Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion General Discussion => Topic started by: kieranmillar on August 19, 2017, 04:17:49 am
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I was looking through all of the cards and events and something occured to me. I can't remember ever buying Silk Road. I think I've bought every other card, including stuff like Harvest, more often in games than Silk Road.
I've not been around anywhere nearly as long as others here, so have simply played less games involving this card, but it just intuitively feels weak to me. Help me out here, what am I missing?
When it comes to Alternative VP I find that it really needs to be worth 3VP or more by the end of the game to be worth picking up. If it's only worth 2VP, getting 2 of them is the same points and cards as a duchy and an estate, except it was a bit more expensive. Now with a card like Gardens, even when trashing early I find a solid engine can get back up to 30 cards naturally, but with Silk Road you need 12 VP cards, which is an entire pile and a half. That's an enormous amount in practice. Even with something like Nobles on the board it can be difficult.
I've thought it might be good in games where there are lots of gains available, but typically in those games you three pile before there is any chance to reasonably gain any amount of victory cards and you're more likely to be better served by a few Estates or an Estate pile-out.
So when is it good? Or has it just failed to keep up with a world that increasingly sees games with a larger proportion of good engine cards?
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Silk Road has been overtaken a little by vp tokens and better trashing, really. It still works in rushes, piling out silk roads, estates, and a card like ironworks. It still works with other victory cards in the kingdom. It can still be a factor in close end games and the person who gets the silk roads will usually win drawn out finishes where there isn't an easy close out on the province pile.
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Eh, it's better than Gardens most of the time?
With the presence of basically any other alt-VP it's not that hard for Silk Road to be worth it, but it's certainly been replaced a bit by all of the other ways to score points. Give it a try sometime when you have a bunch of Nobles or Islands or something.
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Eh, it's better than Gardens most of the time?
With the presence of basically any other alt-VP it's not that hard for Silk Road to be worth it, but it's certainly been replaced a bit by all of the other ways to score points. Give it a try sometime when you have a bunch of Nobles or Islands or something.
I second this. If there's something like Mill on the board, it isn't too hard to get a decent amount of victory cards in your deck without hurting it at all. Though without alt-VP, I usually just buy it in the endgame when I can't afford a Duchy.
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If it's only worth 2VP, getting 2 of them is the same points and cards as a duchy and an estate, except it was a bit more expensive.
You mean a lot cheaper. The difference between $4 and $2 is not very big, whereas the difference between $4 and $5 is. So Silk Road costs a lot less than Duchy but not a lot more than Estate.
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There are two main ways to look a Sroads: as extra VP for late game engines and as a rush card like Gardens.
The later is the easier to wrap your your head around. A typical Garden rush averages maybe 2 cards gained per turn and piles out 26 cards (Gardens, Estates, and an enabler like Iw). This makes your typical garden worth ~3.6 VP and the game ends at T13 at the earliest.
Sroad can do the same magic with a few cards and in the process they can bulk up to 21 VP cards making each Sroad worth 5.2 VP.
This makes uncontested Sroad more point lucrative, but both top out shy of of a province pile and both suffer from the fact that an engine player will gain a higher VP delta from taking the $4 green than provinces. Both are still doable with the right setups, but you need something pretty good once your opponent nabs 2 or 3 of your main green.
Outside of the rush and the rare green heavy kingdom, Sroad is mostly competing with Duchy. Some things are obviously better with Sroads - e.g. Followers without estate trashing will give you a huge boost towards Sroad as does Tournament generally. At 12 green Sroad are strictly superior to Duchies outside of obvious edge cases. A typical end game win for an engine is to hit 3 Prov, 4 Duchies, 1 Estate. That is painfully close if you both kept estates. If you expect to lose the province pile, then you are extremely likely to want Sroad over Duchy. If you lose Provs badly (e.g. 6:2) or Colonies are in the mix, then you will absolutely want to go Sroad over Duchy.
If you are mixing other alt-VP in, then the "beats duchy" threshold kicks in much sooner. Beating provinces requires you to carry 24 VP cards, but can be doable with setups like Iw/Mill or Nobles/Smason.
Sroads is extremely powerful for mass gain scenarios, like with Troll, Smason, Dev or Possession as you may be able to pop an entire VP pile or two in a single go. Piling out both the Sroad and Estate piles generates 40 VP with 16 gains, not easy but something that can allow you to win with a slow starting engine.
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Silk Road was a stronger card, but has become weaker as more expansions have been added, most notably Empires.
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Silk Road was a stronger card, but has become weaker as more expansions have been added, most notably Empires.
I think this is exacerbated by the fact that currently on Dominion Online you get a Landmark in every other game.
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I think I've bought Sroads less than Transmute, but they can be good. One game I remember I did really well w/ them and Charm. I often use lots of Charms to gain many Duchies, and there was also another 4.
