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126

Game Reports / Re: Beggar-Gardens vs. Vineyards Engine

« on: February 04, 2015, 10:09:08 pm »

Nah, Talisman is bad here. On $5+ I'd rather get wharf, on $4 I'll get gardens. If it's too early for gardens, I'll get a beggar. That's if I'm going gardens; and I wouldn't go gardens. In the not-gardens deck talisman is still bad, because it's not worth it to spam farming villages if I can't hit $5. Talisman is a weak card in general. Here talisman, royal seal, beggar, feast, and gardens should all be ignored except maybe at the very very end.

Okay, so I actually just read the last line on Talisman and noted the "that is not a victory card" part. Which really very much reduces the enthusiasm I had for it in a Beggars-Garden rush. So...never mind. (Have to say I don't consider buying Talisman very often so didn't realize the VP card prohibition, but I should have done so before posting.)

127

Game Reports / Re: Beggar-Gardens vs. Vineyards Engine

« on: February 04, 2015, 08:42:25 pm »

I'm surprised nobody bought talisman here.

And that was my first thought. Especially for the Beggar/Gardens person, since Wharf is the only other +Buy (or equivalent). Without looking at the log in depth, the three-pile I would be aiming for here is Farming Village/Gardens/Talisman

128

Game Reports / So I am undefeated against top-20ish players...

« on: February 04, 2015, 08:04:08 pm »

...but I'm pretty sure I don't deserve it. (Also, I am only 2-0)

Edit: adding the kingdom visualized here.

Code: [Select]

Moat, Develop, Workshop, Coppersmith, Island, Moneylender, Rats, Spice Merchant, Tournament, UpgradeSo I don't think I played badly in this game today:

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20150204/log.505ef45ca2e6714a97eee20c.1423095381407.txt

But I wasn't really trashing down as quickly as I might have, and I got really lucky first when Rabid's initial buys *both* missed the shuffle and then moderately lucky when I did have Province in hand to reveal on turn 16, which blocked him from drawing Silver and therefore buying Province. (But that said, I *did* have two Provinces at that point, and was aware of the value of blocking.) My getting a workshop on a board free of +Buy was intentional since I assumed my only chance against a superior opponent was to somehow stake a lead and then pile out. I think I caught on to Rabid's Duchy-gaining strategy with Rats just in the nick of time. Anything else I should learn from this?

129

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Rats?

« on: February 01, 2015, 01:18:48 pm »

Cosine?

Not since Ozle tricked me into giving him Power of Attorney.

Is that one of the new cards in Adventures? :-)

130

Dominion General Discussion / Re: More data mining: Card "strength"

« on: February 01, 2015, 10:41:38 am »

That sounds right to me. Do you have a Pirate Ship theory that fits the data?

My guesses for this are: small sample size, fun, testing or learning.

Good point; it still is below .500, so the "F it, I'm going Pirate Ship, Arrr!" Theory is good. Less good players are probably acquiring it for very different reasons.

Copper (?)

I guess this would be mostly Goons, and also people buying random copper on the winning turn.
The all data will also be dragged down by new players using up all the buys.

Goons was my best guess, too, except I would have thought most Top20 games would have been Goons mirrors, where copper buying is not unheard of. But you're right that these could be last turn buys of (say) 11 Coppers to gain 44 VP or something.

Would have been cooler if it were due to some trippy Coppersmith megaturn engine, but speaking of small sample sizes...

Expressicist: what are the sample sizes of the game base you are working with?

131

Dominion General Discussion / Re: More data mining: Card "strength"

« on: February 01, 2015, 10:01:08 am »

SilkRoad             0.402 0.433 0.031

I think this will be because if Silk Road is good it can be mirrored.
Or at least a few will be denied.
So a lot of the time if you are the only player to buy one, it was a late game $4 hand that you wish was a duchy.

That sounds right to me. Do you have a Pirate Ship theory that fits the data? Only thing I can think of without combing through lots of actual games is when a Top 20 player buys it, he or she buys it relatively late and has a way to play it 2 or 3 times per turn in an engine, uses it to "mast" an opponent by taking down the money then grabs $2-3 every turn (maybe times 2 or 3) and is immune to the mirror because their deck has no money.

Meanwhile, there are some cards where Top 20 players actually outperform their overall win rate (given as 65% here) when they alone gain, although the caveat here is that for some of these cards, overall win rate on the board that contains them could be overall higher or lower than 65%.

