reliable in the long-run. But ok, for some strange reason, you actually want to build the engine. But in this case, where you're drawing your deck pretty much every turn (somehow), you should have enough money to be buying provinces every turn. Or if you don't have that much money, you should be getting money to do that, rather than rats. Or if you don't have the reliability, that first of all will hurt rats, and moreover, you should be getting the engine components to give you that reliability. Or if you're to the point where piles would be an issue from doing that for you, you should be getting the points now now now. At best, there is some situation where you have something like 7 curses, but you're somehow overdrawing your deck anyway, reliably (this already isn't super possible, since you have at least 10 junk/stop cards,but ok, it's vaguely reliable say), and you buy a rats right at the end, or better, you gain one midturn, so you can play it, then draw the new one, and set it up to play and draw all of them in the same turn, netting you some points. But not only is this scenario absurdly contrived, not only are you probably still losing this game anyway, given your opponent has done, you know, something, with a lot fewer junk floating around, not only all that, but there, it's really more of a one-off tactical play than something to keep in your mind and watch out for.

Except, of course, if you're also going vineyards. But that's more about vineyards, and it's already been covered.

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #46 on: January 30, 2015, 09:21:37 am »
+1

My point was never to say that Rats is never good as a curse trasher. It was to say that it's very rarely good. You can introduce edge cases all day long. But each additional constraint you add just lowers the odds even further that it will actually happen in real life. 

Remember, according to you, you need: 1. Rats, 2. Curse attack, 3. No curse trashing, 4. Light trashing, and 5. Strong engine components. Even if you count all of your additions (most of which I personally consider to be real stretches) among the possibilities, you're still looking at about a 1 in 1200 chance of all those pieces coming together. The notion that it's "just as likely as any two card combo" (which is 1 in 400) is just patently false.
 

I blame you for the half hour I just spent figuring out the formula required to find the probability of getting a d-sized combo in a k-sized sample from an n-sized set.  For your information, it's k!(n-d)!/(n!(k-d)!) .  Which, for a 2-card combo in a 10-card kingdom (ignoring Banes because fuck that) from a set of 206 kingdom cards is exactly 9/4223.  Which rounds to 1/400.

EDIT: Fun fact!  With the release of Adventures (30 kingdom cards), this will decrease to ~1/550 !!!  :D :D :D ALL OF OUR TIME HERE IS WORTHLESS

Prepare to have your life ruined:

What is the probability of a d-sized combo where each card is interchangeable with x different equivalents in a k-sized sample from an n-sized set?

I was thinking about that, and then I got lazy.  Also, this still doesn't incorporate Young Witch.  What is the probability if one of the events selected allows you to select an 11th event from a smaller subset?  This would involved tracking whether or not the other events already selected are from that subset.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #47 on: January 30, 2015, 10:12:21 am »
0

I don't understand this on a board talking about dominion strategy, everyone wants to stop talking about dominion strategy. That's an edge case. Well yes, every single game of dominion is an edge case at this point. There are 3.5 EE 11 possible kingdoms. ANYTHING is going be an edge case. Even the collective play of everyone on the forum isn't going to hit 1% of the possible game states

I don't mind talking about edge cases. I don't even mind talking about fairly unlikely edge cases, because they do come up. What I do mind is talking about an extreme edge case and pretending it's a common scenario. That's my issue. That's it. If you had simply owned it and prefaced it with, "This is a ridiculously uncommon edge case, but...", I would have no problem.

Wandering Winder did a solid job of explaining how, even in an 'absurdly contrived scenario', using Rats as a curse trasher is 'more of a one-off tactical play than something to keep in your mind and watch out for.' Now, that said, I am quite certain you could build a kingdom where that's not the case.

But you simply cannot equivocate between that contrived, tailor-made kingdom, and a kingdom containing a two-card combo. Saying "ANY situation is an edge case" doesn't make them equivalent. Unless you think my theory that pink unicorns live at the end of the rainbow deserves equal consideration as the theory of gravity, because, well, ANY scientific theory has a degree of uncertainness to it!
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #48 on: January 31, 2015, 10:06:55 am »
0

The point is, Rats trashing curses is an AWFUL plan. It has nothing to do with probabilities of how likely it is to come up.

