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Author Topic: Announcing Dominion Set Generator  (Read 94910 times)

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WanderingWinder

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #125 on: January 13, 2013, 04:42:56 pm »
+1

I think you're more likely to lose them by appearing to just insult anyone who disagrees with you. I mean 'my opponents have cognitive biases' comes across as 'my opponents are mentally challenged' or 'my opponents are stupid', and this is not a very endearing thing to say. Of course, it doesn't actually mean that, but it can come across that way, and, having cognitive biases is something that is just inherently true of everyone - you have them just as much. So do I. So as an argument, it's a non-starter.

Consider these two arguments:
(A) "Everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot."
(B) "There are some people out there who believe X.  People who believe X are idiots.  If you're reading this and you haven't made up your mind about X, please don't believe X."

On some level, these two arguments are actually the same.  Yet if you go out in the world you'll see that (B)-style is actually used quite frequently -- in political campaigns, in public-service announcements, in activist activities.  Presumably they wouldn't use it if it wasn't at least working to some extent.
There's a difference between telling someone they're wrong and calling them idiotic.

True, but that's missing my point.  Imagine I wrote this; maybe it gets my point across better:

(A) "Everyone who disagrees with me is wrong."
(B) "There are some people out there who believe X.  People who believe X are wrong.  If you're reading this and you haven't made up your mind about X, please don't believe X."

B is fine, if entirely ineffectual. But when you are talking about people having cognitive biases, it doesn't sound like you're saying B, it sounds like you're calling them idiotic. If you want to say B, why would you bring up cognitive biases?

werothegreat

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #126 on: January 13, 2013, 04:56:11 pm »
+1

Which is why I'm wondering why everyone is ignoring my suggestion.  On the game creation page, if you select Casual, just have 3 options:
1) Pure random
2) Basic implementation of set generator (call it "Well-rounded kingdom" or whatever)
3) Advanced - let's you pick and choose the parameters of the generator.
Doesn't that seem self-explanatory enough?

It's a good suggestion.  So good that it was what I expected to happen when I gave them my code a week ago.  Unfortunately what actually came out was
1) To get "Pure random", select "Pro Leaderboard".
2) To get "Well-rounded kingdom", select "Casual Leaderboard".
3) Advanced -- we'll implement this later

I can certainly understand why someone at Goko might have thought this would have been a reasonable midpoint milestone to get to the original idea.  The devil is in the details!

See, but this loses the whole "self-explanatory" part.
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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #127 on: January 13, 2013, 05:12:05 pm »
0

I have just looked at generator page. I don't even understand what half of the settings mean. And this looks like the biggest problem for me.

Because I'm exposing all the settings for the generator, the amount of adjustments can be overwhelming.  There's definitely a lot of room for improvement in the UI (that's why my biggest plea on the page is for a UI guru to pretty things up).  Nevertheless, I just rearranged some things and added a help description to make things a bit more understandable.  Let me know if things are still confusing.

Quote
How should a new player use this generator?

1.  Click on "Generate a Set!"
2.  Look at the set generated.
3.  Play!
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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #128 on: January 13, 2013, 05:21:07 pm »
0

B is fine, if entirely ineffectual. But when you are talking about people having cognitive biases, it doesn't sound like you're saying B, it sounds like you're calling them idiotic. If you want to say B, why would you bring up cognitive biases?

I didn't bring up cognitive biases.  I said a "substantial part of the community" treats the pure unbiased random generator system as "gospel".  theory then asserted that I was accusing my opponents of having cognitive biases.
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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #129 on: January 13, 2013, 05:29:42 pm »
+4

If I understand correctly, the problem we have is that pure random creates too many 'crazy' Kingdoms and not enough 'fun' Kingdoms. 'Crazy' Kingoms being defined as Kingdoms that are 'unbalanced'; they have too much of some things and none of other things. 'Fun' Kingdoms have a good mix of everything on offer: non-terminal Actions, extra buys and/or gains, attacks, a good cost distribution, etc.

If you own just the Base Set, this is basically a non-issue. The card pool is small enough that choosing a card that fits one criterion makes it significanly more likely that the other cards you choose will fit other criteria. You can't very well have a Kingdom with 10 splitters (villages) if there are only 3 splitters in your card pool (Village, Throne Room, Festival). Under these circumstances, I argue that a fancy randomizer is completely unnecessary. Sure, you'll get a Kingdom with no non-terminal Actions once in a great while, but they're rare enough to be a cool novelty rather than a big issue.

