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Author Topic: Announcing Dominion Set Generator  (Read 94895 times)

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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #200 on: January 15, 2013, 04:54:01 pm »
0

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.

I think I wasn't clear on what is hard and what isn't.  "Include 5 from Prosperity" isn't hard, it's already in the system.

If you want to generate a set that uses pure-unbiased random to choose 5 Prosperity cards, here's how to do it.

1.  Change the "Balance" setting to 0.
2.  Click on "Custom..." next to Prosperity.
3.  Click on "Range".
4.  Set "Min" to 5 and "Max" to 5.
5.  Click on "Extreme" in the "Importance" box.
6.  Click on "OK."
7.  Click on "Generate a Set!"

If you want to generate a set that uses the default "balanced set" generator, but want 5 Prosperity cards, do the same thing, but in step 1, use 1 instead of 0.  However, if you do that, then Margrave will be 6 times more likely to show up than Noble Brigand.  But you'll get 5 Prosperity cards and a "balanced" set.

Right now, there is no way to tell the generator to do all four of these, even though it is theoretically possible:
A) I want 5 Prosperity cards.
B) I want each Prosperity card to have an equal probability of being picked.
C) I want each non-Prosperity card to have an equal probability of being picked.
D) I want the generator to be biased towards "balanced" sets.

It is the combination of these four goals that is time-consuming to implement.  Not any of the individual goals, each of which are already in the generator.  I can give you A, B, AB, C, D, AC, BC, BD, CD, ABC, AD, and BCD.  I just can't give you ABD, ACD, or ABCD without more code-writing.
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WanderingWinder

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #201 on: January 15, 2013, 05:05:13 pm »
+3

I fundamentally disagree with your statement that telling people their constraints are invalid is a power user/programmer way to do things. I can't think of ANYONE I know who wouldn't rather be told that such a request is invalid than for you to try to 'get as close as you can'. At least without being told first. For instance, if I go to a restaurant and order duck, and they don't have duck, I don't want them to bring me turkey just because it's the closest they can get - I want them to tell me 'we don't have any duck.'

Of course, I don't know everyone there is, and it's possible that I only know 'power users'. But especially given that EVERYONE else here seems to think that your perceptions of what people want are wrong here, what evidence do you have to the contrary?

onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #202 on: January 15, 2013, 05:08:05 pm »
0

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.

(Whaps head)  Why didn't I think of that?  Great idea.  I've implemented it and it's live now.
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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #203 on: January 15, 2013, 05:28:10 pm »
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I fundamentally disagree with your statement that telling people their constraints are invalid is a power user/programmer way to do things. I can't think of ANYONE I know who wouldn't rather be told that such a request is invalid than for you to try to 'get as close as you can'. At least without being told first. For instance, if I go to a restaurant and order duck, and they don't have duck, I don't want them to bring me turkey just because it's the closest they can get - I want them to tell me 'we don't have any duck.'

Going with this analogy, I believe that puts you in the "power user" bracket as far as ordering food is concerned.  I agree that as far as restaurant ordering is concerned, most people are at the "power user" level.  An example of someone who wouldn't be is, say, a mentally-retarded person who has been trained to always say "I want duck".  When the waitress says "we don't have any duck," he gets agitated and repeats: "I want duck."  For this customer, bringing turkey because it's the closest is actually a better solution, because the customer won't get agitated and in all probability it won't make that much of a difference.

So what that means to me, is that the restaurant has to evaluate their customer base.  A cafeteria in a hospital for the mentally-retarded would do better to behave differently than a public restaurant.  In my experience, this is exactly what happens in real life.

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Of course, I don't know everyone there is, and it's possible that I only know 'power users'. But especially given that EVERYONE else here seems to think that your perceptions of what people want are wrong here, what evidence do you have to the contrary?

I think you misunderstood the post I was referring to.  I'm not saying "power-users" are a minority.  I myself am a "power user" and would also prefer the system to give me an error when the generator can't satisfy my hard constraints.  What I was saying is that "closest possible" is harder to do than "power-user", and I want to solve the "closest possible" interface before I work on the "power-user" interface.  It's easy to tell a customer you don't have any duck; it's harder to figure out what you have that is closest to duck.  I'm trying to tackle the hard problem first, because I know that plenty of people have already tackled the easy problem.

In other words, I'm not prioritizing code-development based on what I think is going to be more popular, I'm prioritizing code-development based on which problems are more difficult to solve.