So, you say, you have a game where the only trashing is rats and some treasure trashing, and there's pretty heavy cursing, and there's card-draw pieces. Ok, I will give you that. Yeah, it won't come up often, but I don't really care, that is not my point, and I agree that it being a rare board isn't really relevant. So let's just assume we're on that board. Great.

You're saying there's a point where the correct move would be to buy rats. You're saying that some point after the curses are gone (I'll give you some flexibility to say, just before they're all gone, only most of them are gone). First of all, this is the exact kind of game where, most of the time, you shouldn't be building an engine, because just going for money will be both faster and, because of the high amount of junk (and lack of trashing), more reliable in the long-run.
Granted, hence why I have said repeatedly that you need things to push you toward engines. A non-exhaustive list includes things like: Colonies, gainers (e.g. Iw, Armory, Haggler), anti-money deck attacks (e.g. Noble Brigand, Cutpurse, Rabble), power engine cards (e.g. Kc, Tr, Border village/$5 draw), engine favoring sifting (e.g. Inn, Cellar, Farming Village). I have stated from the beginning that the criteria of when to go Rats over duchy is when you will see them often enough to trash three curses. Engines, while not common, make this conceptually easy to estimate. Two turns with a perfect deck drawing engine is the obvious case for Rats being equal to Duchy. 

Quote
But ok, for some strange reason, you actually want to build the engine. But in this case, where you're drawing your deck pretty much every turn (somehow), you should have enough money to be buying provinces every turn. Or if you don't have that much money, you should be getting money to do that, rather than rats. Or if you don't have the reliability, that first of all will hurt rats, and moreover, you should be getting the engine components to give you that reliability. Or if you're to the point where piles would be an issue from doing that for you, you should be getting the points now now now. At best, there is some situation where you have something like 7 curses, but you're somehow overdrawing your deck anyway, reliably (this already isn't super possible, since you have at least 10 junk/stop cards,but ok, it's vaguely reliable say), and you buy a rats right at the end, or better, you gain one midturn, so you can play it, then draw the new one, and set it up to play and draw all of them in the same turn, netting you some points.
I've built for a colony engine off Iw/Smithy/Farming Village. I spent my first (two?) $5 on Counterfeit and have been going Rabble/Bazaar with $5 sinces (or grabbing doubles of Fv/Smithy). We are out of Farming villages and I draw an Iw. I have 4 Smithies, 4 Rabble (net draw +16) against 6 curses, 3 estates, of course I should expect to skip 2 or 3 with the Fv each draw so that leaves me with 11 draw slots, with a single Bazaar in play I need 4 Plats, one Counterfeit for double Colonies. Presumably my opponent is either trying to pile down Smithy/Fv with me (and hence going engine-ish at least) or he is going to have a hellavu time making a dent in the provinces or 3 pile when he gets repetitively Rabbled.

I draw deck with 1 action and Iw/Rabble outstanding. My Iw is otherwise useless, so I get the Rats. I expect to have three turns (buying 4 colonies over the next two turns, then either more Colonies for an easy win or some form of end game dancing).

Oh my a blindingly obvious example where Rats has low opportunity cost (it is actually competing with estate, not duchy) and there is a nice confluence of gaining, sifting, attacks, and extra VP to make it farcical.

But we can look at a lot of other options. I'm setting up the engine exactly as you outline (say I have Familiar/University/Pool with decent $5's, say I'm just playing with Alchemy, Base, Prosperity and Dark Ages). But it is starting to fail and I want the Duchies "now, now, now". I'm down 6:4 on curses. I draw a Green, a Curse, a Market, a Gold, and dead draw (e.g. something like Moat). I play the Market, draw a curse, I elect not to play the dead draw because I've been deck tracking and know I have low odds of hitting more coin, but good odds of kicking off my engine next turn. I have $4, I'm down by 2 VP - what do I buy?

Another component (e.g. something like Oasis)? Well maybe that will let me win the province split. But that has to take into account 3 piles and the fact that I'm going to give my opponent a free shot at VP - a duchy gets him up by $5 so then I can no longer win with a 4:4 province split and a bonus duchy. Highly situational odds if a component works. Okay well what about estate? It is 1 VP now, now, now. But it literally does nothing for me unless I get a second estate later; which is rare without a +buy. Rats? Okay I might be able to play it for 1 VP and then draw the gained Rats with a Pool for another VP. Well that is actually useful. Going Rats may well be a tactical choice that ends up working well just because you get a busted hand with $4. Its another path to victory, so why not think about it when analyzing the board?

