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Author Topic: how much should this cost?  (Read 10169 times)

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eHalcyon

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Re: how much should this cost?
« Reply #25 on: August 19, 2012, 08:19:52 pm »
0

If the +$1 is so much better, how comes my card tested perfectly fine at $4?

Well, how much has it been tested and in whose opinion is it balanced?  You said that others think it is OP. :P
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Graystripe77

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Re: how much should this cost?
« Reply #26 on: August 19, 2012, 09:16:53 pm »
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If the +$1 is so much better, how comes my card tested perfectly fine at $4?

Well, how much has it been tested and in whose opinion is it balanced?  You said that others think it is OP. :P

It's my opinion it's balanced. I've tested it in about 35 games, some particularly selected to make it a good card. Honestly, it's not that great. Better than Smithy, but not that great.
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blueblimp

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Re: how much should this cost?
« Reply #27 on: August 19, 2012, 09:45:07 pm »
0

PS Wharf is a LOT better than merchant ship. Dunno how much of that is the buy.
Fairly easy to try out in the simulator (except that the bot won't be optimized anymore). Let's call Wharf-without-buy "Woof", and get WoofWW by replacing Wharf by Woof in WharfWW. Numbers are from a single Ultimate Simulation, which should be accurate to <1%.

Merchant Ship WWWoofWWWharfWW
Merchant Ship WW40% vs 48%27% vs 69%
WoofWW30% vs 64%
WharfWW
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Fangz

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Re: how much should this cost?
« Reply #28 on: August 20, 2012, 09:50:32 am »
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I think it's going to have to cost $4, and it would be on the upper end.  Coin is consistently valued more than cards.  Consider Wharf vs. Merchant Ship.  Wharf ended up getting +Buy, not MS.  Coins were more valuable.

This is indeed comparable to Smithy, and it would probably be the stronger option.

I think it's very dangerous to generalise as 'coins are more valuable than cards', or whatever. Firstly, pricing is not linear - a mix between two cards is not necessarily of intermediate value - it could be much better, or it could be much worse. Pricing should be considered in terms of what the impact this card might have on the game. A terminal gold needs to be pricy, because golds are important for getting more golds and $5s, and indeed provinces. A terminal copper, however, would be virtually worthless. In addition, the difference between $4 and $3 is generally not about which is 'better', but rather which is more dangerous to have en masse to start with.

Smithy has to be at $4, because tons of smithies at $3 will easily allow a player to chain them up and draw their entire deck. The increase from +2 cards to +3 cards is that big a deal. Without the possibility of the large chain, a smithy could easily be priced at $3 without changing its power substantially in a BM-Smithy strategy. Reducing the card draw even weakly like with courtyard drops the price all the way down to $2 (which admittedly is a bit underpriced). Consider also Stables, which compared to laboratory effectively forces you to trade usually a $1, sometimes more, for 1 additional card, at the risk of being a dead card in the hand. And yet Stables is usually a superior card to laboratory!

I think the proposed card would be reasonable at $3. What it actually is, to my mind, is basically one of the pawn options with an extra card. And that extra card is usually not going to let you chain up more cards, except in very rare cases. In BM type strategies it'll perform fairly equally at $3 and $4, I expect, and I don't think the increased ease of setting up an engine is going to make it too powerful at $3, so why make it especially difficult?
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WanderingWinder

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Re: how much should this cost?
« Reply #29 on: August 20, 2012, 09:59:31 am »
+2

So I want to chime in and agree that things are not linear. 1 card just replaces itself. 2 cards is basically netting you 1 card. 3 cards is essentially 100% better than 2 cards. 4 Cards is basically 200% better than 2, but only a 50% bump over 3. But you have to also realize that there's some difference as well. If I am drawing 6, this is hardly worse than 7 for BM, but still might be for an engine (though not much). If I draw 1001, this is never better than 1000, really, because you might as well just say to draw your deck.

And then you have to consider opportunity costs. Giving you cash money is less of an opportunity cost to big money than giving cards is. And perhaps more importantly, with terminals, you can actually buy a lot more terminals if they don't have big draw on them than you can if they do, because there's much less collision risk. And you also have to look at how pricing works. 5s don't need to be 5 because they are so much better than 4s, but because it is a lot easier to load up on 4s early in the game than it is to do with 5s. In the middle-game, there's almost no difference, you can get either one relatively at will.

