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Beyond Awesome

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #175 on: January 14, 2013, 08:03:31 pm »
+3

As others have touched upon before, I think the biggest culprit is not the kingdoms but lack of good matchmaking. Onigame, I think you should really suggest to Goko to have a good matchmaking system, and I am going to reiterate basically what everyone else said. Already, I have played over 1000 games on Goko. There are more "casual" or "newbie" players on there than iso. I have played some players who rage-quit or who were rather pissed off by my play style. I have had a few Village/Torturer pin games, HoP engines with long turns, and ditto for KC engines. In all these games, a lot of the more casual players were frustrated. Here I was doing a million things in one turn and winning while they were just getting a hang of the cards.

So, priority number 1 needs to be better match-making on Goko!

Number 2, another forum member here touched upon the rulebook needing to be revamped. I agree. Last night, I clicked through the current rules on Goko, and damn are they a mess. It needs to be more accessible and user friendly if Dominion is remotely going to reach the popularity of Farmville. And, this should be another top priorty for Goko. And, hey, guess what, I would love it if Dominion reached even half the success of Farmville. I think if Goko were to post on this forum saying they needed some help with a couple of things like an improved online rulebook, you would have people pitch-in. Again, I think this is very important.

Number 3, I get where you are going with your balanced sets. I have actually played a couple now, and ironically, they are a bit boring and usually lend towards a big money strategic which is quite ironic. The thing is, your kingdoms don't often have the card draw for an engine. Sometimes a certain attack dominates, but that's about it. So, at this point, at least, your randomizer does not achieve what you hopped it would. But, I agree that casual players need something a little more "fun" as you put it. I am not sure how best to go about it. I think a good idea is to allow choosing which expansions get selected for games. People can do this in real life and so they should also have that option in real life. I also think options like no attacks or no cursing attacks or always have an attack should be an option under an advance settings option. Some other options might be always include an engine, always include a card that draws +2, etc. Obviously, this would need to be in an advance option menu, but I think you will find many casual players who appreciate having the option of turning attacks on or off.

Anyway, I hope these suggestions have been helpful and you pass this information along to Goko. Thanks.
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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #176 on: January 14, 2013, 08:30:15 pm »
+1

So, I now have an option for generating Uniform sets!  It's inspired by an idea from Donald.  Here's a simplified example to show how it works:

Take the 25 Randomizer cards, and separate it into piles X and Y this way:
(1) Use my set generator and put a randomizer card into pile X.
(2) Use my set generator and put a randomizer card into pile Y.
(3) Go to step 1.

Eventually you'll be out of randomizer cards, and pile X will have 13 cards and pile Y will have 12 cards.
Choose one of those piles randomly, and choose 10 cards from that pile at random.

The result should be something that comes kinda close to my default settings but makes each card almost* equally likely to show up.

I've also implemented this on the stats page.  What is somewhat surprising is the amount of variance even with what seems to be a lot of runs.  For example, I just ran the Uniform generator 100 times on Hinterlands, and here are the top 3 and bottom 3:
Border Village    52    52%    135.2%
Tunnel    46    46%    119.6%
Duchess    42    42%    109.2%
Oracle    34    34%    88.4%
Embassy    33    33%    85.8%
Jack of all Trades    33    33%    85.8%



Run it another time and here are the top 3 and bottom 3:
Develop    45    45%    117%
Tunnel    44    44%    114.4%
Scheme    43    43%    111.8%
Border Village    34    34%    88.4%
Mandarin    33    33%    85.8%
Spice Merchant    32    32%    83.2%

In comparison, here's the same for the non-uniform generator:
Highway    68    68%    176.8%
Stables    65    65%    169%
Border Village    63    63%    163.8%
Silk Road    24    24%    62.4%
Oasis    21    21%    54.6%
Oracle    20    20%    52%

What I'm learning from that is that how my intuition matches margins of error are surprisingly poor.  If you had just shown me the first set of results, I'd totally be thinking that "Gosh, Border Village at 135.2% is totally unacceptable."  But a second run and now Border Village is in the bottom 3.  This suggests to me that, even with my generator on default (non-uniform settings), you'd probably need around 50 games or so before really detecting a difference outside the margin of error.

Another caveat for the Uniform generator is that if you have biased settings in the Attribute section you won't get the full effect.  For example, say you own all the expansions but you want a set that "has at least 5 Prosperity cards."  Well, the Uniform generator is generating 18 different sets (since you have 189 Randomizers), but there are only 25 Prosperity cards.  Each of those sets will be trying to get 5 Prosperity cards, and what will happen is that each set will end up with 1 or 2 of them.  Since you only get one of those 18 sets, you'll have only 1 or 2 Prosperity cards.