Quote
it's really more of a one-off tactical play than something to keep in your mind and watch out for.
Funny, I whole heartedly concur. It is a tactical play that can work well. I have never said otherwise.


The times when you need to keep the tactical possibility in mind are about as common as any specific two card combo. E.g. maybe 1 in 500 games. So you approach a board that has cursing. You quickly see that cursing with no curse trushing means this is going to be a cursing game. Now you have to make a decision - what am I going to do when the cursing is done? You should obviously NOT plan around Rats nibbling away the curses. But if you have an engine setup that looks promising - say other attacks to make the game longer still (note, not discarding attacks that are relatively weak against cursed decks), strong engine cards (e.g. Kc, gainers), and perhaps some more VP so the money player has to take more provinces to secure the win (e.g. Colonies, Fairgrounds, Island) then when you do your calculations for how many points you can score via engine you should keep in mind that Rats can be a pretty nice extra 3-4 on the engine side if you are worried about slipping below 50%+1 before your engine works.

Will this be common? No, as I already said the biggest sieve is the need for other trashing to not be there. What typically makes engines viable after cursing is the trashing.  But there are a large constellation of things that move you toward engine besides trashing. Sifting. Gainers. Colonies. Shelters. Other attacks. Power engine cards. Some Alt-VP. Some pseudo-trashing. Goons/Bish. Light trashing. The exact point at which any combination of these works out into a pattern that says "go engine" is highly board dependent, and I'm tired of having people nitpick where exactly the marginal line is drawn. Clearly I can make illustrative cases where the thread isn't derailed, but somehow people who I've beaten every single time I've played them (which I grant is a huge amount of luck beyond what little skill I have) will go gonzo that my marginal cases are too weak. Rats killing curses is a tactical thing. It isn't common but then no specific card interactions are either. What is it, only 5% of games will even have Rats at all?


I don't mind talking about edge cases. I don't even mind talking about fairly unlikely edge cases, because they do come up. What I do mind is talking about an extreme edge case and pretending it's a common scenario. That's my issue. That's it. If you had simply owned it and prefaced it with, "This is a ridiculously uncommon edge case, but...", I would have no problem.

Oh get off it. I have never said it was common. Your back of the envelope is 1 in 1200, mine is around 1 in 400. I laid out my specific criteria in the very first post - you have be in a place where you'd consider gaining Duchy and the game has to last long enough to eat the curses (seeing the original Rats 3 times is pretty decent as Rats is a bit less harsh on an engine than Duchy, but Duchy is assured points now).

You then proceeded to pretend that I somehow said this was common. I put it on par with any specific two card combo (because there is a LOT of degeneracy between cursers and between engine enablers). Further, there are a lot of common play scenarios that totally warp the odds. E.g. When I play IRL it is not uncommon for me to bring just a few expansions, so we might just have Base, Dark Ages, and Prosperity - which massively inflates the numbers when Rats/Curse killing can be a thing.

"Edge case" has become ludicrous on this forum, we may as well close the forum down to any discussion of specific card interactions - they are all edge cases. I mean do you knwo the odds are that you will Young Witch, Tunnel, and scaling TfB are? Or how about Forager, 2 kingdom treasures, no villages, and cantrip +draw, and a gainer? Or perhaps Chancellor/Stash/Pillage/Alt-VP? Those are my last three games. In the first, the Bane was Tunnel, the TfB was Butcher and it was totally engineless game because Butchering Golds was easy. The second I went Forager/Pot, grabbed 6 Alchemists (bought a second Pot the turn before grabbing #5&6), then I stocked up on Foragers, then grabbed Loan/Contraband/Gold and quickly went to town with $6 Foragers for a triple province turn followed by a double. In the last I completely ignored the Chancellor/Stash because we also had Rogue and I went engine and buried his Chancellor while stocking up on Islands/Duchies. Each of these were "contrived edge cases".

But then most games are. The average game has: no significant trashing (e.g. excluding Death Cart, Prssn, etc.), has no draw, and has no villages (includes Golem, Tr, etc.), has no +buy, has no cursing, has no discard, has no gainers and has no Alt-VP.