Usually they aren't all that good, I'll think about them but not really have an idea. But anything that makes having green cards good/less bad improves them. Crossroads, Ironmonger, Baron, etc.
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I forget the precise details, but we once played a Hinterlands-only kingdom. I focused on Oasis, Tunnel and Silk Road, with a few Spice Merchants for +Buy and trashing.
People competed for the Tunnels, but let me get all the Silk Roads. 3*Estate, 12*Silk Road plus some Tunnels meant over 50VP when we ended on piles.
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Well would you believe it, the first game after I read the responses here had Silk Road on it. So I decided to go for it. It was a game with Plan, Delve, Castles and Magpie and other stuff that was not used much so I planned the magpies to trash my starting estates and got a load of silvers while my opponent opened double-castle and went for them. At the end I just barely beat my opponent, with 6 silk roads and 3 provinces and the 8-cost castle and some other stuff. I think the score was 49 vs 47. I had exactly 12 Victory cards so they were worth the same as Duchies. But thanks to Delve when I hit 6 I got a Silver and a Silk Road instead of just a Duchy which makes it better than Duchy in this case.
It wasn't the typical board but it worked alright, I guess it was like a sloggy silver-flood board so it works fine in that situation. I still need to try it in an engine.
What I have learned somewhat recently is that Artisan can start picking up Duchies earlier than I originally would have thought and you can gain a significant amount of points doing this, so perhaps I should treat Silk Roads along the same lines. If there is a gainer you can pick them up earlier than you would usually green and the points can really add up even if it hurts your engine. Maybe my hang up with Silk Road is that because stop cards are bad in an engine, I would always get a small number of victory cards when possible and of course Silk Road is not worth much in this situation. So perhaps I was undervaluing it because I was always deliberately putting myself in a situation where it couldn't work so I would never see it as useful.
Will have to play around with it more and practice more with building decks that can handle a lot of green, and put more trust into the points accumulating to enough in the long term.
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I forget the precise details, but we once played a Hinterlands-only kingdom. I focused on Oasis, Tunnel and Silk Road, with a few Spice Merchants for +Buy and trashing.
People competed for the Tunnels, but let me get all the Silk Roads. 3*Estate, 12*Silk Road plus some Tunnels meant over 50VP when we ended on piles.
I feel like people who've played the game almost exclusively online and with all sets have missed out on certain weaker interactions like the one you've described that happen when you're playing an expansion standing alone or with base + that expansion. Silk Road has a bunch of cards that interact well with it in Hinterlands - you've got Farmland, so you can upgrade your Estates into Silk Roads when you buy a Farmland, you've got Tunnel, which is an alt-VP card that it's usually best to get early rather than late, and then you've got stuff like Crossroads and Border Village that can help you out either with drawing when your hand is green or letting you gain a green when you buy a Village.
Silk Road also works very well with Trade Route if there's a non-Colony alt-VP out there, and Trade Route is also normally skippable.
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Unrelated, but I've just looked at the Wiki article (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Trade_Route) on Trade Route and noticed the reprint exchanges the order of "Trash a card from your hand." and "+$1 per Coin/token on the Trade Route mat."
I wonder why. It can make a difference, if you trash Catacombs or Hunting Grounds.
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Unrelated, but I've just looked at the Wiki article (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Trade_Route) on Trade Route and noticed the reprint exchanges the order of "Trash a card from your hand." and "+$1 per Coin/token on the Trade Route mat."
I wonder why. It can make a difference, if you trash Catacombs or Hunting Grounds.
It's just trying to be the most natural order.
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Unrelated, but I've just looked at the Wiki article (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Trade_Route) on Trade Route and noticed the reprint exchanges the order of "Trash a card from your hand." and "+$1 per Coin/token on the Trade Route mat."
I wonder why. It can make a difference, if you trash Catacombs or Hunting Grounds.
Interesting, it's an actual buff! I agree with Donald about what sounds natural. Don't think I ever noticed that Trade Route was the other way around; but if asked what the card said, I would have quoted second edition because it just sounds like how it should be. Probably because trash a card from your hand is more like a vanilla bonus.
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If it's only worth 2VP, getting 2 of them is the same points and cards as a duchy and an estate, except it was a bit more expensive.
You mean a lot cheaper. The difference between $4 and $2 is not very big, whereas the difference between $4 and $5 is. So Silk Road costs a lot less than Duchy but not a lot more than Estate.
Late in the game the difference between 4-5 is small unless if you're deck socks.
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If it's only worth 2VP, getting 2 of them is the same points and cards as a duchy and an estate, except it was a bit more expensive.
You mean a lot cheaper. The difference between $4 and $2 is not very big, whereas the difference between $4 and $5 is. So Silk Road costs a lot less than Duchy but not a lot more than Estate.
Late in the game the difference between 4-5 is small unless if you're deck socks.
That's usually true, but it isn't true when you would be buying an Estate.