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[RisingJaguar]

Objective
So the point of this will be to make decisions and evaluate the mid-game.  Often we will have a certain goal/deck in mind but circumstances will change (opponent's strategy, shuffle luck, etc.) that we need to change our goal/deck as well.  I will leave you some information up to a certain point and hope to hear your suggestions on:
1. What the players are trying to do
2. How the players should react
3. If there are ways to set up multiple options:

Board Analysis
The board: Caravan, Embargo, Gardens, Ghost Ship, Golem, Horn of Plenty, Militia, Potion, Remodel, Salvager, and Transmute
This was a game between me and Qmech (a preeetty good player)
At first glance, there is not enough for an engine to be created, no + actions (Golem could count but there's only one cantrip).  All the other cards aren't very good at BM aside from militia and ghost ship at BM.   $5s aren't that special except ghost ship might come into play. 

Deck composition - After Turn 8
Qmech: 2 Gold, 3 Caravan, 1 Militia, 2 Silver, 3 Estate, 7 Copper
Grabbing what you would expect him to at every stage, Gold 6+, Caravan at 4+ and silvers at 3... probably could have gotten a second militia but seems about the same either way.  We can safely tag this player so far as BM militia.  The other deck ended up looking like this after 8 turns (one turn away from hitting reshuffle). 

RJ: 4 Horn of Plenty, 2 Militia, 3 Silver, 0 Embargo, 3 Estate, 7 Copper
RJ opens up with 4 Horn of plentys.  FOUR! What do people do with horn of plenty without an engine to get provinces? He uses one of the HoP early to gain an embargo, to embargo the embargo! 

What could RJ be attempting to set up, and how should Qmech be attempting to stop whatever he is trying to set up? Is there anyway for RJ to slow down Qmech? 

If there is any other information you'd like about this game just post it below and I'll add it

PS.  Hopefully I can do this quite often but I do get busy here and there. 

Edit: http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120629-133429-f5c60e1a.html

[yuma]

Gardens look potentially fun

[shark_bait]

Hmmmm... RJ needs to gain and play a shit ton of Embargos on Province in order to dramatically slow down qmech.  This will allow time for the HOP to gain lots o silver making gardens viable  On the other hand, qmech needs to pick up 2 or 3 Provinces before they get enveloped in curses and then use Salvager/Remodel to end the game ASAP. 

[RisingJaguar]

Hmmmm... RJ needs to gain and play a shit ton of Embargos on Province in order to dramatically slow down qmech.  This will allow time for the HOP to gain lots o silver making gardens viable  On the other hand, qmech needs to pick up 2 or 3 Provinces before they get enveloped in curses and then use Salvager/Remodel to end the game ASAP.

No need to include the spoiler tags on here because I want to encourage posters to share their thoughts.  Btw, Salvager doesn't work in that speeding up the game process.  Also RJ has already embargoed the embargoes so it won't be easy to get access to those. 

[RisingJaguar]

I specifically chose this game because often mid-game decisions come from BM games with Alt-VPs as well as embargo possibility.  Nothing worse than to have a strategy ready that is one-card dependent (alchemist)

[zahlman]

RJ could grab the rest of the HoPs aiming to gain Duchies with them, while counting on qmech continuing to pick up Caravans, for a three-pile rush? Though he'd probably need to pick up a few of them himself... Transmute could be used for Caravan->Duchy, too. RJ already has 2:1 Militia, but decks could easily get big enough to justify buying a third. Salvager is also useful for ending on piles since it can basically be used as "discard a card from your hand, trash a copy of that card from the Supply".

Another weird thought I had was RJ might deliberately pick up Embargoed Embargoes, then Remodel the Curses into more Embargoes, then Transmute all the Embargoes into Duchies... o_O But in the rare cases where you do want to three-pile ASAP and it's worth taking 10 Curses to do so, I'd think Embargoing the Curses would be much faster.

[shark_bait]

Hmmmm... RJ needs to gain and play a shit ton of Embargos on Province in order to dramatically slow down qmech.  This will allow time for the HOP to gain lots o silver making gardens viable  On the other hand, qmech needs to pick up 2 or 3 Provinces before they get enveloped in curses and then use Salvager/Remodel to end the game ASAP.

No need to include the spoiler tags on here because I want to encourage posters to share their thoughts.  Btw, Salvager doesn't work in that speeding up the game process.  Also RJ has already embargoed the embargoes so it won't be easy to get access to those. 