Card                 All   Top20 Diff

Swindler             0.474 0.652 0.178
Bank                 0.463 0.653 0.190
Duchess              0.494 0.653 0.159
PearlDiver           0.498 0.654 0.156
Remodel              0.472 0.654 0.182
Mystic               0.509 0.655 0.146
BandofMisfits        0.478 0.658 0.180
Woodcutter           0.474 0.661 0.187
CandlestickMaker     0.519 0.662 0.143
Haggler              0.478 0.662 0.184
Ill-GottenGains      0.545 0.663 0.118
Smithy               0.461 0.664 0.203
BanditCamp           0.512 0.667 0.155
Fortress             0.483 0.667 0.184
JunkDealer           0.497 0.667 0.170
Moat                 0.435 0.667 0.232
Scavenger            0.506 0.667 0.161
Trader               0.410 0.667 0.257
WanderingMinstrel    0.516 0.667 0.151
Worker'sVillage      0.498 0.667 0.169
Gold                 0.468 0.669 0.201
Harem                0.499 0.671 0.172
Quarry               0.505 0.674 0.169
Masterpiece          0.606 0.676 0.070
Venture              0.487 0.677 0.190
Copper               0.520 0.678 0.158
Torturer             0.484 0.679 0.195
Altar                0.513 0.680 0.167
Mandarin             0.455 0.680 0.225
Cellar               0.441 0.681 0.240
FishingVillage       0.495 0.681 0.186
Watchtower           0.493 0.681 0.188
Highway              0.505 0.683 0.178
Marauder             0.445 0.683 0.238
Embassy              0.517 0.685 0.168
TradingPost          0.497 0.687 0.190
Crossroads           0.523 0.688 0.165
Embargo              0.466 0.689 0.223
WishingWell          0.575 0.690 0.115

So some of these cards are ones that lower-rated players (that is, players overall) do well with when they are the sole gainers as well (e.g., Wishing Well, Crossroads, Highway, Altar, Copper (?), Quarry, Embassy, Scavenger and Mystic). Except for Copper, all of those basically make sense to me since they can work well with building up engines, so any time you are building one and opponent isn't or you are building a better one...makes sense. And gaining Embassy curses your opponent. :-)

But others of these cards seem to be just more magic in the deck of a Top 20 player, the top ten of those in sorted order:

Card                 All   Top20 Diff
Trader               0.410 0.667 0.257
Cellar               0.441 0.681 0.240
Marauder             0.445 0.683 0.238
Moat                 0.435 0.667 0.232
Mandarin             0.455 0.680 0.225
Embargo              0.466 0.689 0.223
Smithy               0.461 0.664 0.203
Gold                 0.468 0.669 0.201
Torturer             0.484 0.679 0.195
Venture              0.487 0.677 0.190

Moat does not top this list, but would have been a good guess. :-)

Finally, there are cards that the Top20 just crush with if they are the only ones to gain them:

Card                 All   Top20 Diff
Colony               0.786 0.935 0.149
Goons                0.682 0.875 0.193
Province             0.667 0.853 0.186
Butcher              0.674 0.853 0.179
Platinum             0.593 0.818 0.225
City                 0.495 0.809 0.314
Mountebank           0.602 0.807 0.205
BorderVillage        0.581 0.804 0.223
Vineyard             0.653 0.802 0.149
Tournament           0.485 0.800 0.315

I think most of these are pretty obvious. The relative top player advantage with City and Tournament is pretty striking, though.

132

Dominion General Discussion / Re: More data mining: Card "strength"

« on: January 31, 2015, 09:19:47 pm »

Okay, so this might be getting interesting. First, I will note that there are *no* cards where the Top 20 have a lower win rate than everybody when they are the only buyer.

But there are some cards where they do appear to (in some cases grossly) underperform when they are the only buyer, which makes these potential "trap" cards. Unfortunately, there is an important confound in the data here present also in the dataset provided: the Top 20 play a very different set of people than the population at large. If the Top 20 were to play the same mix of people that the population played, their win rate on average would be *much* higher. So although below there are columns for Everybody, Top 20, and the difference between them, the two performance columns really aren't directly comparable and so their difference is a bit suspect, too. But I think it is reasonable to point out that if there are cards where Top 20 players achieve a win rate less than 0.500 against any competition (even or particularly just each other), than this should give one pause, for sure.

