Swindlers trash opponent Shelters for free (unless Poor House is in the kingdom or other edge cases), Remodel is just a little less good as an opener (especially if you want $4s), and Salvager and Apprentice in the early game are significantly worse because OGE is the only decent target. Obviously TfB is just worse to varying degrees with Shelters, although Bishop doesn't mind it too much.
You should probably mention for Fairgrounds that Shelters allow for 8 VP Fairgrounds in any normal game without Ruins, Colony, Potion, Young Witch, Black Market, Tournament, etc.
I tend to think the functions of the shelters are not terribly carefully thought out before publication. When they are still all new and shiny it is quite fine and interesting, but probably after ~100 games or so with them the functions of Hovel and overgrown estate kind of pale out.I agree with this sentiment.
I tend to think the functions of the shelters are not terribly carefully thought out before publication. When they are still all new and shiny it is quite fine and interesting, but probably after ~100 games or so with them the functions of Hovel and overgrown estate kind of pale out.I remain satisfied with them after 100+ games with them! Perhaps you just want something different from them than I did.
in a majority of kingdoms, they will be pretty similar to Estates in the way they feel or play.
The player who saves his Hovel has just as much junk as you do until that first Province buy - then he has less.
I guess in big money-ish you'd want to buy it earlier since it'll be harder to get in the right hand... but in big money-ish, buying silver is probably going to be better most of the time. And are you really going to draw a mid-game $2 ?
I think that Necropolis is generally a bigger boon in engines games, letting you start out ahead by a village. I'm rather skeptical of buying more terminals than usual on a village-less board; it just doesn't seem like it would line up often enough. It's nice in games where you do overload on terminals, like workshop/gardens, but this is a case where you'd pile on the workshops regardless.Well, that's kind of my point. If you're going to go with an engine, sure it's nice to have Necropolis. But if you would start with Estates, you would often just go for the engine anyway.
timchen, Davio: you're saying you expect the coolness and newness of them to wear off after about 100 games. But how many games have you played with them?Zero! Or maybe a couple, but < 10.
Well, the increased cost of Estate and the 1 VP it provides could be nice for tiebreaker situations.
The shelters don't behave much differently on many boards, but then a lot of kingdom cards are dead space on most boards. But sometimes they're not dead cards, and that is often the sign of an interesting game. Library, for instance, is usually nothing special, but sometimes a key card that impacts the strategy. Shelters seem rather similar to me. They are not Colony/Platinum. But man, there are a LOT of kingdom cards these days. I'm OK with passing on one to let Shelters exist.Well, I'd rather have Shelters than another Scout, so, that's that at least. :)
The interesting thing about Necropolis is (while giving +2 actions) it actually disincentives opening double terminal. Why? Think about the terminals you normally open with. Swindler (worse), Ambassador (worse), Baron (worse), etc. Sure you can open Woodcutter / Navigator, but you don't want to. I suppose it makes Black Market / Black Market viable on certain boards, and helps some Chapel openings, but there are very few double terminals I think I'd want.
You are quite wrong about Rebuild/Oge in my experience. When you hit Rebuild, you are already getting to 5 coin hands and the game is about buying/gaining duchies to Rebuild into Provinces. It takes two plays of Rebuild to bump Oge up to duchy, which is a bit faster than than the three required to turn the Estates into Duchies, better the +1 card off the first hit make it easier to buy something useful (like a duchy).
You are quite wrong about Rebuild/Oge in my experience. When you hit Rebuild, you are already getting to 5 coin hands and the game is about buying/gaining duchies to Rebuild into Provinces. It takes two plays of Rebuild to bump Oge up to duchy, which is a bit faster than than the three required to turn the Estates into Duchies, better the +1 card off the first hit make it easier to buy something useful (like a duchy).
At first I misunderstood you. If your goal is to rebuild duchies into provinces, then 3 starting estates will slow you down more than one OGE. OTOH, in the case of estates, at the end of your 3 rebuild plays, you've got 3 duchies (or, more likely, E/D/P) instead of one province. This means you have more opportunities to buy rebuilds instead of duchies, so it seems to me that shelters hurt Rebuild more than they help.
The player who saves his Hovel has just as much junk as you do until that first Province buy - then he has less. Now, if you can think you can make a really quick three-pile ending before your opponent has a chance to pick up any Provinces, then Hoveling an Estate might be a good idea, as winning 1-0 is still winning. But, how often will such situations arise?
