Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion General Discussion => Topic started by: jonaskoelker on October 14, 2017, 01:01:26 pm
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Recently I had the following 2p kingdom come up. How would you play it? Catapult/Rocks, Chariot Race, Gladiator/Fortune, Castles, Temple, Archive, Legionary, Wild Hunt, Overlord, Royal Blacksmith — Palace, Ritual.
(http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?title=Special%3AFilePath&file=Catapult.jpg) (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?title=Special%3AFilePath&file=Chariot Race.jpg) (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?title=Special%3AFilePath&file=Gladiator.jpg) (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?title=Special%3AFilePath&file=Castles.jpg) (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?title=Special%3AFilePath&file=Temple.jpg)
(http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?title=Special%3AFilePath&file=Archive.jpg) (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?title=Special%3AFilePath&file=Legionary.jpg) (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?title=Special%3AFilePath&file=Wild Hunt.jpg) (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?title=Special%3AFilePath&file=Overlord.jpg) (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?title=Special%3AFilePath&file=Royal Blacksmith.jpg)
(http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?title=Special%3AFilePath&file=Palace.jpg) (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?title=Special%3AFilePath&file=Ritual.jpg)
No villages, the only +buy is Fortune, the only non-terminals are Archive and Chariot Race. That makes the board rather slow.
Here are some strategies:
- BMU: buy the most expensive of [Province, Gold, Silver] that you can afford until you run out the provinces (tactically bump up Palace points near the endgame, and/or buy Duchy, maybe). Has a hard time with Legionary (I guess); maybe Archive can help a little? But this deck gets thick very quickly (whatever "quickly" means on this board), so you won't have Archive often, or many of them simultaneously, unless you delay ramping up Palace points.
- BM+Archive+Legionary: trash a bit, get some Archives, get a Legionary and a few Golds, attack a lot, buy Provinces and maybe sprinkle in some Rituals. Perhaps Overlord plays here?
- Ritual golden(ish) deck: trash down, get some Archives, get a Fortune, repeatedly trash Curse, trash a Gold for VP, buy a replacement Gold. Transition into Provinces when the Curses are out.
- Jam your deck full of Chariot Races and expensive cards (Gold and Province seems good), some Archives maybe, milk CR for VP. Sounds not terribly awful, but in my experience with Chariot Race it has been... lackluster.
- Play one Wild Hunt per turn, gain 40 VP and an estate around turn 45 ??? sounds terrible, quite easy to contest, at which point... question mark?
I think Castles can fit into BM/Archive/Legionary, maybe in Ritual/golden if you have the time once the Curses run out. I haven't tried putting them into BMU, but I think it likes Province better; BMU's VP/turn rate drops off pretty sharply once it hits 7 Gold/Silver/Copper triples. But in general they seem like an expensive and slow VP supplement, probably not worth going for unless you put effort into getting the two scaling ones ($3 Humble and $10 King's).
I lean towards thinking BM/Archive/Legionary is strongest. The draw is limited, so the discard attack is strong, it can green reasonably soon and use Archive as temporary pseudo-thinning of green cards, so it should be possible to build to a stage where in can semi-almost-reliably attack and buy Province for a small handful of turns. My very lovely opponent never bought Legionary (we played ~5 games on this board) which I think helped me a lot; she swore a bit when I played mine ;D
What do you guys think? What's best here? Which cards never play?
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I'd say use Temple+Catapult to trash down quickly, get a bunch of Archive/Chariot Race, a single Gladiator, try to get Fortune when you can, and pursue Castles - Archive lets you get decently big hands, so get Opulent Castle when you can. Ignore Palace, it's more important to be thin. I'd tentatively ignore Legionary, as Catapult's attack is stronger here and you want one anyway.
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Chariot Race is a weird card and I don't quite understand the strategy of it a lot of the time. It's a cantrip that can give +VP, so you want to get a lot of them to lock your opponent out of those sweet sweet VP tokens, but if you have too many of them you're filling your deck with cheap $3 cards and making each one less likely to hit big.
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I think you want to do the catapult thing.
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I'd say use Temple+Catapult to trash down quickly, get a bunch of Archive/Chariot Race, a single Gladiator, try to get Fortune when you can, and pursue Castles - Archive lets you get decently big hands, so get Opulent Castle when you can. Ignore Palace, it's more important to be thin. I'd tentatively ignore Legionary, as Catapult's attack is stronger here and you want one anyway.
Thanks for the response.