In other words, "I want at least 5 Prosperity cards" is incompatible with "I want each card to be equally likely to show up", and I gotta choose one of those to prioritize.  "Equally likely to show up" is a global constraint, so it wins.

*The reason each card isn't exactly equally likely to show up is because X and Y are of different sizes.  Imagine that my basic set picker was so biased it always chose Festival first when it can.  Then Festival is going to always be in set X, which means Festival is actually less likely to show up (because it's always competing against 12 other cards in set X for 10 spots, as opposed to competing against 11 other cards in set Y).

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Beyond Awesome

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #177 on: January 14, 2013, 09:43:08 pm »
+2

Another thought I have is to have a lobby marked for pro play and another for casual. Casual can be the default lobby, but then players who want to play pro games can go to the pro lobby. Aside from better matchmaking, this should also prevent more casual players from getting paired up with more experienced players.
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DStu

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #178 on: January 15, 2013, 01:53:49 am »
+1

What I'm learning from that is that how my intuition matches margins of error are surprisingly poor.  If you had just shown me the first set of results, I'd totally be thinking that "Gosh, Border Village at 135.2% is totally unacceptable."  But a second run and now Border Village is in the bottom 3.  This suggests to me that, even with my generator on default (non-uniform settings), you'd probably need around 50 games or so before really detecting a difference outside the margin of error.
The effect that happens here is that, while after 100 samples you expect one variable to be quite close to it's average, you are not only interested in one variable, but in 25.   And having (at least) 1 variable out of 25 off its average is about 25 times as likely (at least as long as the probability of this event is small, which is what you are aiming for) than having 1 variable escaping.

Slightly relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/882/


To your alogorithm:  I don't see by what method you put which randomizer cards in piles X/Y.  Also randomly?  If deterministicly, you have the problem that cards that are in X never show up with cards in Y.  If everything happens uniform at random, this should also be perfectly uniform.  A quite complicated method to uniformly draw 10 out of 25, but I haven't followed the thread close enough, I suppose there is a reason why you just don't draw 10 out of 25, but instead preprocess to draw 10 out of  13/12
« Last Edit: January 15, 2013, 12:03:28 pm by DStu »
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hsiale

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #179 on: January 15, 2013, 02:03:34 am »
0

I got better at making sets after Intrigue. I can believe that people playing the base set by itself might feel like it needs something. There are some duds, and those duds reduce strategic options. The base set has done great anyway, but you know, there's room for improvement.
Why not use this room? Doing 2-3 changes to the Goko base set (taking out duds, adding a better but still simple card from another set which would both improve the base and preview later sets, maybe adding one new card if you can talk Jay into releasing it as a promo for people playing with RL cards). If Goko really succeeds, then the clear majority of Dominion players in the world have not seen the game yet, it's not too late for small changes if they're going to improve the experience a lot.
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charlequin

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #180 on: January 15, 2013, 02:52:10 am »
0

Why not use this room? Doing 2-3 changes to the Goko base set (taking out duds, adding a better but still simple card from another set which would both improve the base and preview later sets, maybe adding one new card if you can talk Jay into releasing it as a promo for people playing with RL cards).

I quite liked the idea of printing Dungeon as a promo and adding it to the "base set" going forward, myself.
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #181 on: January 15, 2013, 06:17:28 am »
0

So, I now have an option for generating Uniform sets!  It's inspired by an idea from Donald.  Here's a simplified example to show how it works:
Sweet.

In other words, "I want at least 5 Prosperity cards" is incompatible with "I want each card to be equally likely to show up", and I gotta choose one of those to prioritize.  "Equally likely to show up" is a global constraint, so it wins.
Well obv. you could manage this if you wanted.

Pick 5 Prosperity cards using your algorithm, as if Prosperity were the only set available. You have 25 and make two lists but stop at 5 cards. Pick one of those lists of 5 cards. Now there are 164 cards left for the remaining 5 slots, so start 32 lists of 10, and fill the first 5 slots of each with the Prosperity cards selected. Now finish the algorithm on these 32 lists, then pick one.
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #182 on: January 15, 2013, 06:22:58 am »
0

To your alogorithm:  I don't see by what method you put which randomizer cards in piles X/Y.  Also randomly?  If deterministicly, you have the problem that cards that are in X never show up with cards in Y.  If everything happens uniform at random, this should also be perfectly uniform.  A quite complicated method to uniformly draw 10 out of 25, but I haven't followed the thread close enough, I suppose there is a reason why you just don't draw 10 out of 25, but instead preprocess to draw 10 out of  13/12
The method for putting cards into piles is the old method - all cards are weighted by what they do, so that a set of 10 is more likely to get a village if it doesn't have one yet and less likely if it does, and so on. So with this new algorithm you get some amount of the old idea of "sets are more fun with a village" but with much less "so every set has Bandit Camp."

