Dominion Strategy Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Pages: [1]

Author Topic: Things I've learned recently  (Read 2184 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

AdamH

  • Margrave
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2833
  • Shuffle iT Username: Adam Horton
  • You make your own shuffle luck
  • Respect: +3879
    • View Profile
    • My Dominion Videos
Things I've learned recently
« on: December 03, 2013, 02:25:35 pm »
+9

I'm not sure if this belongs here or in the Articles board. I'll choose here.

I wanted to share a couple of things that I've been working on recently that I think have improved my gameplay. They have been mentioned here before in one form or another but I've gained a deeper understanding of why these things are important and I wanted to share my insights. They involve situations where you don't want to play your action cards.

When I learned the game at first, it seemed that actually playing out your turn in Dominion was sort of done on auto-pilot. Play all your villages and non-terminals first, then play your terminals that draw, then the rest of your terminals. You can make small optimizations to this while still remaining on auto-pilot by alternating Village+Terminal Draw so that you leave yourself with one action remaining a lot. This isn't perfect, but it will get you off the ground in Dominion and give you a sense of what it feels like to play lots of actions in a turn and stuff like that, and hey, it's the best thing you can do about 80% of the time.

But sometimes it isn't. Sometimes you can do better, a LOT better, and sometimes doing a lot better involves not playing an action card even though you have the action(s) to do it.

1. Dead draw: If your economy comes from actions cards and/or you have an action-dense deck, you may think you want to dead draw. Yeah it doesn't hurt this turn and maybe I'll draw something that helps. But I can promise you that you aren't helping your next turn, and I can think of very few situations where that small chance of helping this turn is worth a big chance of hurting your next turn. Every time I dead draw, no matter what, a little alarm goes off in my head and I ask myself if I really want to do this. What is left in my deck that I'm likely to draw? Am I going to want to start my next turn with that in hand? Is my buy this turn really going to be helped that much if I get what I want? This is such an incredibly helpful improvement to the way I look at the game.

2. Reshuffles: the extreme cases are obvious: 20 action cards in play and 10+ cards in my discard? Just stop drawing cards. Smithy and four green cards in hand and less than three cards in my draw pile? Trigger that shuffle! Yeah the cases in between are a little more difficult to judge in general but guess what? You don't have to judge them in general! Every time you're about to do something that will make you shuffle your cards, just think about what's going to happen if you do that. How many cards are you shuffling? What's the general quality of what's in your discard compared to what's in your hand+play area? What are you hoping to draw and how big of a deal is it that you have it RIGHT NOW, potentially at the cost of your next turn or two? This is a lot easier for me to do IRL because shuffling invokes a delay in the game. I used to mind when my opponents would cause a mid-turn reshuffle because it delayed the game, but now I realize that more often than not they are doing themselves a disservice, so I just sit back and smile. Nothing is worse than knowing that your next turn or two is just going to be terrible and you can't do anything about it. It didn't take me long to feel this pain and want to prevent it whenever possible (once I learned that it is possible most of the time).

Dominion can be a game of auto-play, but knowing the times where it's important to stop and think is the first and most important step to stopping and thinking at the right times, so that you can make the best move.
Logged
Visit my blog for links to a whole bunch of Dominion content I've made.

shark_bait

  • Saboteur
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1103
  • Shuffle iT Username: shark_bait
  • Luckyfin and Land of Hinter for iso aliases
  • Respect: +1868
    • View Profile
Re: Things I've learned recently
« Reply #1 on: December 03, 2013, 02:42:15 pm »
+1

Consider order or drawing too.  With cards that draw different numbers of cards you could be forced into a reshuffle you don't want.  Think about how many cards are left in you draw pile and what actions you can play to get to the very end of your deck.
Logged
Hello.  Name's Bruce.  It's all right.  I understand.  Why trust a shark, right?