So like, a terminal gold isn't OP at 4 because it's going to be better than smithy in, say, the late middlegame, but because it is too easy and good to buy 2-3 of them very quickly.

eHalcyon

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Re: how much should this cost?
« Reply #30 on: August 20, 2012, 11:04:26 am »
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I agree that it's not linear.  My original point was simply that official cards are generally priced such that coins are more valued than cards.
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rinkworks

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Re: how much should this cost?
« Reply #31 on: August 20, 2012, 12:38:27 pm »
0

If the +$1 is so much better, how comes my card tested perfectly fine at $4?

First of all, it's not "so" much better.  I believe my exact words were "sliiiightly better."

Second, most of the issue with your card, IIRC, was the +Buy.  +Buy often goes unused, and if it IS unused, then basically the functionality you got out of the card was way closer to balanced.  When you really need that +Buy, however, it's a different story, albeit probably not overly conspicuously so even then.

Second, while playtesting is the most important tool you've got for card pricing, it can be super deceptive.  Here's a recent post about a card it took me, quite literally, somewhere around 20 games before I realized that my first, second, and third impressions were incorrect.  For all I know I'm still wrong.  The difference with your card, though, is that it's a pure vanilla card with a plenitude of other vanilla cards to make comparisons with, so one can be more confident.

Third, the wrong price on a card isn't necessarily going to break the game, or if it does sometimes it will do that in really subtle ways.  Donald has said in the past that Throne Room works perfectly fine at $3, except that it became just a little too easy to stock up on them with extra buys.  I believe he's said similar things about Village, too.  Village is balanced at $2 -- in fact, it wouldn't break the game outright at $0 -- but the ease at which you can rush the stack with extra buys creates a less interesting game.

Where I'm going with this is that I think your card probably does usually create a roughly balanced game at $3 or $4 -- that is, it isn't game-warpingly strong just because getting copies of them are more accessible in the early-game -- but in situations where, say, rushing the pile is profitable (e.g., when Villages are plentiful) and in particular when you can use all the abilities of the card including its +Buy, then you may find you have a problem.  Because price DOES have ramifications in terms of (1) how fast can you build up an engine, and (2) functionality relative to the other vanilla cards in the game.

These two points are related, because the right combination of vanilla bonuses leads to an engine, and if your vanilla card doesn't fit with the price settings of the other vanilla cards, then you've got a gameplay imbalance relative to the other vanilla cards.  Of which there are plenty, all basically flawlessly costed in sync with one another.

Let's say you had a fan card called "Blacksmith."  It gives "+3 Cards" and that's it.  It costs $3.  Is it broken?  Probably not, actually.  It's obviously costed wrong, but on a great many boards it'll be perfectly fine.  On some, though, you'll notice it's just a little too easy to get that drawing engine up and running, and/or you'll notice it's just so much better than other $3 cards that you'll be buying it above other $3 cards way more often than its probably ideal for the game.  It'll still come down to a judgment call.  But that's not to say that one judgment isn't better than another.
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FishingVillage

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Re: how much should this cost?
« Reply #32 on: August 20, 2012, 02:52:01 pm »
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I think it's very dangerous to generalise as 'coins are more valuable than cards', or whatever.
I would think, in general, coin is indeed more valuable than cards (not something ridiculous like +$1 is always more useful than +20 Cards, but +$ is usually of higher priority than +Cards).

Ultimately players don't gain Provinces by reaching a specific hand size, they use cards that give coin (or else they do really weird things like playing 4 Highways and using Workshop to fetch one (but even Highways are giving coin value in some way)). Buying Silvers and Golds (and maybe whatever other Treasures or non-terminal coin sources are available) will increase the average coin value per card in your deck, but Smithies do not.

Players will eventually want Smithies, of course, to make better use of their deck as a whole instead of gambling on every new hand giving $8. I think though, a player would be far more doomed if he ignored Golds than if he ignored Smithies (and yes Gold is more expensive than Smithy, but one gives +$3, the other gives +3 Cards, I would think there's a good reason why one costs more than the other). I don't want to make it sound like I am endorsing BM as a foolproof strategy, just that having 100 cards in hand coming out to $7 somehow, is probably not as useful as a 3 card hand of Duchess and 2 Golds.