Every game is a statistical fluke. Yet we hit them. Sure, saying I need these 3 specific cards is pretty rare. But saying I need a number of confluences (one of these 7 cards, one of these cards that is in 40% of games, etc.) is not the same as edge casing.

Frankly, unless you want to give me a statistically robust definition for "edge case" you are just pissing around with a No-True-Scotsman fallacy.
« Last Edit: January 31, 2015, 10:08:24 am by jomini »
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TheExpressicist

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #49 on: January 31, 2015, 12:09:11 pm »
0

Firstly, let's stay civil. No need to get all worked up over a card game.

Secondly, I'm all for getting specific about what constitutes an "edge case"*.
The "There's No Point Even Discussing This" Edge Case: Something so unlikely, the average player never has and never will encounter it. (1 in 300,000 chance)
The "Extreme" Edge Case: Something so unlikely, the average player has only encountered it once. (1 in 2000 chance).
The "Normal" Edge Case: Something that the average player will see 9 or 10 times throughout the course of their play. (1 in 500 chance)
The "Not Actually An..." Edge Case: Something that really isn't an edge case, because the average player will actually probably see once or twice a week. (1 in 20ish chance)

I have no problem discussing "normal" edge cases. And I agree that people are far too quick to apply the "edge case" label to things that are actually fairly likely. But I take issue with equivocating between the "Extreme" edge case and the "Normal" edge case. They may be within an order of magnitude of each other but the real world impact is huge. And that's what you continue to do when you insist that the "Rats is a good curse trasher" scenario is equally as likely as a two-card combo.

The entire point of my back-of-the-napkin calculations was to show that, even when you're being extremely generous and giving 1 in 1200 odds that such-and-such components are in play, it's still rarely a good play because there are so many situational factors you have to take into account as well: are you losing the Curse split? Will the game last long enough to trash all the curses? Are you going to lose the game anyway? etc. etc.. Granted, I didn't go into detail as to why it's not a good play, but that's because WW is already doing that. What I was pointing out is that you have to add even more qualifiers to those 1 in 1200 odds to get a scenario where what you're saying makes sense.  Which makes it even more unlikely.

*Note: I've rounded off the numbers slightly, but these are pretty close to accurate. If you really want me to explain the statistics behind it, I will.
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Mic Qsenoch

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #50 on: January 31, 2015, 12:46:59 pm »
+8

I'm worried the next inevitable wall of text will swallow us all whole.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #51 on: January 31, 2015, 01:00:06 pm »
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Guys, you're off by an order of magnitude.  Not counting substitutions, a 3-card combo has a 1/12000 chance of occurring.  That's a *thirtieth* the chance of a 2-card combo, not a third.  Allowing for substitutions, but then adding in all the other stuff, it probably evens out.  Note that this will decrease to 1/18000 chance after Adventures.
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jomini

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #52 on: January 31, 2015, 03:51:21 pm »
0

Wero:

~5% games will contain Rats.

Of those games, ~40% will have at least one card that gives curses; or about 2% of games.

Of that 2%, about 30% will not have curse trashing; or about .6% of games. This about 1/166 games will contain Rats/Curse/no curse trashing.

So now we have to look degeneracy for how frequently is an engine viable. Well for a start consider the copper trashers. ~22% of those games will have copper trashing. Colonies will show up in 12%. Kc in 3%. Goons/Monument in 7%. Engine friendly sifting is in something like 42%. Engine friendly Alt-VP is in maybe 16% of the games. Component gainers are in 25%. Game prolonging attacks maybe in 22%. Obviously this is going over 100% as I'm using a pretty simple setup, but at what point do we say engine becomes viable?

Are we talking about assuming that less than 13% of boards can support no trash/curses. That is pretty high bar. And all of this assumes all cards, all random. This isn't even every game on Goko; if some has just Prosperity/Hinterlands/Base the odds go much higher. If you allow for non-random setups (i.e. where I play most of my games, we deal 10 random then alternatively vote to keep and discard cards until we reach keep 5 and discard 5 from the setup and then deal 5 new randoms), this goes completely out the window.

Expressicist:
I appreciate your willingness to start being civil and will stop pretending I've said anything about this stuff being common.