(Heck, that should be obvious from the very beginning.  It's pretty darned clear that the most popular way of set generation is the "choose all cards with a simple pure-random selection process," so the fact that I'm not doing that should be a hint that I'm not trying to satisfy the most popular segment and be done with it.)
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #204 on: January 15, 2013, 05:30:59 pm »
0

Right now, there is no way to tell the generator to do all four of these, even though it is theoretically possible:
A) I want 5 Prosperity cards.
B) I want each Prosperity card to have an equal probability of being picked.
C) I want each non-Prosperity card to have an equal probability of being picked.
D) I want the generator to be biased towards "balanced" sets.
My feeling is that "include 5 from Prosperity (etc.)" is going to be an option that users are vastly more interested in than any other specifics of card selection algorithms. Again I would have the game-instance-generation screen give a choice of algorithms and a choice of expansions. Your algorithm would be called knowing that it was expected to include exactly 5 from Prosperity. To be an algorithm on the list it would have to handle that.

In my imagination your generator comes down to a routine that's handed a list of cards already chosen and a list of additional cards to pick from, and it picks one. It is straightforward to force that to pick 5 Prosperity and 5 non-Prosperity or whatever, biased towards "fun" but with equal probabilities for cards. I don't know what your program looks like of course and understand that work is work.
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #205 on: January 15, 2013, 05:38:52 pm »
0

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.
Obv. there are campaigns, and new players do gravitate towards them; the important thing currently is, man, replace the main set campaign with a better one. And then that's uh 60 games so there you go.

However! I believe Goko wants more campaigns. Specifically they want multi-expansion campaigns. There may be nifty tools available for spicing up levels, but let's say for the moment that there aren't, that all you have to work with is the set of 10 and the starting decks. And the number of players and which bots they are if that's relevant and the paragraph of flavor at the start. And how many zaps you get. Possibly I'm forgetting something.

So anyway. You, Beyond Awesome, and your pals at dominionstrategy.com, could make just such a campaign. Pick two or three expansions and only use those cards (expansions meaning the published ones, so Prosperity and Cornucopia and so on, I am just clarifying that I don't mean the half-sets like Bigger and Better). Tell your story, such as it is. Try to make the levels fun. Maybe 20 levels? Since that's what the others are.

And I mean if you produce this thing and offer it to them, directly or through me, then odds are they will put it up when they get to fixing the campaigns.
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #206 on: January 15, 2013, 05:46:35 pm »
+2

Going with this analogy, I believe that puts you in the "power user" bracket as far as ordering food is concerned.  I agree that as far as restaurant ordering is concerned, most people are at the "power user" level.  An example of someone who wouldn't be is, say, a mentally-retarded person who has been trained to always say "I want duck".  When the waitress says "we don't have any duck," he gets agitated and repeats: "I want duck."  For this customer, bringing turkey because it's the closest is actually a better solution, because the customer won't get agitated and in all probability it won't make that much of a difference.
Dude, are you calling us all retards?

I want Prosperity dammit, I had Seaside for lunch.
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ftl

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #207 on: January 15, 2013, 05:48:16 pm »
0

So anyway. You, Beyond Awesome, and your pals at dominionstrategy.com, could make just such a campaign. Pick two or three expansions and only use those cards (expansions meaning the published ones, so Prosperity and Cornucopia and so on, I am just clarifying that I don't mean the half-sets like Bigger and Better). Tell your story, such as it is. Try to make the levels fun. Maybe 20 levels? Since that's what the others are.

And I mean if you produce this thing and offer it to them, directly or through me, then odds are they will put it up when they get to fixing the campaigns.


Oh man, that sounds fun. I should try to do that.

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.

...but making it mandatory is a terrible idea, IMO.
« Last Edit: January 15, 2013, 05:50:20 pm by ftl »
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Polk5440

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #208 on: January 15, 2013, 05:54:57 pm »
0

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.

I was really hoping they would implement something like this with the "My Decks"/Deck Building tool (whatever they're calling it now) where you can select the recommended kingdoms from the rulebooks to play and other hand-picked stored kingdoms, like maybe those from the DS Championships last year and this year (and any Goko tournaments in the future).
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Ozle

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #209 on: January 15, 2013, 05:58:43 pm »
0

So anyway. You, Beyond Awesome, and your pals at dominionstrategy.com, could make just such a campaign. Pick two or three expansions and only use those cards (expansions meaning the published ones, so Prosperity and Cornucopia and so on, I am just clarifying that I don't mean the half-sets like Bigger and Better). Tell your story, such as it is. Try to make the levels fun. Maybe 20 levels? Since that's what the others are.

