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Author Topic: My first Chapel game  (Read 2931 times)

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vulturesrow

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My first Chapel game
« on: January 12, 2012, 01:22:15 am »
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Mostly interested in my use of Chapel in this game; good,bad, or other. Any other insight of course is both welcomed and appreciated, but I think Im going to be posting a lot in this forum so I dont want to be too annoying. ;)

A few random thoughts: I really dont have good reason as to why I went with Envoy; I thought I read somewhere that it comboed well with Chapel and thats about as far as I got. :) I was really unsure if I should buy some +action or something but I knew that the point of Chapel was to keep your deck lean so I just tried to adhere to that as much as possible. Ok, fire at will. :)

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201201/11/game-20120111-215655-9fdbc860.html

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ftl

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Re: My first Chapel game
« Reply #1 on: January 12, 2012, 01:37:45 am »
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Chapel is amazing for setting up engines and getting to draw cards together that go together.

Envoy is amazing for a really fast Big Money strategy - buy Envoy, then buy silvers and golds, maybe buy a second envoy in the late-game (after you have like 18 cards in your deck or so), then buy provinces.

They don't really go together that well. Envoy+Money is faster than Chapel+Envoy+Money. So in this case, I'd say the envoy buy was a good choice (envoy+money is really good) but the chapel wasn't a good buy - it's a very good card, but not for this purpose.

(BTW, I notice that on your turn 3, you either forgot or decided not to play the Envoy and spent 2 coppers to buy a pawn instead. Any particular reason? Or just new to the interface? That was also a mistake, IMO).

To summarize: Envoy-money was a good choice, chapel does not help single-card-draw+money strategies, and the pawn buy was definitely a mistake.
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jonts26

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Re: My first Chapel game
« Reply #2 on: January 12, 2012, 01:46:43 am »
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I think this game has decent potential for a fun little engine. Haggler + Festival and some cheap actions, pawn mostly, will let you get a good action density quickly. Chapel will help thin the deck of junk and envoy can be used for card draw. The thing is, engines like this can sometimes be a little difficult for beginners because there's just so many cards you can put into your engine. When do you buy what, you know?

I think it might be a decent exercise for you to solo this a few times to get a feel for building an engine out of a mish-mash of parts. Ultimately your goal should be to try to make it faster than the simple envoy/big money. And for reference envoy/BM nets 4 provinces in about 14 turns. If you can do that, you know you've built a viable engine.
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ftl

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Re: My first Chapel game
« Reply #3 on: January 12, 2012, 02:39:03 am »
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Yeah, that works here too. I think. Not straightforward though. BM+Envoy is friggin FAST.

I would suggest starting with simpler things for engine practice, if that's what you want.
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jonts26

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Re: My first Chapel game
« Reply #4 on: January 12, 2012, 02:48:24 am »
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BM/Envoy is fast but it's not THAT fast.

And I think the not-straightforwardness is sort of a plus here though in trying your hand at engine building. Anyone can play envoy/big money and play it, not optimally, but pretty good. Building an engine from spare parts is a skill that really needs experience to develop. This board has all the parts you need for a reliable engine in great supply. Trashing/Actions/Buys and a few other cards which can enhance it like expand/haggler. Honestly I think just playing this board a few times would be very instructive in engine building basics.
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ftl

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Re: My first Chapel game
« Reply #5 on: January 12, 2012, 03:03:22 am »
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Fair enough, might just be a difference in learning styles. I would probably suggest starting with a one-card thing like a Minion engine, then move up to something multi-card but obvious like Fishing Village-Torturer or [disappearing actions]-Library, and have something like festival-village-Envoy-Haggler-Expand be the last step.

I much prefer to learn things step by step rather than jumping in the deep end - I feel like if this board was my introduction to engines, I'd have done a million things wrong and then learned nothing from it, since when you do a million things wrong you have no idea whether you're making progress or not if you fix them one by one, or whether the changes you're making to your gameplan are even 'fixes' or not.

It's a good board to learn to build an engine from spare parts, but I feel like you should know how to build an engine from obvious parts before you go for the spare parts.
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jonts26

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Re: My first Chapel game
« Reply #6 on: January 12, 2012, 03:19:35 am »
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That's a fair point, too. Perhaps I forget what's it's like to be very new to dominion, I skip some of the building blocks. I will say this though. If you can create an engine on this board to beat big money/envoy, you'll be showing a good grasp on engine building.
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Mean Mr Mustard

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Re: My first Chapel game
« Reply #7 on: January 12, 2012, 05:40:59 am »
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In solitaire mode: <a href=http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201201/12/game-20120112-022552-4b5606a6.html>5/2</a> and <a href=http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201201/12/game-20120112-022914-47b3992a.html>4/3</a>

Chapel and Haggler are really strong here.  Chapel clears out the junk and Haggler replaces it with Golds or engine parts.  It starts to snowball pretty quickly.

To play Chapel well you have to do two things quickly that sort of conflict with each other: aggressively trash Coppers and Estates while building something better to replace them.  I feel that Silver is fine as a standard opening because you can safely and aggressively trash down to 2 Coppers and 2 Silvers in the deck and still be able to buy a Gold.  Not trashing Coppers early is a huge mistake.

I do not think that Envoy-bmu is king on this board.
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DG

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Re: My first Chapel game
« Reply #8 on: January 12, 2012, 09:54:32 am »
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The chapel principle is that you clear out the rubbish and replace it with the quality. The difficult part is often getting the quality quickly enough. Extra buys and card gaining are important. The haggler will do this for you since it gains a card every time you buy a card. The big win comes when the haggler buys a province and gains a gold.
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vulturesrow

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Re: My first Chapel game
« Reply #9 on: January 12, 2012, 10:54:57 am »
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Once again thanks for the replies, this is a really helpful bunch and I do appreciate it. I shouldve also pointed out that this was my first time ever playing with cards not in the base set. Some quick responses in no particular order:

I think this game has decent potential for a fun little engine. Haggler + Festival and some cheap actions, pawn mostly, will let you get a good action density quickly. Chapel will help thin the deck of junk and envoy can be used for card draw. The thing is, engines like this can sometimes be a little difficult for beginners because there's just so many cards you can put into your engine. When do you buy what, you know? I think it might be a decent exercise for you to solo this a few times to get a feel for building an engine out of a mish-mash of parts. Ultimately your goal should be to try to make it faster than the simple envoy/big money. And for reference envoy/BM nets 4 provinces in about 14 turns. If you can do that, you know you've built a viable engine.

That is pretty much what was going on in my head. I knew the elements were there for a good engine but putting all together with all those options was a bit of a bridge too far for me at that point.

(BTW, I notice that on your turn 3, you either forgot or decided not to play the Envoy and spent 2 coppers to buy a pawn instead. Any particular reason? Or just new to the interface? That was also a mistake, IMO). 

I think I actually misclicked there.  :-\


Again, thank you everyone!
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