Your edge case definitions are completely post-hoc and frankly worthless. "Edge cases" are every game anyone ever plays. Want to talk about "did I play Stables/Haggler right?" - that's an edge case, better have the right trigger warning in your post. Want to talk about if Witch is a more strategic choice than Cultist when you don't have trashing? Better preface your comments with "extreme edge case". May as well just close down the board.

Now sure, we have degeneracy, but that just pushes the question back further - what degree of degeneracy do we allow? Is Baker close enough to Treasury to Peddler to Bazaar or not?

So how about in the future you read what I actually right - that this is potentially viable when you are considering buying a Duchy and will see your initial Rats thrice more before game end? The explicitly defined conditions give you a 1/166 odds of it showing up. Debating about do 1/3rd of such boards give rise to times where Rats might be better than Duchy or do only 1 in 7 give that potential is pretty worthless.

I'm sorry that I assumed you and everyone else in the thread could estimate these odds yourself (and hence wouldn't assume that no curse trashing, Rats, cursing was somehow ever going to be common) and that I figured that back of the envelope was good enough for discussing strategy.

Using Rats to kill curses is a tactical thing that may or may not show up in 1/166 games (excluding things like Yw, Knights, and Bm). I have never said it is otherwise.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #53 on: January 31, 2015, 04:07:14 pm »
+2

Using Rats just to trash curses VP is probably mathematically correct in some circumstance somewhere, but I doubt anyone is good enough to recognize when that is, so it's better for your winrate to just not try it.

It's like the advice I once heard on this forum, "Just don't buy Mandarin until you reach rank 40".  Which was a little over the top.  But here I don't think it's over the top.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #54 on: January 31, 2015, 04:11:36 pm »
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Using Rats just to trash curses VP is probably mathematically correct in some circumstance somewhere, but I doubt anyone is good enough to recognize when that is, so it's better for your winrate to just not try it.

It's like the advice I once heard on this forum, "Just don't buy Mandarin until you reach rank 40".  Which was a little over the top.  But here I don't think it's over the top.

I played a board with Mandarin/Hunting Party and I had 5/2. I still lost, because my opponent opened double Swindler and hit my Hunting Parties with an accuracy akin to hitting an arrow midair with another arrow. I quickly resigned after having my 3rd Hunting Party converted to Mandarin in 5 Swindler tries.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #55 on: January 31, 2015, 04:34:47 pm »
+4

Expressicist:
I appreciate your willingness to start being civil

Good start.

and will stop pretending I've said anything about this stuff being common.

Not helping, but alright.

Your edge case definitions are completely post-hoc and frankly worthless. "Edge cases" are every game anyone ever plays. Want to talk about "did I play Stables/Haggler right?" - that's an edge case, better have the right trigger warning in your post. Want to talk about if Witch is a more strategic choice than Cultist when you don't have trashing? Better preface your comments with "extreme edge case". May as well just close down the board.

This is not civil.

I'm sorry that I assumed you and everyone else in the thread could estimate these odds yourself (and hence wouldn't assume that no curse trashing, Rats, cursing was somehow ever going to be common) and that I figured that back of the envelope was good enough for discussing strategy.

Using Rats to kill curses is a tactical thing that may or may not show up in 1/166 games (excluding things like Yw, Knights, and Bm). I have never said it is otherwise.

Jomini, sometimes it seems like all you *ever* talk about is edge cases.  Great big blocks of text of them.  Maybe if you stopped taking things personally and tried to get a little perspective, you wouldn't have so many people jumping on your ass about this.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #56 on: January 31, 2015, 04:35:36 pm »
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Guys, Rats is bad. Let's agree and move on. :p
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #57 on: January 31, 2015, 04:39:23 pm »
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To quote myself: "I have no problem discussing "normal" edge cases."

Your numbers are sorta close. I ran a 1,000,000 game simulation:
4.86% kingdoms had Rats.
18.9% had no curse trashing.
33.3% had curse attacks.

So it's actually about 1 in 330 games that have Rats, curse attacks, and no curse trashing.

I ran a filter for "engine viability", which, we can argue over the finer points but here's what it looked for (I tried to make it as generous as possible)
(Any Lab Variant) OR (Any Card Draw AND Any +Action)
AND
(Any Cycling) OR (Any treasure trasher)

As I mentioned, I'm being extremely generous with these definitions. Any card with +2 cards or more was marked as card draw. And any card with +2 actions or more counted as +Action. Also, cards like KC, TR, Procession, Herald, etc. that allows for card chaining were counted as both card draw AND +actions.