And I mean if you produce this thing and offer it to them, directly or through me, then odds are they will put it up when they get to fixing the campaigns.


Oh man, that sounds fun. I should try to do that.



Woah, im in!
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charlequin

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #210 on: January 15, 2013, 06:16:53 pm »
+1

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. 

I think you're making this too complicated. I think that the consistent intuition of an average player, presented with a generator like this, is something like the following:

  • If you don't set any product restrictions, all cards will be selected with approximately equal chances.
  • If you require X items from a given set, the items in that set will be selected with approximately equal chances compared to each other, but not relative to the other items.
  • If you require certain things not to be present, their relative chances will go to 0% but not affect the relative chances of other cards.

You don't need a mind-reading AI to implement that, just to set a reasonable and intuitive default. I think the problem here is that you're interpreting the restriction as "cards must be equally likely" rather than "cards must be equally likely as a baseline before other restrictions are applied."

(The more this gets talked about, the more I think a "fun" generator needs to back into the question by defining different types of "interesting" games and randomizing between them, rather than just an algorithm that veers towards a single specific type of "fun kingdom.")
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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #211 on: January 15, 2013, 08:13:05 pm »
+1

Right now, there is no way to tell the generator to do all four of these, even though it is theoretically possible:
A) I want 5 Prosperity cards.
B) I want each Prosperity card to have an equal probability of being picked.
C) I want each non-Prosperity card to have an equal probability of being picked.
D) I want the generator to be biased towards "balanced" sets.
My feeling is that "include 5 from Prosperity (etc.)" is going to be an option that users are vastly more interested in than any other specifics of card selection algorithms. Again I would have the game-instance-generation screen give a choice of algorithms and a choice of expansions. Your algorithm would be called knowing that it was expected to include exactly 5 from Prosperity. To be an algorithm on the list it would have to handle that.

It currently does handle that.  Just not with B), C), and D) all at once. 

And, actually, there is a way to do all of them at once, now that I think about it.  Just say that Prosperity is your only set, and generate a set using the Uniform randomizer.  Then copy the first five cards, reload the page, paste those five cards into the "must have" field, say that you own all the other sets and not Prosperity, and then use the Uniform randomizer to generate the rest of the set.

I think the lesson to be learned here is that you (and by "you" I mean Dominion players in general) do not want just an algorithm that handles that.  You also want a User Interface that handles that and makes it easy to do.  Which I clearly do not have.

And now I realize why there's been a disconnect for a lot of the discussion here.  I've been creating a new randomizer as an underlying engine for picking cards.  I know that because my randomizer has "pure random" as a possible option, it must be at least at least as good of an engine as a hypothetical randomizer that only provides "pure random", because no matter how you might dislike some of the settings I've put in, you can always change those settings and get the "pure random" you like.  The problem is that I have not provided a clean, simple, and easy-to-understand User Interface for my engine.

It's like, I want to build a house.  I find the existing foundation design for houses limiting so I build a new foundation and I make sure that it can do anything the old foundation can.  Then I present to the public this foundation and ask for comments.  I get a lot of good comments, but also a lot of comments from people who complain that it looks nothing like a house and that a house should have this feature and that feature and they don't see how my foundation does that.  Also there's a house already on the market that decided to swap their foundation for mine, instead of building a new house, and people didn't like how that looked.

So I think it is clear to me what I must do next.  I must build an actual model house that uses my foundation.  Then I can present the model house to people and ask for another round of comments.  (I just hope there won't be a lot of people who knock it away in disgust and say "What is this??  A house for ANTS????")

The underlying randomizer knows how to pick cards using "pure random".  It knows how to pick cards using "balanced".  Now it even knows how to pick cards using "balanced uniform".  It knows how to restrict the selection pool to whatever the invoker wants.  So I'm pretty sure all I need is to figure out how to design the right way to get the randomizer to pick what you want.

Quote
In my imagination your generator comes down to a routine that's handed a list of cards already chosen and a list of additional cards to pick from, and it picks one. It is straightforward to force that to pick 5 Prosperity and 5 non-Prosperity or whatever, biased towards "fun" but with equal probabilities for cards. I don't know what your program looks like of course and understand that work is work.

You are right about most of that, except for the "straightforward" part.  Perhaps this example illustrates why it is not:

I give you a list of 9 cards already chosen.  Your job is to pick the 10th and final card.  However, here are the desiderata:
(1) The set of 10 cards should have 5 Prosperity.
(2) The set of 10 cards should be "fun".
(3) Each card that isn't already part of the 9 should have an equal chance of getting picked.