Now regarding Blacksmith... yeah I could probably see it as being pretty nice at $3, and maybe not as nice at $4. Early game without taking into account the card bought on the other starting turn, drawing 2 cards means you either get CC, or CE, or EE. Drawing CC makes Blacksmith better than Silver. Drawing CE makes it as good as a Silver and gets a dead card out of your next hand. Drawing EE mean you likely won't deal with them for your next hand and you have $4 anyway (due to a hand of CCCEB). It would be interesting if Blacksmith offered +$2 and +1 Card instead, that would probably be worth it at $4.

Also I am a self-professed village idiot, so I think I have some personal experience in understanding how +$ can be more valuable than +Cards =\
« Last Edit: August 20, 2012, 03:00:40 pm by FishingVillage »
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Fangz

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Re: how much should this cost?
« Reply #33 on: August 20, 2012, 03:47:07 pm »
+1

I think it's very dangerous to generalise as 'coins are more valuable than cards', or whatever.
I would think, in general, coin is indeed more valuable than cards (not something ridiculous like +$1 is always more useful than +20 Cards, but +$ is usually of higher priority than +Cards).

Ultimately players don't gain Provinces by reaching a specific hand size, they use cards that give coin (or else they do really weird things like playing 4 Highways and using Workshop to fetch one (but even Highways are giving coin value in some way)). Buying Silvers and Golds (and maybe whatever other Treasures or non-terminal coin sources are available) will increase the average coin value per card in your deck, but Smithies do not.

Players will eventually want Smithies, of course, to make better use of their deck as a whole instead of gambling on every new hand giving $8. I think though, a player would be far more doomed if he ignored Golds than if he ignored Smithies (and yes Gold is more expensive than Smithy, but one gives +$3, the other gives +3 Cards, I would think there's a good reason why one costs more than the other). I don't want to make it sound like I am endorsing BM as a foolproof strategy, just that having 100 cards in hand coming out to $7 somehow, is probably not as useful as a 3 card hand of Duchess and 2 Golds.

Now regarding Blacksmith... yeah I could probably see it as being pretty nice at $3, and maybe not as nice at $4. Early game without taking into account the card bought on the other starting turn, drawing 2 cards means you either get CC, or CE, or EE. Drawing CC makes Blacksmith better than Silver. Drawing CE makes it as good as a Silver and gets a dead card out of your next hand. Drawing EE mean you likely won't deal with them for your next hand and you have $4 anyway (due to a hand of CCCEB). It would be interesting if Blacksmith offered +$2 and +1 Card instead, that would probably be worth it at $4.

Also I am a self-professed village idiot, so I think I have some personal experience in understanding how +$ can be more valuable than +Cards =\

Again though, my point is that I oppose the general statement. You can't swap out a +1 card into a +$1 and say, oh, coin is better than cards, because that generalisation doesn't apply.

Comparing Golds to Smithies is just not enough. (let's not forget that Golds don't require actions to play, multiple golds in hand are awesome, while multiple smithies with no villages are terrible, etc.) You need to think about what roles this card is going to fit into, as a strategy. And in general, a +3 card drawer is going a enable a heck of a lot more strategies than a +2 card drawer, and that +$1 is going to seem like scant consolation a lot of the time because you failed to land the other half of the engine you were looking for or whatever and ended up with a lame-ass $7 hand. Just look at the whole array of cards out there that enable you to trash coppers (thus swapping a future copper for some other card), or which let you swap out a copper for another card (cellar, stable), and how cards which add coppers to your deck are effectively punishing you (Cache, Ill Gotten Gains, Mountebank, Ambassador). Blacksmith is basically a smithy combined with a feature that does the reverse - it turns out of the three cards you drew into a virtual copper. That's not very good.

As it's proposed, it just falls between two stools - it's not a power cash giver, because if you are reliant on that $1 to push you over the edge you'd be crazy. And it doesn't draw enough to easily enable chains of cards.
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FishingVillage

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Re: how much should this cost?
« Reply #34 on: August 20, 2012, 06:21:43 pm »
0

I think it's very dangerous to generalise as 'coins are more valuable than cards', or whatever.
I would think, in general, coin is indeed more valuable than cards (not something ridiculous like +$1 is always more useful than +20 Cards, but +$ is usually of higher priority than +Cards).

Ultimately players don't gain Provinces by reaching a specific hand size, they use cards that give coin (or else they do really weird things like playing 4 Highways and using Workshop to fetch one (but even Highways are giving coin value in some way)). Buying Silvers and Golds (and maybe whatever other Treasures or non-terminal coin sources are available) will increase the average coin value per card in your deck, but Smithies do not.

