Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Game Reports => Topic started by: jotheonah on December 28, 2012, 05:31:17 pm
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http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/28/game-20121228-142700-33759629.html
City and Expand are both really good reasons not to. Also, I might not have been doing it right.
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I'd think the City player benefits a lot from grabbing a couple Horse Traders, too, for earlier +Buy and because a City deck often has more draw than it can use. But then, there was no real trashing here, so...
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I feel like your opponent caught a lot of luck here. Until duchies pile out he's on straight-up city/conspirator, which is terrible. Plus he has to gain some duchies himself. Expand is great for him, but he had to hit almost every single potential coin in his deck on T8/T9 to pick up two that early.
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I wasn't sure about what happened in the game so I put this through the simulator. The two approaches seem pretty even but the city deck will be stronger with human decision making. Some of the optimizations might be
Horse traders - buy a few horse traders before taking duchies, always take extra coppers
Cities - take an early smithy (or two), buy out the cities instead of contesting the dukes
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Well, my thinking was just that going Duke-Duchy I was emptying his city piles for him, without having the opportunity to contest the cities at all.
And Expand allowed him to grab Dukes and Duchies even when they weren't helping his score and then turn them into Provinces.
I'm happy to hear that the strategies are close theoretically.
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I wasn't sure about what happened in the game so I put this through the simulator. The two approaches seem pretty even but the city deck will be stronger with human decision making. Some of the optimizations might be
Horse traders - buy a few horse traders before taking duchies, always take extra coppers
Cities - take an early smithy (or two), buy out the cities instead of contesting the dukes
Did you add a horse trader or two to the city engine?
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I think this board could be played using Horn of Plenty as a linchpin. Here was my first try at it, but I think you could do better:
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/29/game-20121229-114329-cdb85971.html
With a human opponent it'd be different, of course. In the time it takes the Duke player to pick up e.g. 6 Duchies, the engine player could pick up 4 cities and 2 duchies plus 1-2 smithies probably. Once the duchies are emptied it'll be off to the races and you could draw most of your deck, Expand out useless components or Trader copper to improve reliability, buy Dukes and expand them to deny you, and finish off with a HoP megaturn.