See the problem?  Those first nine cards may have already lost you the chance of succeeding at (1) and (2).  And even if you still have a chance, your hands are bound by (3) anyway.  You can't favor any card to help (1) or (2) unless you give up on (3).

What this means is that the routine of "here's a list of cards already chosen, now pick one more with calculated biases" is insufficient to be the only basis of a full-fledged kingdom creator.  There has to be some more stuff overseeing the whole thing and making sure that it all fits together to give the desired result.
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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #212 on: January 15, 2013, 08:18:36 pm »
+1

Going with this analogy, I believe that puts you in the "power user" bracket as far as ordering food is concerned.  I agree that as far as restaurant ordering is concerned, most people are at the "power user" level.  An example of someone who wouldn't be is, say, a mentally-retarded person who has been trained to always say "I want duck".  When the waitress says "we don't have any duck," he gets agitated and repeats: "I want duck."  For this customer, bringing turkey because it's the closest is actually a better solution, because the customer won't get agitated and in all probability it won't make that much of a difference.
Dude, are you calling us all retards?

No, I'm calling us all insensitive people who don't encounter enough retards in your life.  I know I certainly don't encounter enough retards in my life, considering how awkward I tend to act around them.
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ftl

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #213 on: January 15, 2013, 08:33:09 pm »
0

And now I realize why there's been a disconnect for a lot of the discussion here.  I've been creating a new randomizer as an underlying engine for picking cards.  I know that because my randomizer has "pure random" as a possible option, it must be at least at least as good of an engine as a hypothetical randomizer that only provides "pure random", because no matter how you might dislike some of the settings I've put in, you can always change those settings and get the "pure random" you like.  The problem is that I have not provided a clean, simple, and easy-to-understand User Interface for my engine.

I feel like some of the disconnect is because you have two separate goals maybe?

One is to make a complex randomizer with lots of different options which can make all these different fun sets matching all the constraints.

The other is to make a thing which a casualplayer on Goko will use as their default set generator like a magic wand without knowing about what's going on under the hood as long as it makes cool sets.

Those two are sort of different. For the first, saying "hmm, you can do that by fiddling with options and doing X" is a good answer. But for the second, if you're saying that something like "pick 5 Prosperity cards" won't work as expected with your set generator, well, then that's a problem, and "if you fiddle with options you can make it do that" doesn't really help at all.
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #214 on: January 15, 2013, 10:10:41 pm »
0

I give you a list of 9 cards already chosen.  Your job is to pick the 10th and final card.  However, here are the desiderata:
(1) The set of 10 cards should have 5 Prosperity.
(2) The set of 10 cards should be "fun".
(3) Each card that isn't already part of the 9 should have an equal chance of getting picked.

See the problem?  Those first nine cards may have already lost you the chance of succeeding at (1) and (2).  And even if you still have a chance, your hands are bound by (3) anyway.  You can't favor any card to help (1) or (2) unless you give up on (3).
The routine I was describing only handles #2. If you want it to pick a Prosperity card you only give it Prosperity cards to pick from. To get the uniform card frequencies we use the previously discussed algorithm outside of this routine. This routine just picks a fun card to add, given a set of cards already chosen and a set of cards to pick from to add.

What this means is that the routine of "here's a list of cards already chosen, now pick one more with calculated biases" is insufficient to be the only basis of a full-fledged kingdom creator.  There has to be some more stuff overseeing the whole thing and making sure that it all fits together to give the desired result.
Okay yes, you need the meta-algorithm, and #1 and #3 are in the meta-algorithm rather than in the routine I described. I was just saying, if that #2 routine exists then prioritizing Prosperity sounds easy to me. You call the routine using just Prosperity cards for 5 sets, rotating as previously discussed. You pick a set of 5, there's your 5 uniform fun Prosperity cards. Then we call the routine using just non-Prosperity etc.

Again "5 Prosperity" isn't a "should." We just pick 5 from Prosperity and 5 not, it's not something we leave up to chance. It's not a bias like "try to have some player interaction" and so on (in my conception of how things should be). And the reason is that this particular criteria, being from a certain set, happens to be something that many people understand and want, and this blatant "5 from Prosperity" solution is going to beat out anything that leaves you scratching your head.
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #215 on: January 15, 2013, 10:11:43 pm »
+6

No, I'm calling us all insensitive people who don't encounter enough retards in your life.  I know I certainly don't encounter enough retards in my life, considering how awkward I tend to act around them.
Maybe *you* don't encounter enough - *I* have internet access. Boom swish.
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serakfalcon

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #216 on: January 15, 2013, 11:32:59 pm »
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Quote
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.