Quote from: Donald X.
Divide the number of cards the player owns by 10. Prepare to generate that many sets-of-10. Pick a random starting card for each one. Now go through and pick a 2nd card for each set out of the cards remaining, using your existing algorithm. Then pick a 3rd card for each set out of the cards remaining, etc. Eventually you will have used every card, while doing a certain amount to increase the chance of "fun" via how the cards are grouped. Now just pick one of the generated sets at random and there you go. You can use the other generated sets later or not.

If the number of cards they own isn't a multiple of 10, then for perfect results we would have to generate ten times as many sets, using ten copies of each card but of course not allowing duplicates in a set. There is a chance that you will end up with a duplicate left at the end - the card that has to go in this slot is already in this set. I don't know how common that would be, but there are things you can do there, depending on how much work you want to do vs. how much you care about a small amount of compromising card frequency or fun.
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DStu

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #183 on: January 15, 2013, 06:32:12 am »
+1

Quote from: Donald X.
Thanks for the hint, at least I now know what the goal is...

Edit: So if I understand the algorithm correctly, it should get nearly what you want.  You chose a pile at random and 10 cards from this pile at random. Assuming both piles have equally many cards, this would give you each card equally likely, no matter by what method you fill pile X and Y.

Now X has 1 more card than Y, and if there are some cards that happen to have preference to be in X over Y (depends on how exactly the algorithm work, may as well happen), but I don't think that is a big problem, a card from pile X has probability 5/13 to be in a set and a card in pile Y 5/12, which is 38,3% vs 41,6% while you ideally want 40%. Seems close enough. [Edit: Even if you have cards that always end up in X or some that always end up in Y, which is probably not even the case]

Alternatively, for perfection, just take pile X with probabiility 13/25 and pile Y with probability 12/25, in which case you get 40% for everyone.
« Last Edit: January 15, 2013, 06:42:23 am by DStu »
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #184 on: January 15, 2013, 07:19:53 am »
+3

I got better at making sets after Intrigue. I can believe that people playing the base set by itself might feel like it needs something. There are some duds, and those duds reduce strategic options. The base set has done great anyway, but you know, there's room for improvement.
Why not use this room? Doing 2-3 changes to the Goko base set (taking out duds, adding a better but still simple card from another set which would both improve the base and preview later sets, maybe adding one new card if you can talk Jay into releasing it as a promo for people playing with RL cards). If Goko really succeeds, then the clear majority of Dominion players in the world have not seen the game yet, it's not too late for small changes if they're going to improve the experience a lot.
I am trying to think of how to approach this without having any issues. I don't want to try to sell people overlapping products. I am not sold on the idea that Goko's audience will exceed Dominion's; it's nice to aim high though. Currently I think most people just buy everything, so any re-sorting of cards wouldn't make a difference there anyway; what you want is a veto list.

Anyway let's say we want a better introductory set. We can probably do better than the main set with a few swaps, but there's the overlap issue, so let's say, we just merge the main set and Intrigue into one set. To increase variety we'll make it larger - there are 50 cards so let's say we take 40 of them. The remaining 10 cards can go into a Leftovers product that people can ignore, although many will end up with it via buying everything.

I am not sure this plan is so great. Mostly I've just eliminated Intrigue as a product. When you're a new player, you only play pure main set if you start the game yourself or play the main set campaign. The main set campaign in the future will sprinkle in cards from Intrigue/Seaside/Prosperity to spice it up a little; it could go further in that direction although man I don't want to work on it more.

I am not thrilled with the idea of a boring promo irl so that it can be in the main set on Goko. The needs of a promo do not match the needs of a main set.

If we just stick in a few Goko-only cards then I think some of our current actual customers would be pissed.

The main set irl could be changed. Then it couldn't have the SdJ logo though. That's never going to be compelling. It also has an overlap problem. Let's say it has 5 new cards. You already own everything and feel like you have to buy a full large set to get the 5 new cards. You hate us. We need the 5 cards to be available as a separate product. It's not a good number of cards for a product. Let's say there are 12 new cards and we can sell them as a separate product. That separate product looks weird. It's these random simple redundant cards. It's not trivial to make 12 new worthwhile main set cards either; I do not have leftover simple cards worth making. Some people long for Dungeon but well 1) it's redundant, and 2) where are your other 11.

