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[Flip5ide]

So I've noticed lately (actually for a very long time now) that there is a significant game-within-a-game aspect to Dominion. For example:

Player A is a higher-ranked player, lets say they have a 5200 rating compared to Player B's 4100. Player B is aware of this. Player A goes first. Player B buys the same cards as Player A did. Player A buys a couple Minions and a basket of other cards. Player B buys out the rest of the Minions and then buys a couple Provinces and a Duchy to take an early lead before his deck sputters out of coins. Player A buys a Province every few turns before a mega-turn where he buys out the Provinces and wins by 18.

Player A is a higher-ranked player, lets say they have a 5200 rating compared to Player B's 4100. Player B goes first, buying a Sea Hag. Player A subconsciously strays from what he would normally buy (a Sea Hag) because he: 1) doesn't want a mirror slog game, 2) believes that lower-ranked players make suboptimal decisions, 3) wants to find the witty back-door path to victory because he feels this would be a perfect time to take advantage of a weaker opponent and showcase his intuitive skills. Player B takes the safer, slow-and-steady route common to new players. Player A eventually arrives at the cusp of parabolic greening but by then he is too far behind and tries to buy Duchies, Estates, and Great Halls but it's too late. Player B gets a lucky $9 hand and buys the last Province, winning by 17.

These are two of the interesting mindsets that often give the weaker player the advantage (or disadvantage), depending on which player succumbs. My case in point: Is there a subconscious side to every Dominion game? And if so, does it make that much of a difference?

[AdamH]

Interesting thought. I can't say I've ever let this kind of stuff enter my mind while playing Dominion seriously to win. I'm joked about a metagme at a few times on video/stream, and there was one time that Qvist were making videos where I muted him to talk to the video just to make him think I had a Province hand and was observing PPR when I actually didn't, just in case it mattered to him. But I lost that game anyways and it didn't matter. I don't even think it would have affected his play.

OTOH, I have had people just mirror what I'm doing before, not even knowing why, but then beat me because they had better draws and won a key split or something. That's always fun. 

[Mic Qsenoch]

It seems like you are reading a lot more into those decisions than is probably there. I mean for the first example how would you know B isn't mimicking the opening because he thinks it's the best play rather than copying A because he's better? (I assume that was the intent of the example).

Unless you are watching a stream and somebody says "I'm going to do X" and then totally flips when he sees his opponent's choice I don't understand how any of these plays would be interpreted as a "game within the game." And even in the case I am describing above, your opponent's choices introduce new information in the framework of the regular game and this new information can and should impact your choices, but this doesn't make it metagaming.

There is a case where I might consider my opponent's overall level: deciding to resign or not. It's much easier to resign against a highly skilled opponent with confidence that they were going to play out their lead correctly. Against lower players there's a little more motivation to keep playing and see if they will mess it up. But this is pretty minor and my resignation choices are usually based more on mood than anything else.

[Kirian]

I can honestly say I have never taken my opponent's rating into account when making a decision in game.

[Beyond Awesome]

I have played games with a certain strategy in mind. One of the most common ones with me is build an engine first and get fool's golds later. I have played a couple of games where I get Fool's Golds mid-game and the opponent thought I was copying them. More often than not, I am just following my strategy. Sometimes, your draws though can make you change your strategy. Maybe you weren't planning a mirror, but your draws weren't what you hoped for and you end up mirroring anyway.

[Awaclus]

It is definitely a bad idea to believe that your opponent is worse than you and change your strategy accordingly. If he really is worse than you, you will beat him even when you just play normally. If you differ from the plays that would be optimal against a good player and it turns out that your opponent is actually not as bad as you thought, you've just dug your own grave. For this reason, tactics such as the Intimidation Province are just bad.

This applies to most games and not just Dominion, but interestingly enough, the reverse is true for Rock, Paper, Scissors.

[DG]

Let's take a situation where you're in a 3 player game against the goko bots, with council room + treasure looking like the bots strategy.
(1) Generally you don't want a mirror slog game. You will beat the bots in 80%+ of games but as soon as you play a mirror your chance goes down to about 33%, much less as third player. If you use council rooms yourself then the game only gets faster and even more random. An alternative strategy doesn't have to look very attractive to look better than the 33%.
(2) You can predict exactly how the bots will play.
(3) Playing a council room mirror isn't that much fun and you don't learn anything new. You might as well invest your personal time into trying something different and seeing how it fails.