But if Solitaire wasn't installed by default on everyone's computer, that would likely not be the case. You have to think about, how will people find out about this product, channels of distribution, and what will lead them to adopt it. Unless Goko is planning on doing some intense advertising, (which I highly doubt) in an already crowded market (there are so many online games out there its ridiculous, why should I pay to play Dominion online when I could, I dunno, play Kongregate for free, as an example?) I doubt that people will hear about the online version before hearing about the card game. Also, the card game has the jump on the website in that its been out for a while. Anyways, this is kind of off topic.

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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.
Ah, but if the user asked for 5 cards from prosperity (or, 50% prosperity to put it another way), then the user does not want a flat average. Any user input specifying anything should be prioritized beyond anything else you are coding, unless the input is garbage.
(Theoretically, the UI should prevent garbage from being inputted in the first place, but if you have API calls, then it doesn't hurt to include handlers for garbage, so that johnny power user using the API can get still get a result, even if its not exactly what they expected but hey, if they are a power user they are used to getting problems like that and its their fault for over customizing, but joe normal user gets what they expect because they are prevented from getting anything else) I too, am a programmer lol.

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Again "5 Prosperity" isn't a "should." We just pick 5 from Prosperity and 5 not, it's not something we leave up to chance.
The Donald has spoken lol

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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.
Well, considering its the first game or second game (I introduce the game to a lot of people), the early intro of possession makes them think the game is complicated and mean. I actually love possession, here's a fun example of possession/hoard/KC, I just don't like taking the time to explain it to new people. Also, the one guy that figures out how good it is will dominate over the people that thought it was confusing and avoided it because it scares them and/or they thought it was mean.

Quote
(1) The set of 10 cards should have 5 Prosperity.
(2) The set of 10 cards should be "fun".
(3) Each card that isn't already part of the 9 should have an equal chance of getting picked.
Logic should be: Pick 5 prosperity that are fun.
Pick 5 more cards that are fun, taking the 5 prosperity into consideration.
If it is not possible to find 5 more that are fun, pick randomly.
If it's always pulling up Margrave its flawed somehow.

Random should always be the default if the program doesn't know what to do, but if the user has specified anything they are, in a sense saying, "this is what I define to be fun". Another point, if people have limited sets, your generator may 'choke' and not use the full amount of cards they have available right?

I'm thinking though, if implemented maybe your generator should just be an option "Onigame's fun set" without letting people specify further. Maybe allow proportions from sets, I think that would be the number one thing people would want to specify if they specify anything.

(another note, I don't think its a good idea to allow generation of sets through an API call to Goko, that allows clever people to hack the sets by manipulating the call.) I think the issue is, you designed this to be "a" weighted "fun" random generator, something that people could try, for fun, if they wanted. It was implemented as "the" random generator, and now we're asking your generator to do things that it wasn't designed to do, but that "the" random generator should have, aka, being able to pull directly from sets in pre-specified amounts, weigh towards different strategies etc.

Quote
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.
If I can get some free time I may think about coding that. I code for enterprise solution stuff so my java is really rusty.
 




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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #217 on: January 16, 2013, 05:46:30 am »
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I think the issue is, you designed this to be "a" weighted "fun" random generator, something that people could try, for fun, if they wanted. It was implemented as "the" random generator, and now we're asking your generator to do things that it wasn't designed to do, but that "the" random generator should have, aka, being able to pull directly from sets in pre-specified amounts, weigh towards different strategies etc.

Actually it does do the examples you cite -- pull directly from sets in pre-specified amounts, and weight towards different strategies.  It's just that there's not a very good UI to make it do that easily.

I was able to use it to generate a set that had 5 Prosperity and 5 non-Prosperity, and had it use the "balanced" metric, and had every card in Prosperity have an equal chance of appearing, and had every non-Prosperity card have an equal chance of appearing.  The problem is that it took me about 20 mouse operations and some typing to make it do that.

I bet I can also make it do a deck that weights towards trashing strategies and that would take me more than 20 mouse operations.