As the card pool grows, however, crazy Kingoms become more common when you use pure random. Adding a splitter no longer significantly reduces the chances of getting more splitters, etc. Now some might argue that this is as it should be. Players are likely to buy more expansions as they get more familiar with the game and crave more variety. As that happens, they may be more able to deal with 'crazier' Kingdoms. However, let's assume that this isn't the case. I'm sure there will be some players who love the Base Set so much that they'll buy the mega-pack and get everything all at once. So we'll take it as a given that it's still desirable to have fewer 'crazy' Kingdoms than full random provides.

So if the issue is that a larger card pool creates more crazy Kingdoms, here's my solution: reduce the size of the cardpool before choosing your Kingdom cards.

Doing this is simple. Just choose 2 or 3 expansions that you're going to use and then only choose cards from them. Specifically, here's how my homemade randomizer does it:

1. Add 'required' cards to the Kingdom (cards that the user has chosen to definitely be in the Kingdom).
2. Determine how many promo cards will be included in the Kingdom (using a hypergeometric distribution), choose that many promo cards randomly, and add them to the Kingdom.
3. Put tokens into a bag representing the expansions the user owns. There are 2 tokens for the Base Set and 1 token per sub-expansion the user owns. (So if the user owns all of Dark Ages, put three Dark Ages tokens in the bag).
4. Draw out X tokens randomly where X is the maximum number of expansions the user wants to use this game (usually 1, 2, or 3).
5. Until the Kingdom is full, round-robin between the tokens and randomly choose a card from the corresponding expansion. So if I have no required or promo cards in the Kingdom and I chose Seaside and Hinterlands tokens, I'd have 5 Seaside cards and 5 Hinterlands cards in the Kingdom.

I left out a few steps, such as not putting an expansion's tokens in the bag if the max # of expansions is 1 and you'd only have one token for that expansion. You usually don't want to play an all-Alchemy game, etc.

Here are some built-in features of this algorithm:

• It's less likely to create 'crazy' Kingdoms than full random from all cards.
• All cards appear with approximately equal likelyhood.
• You see the interactions between cards in the same expansion more often.
• Cards that work better in the context of their expansion will be duds less often (Scout, Contraband, etc.).
• It automatically abides by the 3-5 Alchemy cards suggestion without additional tweaking as long as the "maximum number of expansions" setting does not exceed 3.
• Your Colony games are more likely to have 3-5 Prosperity cards in them rather than 1 or 2, making Colonies easier to attain.
• It makes it very easy to say, "Give me a game with half (or all) cards from Expansion X." This should be handy for those who just bought a new pack of cards and want to try them out.
• It makes it very easy to say, "Don't give me any cards from Expansion X." This is nice for completionists that want to buy everything but don't always want to play Alchemy games.

I should explain those last two. The UI for my Kingdom generator looks like this:



If a player disallows an expansion, the expansion's tokens don't get put in the bag. If they require an expansion, it automatically chooses ONE token from that expansion before filling the bag (the other tokens from the expansion go into the bag).

One quirk of this generator is that it can generate Kingdoms of all one expansion when you specify, say, a maximum of two expansions. I don't consider it an issue, but I could easily see that some might have a problem with it.

It's my understanding that when playtesting in real life, this is more or less how Donald and company would play; take cards from 2 or 3 expansions rather than from all of them. So the idea has certainly been thoroughly tested. In my opinion, it's a good compromise.
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WanderingWinder

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #130 on: January 13, 2013, 05:32:03 pm »
+1

B is fine, if entirely ineffectual. But when you are talking about people having cognitive biases, it doesn't sound like you're saying B, it sounds like you're calling them idiotic. If you want to say B, why would you bring up cognitive biases?

I didn't bring up cognitive biases.  I said a "substantial part of the community" treats the pure unbiased random generator system as "gospel".  theory then asserted that I was accusing my opponents of having cognitive biases.
You're absolutely right, and I apologize.

On the other hand, what you said isn't exactly free of insult either. But definitely not what I was making out, so I apologize.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #131 on: January 13, 2013, 05:36:44 pm »
0

Hmm, I'm now wondering if the Dominion Kingdom App now isn't completely random.