[assemble_me]

It's always good to monitor what your opponent's doing. If you can think of the strategy he's playing, that's pretty good, because you can react accordingly. But then, a lesson I had to learn is that rating doesn't always mean that much. Even good playes will make suboptimal decisions and you don't want to copy their mistakes (except for very few players probably). On the other hand, players in mid-levels will easily overperform their rating here and there. Also, due to the Goko rating being that swingy, those ratings don't neccessarily determine who's better in general (winning/loosing streaks, inactivity...).
However, if I'm not confident about going for one of many possible strategies on the board and an opponent much better than me will go for a certain strategiy I might drag into his direction. Doing that blindly is still bad, though

[Flip5ide]

Let's take a situation where you're in a 3 player game against the goko bots, with council room + treasure looking like the bots strategy.
(1) Generally you don't want a mirror slog game. You will beat the bots in 80%+ of games but as soon as you play a mirror your chance goes down to about 33%, much less as third player. If you use council rooms yourself then the game only gets faster and even more random. An alternative strategy doesn't have to look very attractive to look better than the 33%.
(2) You can predict exactly how the bots will play.
(3) Playing a council room mirror isn't that much fun and you don't learn anything new. You might as well invest your personal time into trying something different and seeing how it fails.

I would argue (I don't have a simulator, these are just educated assumptions) your best chance against a hypothetical "perfect player" (practical comparison: veteran players with 5800+ rating) is to make the game as close to 50/50 as possible. We are assuming you are the underdog, of course. Best case scenarios/paths for accomplishing this?

a) Rush (gardens/IGG/etc.)
b) Big Money + X game
c) Mirror opening draw purchases and go from there, possibly detouring from your opponent, possibly not.
d) Other (Treasure Map, Urchin, etc.)

[WanderingWinder]

In my experience:

• A much stronger player is still going to outplay a weaker player even with a worse 'strategy' quite a bit of the time, so long as the 'worse strategy' isn't way, way worse (in which case, they would just play that better 'strategy'). Naturally assuming that [weak player] can play ANY strategy as well as [strong player] seems to be, well, a poor assumption. So I don't buy skipping Hag for that reason (there are lots of other reasons).
• Playing something wacky and experimental has more to do with your mood (and potentially how much importance you play in the match e.g. for a tournament, possibly if you are streaming or not) than the rating of your opponent.
• Mirroring opening buys to try to copy your opponent tends to be a really bad plan. At some point you can't, and then you don't know what they're doing as well as they do, and you do something pretty sub-optimal (or you do know what they're doing, in which case you're just playing a strategy, and not inherently mirroring them). You basically lock-in to playing a worse version of their strategy.
• As a stronger player, pretty much the only way I am 'taking advantage' of a weaker player's weakness is to just play the (normal) best game I can. Going out of my way means I am actually playing sub-optimally, which, more or less, is just worse. The only possible exception is that there are sometimes more swindle chances by heading for some weird scenario once I have already gotten way behind.

[enfynet]

Playing something wacky and experimental has more to do with your mood
 [...]
by heading for some weird scenario once I have already gotten way behind.

I'm pretty sure this is my strategy every time.

[pubby]

I've noticed that ratings often affect the pace of the game. If I were to play a game against a level 40 player the game might last 12 turns, but if I play the same kingdom against a level 5 opponent the game could last 16 turns. This doesn't mean I played the second game worse, but rather it made more sense to get into a dominant position and control the game to the end.

[werothegreat]

I've noticed that ratings often affect the pace of the game. If I were to play a game against a level 40 player the game might last 12 turns, but if I play the same kingdom against a level 5 opponent the game could last 16 turns. This doesn't mean I played the second game worse, but rather it made more sense to get into a dominant position and control the game to the end.

There's also an interesting correlation with turn speed; there's kind of an inverse bell curve effect going on.  The lower the level, the longer the player takes for their turn, because they're not quite sure what they're doing yet.  As the level increases, turn time decreases; they become more sure of what they're doing.  As level increases further still, turn time starts to increase again, as the players are now thoroughly thinking through everything they're doing, rather than just buying and playing cards willy-nilly.

[AdamH]

There comes a point in your Dominion career where in order to get better you have to start questioning top-level players. I started doing this maybe 6 months ago and I kinda wish I had started sooner, I think I might have gotten better at the game more quickly than I have been.

I'm at the height of my Dominion career now (25 on the leaderboard) and you should see the mistakes I make -- just this past weekend I missed a pretty embarrassing forced win in a league match and almost lost the game because of it -- I don't think it's practical to assume that the best people in the world never make mistakes.

At best you outplay the best people in the world (which makes you better at the game and feels REALLY good) and at worst you lose and you ask them why, and I don't know of any of them that wouldn't tell you their thoughts on why. Whether or not you believe them is something you have to decide but we aren't so competitive around here that we hold onto our advice so we don't give out advantages to people. No, we write articles and get +1s.

[enfynet]

I've noticed that ratings often affect the pace of the game. If I were to play a game against a level 40 player the game might last 12 turns, but if I play the same kingdom against a level 5 opponent the game could last 16 turns. This doesn't mean I played the second game worse, but rather it made more sense to get into a dominant position and control the game to the end.

There's also an interesting correlation with turn speed; there's kind of an inverse bell curve effect going on.  The lower the level, the longer the player takes for their turn, because they're not quite sure what they're doing yet.  As the level increases, turn time decreases; they become more sure of what they're doing.  As level increases further still, turn time starts to increase again, as the players are now thoroughly thinking through everything they're doing, rather than just buying and playing cards willy-nilly.

What does it mean if you lose to Bots by time-out?

