Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion General Discussion => Dominion Videos and Streams => Topic started by: olneyce on January 17, 2012, 10:41:08 pm
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So I thought I'd join in on the action.
Here's my first effort:
http://youtu.be/WNgKe1zrrvY
I don't have anything except the internal microphone, which means the audio is pretty quiet. Not sure how I can improve that absent buying a better microphone. I think the picture quality turned out pretty well, though.
The game itself is pretty strange. I went for Scrying Pools after a round of Sea Hags, so it's quite drawn out (like, over 20 minutes). If you can manage to slog through it, we were both pretty curious how I actually won. He had 8 Hunting Parties but could never really get his deck off the ground, where my Scrying Pools managed to slice through the mess of curses far better. Would love feedback.
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gg
But I'm a little bit with def here. Of course the Scrying Pool gives you large hands with these Warehouses, that's no question. But 8 Hunting Parties should also give you great hands and should not care much about 5 Curses. I have lost games against HP where I handed out all 10.
So either def made some serious mistake with some reshuffle, getting a sequence of hands with crap, or got unlucky discards by the Pool. But I think it should be faster than going for Scrying Pools, especially as you can only play one terminal here
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I waited for the game to show up on CR before commenting. Great vid btw, you guys are making me want to try this out. Is this possible using freeware?
I think the three Warehouses do not help def at all. I went looking for a reason 8 HPs would lose to Scrying Pool, and that is my answer. I think the HP player on this board has two options once the cursing is finished; either pick up the Bishop to clear out Sea Hag and curses or say fuck it and try to power through with a Nomad's Camp, but either way, those warehouses are dead meat in an already polluted deck unless they are played very carefully. It is far too easy to force a bad reshuffle in a HP engine using it late in the shuffle, or you risk using the HPs to replace the warehouse you just jettisoned if you use it early.
I have to say, the Scrying Pool/Warehouse combo performed much better than I would have expected in a bloated deck with a very light economy. So I walked away learning something, which is really the point, so kudos to you.
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Council Room log is here, for those interested:
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120117-134636-ae5d7528.html
I think the Warehouse explanation makes some sense. I really do struggle to understand how Scrying Pools could cut through the mess so easily when Hunting Parties seemed to break down. But thinking about the value of Warehouses in a SP engine vs. the HP one does help to demystify it a little bit. It also might be down to simple good luck, too.
I tried to do it with freeware and it totally failed, so I had to acquire a pay version of Snapz Pro, which is super easy to use. Once I got it downloaded and running it took maybe 20 minutes to start making a video. Though if you have a Mac and anything from 10.6 on, there's apparently a pretty solid feature within Quicktime to record.
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Yes, I think the Warehouses helped him early in the game to both buy his Hunting Parties and keep up in the cursing business, but once the dust had settled and the die was cast, the Warehouses were a great boon to your Pools and not very good with the Parties. What this really comes down to is that a Hunting Party deck needs to have as few unique cards as possible, and he had 9 (not counting Duchy bought on his last turn). My ideal HP deck has 7, counting Provinces and Estates.
In the end, it is my opinion that your decision to buy Pool won you this game.
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def was possibly right that you got a bit lucky drawing at least 1 SP or Warehouse each new turn, whereas he often got stuck with none of his engine cards. However, SP helped to destroy def's next hand to some extend AND olneyce was able to control the reshuffle exactly, which was not the case for def. So it was some luck, but I nevertheless think SP is a bit better here thatn HP (though I probably would have went for HP myself).
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Hi!
Very interesting to see you playing this game. Few things I noticed:
- In the beginning you said you'd want Alchemists, because Scrying Pools may conflict with all the junk... ;)
- my point about how you can set up the future turn was totally wrong. In fact, that's what you are doing very well there, drawing all the cards of your deck every turn, having the same pool of cards after a reshuffle for the new turn. I can't do this, and therefore am in big problems when I'm not hitting the fewer engine cards in the early part of the reshuffle. This, the attack part of SPs, which we discussed after the game (I don't think it's in the video), which effectively leave me with 4-card hands most of the time, and other little things add together and make a much bigger difference than I thought.
- otherwise, there are many little things, like whether I really wanted to buy the early Gold and the early Province. I think two more Hunting Parties would have been better, maybe, if I already committed for this strategy.
- I don't think the warehouses are that much of a problem. Yes, they are definitely more helpful for olneyce than for me, but they don't really hurt me either. It's nice to play some Hunting Parties and discard useless cards afterwards. A bad reshuffle wasn't triggered by a warehouse, but by a scrying pool. See turn 18, where olneyce triggered a reshuffle AND made me discard a hunting party. Afterwards, I couldn't do much for some turns.
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Very interesting video. I totally didn't understand it too why you were going for SP, I was sure HP were better here, so I learned SPs can shine too in a messed up deck if there are sifters like Warehouse.
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Good comments here. One thing I think this video really clarifies is how often important decisions happen on the fly, and are driven by happenstance instead of complex plans. In retrospect the decision to get Scrying Pools looks smart – and the end-state of my deck suggests a concentrated effort to develop in that direction. But as def points out, my actual comment at the time is that I want to get an Alchemist but don’t have enough money. Which looking back would have been a terrible idea!
The meta-point here is that my ranking suggests I am a top-level player, but I often don’t feel like it. I poke around and stumble into good engines without necessarily having considered it fully beforehand. Whereas I interpret the good moves of my opponents as always being planned.
I think def is also right to note the importance of the Scrying Pool’s ability to forcefully trigger re-shuffles. The Spy feature is surprisingly important when things are poised this delicately.
A final big advantage of Scrying Pools, I think is that they can draw themselves far easier. And can draw multiple Warehouses, too. If you have HP-deck you’re very unlikely to get more than a couple in your hand, since they will skip over themselves. The Scrying Pool will happily give you duplicates or triplicates.
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This is a minor tactical note in the context of the whole game, but given that you had made the decision to go for Scrying Pools, you probably should have trashed the curse rather than the Sea Hag. The Hag would always be drawn through with the Pool and could still be discarded to the Warehouse, whereas the Curse would stop the Pool.
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Would buying one apothecary before the scrying pools (or alchemists) have been an improvement?