Although it does have options which implies if you turn them off it is
(like 'must contain cards of value 2-5')
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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #132 on: January 13, 2013, 05:48:27 pm »
+1

I'm exposing all the settings for the generator, the amount of adjustments can be overwhelming.  There's definitely a lot of room for improvement in the UI (that's why my biggest plea on the page is for a UI guru to pretty things up).  Nevertheless, I just rearranged some things and added a help description to make things a bit more understandable.  Let me know if things are still confusing.
This helps a bit. Still I think you're not in need of an UI specialist, but a manual writing specialist. Pretty but hard to understand UI can have a good look, but will not work. You use lots of game-specific language, and to make things worse this is not the language commonly used when talking about Dominion - both here and on BGG I haven't found words "Antisplitter", "Deckchanger" and a few more.

Quote
How should a new player use this generator?
1.  Click on "Generate a Set!"
2.  Look at the set generated.
3.  Play!
OK. So you want your tool to be a magical wand, not a hammer. People should use it without having a clue how it works.

This is a completely wrong approach. It works for absolute beginners, but those people should be playing fixed, recommended sets anyway. They should not touch the randomizer. And for people who have grown out of fixed sets (which, when those sets are made with enough time and thought put into them, should be somewhere after 50-100 games) it is possible to make a better (providing more choices) randomizer and explain how it works so that they can make the choices consciously. You just need to leave the "I know better than you, do as I say and don't ask why" approach and change it to "I have more experience, let me teach you something so you can make your choices".
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werothegreat

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #133 on: January 13, 2013, 05:51:15 pm »
0

If I understand correctly, the problem we have is that pure random creates too many 'crazy' Kingdoms and not enough 'fun' Kingdoms. 'Crazy' Kingoms being defined as Kingdoms that are 'unbalanced'; they have too much of some things and none of other things. 'Fun' Kingdoms have a good mix of everything on offer: non-terminal Actions, extra buys and/or gains, attacks, a good cost distribution, etc.

If you own just the Base Set, this is basically a non-issue. The card pool is small enough that choosing a card that fits one criterion makes it significanly more likely that the other cards you choose will fit other criteria. You can't very well have a Kingdom with 10 splitters (villages) if there are only 3 splitters in your card pool (Village, Throne Room, Festival). Under these circumstances, I argue that a fancy randomizer is completely unnecessary. Sure, you'll get a Kingdom with no non-terminal Actions once in a great while, but they're rare enough to be a cool novelty rather than a big issue.

As the card pool grows, however, crazy Kingoms become more common when you use pure random. Adding a splitter no longer significantly reduces the chances of getting more splitters, etc. Now some might argue that this is as it should be. Players are likely to buy more expansions as they get more familiar with the game and crave more variety. As that happens, they may be more able to deal with 'crazier' Kingdoms. However, let's assume that this isn't the case. I'm sure there will be some players who love the Base Set so much that they'll buy the mega-pack and get everything all at once. So we'll take it as a given that it's still desirable to have fewer 'crazy' Kingdoms than full random provides.

So if the issue is that a larger card pool creates more crazy Kingdoms, here's my solution: reduce the size of the cardpool before choosing your Kingdom cards.

Doing this is simple. Just choose 2 or 3 expansions that you're going to use and then only choose cards from them. Specifically, here's how my homemade randomizer does it:

1. Add 'required' cards to the Kingdom (cards that the user has chosen to definitely be in the Kingdom).
2. Determine how many promo cards will be included in the Kingdom (using a hypergeometric distribution), choose that many promo cards randomly, and add them to the Kingdom.
3. Put tokens into a bag representing the expansions the user owns. There are 2 tokens for the Base Set and 1 token per sub-expansion the user owns. (So if the user owns all of Dark Ages, put three Dark Ages tokens in the bag).
4. Draw out X tokens randomly where X is the maximum number of expansions the user wants to use this game (usually 1, 2, or 3).
5. Until the Kingdom is full, round-robin between the tokens and randomly choose a card from the corresponding expansion. So if I have no required or promo cards in the Kingdom and I chose Seaside and Hinterlands tokens, I'd have 5 Seaside cards and 5 Hinterlands cards in the Kingdom.

I left out a few steps, such as not putting an expansion's tokens in the bag if the max # of expansions is 1 and you'd only have one token for that expansion. You usually don't want to play an all-Alchemy game, etc.