Players will eventually want Smithies, of course, to make better use of their deck as a whole instead of gambling on every new hand giving $8. I think though, a player would be far more doomed if he ignored Golds than if he ignored Smithies (and yes Gold is more expensive than Smithy, but one gives +$3, the other gives +3 Cards, I would think there's a good reason why one costs more than the other). I don't want to make it sound like I am endorsing BM as a foolproof strategy, just that having 100 cards in hand coming out to $7 somehow, is probably not as useful as a 3 card hand of Duchess and 2 Golds.

Now regarding Blacksmith... yeah I could probably see it as being pretty nice at $3, and maybe not as nice at $4. Early game without taking into account the card bought on the other starting turn, drawing 2 cards means you either get CC, or CE, or EE. Drawing CC makes Blacksmith better than Silver. Drawing CE makes it as good as a Silver and gets a dead card out of your next hand. Drawing EE mean you likely won't deal with them for your next hand and you have $4 anyway (due to a hand of CCCEB). It would be interesting if Blacksmith offered +$2 and +1 Card instead, that would probably be worth it at $4.

Also I am a self-professed village idiot, so I think I have some personal experience in understanding how +$ can be more valuable than +Cards =\

Again though, my point is that I oppose the general statement. You can't swap out a +1 card into a +$1 and say, oh, coin is better than cards, because that generalisation doesn't apply.

Comparing Golds to Smithies is just not enough. (let's not forget that Golds don't require actions to play, multiple golds in hand are awesome, while multiple smithies with no villages are terrible, etc.) You need to think about what roles this card is going to fit into, as a strategy. And in general, a +3 card drawer is going a enable a heck of a lot more strategies than a +2 card drawer, and that +$1 is going to seem like scant consolation a lot of the time because you failed to land the other half of the engine you were looking for or whatever and ended up with a lame-ass $7 hand. Just look at the whole array of cards out there that enable you to trash coppers (thus swapping a future copper for some other card), or which let you swap out a copper for another card (cellar, stable), and how cards which add coppers to your deck are effectively punishing you (Cache, Ill Gotten Gains, Mountebank, Ambassador). Blacksmith is basically a smithy combined with a feature that does the reverse - it turns out of the three cards you drew into a virtual copper. That's not very good.

As it's proposed, it just falls between two stools - it's not a power cash giver, because if you are reliant on that $1 to push you over the edge you'd be crazy. And it doesn't draw enough to easily enable chains of cards.
Hmm, well I admit in my analysis that Blacksmith is probably nice at $3 and maybe not right at $4. Having only 1 of something is usually not good enough. But swapping +2 Cards for +$2 from Smithy to Blacksmith would make it much stronger, and I would think that +1 Card, +$2 is good at $4 and better than the current iteration. Does this seem problematic? My only point was that, considering +$X vs +X Cards, +$X is probably better to have in almost any strategy, and so in general 'coins are more valuable than cards'. I'll admit this was a point that I made separately from the valuation of Blacksmith itself (which is why I quoted a very specific part of your post), so I'm sorry if I misunderstood or did not make my position clear.
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One Armed Man

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Re: how much should this cost?
« Reply #35 on: August 20, 2012, 06:33:39 pm »
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There is finally an effect that does this sort of thing. Mercenary, as weird as it is. I don't know what that tells us.
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zahlman

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Re: how much should this cost?
« Reply #36 on: August 20, 2012, 09:36:24 pm »
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Wharf BM actually enables Wharf + Silver, Gold + Silver, and occasionally Province + Silver turns fairly often.

But the bot will buy Province rather than Wharf+Silver or Gold+Silver, won't it?
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Mic Qsenoch

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Re: how much should this cost?
« Reply #37 on: August 20, 2012, 09:49:34 pm »
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Wharf BM actually enables Wharf + Silver, Gold + Silver, and occasionally Province + Silver turns fairly often.

But the bot will buy Province rather than Wharf+Silver or Gold+Silver, won't it?

Not necessarily. The bot posted earlier in the thread won't buy a Province unless your total treasure value (in deck) is greater than $16. So if you draw $8-9 early in the game then the bot might make a Wharf+Silver or Gold+Silver purchase. At least I think it will, I haven't really used the simulator much. I also can't speak to how often this actually comes up with those particular buy rules.

My comment was more a general note that the plus buy on Wharf can be useful even in big money games, not really about the simulators.
« Last Edit: August 20, 2012, 11:37:50 pm by Mic Qsenoch »
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