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Author Topic: Delve: A Brief Overview  (Read 14711 times)

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Witherweaver

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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #25 on: July 06, 2016, 03:52:05 pm »
+2

This is just a brief overview; are you going to ... delve deep into this one later?
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Witherweaver

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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #26 on: July 06, 2016, 03:54:10 pm »
0

Small serious suggestion: start with the card text of Delve, because likely many people (at least myself) don't know what it does without looking it up.
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Seprix

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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #27 on: July 06, 2016, 04:38:48 pm »
0

Small serious suggestion: start with the card text of Delve, because likely many people (at least myself) don't know what it does without looking it up.

Done. I already know what all the cards do though.
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Witherweaver

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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #28 on: July 06, 2016, 04:41:34 pm »
+3

Small serious suggestion: start with the card text of Delve, because likely many people (at least myself) don't know what it does without looking it up.

Done. I already know what all the cards do though.

I assumed you weren't addressing the article to yourself, though.
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singletee

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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #29 on: July 06, 2016, 05:23:03 pm »
+3

Delve could be said to have several close relatives. Let's take a look at 2 of them.

Masterpiece: The most obvious one. Delve and Masterpiece can both give you a bunch of Silvers instantly with only one buy. The more money you pay, the more Silvers you get. Delve is a better deal up to about $6 or so, depending on whether you'd take free Copper. The biggest difference is that you can buy Delve with a leftover $2 for a small boost; Masterpiece requires a bigger investment.

Scouting Party: Both cost $2, and both give back a buy. But which do you want? In Big Money, the Silver is great at this cost, so you probably want that unless there is only a shuffle or two left. In an engine, get Scouting party if you need reliability, Delve if you need economy/payload.

Other "relatives" are Travelling Fair and Save. I may write a compare/contrast about them and Delve later. Or maybe someone else wants to.

Delve for double Silver in the opening will prove very useful where you want to open a $3 that does not give economy like Ambassador, Lookout, or Smugglers.

Seprix

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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #30 on: July 06, 2016, 07:07:17 pm »
0

Other "relatives" are Travelling Fair and Save. I may write a compare/contrast about them and Delve later. Or maybe someone else wants to.

Go for it. I was barely able to write this overview.
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Willvon

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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #31 on: July 18, 2016, 11:45:26 pm »
+1

Thanks so much. I found it to be very informative. We haven't played with it yet, but I look forward to testing it out.
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freact

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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #32 on: July 19, 2016, 01:45:21 am »
+2

Cool article. I found it quite surprising at first that buying the silver is actually better for your money density!

Had to double check it for myself. Assuming you buy silver every turn from the start, it's still better to go silver x3 than gold until you have a whopping 13 silvers in your deck! For anyone who is curious here's the check to see if you should buy gold:

if 2*m + 3 > 3 *n then buy gold
m is your decks total money. n is the number of cards in your deck.

Although, this only considers money density. I wonder if gold is still better to get spikier turns?
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Seprix

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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #33 on: July 19, 2016, 10:19:53 am »
0

Cool article. I found it quite surprising at first that buying the silver is actually better for your money density!

Had to double check it for myself. Assuming you buy silver every turn from the start, it's still better to go silver x3 than gold until you have a whopping 13 silvers in your deck! For anyone who is curious here's the check to see if you should buy gold:

if 2*m + 3 > 3 *n then buy gold
m is your decks total money. n is the number of cards in your deck.

Although, this only considers money density. I wonder if gold is still better to get spikier turns?

Gold can spike, but it is not as numerous and consistent. Having a hand of 4 Silvers gets easier when there are tons of Silvers in deck, whereas someone has to connect 2 Golds+Silver or 2 Golds+2 Copper or 1 Gold+3 Silver, etc.
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DG

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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #34 on: July 19, 2016, 11:28:07 am »
0

Although, this only considers money density. I wonder if gold is still better to get spikier turns?

Yes. A common problem with masterpiece is that you hit 7 income hands frequently.

If you have the option to buy 2 silvers this is equivalent in 'money density' to buying 1 copper and 1 gold. Buying just 1 gold is generally superior.
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Asper

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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #35 on: July 21, 2016, 09:07:09 pm »
+4

Fact fun: My first game with Delve also had Catapult and Feodum. Needless to say the Silver pile was emptied. Also i got to shoot huge tracts of land at my opponents, but that's beside the point.
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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #36 on: July 22, 2016, 04:28:41 pm »
+1

Although, this only considers money density. I wonder if gold is still better to get spikier turns?

Yes. A common problem with masterpiece is that you hit 7 income hands frequently.

If you have the option to buy 2 silvers this is equivalent in 'money density' to buying 1 copper and 1 gold. Buying just 1 gold is generally superior.

$7 is not as bad in a Masterpiece game as it is other BM style games.  In the building stage where you are overpaying, $7 nets you 4 Silver and 1 Masterpiece.  This is much better than Gold.  Once you reach the greening stage your deck will typically have an average density of around $1.5/card.  That is practically a Province every other turn.  And with a deck that takes 6-7 hands before reshuffling, that's 3-4 Provinces with 3-4 Duchies before you start with a more diluted deck.  Even if you have to settle for more Duchies because of unfortunate $7's you at least have a deck that is more capable of spiking future Province buys.

I know people don't like BM strategies and I agree.  It's just my opinion that Masterpiece/BM really is the core BM strategy much more so than Smithy/BM.  People don't give enough credit for how Masterpiece fundamentally makes the best possible BM strategy. 

I haven't done the sims to back this up, but I would wager that given optimal strategies, BM/Masterpiece/X will beat BM/X for any kingdom card X.
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traces Around

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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #37 on: July 22, 2016, 05:00:21 pm »
+2

I haven't done the sims to back this up, but I would wager that given optimal strategies, BM/Masterpiece/X will beat BM/X for any kingdom card X.

Easy cases where this isn't true: discard attacks (excluding Margrave), Fool's Gold. Reasons are pretty obvious and the simulator backs both up.

But yeah, Masterpiece is very good for money strategies - like, improvement by 3-12 percent in any other case just buying Masterpiece on 7 with no other optimization. Faster strategies and other silver flood strategies naturally are not affected as much.

Having said that, Delve tends to be better than Masterpiece in these strategies based on what I have seen with the simulator so far - speed is very important in money strategies and Delve is just plain faster.

arcee

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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #38 on: August 28, 2016, 04:56:42 pm »
+1

Envoy/Delve seemed pretty beastly - had it come up alongside Baker in a multiplayer game, with Tower as a landmark (+1 VP per card from an empty pile).  So open Envoy and double-silver, flood like mad, pick up envoys due to bloated silver deck, etc.
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Re: Delve: A Brief Overview
« Reply #39 on: August 28, 2016, 08:22:28 pm »
+1

No comments. Is it that bad?

I think it may be too early for Empires articles. In the article itself, you explicitly make a "bold prediction" based on limited playing time.   That's basis for discussion, not a full-fledged article. As it is, maybe the lack of comments is because people don't feel they're familiar enough to point at stuff to say that it's wrong or they agree, because they have yet to form an opinion.

As someone who hasn't played with Empires yet, I actually think early is when these articles are the most useful. Later a lot of people will be able to figure this out on their own. But now you already know a lot about this card (assuming you read the whole article). Before you first game. Also, this isn't such a complex card, I don't think a terrible amount of experience is necessary to write something like this, just some. Great work though, Seprix!
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This is exactly the kind of deep analysis I come to f.ds for. 

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