This is my first article so please give feedback!
Generally speaking, a large part of dominion is determining which available overarching strategy will be fastest to end the game. This is obviously not the whole story, as you need to end the game with more points than your opponent, as well, but speed is clearly a factor. If you build a massive engine, and pile out in a megaturn on turn 25, where smithy big money was available what was really the point? Of course, this assumes no attacks, or other interactive cards/events that may interfere with the simpler strategy are present on the board. Even within a given overarching strategy, there will be a question of when to make the transition from building to greening. If ending as early as possible is important, then it is important to get this right. IF.
The above reasoning leads to statements about average game length for strategies where piling out the provinces or colonies is the goal. While interesting, it means that in evaluating a strategy, you need to think its absolute speed, a tedious, painful and often impossible task for humans. Instead, let me present another way of looking at the game. with this method, the megaturn on turn 25 is not a bad thing, even when there was a way to end the game earlier, even far earlier than that.
In Dominion, you are competing with another player. You are NOT competing against yourself. If winning is your goal, then ending as early as possible in absolute terms, should NOT be important to you. You want to make sure that whenever the game happens to end, you have more points than your opponent. This statement may seem trivial, but it can greatly simplify your life. If you are building an engine, you will always be wondering when enough is enough. How many actions/drawers/payloads do you need before it is purely gratuitous. If the answer depends on your opponent's behavior, then you have a very easy heuristic to answer your question. While both of you are building up, ask yourself this question: who has the more powerful deck (where power is defined loosely by ability generate coin consistently)? If you believe it is you, then you should strongly consider making it even more powerful and
not greening. Powerful decks are able to buy more things. You can buy more actions/drawers/payloads than he can on every turn. Ceteris paribus, this means that the balance of power between the two of you will continue to get more lopsided. There is no reason to convert your power to victory points until...
Your opponent starts greening. You can usually divide dominion into two segments - building and greening. Building is akin to raising an army; Greening akin to going to war. If you are the stronger power, it is very likely that you can allow your opponent a preemptive strike in the form of the first province (or the equivalent). Once he does this, he has declared war. the statement he is making (that you have forced him to make) is that he can defeat you in battle, even though both of you know that is is you with the stronger army.
Well, there are three questions/concerns that you may have at this point.
- If your army is stronger why not make the first move?
- What if his preemptive strike actually gives him the headstart he needs to win the war?
- what if the game is getting close to ending via 3-pile (at this point the only metaphor I can think of for that is environmental disaster)?
I will answer in order. First the reason you want him drawing first blood is because in this way you know that he is no longer in the prep stage. If you make the first move, it is possible that you slipped up. Perhaps you should have waited to green so that your army doesn't lose its vitality while at war (i.e. it becomes difficult to green). If this is the case, then he has the opportunity to keep building his army. and perhaps he will choose the optimal time to strike, beating you in the long run. On the other hand if you allow him to make the first move, you are telling him "any day of the week, I'll meet you on the battlefield. You choose." When he strikes first, he is stating "I believe I can win this war. Let's go." But you both know this isn't true. Your army is superior. And you now have the added benefit of knowing that he is in battle mode. The concern that he will continue to build his army and strike and some more optimal time has dissipated.
For the other two questions the answer is really the same. The reason for this is that the questions are really the same. Gaining a huge headstart is really the same idea as reducing the length of the game. In the first case he is moving rapidly toward the goal. In the second case the goal is moving rapidly toward him. Both of these reduce the distance between your opponent and the goal.
The answer is: Be careful with this perspective. while both of you are in building phase, you need to ask yourself on every turn (well not every, but you know what I mean): How much damage can he do now, if he starts greening? Can he three pile? Fortunately, these are much easier questions to answer than "Is now the optimal time to start greening in order to minimize numTurns?" You see how many coins, gainers and buys he has on every turn. Just imagine that he greened during his past turn. How many point would he have received? add a little to that, as his deck is now slightly more powerful. You see how many cards are in each pile. Can he end the game in his next few turns and maintain a point lead?
Now the question is what you should do if you find yourself with the weaker army. Well, you need to hope he trips over one of the pitfalls listed above. If he greens first, that may give you the opportunity you need to achieve military superiority and start greening later, watching his army die in a frozen wasteland of 4 or 6 coin turns. If he is not careful, you can trigger a natural disaster and end the game before his army a chance to flex its muscle, or pre-empt his attack with a vicious air raid scoring several provinces in one turn, again rendering his powerful army futile.
I want to mention that there is an oversimplification being made here. I stated that once he has greened, you know he is in battle mode, and will not be improving his army further. This is not technically true (though it usually is, in practice). He can green once and then change his mind with little damage. however this is of no real concern to you. If he backs away from war, you can feel free to do the same, knowing that you likely came away the victor in your first skirmish, as you went in better prepared. You are both now back in building phase. both of your armies are slightly weaker, but yours is still the superior force. No harm done.
Finally, I want to mention a special type of pre-emptive strike. There are engines that take a while to get off the ground. If you look at power as a function of turn number, these engines take a while for the desired exponential growth to occur, and it is even possible to have negative power growth for several turns. ambassador, or chapel can lend themselves to these types of engines, for example (finally, I mentioned a dominion card). If you are aiming for an engine like this, know that you will be in a vulnerable state for some time. Your opponent might have the opportunity to attack you while your pants are down, so to speak. When deciding to build this kind of engine, you should ask yourself how long you think you will be vulnerable for. It may not be worth it. This is probably, the hardest evaluation you will have to make with this learning paradigm, but I find that in practice, it is usually not too hard to avoid the pitfalls of a long gestation period, to mix metaphors for a moment.
Ok, with all the flowery language above, there will be cases when you just don't see the sneak attack coming. For example, I did not know about Artisan/Scepter combo until it was used against me to end the game when I thought there was no earthly way to bring about this calamity. This is frustrating, but live and learn. Add these losses to your playbook. this perspective still succeeds in changing the learning paradigm from "minimize(numTurns) over every (strategy, implementation) pair available" to "find all sneak attack and rush strategies available." And that is a much more human question.