Here are some built-in features of this algorithm:

• It's less likely to create 'crazy' Kingdoms than full random from all cards.
• All cards appear with approximately equal likelyhood.
• You see the interactions between cards in the same expansion more often.
• Cards that work better in the context of their expansion will be duds less often (Scout, Contraband, etc.).
• It automatically abides by the 3-5 Alchemy cards suggestion without additional tweaking as long as the "maximum number of expansions" setting does not exceed 3.
• Your Colony games are more likely to have 3-5 Prosperity cards in them rather than 1 or 2, making Colonies easier to attain.
• It makes it very easy to say, "Give me a game with half (or all) cards from Expansion X." This should be handy for those who just bought a new pack of cards and want to try them out.
• It makes it very easy to say, "Don't give me any cards from Expansion X." This is nice for completionists that want to buy everything but don't always want to play Alchemy games.

I should explain those last two. The UI for my Kingdom generator looks like this:



If a player disallows an expansion, the expansion's tokens don't get put in the bag. If they require an expansion, it automatically chooses ONE token from that expansion before filling the bag (the other tokens from the expansion go into the bag).

One quirk of this generator is that it can generate Kingdoms of all one expansion when you specify, say, a maximum of two expansions. I don't consider it an issue, but I could easily see that some might have a problem with it.

It's my understanding that when playtesting in real life, this is more or less how Donald and company would play; take cards from 2 or 3 expansions rather than from all of them. So the idea has certainly been thoroughly tested. In my opinion, it's a good compromise.

Do you have a day job?  I don't mean this as an insult, I'm just impressed you have the time to do all of this Dominion stuff without actually being paid to do it.
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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #134 on: January 13, 2013, 06:25:58 pm »
0

Seaside bottom 5:
Pirate Ship    237    23.7%    61.62%
Merchant Ship    219    21.9%    56.94%
Embargo    208    20.8%    54.08%
Sea Hag    190    19%    49.4%
Cutpurse    188    18.8%    48.88%
You seem to be aiming for maybe one attack card per set-of-10? But that's half what the expansions themselves have. So here's the Seaside bottom 5, with three attacks plus a "helper" (okay Embargo does not "help" much, but you know, it's non-attack interaction). The Hinterlands bottom 5 has two attacks, two helpers, and a VP card.

So, I think player interaction is being downweighted too much.

That's a reasonable inference from the data I shared, but it's a bit more complicated than that.  There's no special treatment for Attacks, but the generator tries to aim for 2 to 5 "Interactive" cards (Helpers and Attacks).  The problem with these five guys is not that they're Interactive, but because they have nothing else going for them besides being Interactive.  Ambassador, for example, is the 8th favorite card, because of it being a deck thinner in addition to being Interactive.  These guys are down here because, they don't do anything extra that the generator values (there's a tiny little boost for cards that give coins, but it's pretty small).

Look at Hinterlands, where Margrave is sitting happily at 4th place (he's got a +Buy and he's worth 5).  Probably it would go up more if I tried boosting the Interactive field more.

So maybe what's going on is that Pirate Ship and Embargo (and to some extent, Sea Hag) have a "playing with toys and evocative" fun factor that I'm not catching here.  That's a bit hard to quantify.  Or maybe I just need to boost the Coinage attribute.
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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #135 on: January 13, 2013, 06:31:30 pm »
0

OK. So you want your tool to be a magical wand, not a hammer. People should use it without having a clue how it works.

This is a completely wrong approach. It works for absolute beginners, but those people should be playing fixed, recommended sets anyway.

Going with this analogy, I want neither a magical wand nor a hammer.

I want my tool to be a "magical wand creator".  For beginners, here's a magical wand that my tool made, use it however you want.  For tinkerers, they twiddle with dials and stuff until they've made their favorite magical wand, then they use that.
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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #136 on: January 13, 2013, 06:35:21 pm »
0

@onigames, I think the biggest problem with your set generator as far as UI is concerned as that the language you use is very confusing. I looked at it a couple of months ago and gave up because I had no idea what the words meant. Now, I know this can fixed. I think there is even a page here about commonly used Dominion terminology. For example, village is the term that you use for splitter (I believe). Using terminology that most people are familiar with would be super helpful. I know you were a playtester, but almost all of us here weren't playtesters, and as a result, we use different words but I do believe mean the same thing. No insult intended, but some of your words seem like a foreign language.
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hsiale

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #137 on: January 13, 2013, 06:57:54 pm »
0