Let's say we just sprinkle in cards from expansions; to make expansions not look awful due to overlap we only take one from each large one. We take out 5 duds for a card each from Intrigue, Seaside, Prosperity, Hinterlands, Dark Ages, avoiding stuff like duration cards in favor of straightforward but interesting things. Online we already have just such a sampler for people with that card you scan in; you still have the duds but well have I mentioned that a veto list would be nice? IRL well like I said, no SdJ logo. It sounds okay otherwise. We could also ditch the Copper randomizer etc. and have 26 cards, dropping 4 for the new 5. Online there's no logo, but we can't just give that 5-card sampler to everyone because then it's like "ha ha you got that card to scan in for nothing." Let's say online there's a different 5-card sampler we just give away. We don't want to take out those 4-5 duds though, this would disappoint people who actually know the physical game, which I still think is most people. I am not thrilled with a 5-card Leftovers set. Again a veto list does the trick.

And again the main set campaign can just include non-main-set cards, that seems like the big trick. If I am a new player, probably I go straight to the campaigns. Those levels can include Chancellor less often and throw a Nobles at you somewhere. If I go to the multiplayer lobby then probably I join someone else's game and see all sorts of non-main-set things. Anyway I think improving the main set campaign is as good as it gets online.

For a better starting experience IRL, probably there are two things you can do. You can package the main set with a small expansion, although now your product is more expensive and maybe that's just self-defeating. Or you can do a retheme like the Hobby Japan ones; you lose the logo and totally overlap but kind of sort of deal with it by having new art.
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serakfalcon

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #185 on: January 15, 2013, 12:01:38 pm »
0

Two quick comments:
Dominion, is first and foremost, a card game. It is highly unlikely that the amount of people that know how to play dominion and/or have purchased dominion online will ever surpass the amount of people who know it and/or play it regularly IRL. However, what you may see, is that people who may not own dominion, but play it with friends, or dominion fans, will add to their addiction by playing online as well. A good implementation will attract more casual gamers, but I think the internet is full with plenty of fun computer games that aren't pretending to be card games, so chances are people will find Goko Dominion because they are already know about Dominion, and more casual people will stick around then they do on iso, on account of it being easier to use. (and more possible for them to win, b/c of the bots)

I have a feeling that if someone is trying to specify 5 Prosperity cards, that they would be a little confused at only getting 1 or 2. Of course at that point, they are screwing with probability, chances are, they want to. In that case, rather than a flat average, it should be, a flat average given the constraints. So, there should be no particular prosperity card favored in the 5, and no particular non-prosperity card favored in the other 5. Tools need to be straightforward: Gimme 5 Prosperity shouldn't give me 2 prosperity!

As a note on new players:
I usually do like to introduce new players to the variety of Dominion right away, so that they can get an idea of what the game is all about. So, I do draw randomly from all the sets I have available, with three caveats:
1. I take out game killer cards, that are easy to run away with the game if you know what you're doing. This is mostly to prevent temptation to myself. For example, fool's gold, goons, (especially if there is a village), possession, tournament. For some reason people are pretty good at figuring out the value of KC or Throne Room, so I usually can leave those in.
2. I try to make it a little bit of a learning experience, so if I see that a certain type of winning strategy is more possible, I'll swap out cards to make it a little more obvious, and still possible to do if they buy things randomly.
I try to take them through four main 'flavors' of winning dominion: The engine game, the big money game, the greening game (aka special VPs, a la gardens, or bishop or duke etc.), and my special favorite, the hail mary three pile scramble (don't need special victory points, just end the game when you're ahead by buying out three piles, works especially well if everyone is trying to buy the same actions and there are lots of cursers out there).
3. I explain the importance of trashing and junking early on, and may even play a game with nothing but trashing and junking, just so that they can see why junking is bad if it happens to you, but not the end of the world if you manage it, and that trashing is powerful (even those hard-earned estates that you start with! Even if you could buy a silver instead! Nobody likes to see those go at first, for some reason). Also, I help them see that junkers, especially cursers, can be an easy ticket to a 3-pile hail mary.

Any randomizer trying to make the game more fun should probably take those into consideration, and each one separately (maybe there should be different randomizers for game flavors, or a slider?) For example, what makes an engine game can kill big money, greening could kill an engine but depending on the board the engine may be faster, engines or big money could lose to a well-timed three pile scramble, sometimes two or more strategies are possible on the same board but that usually makes the board a little weaker either way since the strategies are at odds with eachother.