We're at different points when viewing game speed.  I see his deck as fast!  He's got province buying power up the wazoo.  Your deck is clearly in it for the long haul with your 4 HOP and no megaturn chance.  By speeding up the game, I want to see him use Remodel or Salvager to trash anything and everything to pile drive the Province pile regardless of whether they are Golds, Caravans or even other Provinces.  He needs to end the game before you can get super Gardens.

Another note, HOP gains, therefore not picking up any curses with it.

[eHalcyon]

Yeah, I upvoted shark_bait's answer, but before I saw it I was going to post:

HoP to gain Embargoes.  Embargo EVERYTHING.  HoP to gain EVERYTHING.  Win.

Though probably you mainly want to embargo Province, Duchy and HoP multiple times, and then HoP it up.

[RisingJaguar]

Hmmmm... RJ needs to gain and play a shit ton of Embargos on Province in order to dramatically slow down qmech.  This will allow time for the HOP to gain lots o silver making gardens viable  On the other hand, qmech needs to pick up 2 or 3 Provinces before they get enveloped in curses and then use Salvager/Remodel to end the game ASAP.

No need to include the spoiler tags on here because I want to encourage posters to share their thoughts.  Btw, Salvager doesn't work in that speeding up the game process.  Also RJ has already embargoed the embargoes so it won't be easy to get access to those. 

We're at different points when viewing game speed.  I see his deck as fast!  He's got province buying power up the wazoo.  Your deck is clearly in it for the long haul with your 4 HOP and no megaturn chance.  By speeding up the game, I want to see him use Remodel or Salvager to trash anything and everything to pile drive the Province pile regardless of whether they are Golds, Caravans or even other Provinces.  He needs to end the game before you can get super Gardens.

Another note, HOP gains, therefore not picking up any curses with it.

Oh I totally understood the salvager speeds up game process except remodel goes around the embargo, salvager does not. 

[lespeutere]

This looks generally like a pretty interesting thing, I'd really appreciate you following up with those if you can.

I'm a little curious, however, how this fits to the topic of midgame decisions since at the moment we're trying to figure out RJ's initial strategy (which I'm totally lost at, to be honest), right (apart from the questions how to slow Qmech down or how Qmech can speed it up, respectively)?

The only thing I can see to slow Qmech down would be ghost ship which RJ'd need to play with Golems but setting this up takes some time, as he'd need to buy a potion and (a) ghost ship(s) and (a) golem(s). In the meantime he could grab some caravans with HoP (IF he plays, militia/copper/silver/HoP) to put in some +actions for golem. Another problem is, he can't gain golems with HoP which would be desirable IF he wanted to follow this golem/caravan/ghost ship path.
I'm not very convinced of this way since it would've been more promising to build it up from the beginning and then adding some HoP to it, imho.

For Qmech, I guess I'm with shark_bait, salvaging to speed province piling up to prevent RJ from anything he's planning.

Which I'm sure he is but I don't have any sensible idea. I'm really tempted to look this one up on CR (haven't, though).

[Ozle]

I dont think there is time to embargo everything?
I assume RJ is going gardens with the odd embargo along the way

Militia c c hop is enough to get you two ardens per turn, and then embargoswhen you have less on the provs

[RisingJaguar]

Okay below you can investigate the log yourself to see what both of us did! I'm too lazy to come up with all the details right now.  One thing I do realize now (I realized it late in this game), that I could have used HoPs to gain embargos and stop the province madness (say on T9). 

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120629-133429-f5c60e1a.html

To clarify why I dubbed this mid-game decisions is because we are at a point in the game where one player (Qmech) has played the game that he expected to play, BM-Militia because its probably optimal.  You would also expect your opponent to play that as well but clearly has chosen a different route with HoPs.  Now the question is, do you continue with your same route? Totally sack your game plan? or modify it a bit (and of course how much)?  The same question can also be posed to RJ who now that he has seen the gameplan, how can he adjust his game to it. 

Part of this is to know what happened previous to what occurred.  For example, I would suspect one should be able to figure out what RJ is trying to do by turn 4 after his second HoP.  Qmech could have purchased an embargo then but chose to go on with his plan.  The important thing is to analyze the opponent's gameplay (usually their purchase options although unplayed cards may also be included) to see what their strategy may be and to react to it. 

[DrFlux]

Yes this is quite interesting. I guess the take away is that its important to be flexible and respond to your opponent. At your second HoP buy, he should have considered embargoing gardens, and he probably should have bought a remodel or two to get around the possibility of you embargoing the provinces. I think him going for gardens so early was a mistake, the game is going to go longer than he thought, so I would have bought another gold turn 12 (being in QM's shoes).

Just my 2 cents.