I want my tool to be a "magical wand creator".  For beginners, here's a magical wand that my tool made, use it however you want.  For tinkerers, they twiddle with dials and stuff until they've made their favorite magical wand, then they use that.
Beginners can't use it however they want. They can choose to use it or not, and the choice is not theirs. They will do whatever you tell them, how do they know what to choose on their own? And this is what I'm most afraid of, the generator prefers engine heavy boards and those are not what people should start from. Learning Dominion should start from learning basics of Big Money and then being shown some boards with an easy (both to notice and to play) engine which can beat Big Money (and a few where it can't, with a good explanation why). Then a few other boards showing other basic Dominion strategies, deck types and card interactions. You don't need hundreds of boards for this, that's why set generator should not be made with beginners in mind. They should get handpicked sets and learn basics. Enough to be able to use set generator as a hammer (consciously choosing which nail to hit this time) and if confronted with a board too hard for them, knowing at least enough to understand why they were destroyed.

On the other hand, I don't want to move dials a lot and look for my favourite "magic wand" by trial and error. I prefer to be given a set of hammers and choose at first glance the one that suits me on a given day. And once I change my mind, I want to pick another one I'm happier with. Giving way to influence sets is good, but you should promote using variety of sets. If all players are encouraged to look for their comfort zone, there might be a problem of noone wanting to enter the zone of another player (and to play a game someone must join another player's table). Set generator settings should be something easily readable, so that when I click "Table Details" button in the game room, I see settings used here and can instantly decide if I'm in a mood for such game and join. That's why too many options is a bad things and you should look for simplicity while preserving as much of choice as possible.
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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #138 on: January 13, 2013, 08:45:50 pm »
0

Okay, maybe I'm stupid here, but... why is there a bonus for cards costing 5?

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #139 on: January 13, 2013, 10:32:48 pm »
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I imagine because boards with no $5's tend to be really bad boards.
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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #140 on: January 13, 2013, 11:14:18 pm »
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But isn't this mostly a function of there tending to not be the right kind of power, more than the actual cost of 5? I mean, isn't that 5 cost a proxy? Like, if there's counting houses and saboteurs and outposts, the board can still suck. But if there's fishing villages and smithies and goonses and grand markets or whatever, you can get a really nice board anyway. I would think that it's more about having the spots and the power level covered, which I would be wanting to check by other measures of strength if I were doing this kind of thing. And since onigame IS checking those other things, the 5-cost thing seems superfluous, like he is double counting.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #141 on: January 14, 2013, 03:54:29 am »
+1

Honestly, I didn't know until yesterday that my generator was *sooo* dismissive towards KC.

See, and even if you fix that, it would still be worrisome. Because what if it's just as dismissive towards some pairs of cards, or towards some interactions, or strategies? You can't pick that out as easily as running numbers on card frequencies... but it'll have the same effect, or making games more "samey" than they need to be.

Maybe "Onigame's Casual Setup" would be a better short name.  It feels so vain though!

I'd even take out "casual" because I don't particularly see this a more "casual" than full-random...

Quote
Absolutely.  I knew this.  My cognitive dissonance isn't because I didn't know why this thread is suddenly so popular; it's because I can't tell whether the events of the last three days was a good thing or a bad thing.

On some level, it's a bad thing because I did stuff that made people unhappy.  But on some level, it's a good thing because I'm actually getting some very good opinions from people on this thread and I feel that both my generator and Goko's eventual implementation of Kingdom selecting will be much improved because of it (but who knows, that might just be unrealistically optimistic on my part).  So maybe a couple of days of unhappiness was worth it.  I guess time will tell.

You could have had basically a similar good effect with much less bad effect by announcing "this generator will be the default for casual games. Please try it out" instead of just implementing it first, making it the default by surprise, and asking questions later...

Quote
This is an absolutely beautiful point, and I'm glad you made it, because it's definitely a game-changer in forming how I think about players and what my goals are in trying to design a good interface for Goko.

Unfortunately I'll need some time before I can articulate my new thoughts fully on this... Other projects beckon and I won't have a free weekend for a while.

A good start when finding out what players want would probably be, well to ask them. Put out a survey (to your target audience, I guess not to us ;)) , or maybe get goko to add a "like/dislike this kingdom" button and data-mine the results of that. I suspect that would be a much better starting point for designing something that casual players want, rather than trying to come up with something super-complicated on your own based on what your hunches are as to what people would find fun.