Catapult's attack is stronger than Legionary: Assuming we can rank card goodness linearly, they would discard their two worst cards to Catapult, and do the same to Legionary but also cycle their median card. Probably the median card is average, so it's as good as what they'll draw—but it's harder to plan what to do when you have two chosen cards and a random vs. three chosen cards. I think this slightly favors Legionary. Also, eventually you will have trashed all the treasures you want to trash, and Legionary doesn't require any fuel, so maybe you transition to Legionary in the late game—after trashing and getting a Fortune? I have a hard time seeing cursing as relevant, since there is plenty of trashing. I mean sure, it takes up terminal space, but it eats your Silver. I guess maybe, if you have $3 spare above your main buy... ?
Ignore palace because it's more important to be thin: each use of palace is card-count neutral, but adding cards to be ritual'ed isn't, and staying on top of trashing is at the expense of attacking with Catapult (or digging with Gladiator). I take it this is what you have in mind, approximately? I was tired when I wrote this, I read "Palace" and thought "Ritual". Pedantic nitpicking: I think the goodness of being thin is non-independent of what else you're doing, so "being thin is more important" should probably be recast as "The palace-focused strategy is weaker than some other strategy which performs best when your deck is thin, hence you should thin down, ignore Palace, and do that other strategy", with which I agree. (On some boards Gardens rush beats Palace BM/slog, so thinness is not always good and is not the only argument against Palace.)
Get a bunch of Archive/Chariot Race: do you get as many Archives as you can here, or is a small handful enough? In my experience, decks similar to what you describe work ok-ish with 3-4 Archives; they would probably work better with 1 or 2 more, but the opportunity cost is often a Gold, so you're drawing a bigger proportion of a smaller total payload. Eh, if I replay this board I should probably try with more Archives just to compare. How big a deal is Chariot Race? It looks to me like it can safely be skipped in favor of more Silver.
I take it Wild Hunt and Royal Blacksmith are out of question in this deck: you have plenty of actions and few terminals, so there'll be a lot of dead draw and the cards will prove not worthwhile. Maybe Overlord could play here? It can trash your Catapult/Temple/Gladiator once you don't need those, then become a spare Archive or Legionary? (Or maybe Catapult if that's better.) The cost looks non-trivial, though.
How big a deal is Fortune? Clearly Fortune is a good card—but you can get it if your opponent goes for Gladiator even if you don't. If you pick up a Gladiator and your opponent doesn't, your advantage is a cheap terminal sometimes-Gold (esp. if paired with a Castle in a 2p game), you gain a Gold when you buy your Fortune, and you likely get to play yours first (assuming you have $8 when you uncover it). The cost of this is a large amount of terminal space used on playing Gladiator that could be spent either trashing or attacking with Legionary. Is that worth it? Maybe the right timing of Fortune (if you have the only Gladiator) is such that you're likely to drain the last two provinces from the supply on your first Fortune turn—that way you try to maximize the value of the asymmetric benefits of uncovering Fortune.
I think you want to do the catapult thing.
Boss the Catapult split, pelt them with Rocks, then pelt them with a few Catapults once you have completed the bombardment?
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I'd be tempted to get an overlord here as you want to play a different choice of terminal at different times and you have time to pay off the debt while trashing down. This means the piles won't go down so much and the fortunes and rocks might not come into play. This would simplify the kingdom a bit as you're then looking at a deck with chariot races, archives, gold, overlord. I'm struggling to see a sustained strategy that is trashing with catapults or ritual but they might see a little use, perhaps some castles malarchy. I'm assuming that a palace based deck that keeps coppers will be beaten up by some chariot race and legionnaire thing.
With the two vp piles, castles and provinces, you probably need to overbuild the deck before greening. Archive is going to do some peculiar stuff but is obviously worth it to increase hand size. I'm assuming chariot races cannot be the main payload in a mirror as they themselves are going to be cheapest card in your deck, making it somewhat counterproductive to add more and more. I'd possibly let my opponent attack the castles and just buy out selective ones as defense.
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I'd be tempted to get an overlord here as you want to play a different choice of terminal at different times and you have time to pay off the debt while trashing down. This means the piles won't go down so much and the fortunes and rocks might not come into play. This would simplify the kingdom a bit as you're then looking at a deck with chariot races, archives, gold, overlord. I'm struggling to see a sustained strategy that is trashing with catapults or ritual but they might see a little use, perhaps some castles malarchy. I'm assuming that a palace based deck that keeps coppers will be beaten up by some chariot race and legionnaire thing.