 I don't think its fair to prioritize one way of winning the game over others. Engines usually get picked up at first because they are easy to understand, but once people realize there are other ways to win they enjoy trying them (one of my latest games with new people ended with a tie: one person had gone big money with fools gold, smithy and squire, and bought out almost all the fools gold, the other had gone engine with smithy, golem and festival after trashing everything they started with, got almost all their money from actions and by the end went through their deck every turn, naturally. All the people playing were impressed that such radically different strategies could have the same end result).

From what I can gather, your simulator doesn't keep these strategies distinct. They are very distinct, and pull the game in different ways. Maybe rather than try to enable all of them, keep them as separate 'flavors', that could be mixed, but not necessarily.


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hsiale

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #186 on: January 15, 2013, 12:35:07 pm »
+1

Anyway let's say we want a better introductory set. We can probably do better than the main set with a few swaps, but there's the overlap issue
What about adding Stash to the (online) main set? I don't see any problem with this:
- it is not a very complicated card, I think it's second simplest promo after Envoy (but Envoy is too similar to Smithy), I'd say some base set cards are more complicated (Library, Bureucrat, Adventurer),
- it is not implemented yet, so nobody has bought/earned it and nobody will be unhappy other people get it for free,
- many people will actually be happy that they don't have to get it adventures way (there's still not enough adventures to get 3 already implemented promos),
- it introduces the idea of kingdom card which is a treasure (there is alt-VP in base set, but no alt-$),
- it makes Chancellor, definitely the biggest dud of the set, way more useful,
- and I guess if RGG decides to put the IRL base set in line with this, they could get away with printing "Bonus promo card included" on the box to avoid SdJ logo issues. By the way, I'm not even sure if it will lead to any problems anyway, Carcassonne had a major rule change after getting SdJ and my copy (2009 RGG edition) still has the logo on it.

For a better starting experience IRL, probably there are two things you can do. You can package the main set with a small expansion, although now your product is more expensive and maybe that's just self-defeating.
Will it be so much expensive? Looking at Dominion products that include only cards, we have:
- 150-cards Alchemy and Cornucopia: MSRP $30,
- 300-cards Hinterlands: MSRP $40,
- 500-cards Base and Intrigue: MSRP $45.
I think a 1000-cards box would have MSRP of $60. $65 if some extra things like tokens or mats are included.
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #187 on: January 15, 2013, 12:56:27 pm »
0

What about adding Stash to the (online) main set? I don't see any problem with this:
I don't imagine springing whatever interface Stash gets on new players will be ideal, but whatever; giving people Stash means not having it as a thing to play through campaigns to get. They already wish they had more promos.

By the way, I'm not even sure if it will lead to any problems anyway, Carcassonne had a major rule change after getting SdJ and my copy (2009 RGG edition) still has the logo on it.
I don't know the details there, I just know it's an issue. Maybe the SdJ people would say, sure, swap out a few cards. That would be a necessary step though. We had to change the rulebook to match the German one, back when, in order to use the logo.

Will it be so much expensive? Looking at Dominion products that include only cards, we have:
- 150-cards Alchemy and Cornucopia: MSRP $30,
- 300-cards Hinterlands: MSRP $40,
- 500-cards Base and Intrigue: MSRP $45.
I think a 1000-cards box would have MSRP of $60. $65 if some extra things like tokens or mats are included.
Looks like main set plus Prosperity plus Alchemy is $100: http://www.amazon.com/Rio-Grande-Games-RGG-425/dp/B003Y737CO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358271977&sr=8-1
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werothegreat

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #188 on: January 15, 2013, 01:05:59 pm »
+1

I think it might be worth doing a 5th/10th/Whatever-th Anniversary edition of the base set, where you streamline the wordings (say "Copper" instead of "Copper card" etc), and put a "may" into Throne Room.  It wouldn't change all that much, and most players wouldn't feel that they *needed* to pick it up, but they would know that Dominion now works by this second edition where Throne Room has a "may."  That would really be the only change.
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #189 on: January 15, 2013, 01:11:56 pm »
0

I think it might be worth doing a 5th/10th/Whatever-th Anniversary edition of the base set, where you streamline the wordings (say "Copper" instead of "Copper card" etc), and put a "may" into Throne Room.  It wouldn't change all that much, and most players wouldn't feel that they *needed* to pick it up, but they would know that Dominion now works by this second edition where Throne Room has a "may."  That would really be the only change.
Throne Room isn't the only one of those in the main set, but I don't think nonessential functional wording changes are on the table.
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hsiale

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #190 on: January 15, 2013, 01:26:03 pm »
0

I don't imagine springing whatever interface Stash gets on new players will be ideal, but whatever;
I don't know what interface do they plan for Stash, looking at the time it takes them to code it it will most probably be overly complicated, Iso interface for Stash is not hard to use. But indeed if it is complicated then it's a problem.

giving people Stash means not having it as a thing to play through campaigns to get. They already wish they had more promos.
I hope they release those campaigns then, so far it's still impossible to get all 3 of Governor, Envoy, Walled Village.

