Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Game Reports => Topic started by: eliegel34 on December 11, 2012, 02:11:59 am
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I've played a lot of different Hunting Party/X games, but i never thought of Counting House as a good X. I was looking at this set, and figured with no other obvious strategy i'd try HP/CH. It was a pretty fun combo to try! Hunting Party does a great job of sifting through your whole deck once you have enough of them, and then Counting House pulls all the Coppers out of the discard.
I think i could have set it up faster, but it was such a weird game with Smugglers. I don't think it's worth the time to buy Gold in this deck but i'm not sure if a free one from smugglers hurt or not. I think this could be pretty strong on a board with some sort of non terminal +Buy since it would be pretty easy to build up to double Hunting Party turns, Province/Hunting Party turns or maybe even double Provinces. It sure was weird to play with Counting House in a game that wasn't a slog!
Bishop, Cellar, Counting House, Crossroads, Great Hall, Hunting Party, Smugglers, Tribute, Village, and Walled Village
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/10/game-20121210-225338-0c01b34b.html
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Cute combo, but as you pointed out, it needs +Buy.
Also the CH of course is at the same price level as HP so they kind of conflict. Still, I don't really see anything much better.
You could have gone with HP+Bishop or something. Great Hall/Crossroads looks like a big pile of nothing.
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Sometimes the best thing a board has is Hunting Party and a +$2. Sometimes the +$2 is Mountebank, sometimes it's Chancellor. Sometimes it's Militia; sometimes it's Bank. And sometimes, it's Counting House.
Not Navigator, though. Never Navigator.
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Sometimes the best thing a board has is Hunting Party and a +$2. Sometimes the +$2 is Mountebank, sometimes it's Chancellor. Sometimes it's Militia; sometimes it's Bank. And sometimes, it's Counting House.
Not Navigator, though. Never Navigator.
Duchess is even worse....
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Sometimes the best thing a board has is Hunting Party and a +$2. Sometimes the +$2 is Mountebank, sometimes it's Chancellor. Sometimes it's Militia; sometimes it's Bank. And sometimes, it's Counting House.
Not Navigator, though. Never Navigator.
I'm not convinced Navigator is that bad. If you're responsible about when you play it and when you stop playing HPs to keep your draw pile in order, it should actually be pretty good. Not one of the best, but decent -- better than a pure terminal Silver with no bonus. It helps you start up faster and should be able to skip dud turns more often than it creates them. It's probably better than Counting House.
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... I don't understand why Navigator would be bad at all? Something about missing reshuffles, but with a lot of HPs you're going to be reshuffling mid-turn quite a bit anyway, yeah?
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... I don't understand why Navigator would be bad at all? Something about missing reshuffles, but with a lot of HPs you're going to be reshuffling mid-turn quite a bit anyway, yeah?
The mid-turn reshuffling does not matter -- it's the last one that counts. When you have a full HP stack, you will often end up playing HPs that find no unique cards, leaving your entire deck in the discard. If you finish off this chain with a Navigator, you will trigger a reshuffle that is missing all of your HPs. If you use Navigator as your X, you need to stop playing HPs before that point so that Navigator does not trigger a reshuffle.
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I recently played a game where the +X in HP+X was just harem. I opened silver-silver, and didn't bother getting the harem until WAY into the game. I'm now not really convinced you even need the +X if you get enough hunting parties. I mean, if you have silver gold estate copper HP, well, you are going to draw an extra card for every HP in your deck, and that will assuredly be enough to buy a province, just by random coppers (and maybe a silver).
I mean, if you have something spicy like militia or baron, or possibly even something OK like chancellor, go for it, but I think with navigator, or with counting house without extra buys, I'd just play money + HP.
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HP+money and no terminal silver is reasonable but not great as a money strategy. Better than lab, worse than monument or courtyard or JoAT.
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Okay, I'd buy that, but I still think its better than HP+Navigator (or duchess, or counting house with no extra buys). Also, why would you even compare it to monument, since you'd just want to go HP+monumtent.