With the two vp piles, castles and provinces, you probably need to overbuild the deck before greening. Archive is going to do some peculiar stuff but is obviously worth it to increase hand size. I'm assuming chariot races cannot be the main payload in a mirror as they themselves are going to be cheapest card in your deck, making it somewhat counterproductive to add more and more. I'd possibly let my opponent attack the castles and just buy out selective ones as defense.
Overlord is not a great fit with Chariot Race.
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I got 10/12 abbreviations correct without looking, took me a while though.
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Semi-recently, Awaclus posted Obstacles: Beyond the Five Deck Types (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=17572.0). Mainly for my own benefit, let me try and address his list of 7 obstacles for my five suggested strategies:
BMU/Palace
- Your starting deck consists of crappy cards — Coppers are not great, but they're not awful when supplemented with Silver and Gold; also, they're worth points!
- The main source of VP comes from putting crappy cards into your deck — Nope, thanks to Palace my main source of VP comes from putting Silver and Gold into my deck.
- You only get 5 cards and 1 buy every turn — 5 cards is enough because they'll be decent on average, I won't build up to the point where 2+ buys would be useful. Against Legionary I'll only have 3, though, which puts Province out of reach of most hands. Archive can help counteract this, a bit, but that's a detour from buying treasures.
- You can only play one Action card every turn — That's fine, the only action I would ever want to play is Archive which is non-termial.
- When you buy a card, it takes a while before you even get to use it at all — that's okay, I have more copies of my good cards, and I can put low-money turns to good use.
- You don’t always draw cards in the order you would like — I don't need to, I have redundancy and my cards combine linearly. Spending my $3-5 turns on buying Silver is perfectly fine.
- In order to win, you need to be able to end the game by emptying the Provinces, Colonies or any three piles while you’re ahead — I'll get lots of points from Palace, so I'm not afraid of being behind. I'll buy Provinces when I can, eventually that's how I'll end the game.
BM+Archive+Legionary
- Your starting deck consists of crappy cards — I'll trash many/all of them with Temple and/or Catapult.
- The main source of VP comes from putting crappy cards into your deck — I'll temporarily set them aside with Archive.
- You only get 5 cards and 1 buy every turn — I'll thin down, draw more good cards with Archive. I'll not overbuild my treasure payload beyond what I have buys for. Getting an Overlord instead of multiple different terminals can free up some buys. I can trash some cards when I no longer need them (trashers with Overlord after trashing, Gladiator after Fortune if I go for that) such that I won't have to draw them.
- You can only play one Action card every turn — My draw is non-terminal; a lucky Archive can let me coordinate my way out of terminal collisions; the bulk of my VP-buying power comes from treasures; my various terminals are useful in different stages of the game: trashers early, Legionary is always good but especially later in the game when my opponent has a better deck (each discard hurts more). If I could play more terminals I could perhaps accomplish more, but I can work around the limitation.
- When you buy a card, it takes a while before you even get to use it at all — I cycle moderately quickly with Archive, given that I have thinned.
- You don’t always draw cards in the order you would like — They don't interdepend. Exceptions: Legionary synergizes with Gold and terminals antisynergize with other colliding terminals. Archive helps me coordinate my cards, Overlord lets me trash my early trashers and be a spare Legionary when I need it.
- In order to win, you need to be able to end the game by emptying the Provinces, Colonies or any three piles while you’re ahead — I'll slow my opponents down with Legionary, catch up with the Castle pile (maybe) and empty the Provinces. If I spend time getting a Fortune, I can catch up faster and have more pile control from the extra buy; an extra buy could alternatively help me green sustainably for a longer period of time by enabling Province+Archive turns.
Ritual Golden(ish) deck
- Your starting deck consists of crappy cards — I'll trash all of them.
- The main source of VP comes from putting crappy cards into your deck — No, 'cause I'll Ritual expensive cards and then trash the Curse.
- You only get 5 cards and 1 buy every turn — I'll draw more with Archive and I'll get a Fortune for +buy.
- You can only play one Action card every turn — That's sufficient to balance my trashing and self-cursing rates. If my opponent junks me, I'll use Archive's sifting to cope (imperfectly).
- When you buy a card, it takes a while before you even get to use it at all — Thinning and Archive makes me cycle moderately quickly.
- You don’t always draw cards in the order you would like — The important task is colliding Curse with a trasher (the rest is just treasure and Fortune), and getting to play Fortune; the rest of what I do is just treasures. Archive gives me pretty much everything I need.
