Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion Articles => Topic started by: Screwyioux on April 02, 2018, 11:26:30 am
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Fortress Big Money
(https://i.imgur.com/yuzsOqB.png)
With our most recent episode of the podcast out, I wanted to clarify a reference we made to one of the staple strategies in high-level Dominion counterplay. I figured most people knew about it, but it looks like some aren’t aware of the power combo.
That’s okay though, it’s why we do what we do. It doesn’t mean we’ve failed, it just means we need to slow down and take a step back (only been teaching domindion for like a month or something so it’s understandable if some people need to catch up). I’m going to start with the basics here. I think most of us know that drawing cards is powerful, and actions win games, but you never know who’s reading (who knows, maybe I’ll even read this before I publish).
We’ll start by talking about something else. My qualifications for this are that I’m very good at Dominion (I played in the gencon qualifier last year and I own all the expansions).
What’s the goal of a big money deck? Obviously, it’s to buy 5 of the 8 provinces before your opponent can do whatever it is they’re doing. Doing this is a strong play. It requires and showcases a level of drawing and buying that separates a good player from a great one.
Why is fortress so good for this? Why wouldn’t you just buy a silver? You can’t buy provinces without coins, and getting 5 of them requires 40(!!) coins at minimum. You get money by drawing cards, and drawing cards can be a pain.
Let’s do some math on how your first two turns break down WITHOUT the powerhouse opener of Fortress-Fortress (Fortress-Silver if you miss the shuffle):
(https://i.imgur.com/ANhhQZY.png)(https://i.imgur.com/O4t0Dwd.png)
As you can see, Silver Smithee looks like it comes out ahead most of the time, but that’s a logical fallacy.
You see, Smithey, despite being able to draw silver copper gold, could draw things dead, like estates and Semithys you can’t play now.
That’s where fortress comes in. You need 8 money, but you start out with all these cards that only give you a $1. How do you turn five of those into $8 (much less $40)?
Easy. You need more of them. Obviously, you’re grabbing an extra copper with your markets whenever you haven’t spent all your money on Silvers and Fortresses, which helps with your money density, but it doesn’t change the fact that you have only start out with 5 cards of the 8 you need.
You play a Fortress from your hand and it draws you a card. You’ve now seen 6 of the 8 cards you need. That’s where the Smitehy tree stops dead in its tracks and its why we skip that card whenever we can get Fortress instead.
The Fortress pile, however, synergizes with itself in ways we’re still trying to understand here in the top tables of the dominion community. After all, this is a game of resource management. Your cards are resources. Your money is a resource and your actions are the most important resource (with points coming in as a close second).
Smithy’se problem is that it consumes the resources it needs, actions. Market’s issue here isn’t that it consumes resources, but it doesn’t create the resources you need to play more of them. It says plus action on it, but a good Dominion player is tracking how many actions he plays per turn versus his available pool and realizes he’s not actually profiting when he draws and plays a fortress. If you’re not making actions, you’re losing actions.
Obviously, Fortress creates value in this situation by not only refusing to consume actions, but adding them to your pool.
We have this theory from Dominion called opportunity cost (which is way too complicated to go into here so just google it or something), which states that any time you buy a Market, it could have been a Fortress. So every time you play that action, it’s like you lose an action you could have had.
Now that we’ve established that, let’s come back to how a Fortress big money deck wins the game (and it does).
Smiethy showed us some cards but didn’t quite get us to Province. Fortress, on the other hand doesn’t have that hard cap of how many you can play.
Playing 3 or 4 of them means that you’ve seen more than enough of your deck to buy a province, and possibly enough to grab an extra duchy or silver too!
Let’s do some math on Fortress:
(https://i.imgur.com/VRJjX4g.png)
The other strength of Fortress is that cards like Swingler, Knights and Rogue actually INCREASE the number of Fortresses in your deck, making it possible to own the entire Fortress pile by turn 4 or five if you plan correctly.
Now getting into exactly who wins the game based on how the Fortress split goes is well beyond the scope of this article, but hopefully now you understand the strategy and how it applies to games of Dominion for epic comebacks.
Check out the episode in question below and happy holidays, everyone!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmXmjOxKMTg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmXmjOxKMTg)
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Aren't you a day late?
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The other strength of Fortress is that cards like Swingler, Knights and Rogue actually INCREASE the number of Fortresses
Begging for a meme.
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Aren't you a day late?
And a dollar short of the double fortress open.
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I was a little skeptical first, but then I looked at the Nakagami density function and that persuaded me to give Fortress/BM a try. I think it most closely captures the development of your money density.
How does Fortress/BM compare to big money with Coin of the Realm?
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The fact that that youtube link wasn't to Rick Astley had me skeptical at first
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The fact that that youtube link wasn't to Rick Astley had me skeptical at first
The fact that you said the link wasn't to Rick Astley made me think that it was, but then it wasn't. Pretty nice double-reverse psychology.
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This YouTube link is to Rick Astley: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?board=50.0
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I was a little skeptical first, but then I looked at the Nakagami density function and that persuaded me to give Fortress/BM a try. I think it most closely captures the development of your money density.
How does Fortress/BM compare to big money with Coin of the Realm?
Exactly! And that's a good thought. Big Money CoTR is widely accepted to be the close-second counterpart to BM Fortress, so I decided to run the numbers through my bot and I think the results speak for themselves:
(https://i.imgur.com/f0Ztzjy.jpg)
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This YouTube link is to Rick Astley: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?board=50.0
One of the great tragedies of our generation is how Youtube's preroll ads have ruined the comedic timing of such a cherished meme.
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This YouTube link is to Rick Astley: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?board=50.0
One of the great tragedies of our generation is how Youtube's preroll ads have ruined the comedic timing of such a cherished meme.
One of the great comedies of our generation is how you can block the ads with a browser extension. (or if you're on Opera, you don't even need an extension)
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This YouTube link is to Rick Astley: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?board=50.0
One of the great tragedies of our generation is how Youtube's preroll ads have ruined the comedic timing of such a cherished meme.
One of the great comedies of our generation is how you can block the ads with a browser extension. (or if you're on Opera, you don't even need an extension)
There are forums where admitting that you have an ad blocker gets you banned. I take it this is not one of those forums?
(Not that I have one)
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This YouTube link is to Rick Astley: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?board=50.0
One of the great tragedies of our generation is how Youtube's preroll ads have ruined the comedic timing of such a cherished meme.
One of the great comedies of our generation is how you can block the ads with a browser extension. (or if you're on Opera, you don't even need an extension)
There are forums where admitting that you have an ad blocker gets you banned. I take it this is not one of those forums?
(Not that I have one)
We ban you for not having an ad blocker. I'll have to report you.
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I decided to run the numbers through my bot and I think the results speak for themselves: [...]
This is spiraling out of control :o
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Fortress / big money is insane with Goat.