"Making it the default" should be the *last* step in designing something, not the first one! ;)

Oh, just a random comment, about a board that I thought was cool precisely *because* it violated the balance your algorithm wants; it's from an IRL game a few weeks ago, but it's still in my mind, so it must have been memorable. I remember it had Steward, Familiar, Procession, Fortress, Trading Post, Expand, and no other $5-cost cards and no +Buy and nothing besides Steward that drew more than 1 card. It's a pretty unbalanced board. There's the Procession-Fortress combo, but nothing costing $5 worth getting lots of copies of... except it didn't matter, because the Expand just wanted $5-cost fuel to turn into Provinces, didn't matter what it was. So it was a game where I gained like 5-6 trading posts, mostly because they were the only thing costing $5, and I thought that was pretty cool because it's not often that you want that many Trading Posts!

That's a game where the magic would have been killed by trying to make the board balanced. With your algorithm, it would have been heavily weighted to have something like a $5-cost card which gives +Buy and card draw and has interaction... so maybe Margrave or Council Room something? But man, that would turn the kingdom into a standard engine board with Prcssn/Frtrss to gain those. It's fun to use cards in strange ways! I don't think that's something which only "pros" find fun!
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #142 on: January 14, 2013, 04:46:04 am »
+3

It's my understanding that when playtesting in real life, this is more or less how Donald and company would play; take cards from 2 or 3 expansions rather than from all of them. So the idea has certainly been thoroughly tested. In my opinion, it's a good compromise.
Most of my testing IRL has in fact been, 5 cards from expansion A, 5 from expansion B, otherwise random. For the next game I would rotate out 2 of each rather than replace all ten. I have also done a fair amount of 10 cards from one expansion.

Online testing has mostly been, force 3-5 cards from current expansion, the rest random. Some testing of course has involved, we have to play with a particular card this game to test it.

Anyway I can say that 5 cards from each of two expansions is a fine way to play Dominion.
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #143 on: January 14, 2013, 04:49:40 am »
+2

OK. So you want your tool to be a magical wand, not a hammer. People should use it without having a clue how it works.
I think a magic wand will be better for most players, beginners or not. It's not that it should be uh non-clue-giving; it should be clearly titled, "Engine-heavy" or "Wacky" or whatever it is. A mass of options is no good, it's for computer programmers. A small number of big toggles is fine, or just, picking a selection algorithm from a list. It's fine if the mass of options is hidden away somewhere but man I do not think the average player is messing with it. They are here to play Dominion, not to learn what "splitter" means and then consider how many of those they want.
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #144 on: January 14, 2013, 04:55:01 am »
0

Look at Hinterlands, where Margrave is sitting happily at 4th place (he's got a +Buy and he's worth 5).  Probably it would go up more if I tried boosting the Interactive field more.
But this just makes me think, it picks Margrave because Margrave has more going on, what with the card-drawing and +buy, and then that makes it less likely to pick the other attacks because the set of 10 has an attack already, it has Margrave. The presence of an attack that fits multiple slots lowers the frequency of all the other attacks. This in turn makes your player interaction tend to come from the same cards over multiple games, when it's more fun to mix that up.

So maybe what's going on is that Pirate Ship and Embargo (and to some extent, Sea Hag) have a "playing with toys and evocative" fun factor that I'm not catching here.  That's a bit hard to quantify.  Or maybe I just need to boost the Coinage attribute.
I think it's okay that say Pirate Ship fills no slots other than attacking and making coins. That doesn't make it a bad card to include in sets of 10. It remains an important card because it provides interaction, and for sure it's best if the interaction varies, if it's not a ton of Ghost Ship and Ambassador games and not many Pirate Ship or Sea Hag ones.
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Donald X.

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #145 on: January 14, 2013, 05:35:47 am »
+2

Okay, maybe I'm stupid here, but... why is there a bonus for cards costing 5?
I imagine this comes directly from me, saying, $5's are important (it goes further: $5's that you can load up on are even better, and you will notice an emphasis on them in the later sets).

While power level may not correspond directly to cost, it tends to at the high end, and at $6 you have Gold. If there are good $5's then I can buy them at $5, and consider buying them over Gold at $6. If there are no $5's then I am buying Silver and Gold more often and my deck is more boring. If I am a good player I don't want to be punished for drawing $5, even though I'm good enough to know when I should buy a $2 instead, and if I'm not a good player I feel really punished when I draw $5 and there isn't one, even vs. the case where the $5 is Counting House. If I am a good player I may really enjoy buying a $2 when I have $11, and so on, but the presence of a $5 on the table if anything increases that joy rather than reduces it - look, I could have had a Lab, but I bought a Pawn.