Looks like main set plus Prosperity plus Alchemy is $100: http://www.amazon.com/Rio-Grande-Games-RGG-425/dp/B003Y737CO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358271977&sr=8-1
Because it's 3 boxes sold together, not one box containing 1000 cards. What I had in mind is packaging together at the production stage. Alchemy and Cornucopia are 300 cards in two boxes with total MSRP $60, Hinterlands is 300 cards in one box with MSRP $40.
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #191 on: January 15, 2013, 01:36:52 pm »
+1

Because it's 3 boxes sold together, not one box containing 1000 cards.
It is not three boxes sold together, it is one box containing 950 cards plus playmats and tokens. http://tabletopgeeks.com/files/2012/03/DominionBigBox-650x487.jpg
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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #192 on: January 15, 2013, 03:07:41 pm »
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In other words, "I want at least 5 Prosperity cards" is incompatible with "I want each card to be equally likely to show up", and I gotta choose one of those to prioritize.  "Equally likely to show up" is a global constraint, so it wins.
Well obv. you could manage this if you wanted.

Pick 5 Prosperity cards using your algorithm, as if Prosperity were the only set available. You have 25 and make two lists but stop at 5 cards. Pick one of those lists of 5 cards. Now there are 164 cards left for the remaining 5 slots, so start 32 lists of 10, and fill the first 5 slots of each with the Prosperity cards selected. Now finish the algorithm on these 32 lists, then pick one.

While this probably satisfies what the user *meant*, it doesn't actually do what the user *said*, because now each card is not equally likely to show up.  Prosperity cards are heavily favored.  Now, you might argue that perhaps the user is okay with Prosperity cards being heavily favored, since they did want 5 of them.  But that's a human, psychological judgment; the generator doesn't have a smart AI that can predict which preference is more important.  Maybe it's more important to the user that cards are uniform, and the Prosperity restriction was an unimportant "try to do this if you can" rule. 

Without an interface to let the user set an importance on the "uniform" constraint, I have to set the default somewhere.  Right now it's at the top because it chooses cards in a fundamentally different way than the core generator does.

So, essentially what's needed is an interface to be able to say "I want some of my constraints to be more important than the card selection being uniform."

The correct solution, I feel, is that the user can designate which slots are to be filled by what generator.  That way a user can, say, pick 5 slots and use the "Prosperity-only generator" to fill those, and use the "All-cards generator" to fill the other 5.  Or maybe they use the "All-cards-except-Prosperity generator" to fill the rest, depending on whether they intended 5 as a minimum or an absolute.

To make that work on my site would require pretty extensive UI changes (the uniform thing was easy in terms of UI -- it was just adding one button).  I do not enjoy coding UI, as you can probably tell from the massive amount of confusing settings on the page, so it may be a long while before I will get to this on my page.
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eHalcyon

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #193 on: January 15, 2013, 03:18:48 pm »
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Have the system check if all constraints are compatible.  If there are conflicts, report those conflicts to the user.  At this point you may have the system decide which constraint to fulfill and which to break.  That should also be reported to the user.  Then, leave it to the user to tweak the settings if they aren't satisfied with the way the system resolved conflicts.

On the specific example -- IMO, "Include 5 prosperity" is a harder constraint than "make all cards equally likely to appear".  Yeah, Prosperity is heavily favoured when your enforce including 5, but you can at least make all other cards equally likely among the remaining 5.
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #194 on: January 15, 2013, 03:20:29 pm »
+2

Maybe it's more important to the user that cards are uniform, and the Prosperity restriction was an unimportant "try to do this if you can" rule. 
This seems extremely unlikely to me. I think anyone saying "5 from Prosperity" actually wants 5 from Prosperity, that's more important to them than whatever other criteria. They want to play with Prosperity.