Is quite curious - Who is the mystical "Celestial Chameleon"?

flies

  • Minion
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 629
  • Shuffle iT Username: flies
  • Statistical mechanics of hard rods on a 1D lattice
  • Respect: +348
    • View Profile
    • ask the atheists
Re: Things I've learned recently
« Reply #2 on: December 04, 2013, 10:53:18 am »
+1

1. Dead draw: If your economy comes from actions cards and/or you have an action-dense deck, you may think you want to dead draw. Yeah it doesn't hurt this turn and maybe I'll draw something that helps. But I can promise you that you aren't helping your next turn, and I can think of very few situations where that small chance of helping this turn is worth a big chance of hurting your next turn. Every time I dead draw, no matter what, a little alarm goes off in my head and I ask myself if I really want to do this. What is left in my deck that I'm likely to draw? Am I going to want to start my next turn with that in hand? Is my buy this turn really going to be helped that much if I get what I want? This is such an incredibly helpful improvement to the way I look at the game.
If you're just drawing average cards, the effect is faster cycling and a chance of drawing treasure.  If you draw cards dead, you're mainly just speeding up your cycling.  Usually this is a good thing.  You might be triggering a bad reshuffle, and you should be mindful of that.  If you're tracking your deck and you know you have key cards that you don't want to draw dead, that's the other case where you'd want to hold off.  It seems like you're referring to this latter case here, but the cycling is non-negligible.  Note that sometimes tracking your deck reveals that the cards ahead aren't worth saving so that on average (i.e. without knowledge of what remains in your deck), the effect would be pure cycling.
Logged
Gotta be efficient when most of your hand coordination is spent trying to apply mascara to your beard.
flies Dominionates on youtube

AdamH

  • Margrave
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2833
  • Shuffle iT Username: Adam Horton
  • You make your own shuffle luck
  • Respect: +3879
    • View Profile
    • My Dominion Videos
Re: Things I've learned recently
« Reply #3 on: December 04, 2013, 10:57:37 am »
0

If you're tracking your deck and you know you have key cards that you don't want to draw dead, that's the other case where you'd want to hold off.  It seems like you're referring to this latter case here, but the cycling is non-negligible.

Agreed. This is what I'm referring to, but that's the important part of my improvement. My default mindset was that cycling is always good when you have the option to do it, so you should always do it (without thinking). This is true in most cases, but not always.

Deck tracking is important for both of my points, yes.
Logged
Visit my blog for links to a whole bunch of Dominion content I've made.

flies

  • Minion
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 629
  • Shuffle iT Username: flies
  • Statistical mechanics of hard rods on a 1D lattice
  • Respect: +348
    • View Profile
    • ask the atheists
Re: Things I've learned recently
« Reply #4 on: December 04, 2013, 11:07:23 am »
0

gotcha.
Logged
Gotta be efficient when most of your hand coordination is spent trying to apply mascara to your beard.
flies Dominionates on youtube

BadAssMutha

  • Bishop
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 115
  • Respect: +119
    • View Profile
Re: Things I've learned recently
« Reply #5 on: December 04, 2013, 12:01:48 pm »
+3

Your point about reshuffles is so, so important. By triggering a reshuffle at certain times and holding off at others, you can make your draw deck considerably better (or worse) than your entire deck as a whole. Knowing which is which requires some experience and just a little card counting. Generally, try to shuffle when good cards are in the discard and bad cards are in your hand.

Another point about shuffling is the timing of a buy. If you trigger a reshuffle this turn, whatever you buy will have to wait until the next reshuffle to come into play (unless there's Watchtower or Royal Seal or some such). This is more important when your deck is large and reshuffles are infrequent, and also with attack cards which are better to play early and often. It's important to think about how much you need the extra buying power from the draw that will trigger the reshuffle - similar to your comment about drawing dead. You have to consider the opportunity cost in terms of your next turn. With a hand of Lab, 3 Copper and a Silver and 1 card left in the draw, I recently decided to not play the Lab and get a decent $5 into the shuffle this round, rather than trigger the shuffle and get a $6 Gold that wouldn't come around for a few more turns.
Logged
Pages: [1]
 

Page created in 0.043 seconds with 20 queries.