The interesting thing about Necropolis is (while giving +2 actions) it actually disincentives opening double terminal. Why? Think about the terminals you normally open with. Swindler (worse), Ambassador (worse), Baron (worse), etc. Sure you can open Woodcutter / Navigator, but you don't want to. I suppose it makes Black Market / Black Market viable on certain boards, and helps some Chapel openings, but there are very few double terminals I think I'd want.
Double Masquerade! Woo!
timchen, Davio: you're saying you expect the coolness and newness of them to wear off after about 100 games. But how many games have you played with them?
Fortune Teller reacts interestingly - it now effectively discards your opponent's entire deck in the beginning - this can prove very annoying if it prevents them from playing or lining up key cards - one IRL game I played had me frustrated for a few turns as a Fortune Teller prevented me from lining up my Urchin with my Marauder to get a Mercenary.
Davio, you're entitled to your uninformed opinion, but I don't see why anybody should take you seriously when you've played a negligible number of games with Shelters. You really have no idea what you're talking about.I don't think this is entirely true. Although I agree that my opinion isn't worth that much due to my lack of experience, I don't think it's worthless. I am a very experienced Dominion player. I'm not in WW's league, but I have a couple thousand games under my belt. So I think I can oversee the Dominion landscape quite well and am thus entitled to give an opinion that has some value.
Sure, I don't think your opinion is valueless. But I wouldn't put something out based on half a dozen games with them in a very casual setting. I guess my point is that you're saying this about actually published cards, which means they had to get past Donald and the playtesters, and my guess is that they, with a bunch of experience with the cards, are going to have more to say on them than you or I would. And they said enough to get them published.Davio, you're entitled to your uninformed opinion, but I don't see why anybody should take you seriously when you've played a negligible number of games with Shelters. You really have no idea what you're talking about.I don't think this is entirely true. Although I agree that my opinion isn't worth that much due to my lack of experience, I don't think it's worthless. I am a very experienced Dominion player. I'm not in WW's league, but I have a couple thousand games under my belt. So I think I can oversee the Dominion landscape quite well and am thus entitled to give an opinion that has some value.
If Donald would show a new card to Stef, without letting him play with, I'd still value his opinion on it. Now I'm of course not in the same league, but you get the idea.
Thing is, you can see interactions in your head and how games would play out without actually playing them. And you don't even have to be some kind of rain man.
I'll admit that I'm more than likely not entirely right, that doesn't mean I'm automatically entirely wrong.
Reading this back it looks like all I want to do is brag about my mad skillz, but that's not the case.
The player who saves his Hovel has just as much junk as you do until that first Province buy - then he has less. Now, if you can think you can make a really quick three-pile ending before your opponent has a chance to pick up any Provinces, then Hoveling an Estate might be a good idea, as winning 1-0 is still winning. But, how often will such situations arise?
This if faulty logic... it makes the assumption that you will always have Hovel in hand when you buy your first Province. That's not very likely, unless you are building a deck-drawing engine. In a game without much drawing, to buy a Province with Hovel in hand means you got to $8 using only 4 cards... it's much more likely that you can get to $8 with 5 cards than it is with just 4 cards.
I'm definitely not saying that I know for sure that buying an Estate on 5/2 isn't usually the wrong move... it very well might be. But you definitely can't assume that you'll have the chance to trash it on a Province buy later on. I remember this being discussed at great length in another thread, and I thought that there was still no consensus; with a lot of people making good arguments on both sides.
timchen, Davio: you're saying you expect the coolness and newness of them to wear off after about 100 games. But how many games have you played with them?Zero! Or maybe a couple, but < 10.
My point of view is purely based on expectation and speculation, not experience.
That said, I am entitled to my point of view of course.
I will admit that the reason I was drawn into Dominion initially was because of its symmetry. I knew about MTG and in my head it was a sinking hole for money where the player with the best deck and the most money would always win. So Dominion was a fresh experience because it allowed equal access to everything.
Of course, there was still asymmetry in shuffling and a 5/2 vs 4/3 start can be pretty brutal or devastating, depending on the kingdom. I also didn't know about first turn advantage back then and didn't think much about the way the first player would get a Curse after the shuffle and the second would get it before the shuffle.
With new expansions, a lot of cards came out that messed with this equal opportunity. Tournament is a key example.
Now we have Dark Ages which has a lot of added asymmetry in Knights, Ruins and Shelters. For me this takes away from the original concept which I thought Dominion was all about. Even though perfect symmetry is a myth, I still thought it would be a core principal. And yes, you could say that there are still many kingdoms which don't have any of these cards and that's of course very true. Still, it's something which I care about.