Based on these criteria (Rats && !Curse Trashing && Curse Attack && Engine Viability), and out of 1,000,000 games, 711 of them met those criteria. So in other words, 1 game in 1406.  And then consider that you need to have at least four curses, which there's about an 18% chance that you'll have three or less, further lowering the odds to 1 in 1694 games.


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jaketheyak

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #58 on: January 31, 2015, 05:09:14 pm »
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This reminds me of that Counterfeit + Venture thread where that guy was writing massive walls of text to contrive ludicrously unlikely edge cases in a futile effort to prove a point that nobody was buying into.

Hmm...
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #59 on: January 31, 2015, 05:26:30 pm »
0

Also, tangent, I realized there's no need to include Banes in probability unless Young Witch is part of the combo with a $2 or $3 card.  If your 2 cards don't cost $2 or $3, then the topic is moot; we don't care if there's a Bane, since it doesn't change the probability of the combo occurring.  If one or more of the cards cost $2 or $3, then if one of them is the Bane, then that's equivalent to replacing Young Witch with that card, in terms of probability.  So for most combos, we don't care about Banes.

If Young Witch is in the combo with a $2 or $3 card - let's say YW/Tunnel - things get a little more interesting.  Allowing for a Bane increases the possibility of the combo occuring ever so marginally.  Since Tunnel not being the Bane and being the Bane are two mutually exclusively events, we can deal with them separately, and then later add them.  i.e. Prob(Tunnel != Bane) + Prob(Tunnel == Bane) = Desired probability

So our normal 2-card probability is 9/4223 (9/5546 with Adventures).  Now, a probability is just the number of combinations *with* our desired event divided by the total possible combinations.  The number of combinations with Tunnel as Bane are going to be using n=204 (we've removed YW and Tunnel from our set), k=9 (YW is guaranteed), d=0 (we want the combinations WITHOUT Tunnel) - each of these has one combination with Tunnel as Bane.  This is 204!/(9!195!).  We now have 205!/(10!195!)+50*205!/(9!196!) possible combinations [since there are (before Adventures) 55 $2/$3 cards, leaving us with between 45 and 55 options to choose from for Banes, depending on how many $2 and $3 cards are in the Kingdom, which I've averaged to 50 since this number is going to be very small compared to the other one anyway].

Thus:
Probability of YW/$2-3 card combo = 9/4223 + 1/(205/10 + 50*205/196) = 9/4223 + 1/(20.5+ 52.3) = 66.98/4223 = 1/63.04, which is marginally larger than the normal 2-card probability of 1/469.22.

Of course, this will depend *slightly* on your choice of $2-$3 card averaging constant.


Never mind, did this wrong, head hurts
« Last Edit: January 31, 2015, 05:40:34 pm by werothegreat »
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #60 on: January 31, 2015, 05:35:59 pm »
+1

This reminds me of that Counterfeit + Venture thread where that guy was writing massive walls of text to contrive ludicrously unlikely edge cases in a futile effort to prove a point that nobody was buying into.

Hmm...

I really wish I didn't make that thread.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #61 on: January 31, 2015, 05:41:59 pm »
+3

I really wish I didn't make that thread.

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #62 on: January 31, 2015, 05:50:09 pm »
+1

I really wish I didn't make that thread.

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #63 on: January 31, 2015, 05:52:10 pm »
0

I really wish I didn't make that thread.

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #64 on: January 31, 2015, 05:54:21 pm »
+1

I really wish I didn't make that thread.

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #65 on: January 31, 2015, 05:55:57 pm »
+7

Now I have lost Making Fun Points instead.

That's a fun point you made.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #66 on: January 31, 2015, 07:18:38 pm »
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Guys, Rats is bad. Let's agree and move on. :p
Rats is bad. And then, power-level-wise, some games it's good, some games it's bad. It's not the broadest card but it has its times to shine.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #67 on: January 31, 2015, 10:27:50 pm »
+4

Rats isn't bad, it's awful, except when it's excellent. I already explained this, why did this thread continue?
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #68 on: January 31, 2015, 10:36:33 pm »
0

Rats isn't bad, it's awful, except when it's excellent. I already explained this, why did this thread continue?