- In order to win, you need to be able to end the game by emptying the Provinces, Colonies or any three piles while you’re ahead — I'll gain VP at a good rate without making my deck worse, using Ritual, then transition into Provinces if I'm ahead, or Castles if I need to catch up even more. I'll have better pile control and more money than strategies that don't get Fortune, and I can green sustainably with Province+Archive turns.
Chariot Race plus expensive cards
- Your starting deck consists of crappy cards — Trashing!
- The main source of VP comes from putting crappy cards into your deck — Nope, they come from playing lots of Chariot Races.
- You only get 5 cards and 1 buy every turn — Once built, all I want to do is play a bunch of non-terminals and buy a Province, so that's enough. Archive can boost my hand size.
- You can only play one Action card every turn — My key card is non-terminal; maybe I can throw in a spare Legionary for the attack?
- When you buy a card, it takes a while before you even get to use it at all — Thanks to thinning, cantrips and Archive I'll cycle very quickly.
- You don’t always draw cards in the order you would like — What I lack in ability to target my Chariot Races I'll make up for by playing lots of them and getting Provinces.
- In order to win, you need to be able to end the game by emptying the Provinces, Colonies or any three piles while you’re ahead — I'll use Chariot Race to gain loads of points while my opponent's deck gets worse and worse, then get the last few Provinces when I'm ahead.
Slog-like thing with Wild Hunt
- Your starting deck consists of crappy cards — I'll put enough copies of my key card in my deck that they're not diluted out too badly by my bad cards. Also, I'll probably trash some of my bad cards.
- The main source of VP comes from putting crappy cards into your deck — I'll gain a large number of VP per bad card.
- You only get 5 cards and 1 buy every turn — I'll put enough Wild Hunts into my deck that I'll be guaranteed to draw one. One buy is enough.
- You can only play one Action card every turn — That really limits me :( this means that WH won't give me more than 1 VP per turn.
- When you buy a card, it takes a while before you even get to use it at all — Once I have a few Wild Hunts, having the extra ones show up a with a delay doesn't hurt that much.
- You don’t always draw cards in the order you would like — So long as I draw one WH, I'm happy.
- In order to win, you need to be able to end the game by emptying the Provinces, Colonies or any three piles while you’re ahead — I'll make 1 VP/turn (delayed) while my opponent does nothing(?!?) for a long time, then attack either Provinces or piles (slowly). Maybe I'll combine Wild Hunt with something moneyish and get some points from Palace and Province?
So what have we learned?
I think this spells out in more words what I was already mostly aware of when I looked at the board—some of it at the back rather than front of my mind. I think it explicates very well why WH slog is awful. When I spell out the battle plan for Chariot Race, I feel not completely convinced that it's good: to play CR profitably you need cards that are more expensive than your opponent's; lots of Provinces seems like a good candidate—but that pushes the game towards ending, and the point of mass CR is to secure an advantage in the long game, so there's a clear internal conflict in that strategy.
One thing that hadn't occurred to me before spelling all of this out: maybe WH can play as a supplement to BMU/Palace. The primary thing that makes WH bad on its own is that it gains points extremely slowly. Combine it with a strategy that can gain a decent amount of points basically from turn one until forever, and the downside is mitigated. Also, the draw from WH mitigates discard attacks which really hurt BMU/Palace. There's still the issue that getting WH or Archive means you won't get a treasure (and hence no VP) that turn, so you still take that hit. But given that WH is no longer the focus of the strategy, that addresses the issue that a WH-focused strategy sucks. Is it a better supplement than Archive? Does it make WH playable? Gee, I don't know, but I think it would be worth trying.
The three remaining strategies sound similar on a lot of points: trash down, get a bunch of Archives, cycle fairly quickly, dodge collisions with Archive; they of course also diverge on which source of VP they stress and which terminal they want to play repeatedly at which stage in the game. You can sprinkle some Ritual and some Chariot Race into Archive+Legionary/Catapult+Treasure (maybe even advantageously!), but it seems harder to sprinkle anything into a deck that goes full golden with Ritual without it losing its golden nature.
Another observation: all of these strategies except what I'm calling BM+Archive+Legionary try to deal with obstacle 2 by gaining points without making the deck (much) worse: BMU/Palace by making it better, Ritual by not making it worse, CR by turning Provinces into a renewable source of VP and WH by only making it ever so slightly worse for each large burst of VP.
All in all, I think it can be useful to map out your strategies along Awaclus' 7 axes. The understanding-gains were modest, but more than nothing. Oh well, I wasn't trying to get a "this simple trick will turn you into a genuis", so I'm not disappointed.