Card                All    Top 20  Diff

Thief                0.357 0.389 0.032
University           0.331 0.411 0.080
SilkRoad             0.402 0.433 0.031
Cache                0.425 0.464 0.039
PirateShip           0.243 0.464 0.221
Rats                 0.405 0.465 0.060
NobleBrigand         0.377 0.473 0.096

So for the above cards, something was almost certainly wrong with your strategy if you were the only buyer, no matter who you were. The only card here where there is really strong evidence of vastly superior use by stronger players is...Pirate Ship! Apparently still very frequently a mistake overall to buy it, but the Elite almost scrape back to even when they buy it. More could be gleaned, but not by me tonight.

133

Dominion General Discussion / Re: More data mining: Card "strength"

« on: January 31, 2015, 07:31:12 pm »

Knowing what cards are more likely to be gained by the strongest players (modulo the high situation-dependency you note) can be useful for the rest of us

I doubt this is very useful, if someone 20 levels below me were to copy my exact gain %s he'd almost certainly be getting worse results than he's getting now.

Absolutely true, but that's not what I would be using it for.

One thing I noticed from the previous posted list of gain stats for stronger players and my personal gain stats is that I over-gain the "strong" cards and under-gain the "weak" cards, in a statistical sense. This could potentially happen for a lot of reasons, but looking a bit more closely, I think it usually means one of three things:

1) I under-appreciate the situational utility of some cards that are generically weak, maybe because I don't quite realize what they really could do. So I think more about those cards, re-check the wiki, maybe look up some games where they were in the kingdom and gained by strong players, and look at my own games where I gained or ignored them. So it can give me something concrete to think about while contemplating the general reasons why I am 20 levels weaker than (say) you.

2) I sometimes buy what could be "strong" cards without a complete understanding of how they would fit into my eventual plan. So there seems to be some evidence that I am way too enthusiastic about Farming Village. Might want to look into that.

3) Sometimes with some cards I apparently have No Idea. You buy it at 80%, I buy it at 30%. Or vice versa. No way should I gain it at the same rate as you until I figure it out, but that's an obvious place to look in general.

134

Dominion General Discussion / Re: More data mining: Card "strength"

« on: January 31, 2015, 07:01:10 pm »

Here's a fairly simple metric I'd like to see: Take the games in which exactly one player gains a card, then find in what percentage of those games the player who got the card won. Obviously this won't tell the entire story (true of any metric), but I like simple, intuitive things in general, when people can both understand the metric and its limitations.

Yes, that would be interesting. It would give you something like the relative risk of winning with Card X when there is a difference of opinion on strategy. A lot of that could be a wash, but some of it might be revealing. I think also the RR of winning|gain X vs. winning|not_gain X could be interesting.

135

Dominion General Discussion / Re: More data mining: Card "strength"

« on: January 31, 2015, 05:44:08 pm »

Yeah. I think this list has a very (very) rough relationship with how good the cards are, but that isn't really good for much at all.

So I find some additional usefulness in the two components that I don't get from the composite. Knowing what cards are more likely to be gained by the strongest players (modulo the high situation-dependency you note) can be useful for the rest of us, and the hard data are better than our fallible memories. So if Qvist's rankings have two $4 villages in one order and the objective data has them in the opposite order by a decent margin...stuff like that would be revealing.

The other component, which shows how much more mileage strong players get out of specific cards, may also be interesting. This is really even more interesting for the more rarely gained cards (e.g., what are you all doing with Harvest? Maybe I should look.) But a lot of it seems to indicate how much better engine building gets for the Level 40 crowd, which many of us aspire to.

More important, these are overall rankings. On any given board, you can throw them out the window - it doesn't matter that 195 other cards exist which might make card X good or bad. You only have the other 9 which exist right then and there, and that's basically always going to be a lot different than the general case.

I agree in the general case, but there are some splits (Attacks present vs. not; Villages present vs. not, maybe others) where difference in gain rates and success given gain could be instructive.

(I skip the Magic references and shout out to Stef.)

Re: the metric itself. The source of my head-scratching is, you applied a normal CDF to it. People do this all the time, and I'm not sure why - my guess is that it's because they did it all the time in their one stats course.

That baffled me, too, which is why I mentally inserted a call to an empirical CDF function instead of the normal in my comment above. :-) I suppose if we were going to plug this into some analysis that really really cared about normality...but we're not.

So again: I see some value in the two rates separately (gain rate and win|gained), but no strong rationale for normality or for forming a single index. And I would like to see win|not_gained.

136

Dominion General Discussion / Re: More data mining: Card "strength"

« on: January 30, 2015, 08:49:15 pm »

How are you calculating the Standard Deviation? It's the St Dev across... what?