It's not good, except when it's good, then it's good, unless it's bad, which of course then it's bad.

c:
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #69 on: January 31, 2015, 10:38:16 pm »
0

Rats isn't bad, it's awful, except when it's excellent. I already explained this, why did this thread continue?

All cards are either bad or mediocre, except when they are good, modulo an intensifier.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #70 on: January 31, 2015, 10:39:05 pm »
+3

Guys, Rats is bad. Let's agree and move on. :p
Rats is bad. And then, power-level-wise, some games it's good, some games it's bad. It's not the broadest card but it has its times to shine.

Well, it's good when compared to cards that are worse than it.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #71 on: February 01, 2015, 01:49:04 am »
+1

They can't all be the best bad card ever.
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   Quote from: sudgy on June 31, 2011, 11:47:46 pm

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #72 on: February 01, 2015, 01:49:20 am »
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   Quote from: sudgy on June 31, 2011, 11:47:46 pm

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #73 on: February 01, 2015, 10:31:56 am »
+2

Cosine?

Not since Ozle tricked me into giving him Power of Attorney.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #74 on: February 01, 2015, 01:18:48 pm »
+2

Cosine?

Not since Ozle tricked me into giving him Power of Attorney.
Is that one of the new cards in Adventures? :-)
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #75 on: February 02, 2015, 12:36:54 pm »
0

Cosine?

Not since Ozle tricked me into giving him Power of Attorney.
Is that one of the new cards in Adventures? :-)

Oh, rats.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #76 on: February 02, 2015, 05:16:03 pm »
+2

Cosine?

Not since Ozle tricked me into giving him Power of Attorney.
Is that one of the new cards in Adventures? :-)

Oh, rats.
No, that's the next expansion. Having a pile of 20 Rats in Dark Ages was so fun, they're going to release a box that is just 300 more copies. It's your choice whether to play with them as a single pile or to make an entire Kingdom out of them - either way, just wait until you play with them against Lord Bottington!
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #77 on: February 02, 2015, 11:07:20 pm »
+1

Cosine?

Not since Ozle tricked me into giving him Power of Attorney.
Is that one of the new cards in Adventures? :-)

Oh, rats.
No, that's the next expansion. Having a pile of 20 Rats in Dark Ages was so fun, they're going to release a box that is just 300 more copies. It's your choice whether to play with them as a single pile or to make an entire Kingdom out of them - either way, just wait until you play with them against Lord Bottington!

I thought the new expansion had a physical manifestation of Goko you could fight.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #78 on: February 03, 2015, 12:06:04 pm »
0

Maybe the next expansion has a Rat Catcher in it
Like a Pied Piper :D
« Last Edit: February 03, 2015, 12:49:00 pm by petegeo »
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #79 on: February 03, 2015, 02:49:42 pm »
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I love playing Rats if the proper combo presents itself on the Kingdom otherwise leave it alone because it will just eat up all your economy and other important cards.
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #80 on: February 03, 2015, 02:50:19 pm »
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Maybe the next expansion has a Rat Catcher in it
Like a Pied Piper :D

Are they making another expansion?
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« Reply #81 on: February 03, 2015, 03:00:37 pm »
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #82 on: February 03, 2015, 03:09:08 pm »
0

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Re: Rats?
« Reply #83 on: February 16, 2015, 09:04:12 pm »
+2

Here's a game in favor of jomini's position from e vs liopoil league match. e uses Rats to trash 6 Curses and makes his Ironmongers a better village so it pays off.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20150216/log.515f2508e4b09ee2d2aa5c19.1424138249293.txt

Hooray Rats!
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Re: Rats?
« Reply #84 on: February 16, 2015, 09:30:32 pm »
+1

Here's a game in favor of jomini's position from e vs liopoil league match. e uses Rats to trash 6 Curses and makes his Ironmongers a better village so it pays off.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20150216/log.515f2508e4b09ee2d2aa5c19.1424138249293.txt

Hooray Rats!
Meanwhile in my stream I was whining about how rats are bad and e will surely run out of purple soon and oh wait why did he just gain another one with armory and why am I not winning I opened 5/2 on a witch board.

Yeah, I got outplayed there. I passed on an engine thing because of my opening and shuffles, but that was a mistake.
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