[-Stef-]

There's also an interesting correlation with turn speed; there's kind of an inverse bell curve effect going on.  The lower the level, the longer the player takes for their turn, because they're not quite sure what they're doing yet.  As the level increases, turn time decreases; they become more sure of what they're doing.  As level increases further still, turn time starts to increase again, as the players are now thoroughly thinking through everything they're doing, rather than just buying and playing cards willy-nilly.

Although I see your point, just naming it turn speed is a bit of an oversimplification. When I watch other peoples streams I can both think "how can you not slow down and think about this?" and "just play the village and the smithy right now and then start wondering what to do". Some decisions that are complicated for some are very easy for others. And sometimes I see so many possibilities it hurts and someone else may just take one, not even noticing the possible alternatives.

[GeoLib]

I think the only time that this factors in is that if I see my opponent do something unexpected I stop and try to figure out why. If they're more highly rated I might spend longer or reevaluate my own analysis more.

[WanderingWinder]

There comes a point in your Dominion career where in order to get better you have to start questioning top-level players. I started doing this maybe 6 months ago and I kinda wish I had started sooner, I think I might have gotten better at the game more quickly than I have been.

I'm at the height of my Dominion career now (25 on the leaderboard) and you should see the mistakes I make -- just this past weekend I missed a pretty embarrassing forced win in a league match and almost lost the game because of it -- I don't think it's practical to assume that the best people in the world never make mistakes.

At best you outplay the best people in the world (which makes you better at the game and feels REALLY good) and at worst you lose and you ask them why, and I don't know of any of them that wouldn't tell you their thoughts on why. Whether or not you believe them is something you have to decide but we aren't so competitive around here that we hold onto our advice so we don't give out advantages to people. No, we write articles and get +1s.

In general, this should come pretty soon. As Mic often says, we don't know what we're doing - it's just that we tend to not know it a little bit better.

[dondon151]

No, we write articles and get +1s.

You mean, we repeat Dominion memes and get +1s.

[AdamH]

No, we write articles and get +1s.

You mean, we repeat Dominion memes and get +1s.

[popsofctown]

I think as a low-mid level player, blindly copying my opponent's strategy might sometimes be the best way to win the one particular game I'm playing in, but is not a good strategy for climbing ladder overall, because I will learn less and grow less as a player that way. 

The only time I will do it is in a tournament setting, where the significance of the outcome of the match dwarfs the game's impact on my overall growth as a player.

Even then, at least half the time I have a better shot if I play the game on my own terms.  Sometimes in tournaments against much better players I will see the other guy buy a card that doesn't make sense to me.  If I could figure out a rationale for it, I think I'd copy, but if I can't, I shouldn't.  I'm reminded of a chess tactic proverb I heard once that if a much better player offers you a material sacrifice, and you can't understand why, just take the material.  Work with the heuristics that you have and that you have a dominating control over like "losing a rook is bad" and "Don't buy Counting House in a Mountebankless Province game".


In fact, in an extreme case, if I had an hour to teach my little cousin Jon Jon how to 1v1 best of seven Stef for a million dollar prize, I don't think any plagiarism of any of Stef's ideas would be involved at all.  If I spent 5 minutes of that discussing what Stef might do, I'd point out that he needs trashing against cursers and not to choke onto Provinces and Duchies early if Stef is playing the long game, but I don't anticipate telling him to mimic Stef's play at all. 

[Flip5ide]

Work with the heuristics that you have and that you have a dominating control over like "losing a rook is bad" and "Don't buy Counting House in a Mountebankless Province game".

FTFY

[WanderingWinder]

Work with the heuristics that you have and that you have a dominating control over like "losing a rook is bad" and "Don't buy Counting House in a Mountebankless Province game".

FTFY

FTFY

[Flip5ide]

Work with the heuristics that you have and that you have a dominating control over like "losing a rook is bad" and "Don't buy Counting House in a Mountebankless Province game".

FTFY

FTFY

[Chris is me]

I definitely take my opponent's rating into account, but kind of backwards of what the OP talked about. If my opponent is of a good rank, particularly one higher than mine, and they do something I didn't expect or even think about, I immediately try to determine what about the kingdom I missed. This probably will change with experience.

I've noticed that ratings often affect the pace of the game. If I were to play a game against a level 40 player the game might last 12 turns, but if I play the same kingdom against a level 5 opponent the game could last 16 turns. This doesn't mean I played the second game worse, but rather it made more sense to get into a dominant position and control the game to the end.

There's also an interesting correlation with turn speed; there's kind of an inverse bell curve effect going on.  The lower the level, the longer the player takes for their turn, because they're not quite sure what they're doing yet.  As the level increases, turn time decreases; they become more sure of what they're doing.  As level increases further still, turn time starts to increase again, as the players are now thoroughly thinking through everything they're doing, rather than just buying and playing cards willy-nilly.

I've found this frustrating, as when I really need time to figure out a very complicated scenario over multiple turns, I sometimes get told I need to "learn to play faster"... I already did - I'm at the other part of the bell curve now!