Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion General Discussion => Topic started by: HockeyHippo on July 15, 2011, 01:08:48 pm
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A serious problem, which makes me lose games.
Hell, my name's HockeyHippo and I'm a engine addict.
Too often I try to make a huge engine that wins the game in one turn. Especially when I'm playing IRL. In 4 player games I simply get torn apart by attack cards.
Sometimes it works and I love myself, other times I cry myself to sleep.
Why can't I just play a normal game and buy a province one at a time? Why must I buy two Grand Markets with 13, rather than a Province and Dutchy?
I need help.
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Well, you seem to have identified the problem. What do you expect us to do about it?
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Why is that a problem? The situation you are describing sounds like a casual setting.
Have fun, play the game. Make your crazy engine that will win 10% of the time, but is fun 100% of the time.
I started playing more "Efficiently" in casual games (I suppose that's isotropic play bleeding into my kitchen table) and trust me, when you win 95% of the games you play, nobody wants to play anymore. Either that, or they suspect you are slow rolling them, and then they don't want to play anymore. Same result.
Have fun and lose, it's more fun for everyone haha
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There's no leaderboard IRL so do whatever is fun for you.
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Playing Big Money against your friends is boring. Buy more actions, it's good for friendships.
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I love the responses here to this heartfelt plea. :)
But it does raise the one reservation I tend to have with Dominion, which I otherwise love: It sometimes seems a winning approach and a fun approach are not the same thing.
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Other deckbuilding games are the same way. Magic, for example, has very strictly divided competitive and casual gaming playstyles and communities - playing to win (at all costs) and playing for fun are just different. You learn to choose your playstyle based on who you're playing with.
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HockeyHippo, I often have the opposite problem. I see the pretty green cards and I grab them too quickly. Then my opponent pulls off a turn that uses 25 actions, buys out the rest of the Province stack and takes about fifteen minutes of my life that I'll never get back. It's rather disheartening, but it has forced me to look for the big turn myself, because I don't enjoy getting crushed. I guess my message to you is to look at it as an opportunity to improve your game. There are games where you should look for a big turn, and games where it's better to just grind it out. The trick, I guess, is to know which strategy to use.
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The leaderboard is part of the problem I think. Too much pressure to win and not just play for fun. I see my registered but unlevelled friends sign in and despair that my ranking will go down if I lose. Now that really is a sad condition!
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The leaderboard is part of the problem I think. Too much pressure to win and not just play for fun. I see my registered but unlevelled friends sign in and despair that my ranking will go down if I lose.
Astute observation. Are your friends unlevelled simply because they haven't played enough games yet, or is there some way to avoid having a level ranking?
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The leaderboard is part of the problem I think. Too much pressure to win and not just play for fun. I see my registered but unlevelled friends sign in and despair that my ranking will go down if I lose. Now that really is a sad condition!
Of course your ranking goes down if you lose. It also goes up if you win. That's kind of the point.
Why would that stop you from playing your friends? Do you play less competitively when you're playing your friends or something?
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The leaderboard is part of the problem I think. Too much pressure to win and not just play for fun. I see my registered but unlevelled friends sign in and despair that my ranking will go down if I lose. Now that really is a sad condition!
Of course your ranking goes down if you lose. It also goes up if you win. That's kind of the point.
Why would that stop you from playing your friends? Do you play less competitively when you're playing your friends or something?
I'm pretty sure that losing against someone 20 levels below you hurts your ranking more then losing to someone 20 levels above you in trueskill.
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But you also expect to beat that person more often, so, if trueskill does its job correctly, it evens out.
Basically what you said only makes sense if you somehow know that your friends are underrated by the system - which is certainly possible!
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Yeah, I'm just trying to convey the Zen of TrueSkill here:
If you play the games you most enjoy playing, TrueSkill will fluctuate a lot but vaguely converge on your actual skill level over time.
If you try to manipulate the games you play with the purpose of increasing your TrueSkill... pretty much exactly the same thing will happen, except you'll have less fun.
If you're really good at the manipulation, you might get your TrueSkill to hover a few levels too high for you for a while, but probably not indefinitely (because you'll tend to lose on average to people who earned the same skill level through playing the game well instead of the meta-game). And if you care that much about your level, then you'll probably be particularly sad about your eventual decline, so now you'll have less fun playing the games and you won't even accomplish your goal of feeling good about your level.
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Perhaps you need to tell yourself that a province is an alias for something you like, perhaps a holiday in Hawaii. Every time you look at the kingdom you can then remember that you'd like a Hawaiian holiday and remember to buy that province. Even if you like drinking beer I wouldn't use that as the alias, just to make sure that buying too many provinces doesn't impair your play.
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Perhaps you need to tell yourself that a province is an alias for something you like, perhaps a holiday in Hawaii. Every time you look at the kingdom you can then remember that you'd like a Hawaiian holiday and remember to buy that province. Even if you like drinking beer I wouldn't use that as the alias, just to make sure that buying too many provinces doesn't impair your play.
I do like them... but I want 5 of them, at the same time! (TWSS)
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Enjoy engine cards responsibly.