Back to Shelters, the point I'm trying to make is that in my view they don't anything significant. I'm not disputing that they can sometimes offer funny little tactics, I just don't think that in the grand scheme of things it's such a significant change. Notice how I'm contradicting myself by first saying that these cards add to asymmetry and now claiming they don't make much of a difference. The asymmetry thing is more of a moral issue than a de facto one.
In conclusion I would have preferred another kingdom card instead of the Shelters, but I don't mind at all that they exist and don't really mind playing with them as well.
The player who saves his Hovel has just as much junk as you do until that first Province buy - then he has less. Now, if you can think you can make a really quick three-pile ending before your opponent has a chance to pick up any Provinces, then Hoveling an Estate might be a good idea, as winning 1-0 is still winning. But, how often will such situations arise?
This if faulty logic... it makes the assumption that you will always have Hovel in hand when you buy your first Province. That's not very likely, unless you are building a deck-drawing engine. In a game without much drawing, to buy a Province with Hovel in hand means you got to $8 using only 4 cards... it's much more likely that you can get to $8 with 5 cards than it is with just 4 cards.
I'm definitely not saying that I know for sure that buying an Estate on 5/2 isn't usually the wrong move... it very well might be. But you definitely can't assume that you'll have the chance to trash it on a Province buy later on. I remember this being discussed at great length in another thread, and I thought that there was still no consensus; with a lot of people making good arguments on both sides.
I think wero's logic is an abridged version of what he meant to say. The classic argument (from the old Hovel thread, which I remember as ending in a fairly strong consensus) is that at SOME point you will get to buy a Province or some other victory card and trash the Hovel without really going out of your way. It might not be on your first Province buy; that part is an oversimplification. But experience seems to show that it will usually happen well before the stage of the game when you would welcome a bonus Estate, which is the relevant question.
Also, and this should probably go in the article unless it's considered too obvious, mixed-type Victory cards are great with Hovel as they can be bought much earlier and more reliably than Province even on a Hovel turn. Island, for instance, almost doubles its effectiveness if it trashes a Hovel for free.
One thing for shelters is that even though their effect might not be that big, it's an effect that can happen IN COMBINATION with other cards. If you add in one more kingdom card, it'll only show up some small fraction of the time and even then will have to replace a card.Okay, this is a statement I hadn't previously considered and my opinion has been revised accordingly. :)
Shelters can appear more often than any individual Kingdom card, so even if they have a smaller effect they'll have a smaller effect in more games, and they don't replace any other kingdom card.
As for Island; while it's certainly better to buy with Hovel in hand, it also seems like you would be less likely to want an Island in a game with Shelters instead of Estates. If you have no way to trash, then setting aside an Overgrown Estate or I guess Copper can be good, but not as good as setting aside Estates. Similar to how you might not open double-Amb in a Necropolis game, even though you have less risk of colliding.
Fun calculation (which is probably obvious to many if they've considered the issue):As for Island; while it's certainly better to buy with Hovel in hand, it also seems like you would be less likely to want an Island in a game with Shelters instead of Estates. If you have no way to trash, then setting aside an Overgrown Estate or I guess Copper can be good, but not as good as setting aside Estates. Similar to how you might not open double-Amb in a Necropolis game, even though you have less risk of colliding.
On the other hand, buying Great Hall with Hovel in hand is roughly comparable to buying Island in an Estate game.
And similarly, of course, having Hovel in hand can help you make your decision between Gold and Harem.
Fun calculation (which is probably obvious to many if they've considered the issue):
Harem-with-Hovel beats Gold, from a totally naive raw money density perspective, as long as your money density is greater than 1. It's like trashing a Copper: one less coin, one less card.
QuoteFun calculation (which is probably obvious to many if they've considered the issue):
Harem-with-Hovel beats Gold, from a totally naive raw money density perspective, as long as your money density is greater than 1. It's like trashing a Copper: one less coin, one less card.
Let's say you have X total cash and Y cards. Money density with a Gold is (X+3)/(Y+1). Money density with a Harem, sans a Hovel is (X+2)/Y. If money density = 1 then X = Y. (X + 3)/(X+1) != (X+2)/(X)
In reality, the choices are equivalent when X = Y - 2; which is actually a good bit sooner - as in turn 2 if you buy a silver (X = 9, Y = 11). The only time you should not take a Hovel trashing Harem over a Gold if you are just looking at money density is if you've been heavily cursed/ruined.
You might still prefer the Gold if you have good sifting.