I also think that for most people, set bias is the knob they are most likely to actually fiddle with, to the extent that I would take it out of the randomizer-specific section - the main game-generating screen the user sees lets them pick "pure random" or "engine-heavy" or "engine-heavy with cards equally likely" or "some other option," and then next to that they pick, bias towards Prosperity or Seaside or whatever. And then if they pick the Prosperity option, that applies whether they want pure random (thus not actually pure random, but pure random within the limits of N being from Prosperity) or engine-heavy or whatever.
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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #195 on: January 15, 2013, 03:33:50 pm »
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Dominion, is first and foremost, a card game. It is highly unlikely that the amount of people that know how to play dominion and/or have purchased dominion online will ever surpass the amount of people who know it and/or play it regularly IRL.

Why do you feel that being a card game makes this highly unlikely? 

As a counterexample, I feel that the amount of people who play Solitaire on the computer greatly surpasses the amount of people who play it IRL.

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I have a feeling that if someone is trying to specify 5 Prosperity cards, that they would be a little confused at only getting 1 or 2. Of course at that point, they are screwing with probability, chances are, they want to. In that case, rather than a flat average, it should be, a flat average given the constraints. So, there should be no particular prosperity card favored in the 5, and no particular non-prosperity card favored in the other 5. Tools need to be straightforward: Gimme 5 Prosperity shouldn't give me 2 prosperity!

Yes, but one could make the argument "Gimme a flat average shouldn't give me something where Prosperity is favored 250%!"  Maybe some studly programmer could write an AI that can take a morass of contradictory human desires and figure out what the human *really* wants, but I'm not that good.  (I'm reminded of the automatic Google search term spell check -- sometimes I'm like "Thanks Google, I did have a typo in my search term and I'm glad you corrected it," but sometimes I'm "Darn you Google!  That wasn't a typo, stop showing me search results for what you thought I meant!")

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1. I take out game killer cards, that are easy to run away with the game if you know what you're doing. This is mostly to prevent temptation to myself. For example, fool's gold, goons, (especially if there is a village), possession, tournament.

How do you run away with the game with Possession?  I'm pretty sure the general dislike of Possession has little to do with it being a run-away game-killer and more to do with it being a I-feel-like-you-stole-my-good-hand card.

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Any randomizer trying to make the game more fun should probably take those into consideration, and each one separately (maybe there should be different randomizers for game flavors, or a slider?) For example, what makes an engine game can kill big money, greening could kill an engine but depending on the board the engine may be faster, engines or big money could lose to a well-timed three pile scramble, sometimes two or more strategies are possible on the same board but that usually makes the board a little weaker either way since the strategies are at odds with eachother.

From what I can gather, your simulator doesn't keep these strategies distinct. They are very distinct, and pull the game in different ways. Maybe rather than try to enable all of them, keep them as separate 'flavors', that could be mixed, but not necessarily.

I really like the concept of there being a randomizer that evaulates sets based on potential strategies and then tries to balance those strategies on the board.

I do not feel that my randomizer can easily be adapted to become such a randomizer.  My randomizer works at a much lower-level; it looks at simple attributes of cards and tries to balance a kingdom around which attributes show up.

If anyone wants to try to write such a randomizer and succeeds, I have no doubt that it will do a better job at generating fun sets than my randomizer does.  But until someone actually writes one, I will prefer to play with my randomizer over "pure random".  Yes, the default settings of my randomizer prioritizes engines over non-engine strategies.  As a casual player, I find engines more fun than other strategies.  If you're a player who wants to see other strategies more, the default settings on my randomizer are not for you.  Either use a different randomizer, write your own, or see if you can tweak the settings on my randomizer to make one that works for you.  There's a high-level setting, "balance", that can be set to negative values to make the selection be biased against engines.  Maybe that's a good place to start?

I don't and have never intended for my randomizer to be the be-all-end-all of Dominion set generators.  The domain name was available so I just grabbed it.  :)
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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #196 on: January 15, 2013, 04:04:32 pm »
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Maybe it's more important to the user that cards are uniform, and the Prosperity restriction was an unimportant "try to do this if you can" rule. 
This seems extremely unlikely to me. I think anyone saying "5 from Prosperity" actually wants 5 from Prosperity, that's more important to them than whatever other criteria. They want to play with Prosperity.

As a human, I understand this.  But you're missing my point, which is that the generator doesn't understand this.

Most generators out there have one fundamental assumption, which is "If what the user asks for is impossible, report an error and fail."

My generator goes against this assumption, and instead does "If what the user asks for is impossible, try to get as close as you can."

Let's say that the user says "I want at least 5 Prosperity, I want at least 5 Intrigue, and I want at least 5 Seaside."  Right now, you can tell this to my generator, and it will give you a set that has 3-4 Prosperity, 3-4 Intrigue, and 3-4 Seaside.  It compromises your three desires and fails at all of them, but does something that may have come close to what you wanted.