Now there might be $4's that are strong enough to compete with $5's, such that for some players it would make sense to include them in the "$5's" category. They never do the job of costing $5 though.

I did not realize the important of $5's initially; the main set emphasizes $4's, on the grounds that none of the basic cards cost $4, as if Duchy is doing something for $5. These days I am all about the $5's. I don't feel like players feel so screwed drawing $4 in a game with no $4's; they get used to paying $4 for Silver. A $2 makes you feel less screwed getting $2/$5 or when you're choking on Curses or what have you; if I had to pick two costs to include on kingdom cards in a set-of-10, I'd pick $2 second.

One of the Dark Ages recommended sets has no $5's, because it seemed like, hey, here's something you don't see every day. And I've told the story of a game Bill won with a deck that at one point was all $2's (there were $5's in that game, but some of them trashed your cards costing $3-$6). Those rare situations are good, but they should remain rare. I don't know the odds of a game having no $5's using random all sets these days, but you know, it's intentionally not too common.
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DStu

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #146 on: January 14, 2013, 06:18:57 am »
0

Now there might be $4's that are strong enough to compete with $5's, such that for some players it would make sense to include them in the "$5's" category. They never do the job of costing $5 though.

I have done no statistics on that, but my feeling is also that there are not that many $4s that you really want to load up with.  Of course there are lots of Villages+, but these you either need for your deck, because you have an +action/+draw engine or want 1 or two villages to add to your cantrip engine. In which you don't load up with them in the sense of "they might always be a nice thing you can add to your deck over Silver/Gold", but they just are the topic of the strategic decission you have taken anyway.  In other types of deck, you don't want them at all.
Next to them, there is what? Spy (yeah), Tournament is probably the best one here but already has some drawbacks if you get to many of them, Conspirators needs their own special deck.  That's what I can think of, going to the wiki to find more .... ok Caravan might fit, Ironmonger looks like a candiate, and that's it.

In contrast, there are 3 Lab-variants at $5, Bazaar, Market, Treasury which easily win over Silver in most decks and sometimes over Gold.  Already more than I named at $4, and that's before I even started thinking...
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hsiale

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #147 on: January 14, 2013, 07:38:35 am »
0

I think a magic wand will be better for most players, beginners or not. It's not that it should be uh non-clue-giving; it should be clearly titled
I agree. And once it is clearly titled, it becomes a hammer. I don't want to easily understand how did someone make this hammer. I just want to know how it will work when I take it. So there are 5-8 various hammers to choose from (not 500, given 500 hammers I would just stare at them and not do any work). Which is extremally important especially when those generators will be used for casual play - I look at the table, see which generator was used and can instantly decide if I want to play this game, without having to spend time on analyzing the whole set.
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onigame

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #148 on: January 14, 2013, 01:34:22 pm »
0

Which is extremally important especially when those generators will be used for casual play - I look at the table, see which generator was used and can instantly decide if I want to play this game, without having to spend time on analyzing the whole set.

Well, what I had in mind is that while you do get the see what generator was used, in casual play the table generation should try to occur before you decide if you want to play the game.  This not only mimics real life but is what isotropic does:  Here's the kingdom you're going to play with, do you want to play it?

And if you can see the kingdom, it is really that important which generator was used to make it?  (My generator, unlike any other custom generator out there that I've seen, is completely probabilistic and so it is theoretically possible that every set will be generated by it.)
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LastFootnote

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Re: Announcing Dominion Set Generator
« Reply #149 on: January 14, 2013, 01:39:09 pm »
+2

Which is extremally important especially when those generators will be used for casual play - I look at the table, see which generator was used and can instantly decide if I want to play this game, without having to spend time on analyzing the whole set.

Well, what I had in mind is that while you do get the see what generator was used, in casual play the table generation should try to occur before you decide if you want to play the game.  This not only mimics real life but is what isotropic does:  Here's the kingdom you're going to play with, do you want to play it?

And if you can see the kingdom, it is really that important which generator was used to make it?  (My generator, unlike any other custom generator out there that I've seen, is completely probabilistic and so it is theoretically possible that every set will be generated by it.)

While technically true, this is a pretty meaningless statement. Here's my new random algorithm: Generate a random number between 1 and 10000000. If the number is 17, pull random cards from all owned cards. Otherwise, use the recommended First Set kingdom from the base game.

All Kingdoms are technically possible! Woo-hoo!
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