Sorry, I meant the money density AFTER the purchase needed to be greater than 1. (After either purchase; it doesn't matter which option you choose.) Post-purchase money density is described by the formulae you gave, (X+3)/(Y+1) and (X+2)/Y, so we seem to agree.QuoteFun calculation (which is probably obvious to many if they've considered the issue):
Harem-with-Hovel beats Gold, from a totally naive raw money density perspective, as long as your money density is greater than 1. It's like trashing a Copper: one less coin, one less card.
Let's say you have X total cash and Y cards. Money density with a Gold is (X+3)/(Y+1). Money density with a Harem, sans a Hovel is (X+2)/Y. If money density = 1 then X = Y. (X + 3)/(X+1) != (X+2)/(X)
In reality, the choices are equivalent when X = Y - 2; which is actually a good bit sooner - as in turn 2 if you buy a silver (X = 9, Y = 11). The only time you should not take a Hovel trashing Harem over a Gold if you are just looking at money density is if you've been heavily cursed/ruined.
I've mentioned this before I think but Great Hall/Silver (Trash Hovel) opening is the first opening in dominion history that has a 100% chance of giving you one hand worth at least 5 coins on turns 3 or 4.If you don't count various multiplayer scenarios or silver/nomad camp/potentially-a-nomad-camp-here-on-exactly$4.
I've mentioned this before I think but Great Hall/Silver (Trash Hovel) opening is the first opening in dominion history that has a 100% chance of giving you one hand worth at least 5 coins on turns 3 or 4.
I found the edge case! I found the edge case!
Trash Hovel to Estate on a 5/2 opening when Bishop is on the board, because you'll get more points that way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6IK9ThMJhI
I think the article isn't looking too shabby at the moment. I would like to suggest opening it with a bit more explanation of the bleeding obvious, though, by explicitly describing the four main ways starting Shelters differ from starting Estates:
1. They have a cost of 1, not 2
2. They're not worth VP
3. 2 of them aren't Victory cards
4. They do stuff
Much of the article then goes on to discuss the effects these differences make alone and in combination, so it would be good to have them spelled out at the start.
I will admit that the reason I was drawn into Dominion initially was because of its symmetry. I knew about MTG and in my head it was a sinking hole for money where the player with the best deck and the most money would always win. So Dominion was a fresh experience because it allowed equal access to everything.
The whole point ofI will admit that the reason I was drawn into Dominion initially was because of its symmetry. I knew about MTG and in my head it was a sinking hole for money where the player with the best deck and the most money would always win. So Dominion was a fresh experience because it allowed equal access to everything.
I second that.
From playing some games with Dark Ages, though, Shelters do not deviate from the symmetry promise. Everyone still starts with the identical deck. I really enjoy playing with them. Ruins even aren't so asymmetric because they are all so bad. Some are just a little worse than others. Knights, on the other hand, I don't like very much (even though they all attack, they are a close third behind Black Market and Tournament as the worst offenders of equal access). Haven't played more than a few games with them, though.
The whole point ofI will admit that the reason I was drawn into Dominion initially was because of its symmetry. I knew about MTG and in my head it was a sinking hole for money where the player with the best deck and the most money would always win. So Dominion was a fresh experience because it allowed equal access to everything.
I second that.
From playing some games with Dark Ages, though, Shelters do not deviate from the symmetry promise. Everyone still starts with the identical deck. I really enjoy playing with them. Ruins even aren't so asymmetric because they are all so bad. Some are just a little worse than others. Knights, on the other hand, I don't like very much (even though they all attack, they are a close third behind Black Market and Tournament as the worst offenders of equal access). Haven't played more than a few games with them, though.Dominiongames is asymmetry: you usually don't have unlimited VP available (Monument, Goons + Ambassador and Bishop + a few DA cards aside), so the player who gets the most, wins. If you piledrive, say, Cities or Laboratories, you are the only player who has access to them and then you have quite an advantage there. If it wasn't for asymmetry, everyDominiongame would end on a draw. Now, I can see why Black Market isn't everyone's favorite card, because getting the only Mountebank in the whole game can be devastating and is completely luck-dependent, and the same is true for Tournament to a lesser extent (because it depends on luck significantly less), but getting to $5 is a matter of luck only when at least one player opens 5/2 and another player does not. Sure, the player going first always has additional advantage from Knights being on the table, but that's also true for attack cards. While Knights aren't bad cards, they are worse than the power 5 cards, and usually getting a specific Knight is more a matter of choice.
In Dominion, every player has equal chances of winning the game before the first player is decided and Knights, Tournament and Black Market do not change that.