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[Mic Qsenoch]

I'm worried the next inevitable wall of text will swallow us all whole.

[werothegreat]

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.

[jomini]

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.

[popsofctown]

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.

[Seprix]

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.

[werothegreat]

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.

[Seprix]

Guys, Rats is bad. Let's agree and move on. :p

[TheExpressicist]

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.

[jaketheyak]

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...

[werothegreat]

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

[Seprix]

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.

[Awaclus]

I really wish I didn't make that thread.

Seprix reveals Copper.

[Seprix]

I really wish I didn't make that thread.

Seprix reveals Copper.

Seprix trashes his hand, and resigns.

[werothegreat]

I really wish I didn't make that thread.

Seprix reveals Copper.

Seprix trashes his hand, and resigns.

Seprix loses 50 billion gokopoints.

[Seprix]

I really wish I didn't make that thread.

Seprix reveals Copper.

Seprix trashes his hand, and resigns.

Seprix loses 50 billion gokopoints.

Ha! Goko is no longer Dominion Online's ruler! Now I have lost Making Fun Points instead.

[Awaclus]

Now I have lost Making Fun Points instead.

That's a fun point you made.

[Donald X.]

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.

[liopoil]

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

[Seprix]

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:

[pacovf]

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.

[AJD]

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.

[sudgy]

They can't all be the best bad card ever.

[sudgy]

Also, tangent

Cosine?

[qmech]

Cosine?

Not since Ozle tricked me into giving him Power of Attorney.

[Throwaway_bicycling]

Cosine?

Not since Ozle tricked me into giving him Power of Attorney.

Is that one of the new cards in Adventures? :-)