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Okay, I'd buy that, but I still think its better than HP+Navigator (or duchess, or counting house with no extra buys).
I'm 99.9% sure you're wrong here. Nav gets you a faster start, it's a different unique card, so it's easier to find everything you need with less HP plays (instead of counting on getting a second Silver or third Copper), and as stated before should probably skip more bad turns than it creates assuming you play it smart.
Even if you don't play it smart, it's still better for the first 2 reasons, as verified by simulation (which is unlikely to handle shuffles intelligently).
I just took DGs bot and added a rule to buy up to 2 Navs and it comfortably beats the pure Hunting Party bot (~55-35).
Perhaps more surprisingly, it also beats HP+Woodcutter and HP+Chancellor and is on par with HP+Nomad Camp.
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Perhaps more surprisingly, it also beats HP+Woodcutter and HP+Chancellor and is on par with HP+Nomad Camp.
How can Navigator beat Chancellor in a simulator? The ONLY possible benefit of navigator over chancellor is "saving" a particularly good hand, rather than just discarding everything to reshuffle faster. Do the play rules for navigator actually allow such choices to be made properly by the AI?
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Perhaps more surprisingly, it also beats HP+Woodcutter and HP+Chancellor and is on par with HP+Nomad Camp.
How can Navigator beat Chancellor in a simulator? The ONLY possible benefit of navigator over chancellor is "saving" a particularly good hand, rather than just discarding everything to reshuffle faster. Do the play rules for navigator actually allow such choices to be made properly by the AI?
I'm more surprised that it beats Woodcutter and Nomad Camp. +Buy is so nice for the HP stack!
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How can Navigator beat Chancellor in a simulator? The ONLY possible benefit of navigator over chancellor is "saving" a particularly good hand, rather than just discarding everything to reshuffle faster. Do the play rules for navigator actually allow such choices to be made properly by the AI?
The sim is going to play neither card optimally, but manages to play Nav less wrongly. I'm not sure if you can really draw any conclusions from this. Generally Nav is better than Chancellor since you get to do a partial discard or opt not to after seeing the cards, so you can use it even when there are a fair number of good cards in the draw pile. I'm not sure if this makes up for the forcing of bad shuffles when compared to the almost-as-good deck-flipping of Chancellor, but I'm sure the difference is not huge. Point is, don't avoid Nav+HP like the plague.
I'm more surprised that it beats Woodcutter and Nomad Camp. +Buy is so nice for the HP stack!
I didn't add any logic to buy 2xHP with $10 instead of Province, so I'm not saying Nav is actually better than Woodcutter. It's most likely not. But I guess this demonstrates the idea that getting the better start is actually quite valuable -- it's at least more valuable than being able to get extra Estates at the end, which means it's more than a tie-breaker kind of thing.
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The sim is going to play neither card optimally, but manages to play Nav less wrongly.
My point was that there might be a valuable conclusion to draw from investigating how/why it plays Nav less wrongly. If the bots are (as i assume they would be...) playing a very basic "just discard everything to nav, always flip the deck with chancellor" strategy, I would expect chancellor to win. If that isn't the case, I'd want to look at some logs to figure out why. Especially with a hunting party deck...
Also, nav doesn't have partial discard. If it did it would be quite a bit better...
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The sim is going to play neither card optimally, but manages to play Nav less wrongly.
My point was that there might be a valuable conclusion to draw from investigating how/why it plays Nav less wrongly. If the bots are (as i assume they would be...) playing a very basic "just discard everything to nav, always flip the deck with chancellor" strategy, I would expect chancellor to win. If that isn't the case, I'd want to look at some logs to figure out why. Especially with a hunting party deck...
Also, nav doesn't have partial discard. If it did it would be quite a bit better...
By partial discard, I mean you can discard some of deck instead of the whole thing, not that you can discard only some of the cards you look at.
You can see the Navigator play rules here: http://dominionsimulator.wordpress.com/play-rules/seaside/navigator/
Chancellor always discards.
So the Nav play is smarter, but it doesn't think about things like shuffles.