I still have faith that the underlying theory/engine (have a set of cards, use weighted probabilities to choose the next one) is relatively robust and can be made to handle most common use-cases.  But the next step is to make those use cases easy to request.
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Beyond Awesome

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #218 on: January 16, 2013, 05:13:27 pm »
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onigame, I might be wrong about this, but I don't think I am. In the private beta, I believe your randomizer is still being used for casual games. Almost every game has one card with Potion in its cost coming up. I believe your randomizer might be weighted a very heavily towards Alchemey.
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ftl

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #219 on: January 16, 2013, 05:25:19 pm »
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If it has one card with potion, then it's probably not that. This randomizer would cluster potion-cost cards, so you'd have 0 or 3, but not 1.
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Beyond Awesome

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #220 on: January 16, 2013, 06:27:10 pm »
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If it has one card with potion, then it's probably not that. This randomizer would cluster potion-cost cards, so you'd have 0 or 3, but not 1.

Interesting. I wonder why so many kingdoms in the casual setup have Alchemy cards showing up. Maybe to make it easier to test the cards?
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Tables

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #221 on: January 16, 2013, 08:01:18 pm »
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Well, what's the chance of full random (currently) selecting at least one alchemy card? I suspect it's actually pretty high.

Ignoring Young Witch and only considering potion cost cards, I make it about 43% assuming you have no promos. That might look low, but eh, it's an average. Assuming 'almost every' game means about 4 in every 5 games or so, that doesn't seem especially unlikely unless you've played like 30+ games.
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...spin-offs are still better for all of the previously cited reasons.
But not strictly better, because the spinoff can have a different cost than the expansion.

onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #222 on: January 17, 2013, 08:49:43 pm »
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If it has one card with potion, then it's probably not that. This randomizer would cluster potion-cost cards, so you'd have 0 or 3, but not 1.

Yep.  The general way my randomizer (on default) deals with Alchemy is that already having an Alchemy card greatly favors the selection of more Alchemy cards, so getting just 1 Alchemy card is a rare occurrence -- it means that either that was the last card you got or you managed to get an earlier Alchemy card and made a whole bunch of "saving throws vs. Alchemy". 

You can go to my site and experiment.  (Remember, to get "full random", just change "Overall Balance" to zero -- and that's a sticky setting.)  http://dominionsetgenerator.com/

One side-effect of this implementation, though, is that when an Alchemy card is picked early, sometimes I'm getting 5+ Alchemy cards and I'm not totally sure that's a fun thing. 
« Last Edit: January 17, 2013, 08:51:06 pm by onigame »
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Davio

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #223 on: June 28, 2013, 03:50:06 am »
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A recent game with Robz made me come back to this thread.

The game we played had Tournament and that's pretty much saying it all.
I got the first Province, he got the first Prize and it was game over for me.

Now I'm not sad that I lost, I was sad that we played such a dull game basically just going through the motions and whoever got luckiest would win. Playing dull games like that are just a waste of both players' time and not why we like to play Dominion. I play Dominion to discover interesting interactions and try my best to optimize my moves, surprise myself and my opponent. Games where optimal moves are clear don't do much for me.

So I was thinking about pure random sets like they are generated on Goko right now (at least I think it's just full random with no tweaking) and thought: How often are they boring like this? I don't have a number, but I did think a tweaked semi-random generator may be better.

How do you guys feel about using a semi-random generator, like the one in this thread, for pro games? Is it blasphemy? Paradise?
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ftl

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #224 on: June 28, 2013, 04:25:18 am »
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Sort of blasphemy I think?

The problem is that by picking the semi-random generator already inherently pick which interactions to put in and which ones not to. If you know what kind of game you want to play you can design kingdoms like that, but if you want to encounter something you didn't expect, that's hard to design into a kingdom generator! I remember earlier, it turned out that the Kingdom generator would basically never give you some cards, and would give you others all the time. So onigame fixed that, but who knows whether it's still doing the same thing for two-card combos? Are some two-card combos basically never going to show up? 

I know for me, my favorite kingdoms are the ones where you have to work around the lack of some resource - maybe use Remodel+Fortress to get around lack of +Buy, or the obvious one of TR+Cantrip to get around lack of Villages or using Moat as draw, etc. And the kingdom generator discussed here would explicitly work against that, trying to generate sets that had a little bit of everything natively.

I remember  back when this started, I went on iso and just randomized sets a bunch of times to see how many of them 'looked boring' and it was pretty low, 1 in 10 or so. Of course, maybe more sets would look boring if I were better and could more clearly see that one of the possible strategies is clearly superior or something, I don't know.
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