Let's say that the user says "I want at least 5 Prosperity (important!), I want at least 5 Intrigue (important!), and I want at least 5 Seaside (not important)."  Then the generator will make you a set of 5 Prosperity and 5 Intrigue.  Your two important constraints got satisfied, your unimportant one got shafted.  You can even tweak the importance values so that you get a 5-4-1 distribution.  (Although honestly, if you're at the "tweaking importance values" stage, maybe you should consider just changing the "5"s?  Just saying.)

Having said that, my generator does have some high-level constraints that are in the "super-important" class, where lower constraints cannot override them, and if they can't be satisfied, the generator will fail and issue an error.  Some of them are:
* The generator doesn't give you cards from a set you don't own.  If you try to generate a normal set and you don't own 10 distinct cards, it will fail ignominiously. 
* The generator doesn't give you more or fewer cards than are specified.  If you ask for a 13-card set, you will get a 13-card set.  You will never get 12 or 14 even if that would make your other constraints more satisfied.  If you only own 12 cards and you ask for a 13-card set, the generator will fail.
* If you said you want a uniform distribution, you will get one.

Right now, the problem is that "uniform" is super-important and will always be prioritized over "favor Prosperity cards".  This isn't a mistake in the code, it's just code design that doesn't match what you expect.

What it seems like I need to do to satisfy you guys is to put more stuff in the "super-important" category (such as "I want to play with 5 Prosperity dammit!"), and bump "uniform" down to a "more important than other stuff but not as important as the super-important stuff". 

This way, if the user says "I want 5 Prosperity (super-important), 5 Intrigue (super-important), 5 Seaside (super-important), and only 10 cards (super-important)", it should fail and give you an error message; but if the user says "I want 5 Prosperity (super-important), 5 Intrigue (super-important), 5 Seaside (not important), and only 10 cards (super-important)", it should actually give you something.

That's a fundamental extra layer on top of the existing code, and, as I said, it's substantially more work and I don't have the next few weekends free.  So, yeah, please don't be too disappointed if it doesn't show up quickly.
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #197 on: January 15, 2013, 04:17:58 pm »
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As a human, I understand this.  But you're missing my point, which is that the generator doesn't understand this.
It seems crazy to me to be talking about how the generator doesn't understand it. The generator doesn't understand anything and doesn't have to. It can do what it's told. And we don't need to let people tell it to do impossible things. Again, completely outside of your program, the user picks a selection method and picks set biases. At that level there's some decision about how many cards to include from each set based on what they picked. Inside your selection method code, you know you need 5 from Prosperity and just deal with it.

That's a fundamental extra layer on top of the existing code, and, as I said, it's substantially more work and I don't have the next few weekends free.  So, yeah, please don't be too disappointed if it doesn't show up quickly.
I don't need any work from you here ever. I don't mean that in an unfriendly way. Why would I need you to do this? Pure random is awesome and we have that already. If you feel like writing something, man, have fun, I don't mind.

But the idea that "include 5 from Prosperity" is hard, man, I don't see it. Speaking as a computer programmer, it sounds trivial. For sure it would not involve treating that bias like the biases towards Village etc.
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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #198 on: January 15, 2013, 04:21:53 pm »
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Have the system check if all constraints are compatible.  If there are conflicts, report those conflicts to the user.  At this point you may have the system decide which constraint to fulfill and which to break.  That should also be reported to the user.  Then, leave it to the user to tweak the settings if they aren't satisfied with the way the system resolved conflicts.

This is a "programmer"/"power user" way of system design.  In general, it tends to work well for people who have some understanding of the system and fail horribly for people who "just want things to work".

Think about, oh, Microsoft Windows, which may pop up some screen saying "A critical system error was encountered when accessing 0x0438FA3E.  Abort, Retry, Fail, or open a debugger?"  Surely you can accept that this message is a fine thing to show power users and a bad thing to show most casual users.

We may have different beliefs on whether choosing a set of Dominion cards is at the same level of difficulty and when it is appropriate to carry on even if things are broken and when it is appropriate to report and error and make the user start over.  But, at least for the time being, I'd like to try to get the "carry on even if things are broken" to work, because it's easier to go the other way if I end up deciding that the other way is better.

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Beyond Awesome

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #199 on: January 15, 2013, 04:48:36 pm »
+4

I have an idea. We should have a contest on Dominion Strategy to try and come up with 50 fun casual kingdoms that Goko will implement. After players play through those 50 kingdoms, then, they can play full random. I don't know. Just a thought.
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