It's the SD of the "Gain %" column. Likewise with "Win %" column.

in other words: StDev{ (Card A Games Bought)/(Card A Games Available), (Card B Games Bought)/(Card B Games Available), (Card C Games Bought)/(Card C Games Available), .... etc.}
or for Win%: StDev{ (Card A Games Won)/(Card A Games Bought), (Card B Games Won)/(Card B Games Bought), (Card C Games Won)/(Card C Games Bought), .... etc.}

So the standard deviation between cards? It's the same for every single card then?

Not sure what you mean by it being the same for every single card. It's the standard deviation of the set of all cards.

I am clearly not Wandering Winder, but I think I share his confusion. What I took his question to be is that the denominator of the first term contributing to score and the second term contributing to score (the SD of the relevant columns) is the same for every card that has a score. And that seems to be the case. So...you don't really need it? I mean, you're taking the CDF for both terms, which varies between 0 and 1, which is how you get a 0-100 scale after you multiply by 50. Normalizing first doesn't really get you anything. Unless I'm missing something.

You're missing something. He's dividing before taking the Normal CDF.

Yes, I saw that like three seconds after I posted. A victim of my own R coding practices of yore, where I generally used ecdf (the empirical CDF). And then I saw TheExpressicist's post that ranks would be basically as good, and I agree there.

But I'm still not sure what you gain from making a single index here. Especially when we are talking about *card* strength.

Imagine a card called "Winner" that costs $0 and allows you to win when played. Everybody would gain it like crazy (100% gain, for the purposes of this thread) and it would be (nearly?) a total crap shoot to win with it, so I guess it would be like -15% or something in this scheme and its score might even be somewhere south of Rebuild's.

137

Dominion General Discussion / Re: More data mining: Card "strength"

« on: January 30, 2015, 08:04:57 pm »

How are you calculating the Standard Deviation? It's the St Dev across... what?

It's the SD of the "Gain %" column. Likewise with "Win %" column.

in other words: StDev{ (Card A Games Bought)/(Card A Games Available), (Card B Games Bought)/(Card B Games Available), (Card C Games Bought)/(Card C Games Available), .... etc.}
or for Win%: StDev{ (Card A Games Won)/(Card A Games Bought), (Card B Games Won)/(Card B Games Bought), (Card C Games Won)/(Card C Games Bought), .... etc.}

So the standard deviation between cards? It's the same for every single card then?

Not sure what you mean by it being the same for every single card. It's the standard deviation of the set of all cards.

I am clearly not Wandering Winder, but I think I share his confusion. What I took his question to be is that the denominator of the first term contributing to score and the second term contributing to score (the SD of the relevant columns) is the same for every card that has a score. And that seems to be the case. So...you don't really need it? I mean, you're taking the CDF for both terms, which varies between 0 and 1, which is how you get a 0-100 scale after you multiply by 50. Normalizing first doesn't really get you anything. Unless I'm missing something.

I also see a deeper confusion here, which is the distinction between how strong a card is by itself and how much it allows a strong player to amplify his or her skill. So Rebuild has a pretty mediocre win_rate here, but it's hardly a weak card; the problem is that there is only so much you can do to eek out extra wins against competent opposition, since shuffle luck is clearly important. Similarly, Swindler looks like a bad card here by win_rate...but that's because your opponent can swindle, too, and is similarly swingy. Also Highway: a very good card, but even a nimrod like me can use it effectively (it was key on the one board where I beat a Top 20 player). Indeed, for the strength of cards alone, in many cases, negative means the card itself is so strong that, in combination with shuffle luck even a top-rated player is going to have a hard time coming out ahead. Similarly, cards that excel in BM games are not going to look good here because it is easier for most to play BM well.

What is clear here is that cards that are best in well-constructed engines will look really good on this list because the strongest players are waaaaay better at constructing engines than even pretty good players, so they actually amplify the value of those cards.

And actually, the really interesting cards are the ones that are not bought much by strong players, but, when they are, impart impressive benefits. Contraband is +6.7% and Harvest is +6.5%, which I guess is a 71% overall win rate or so.

That said, I think there are a few cards here that might be legitimately traps for better players, at least right now. I have personally beaten stronger players more often than not when they indulge in Golem, for example. If I am right, the -2.5% performance here mostly comes from games where the strong player buys Golem, the weaker one ignores it, and capitalizes on the slowness; maybe not enough to win a lot, but more than expected. Graverobber is another card that I think sometimes looks better on paper than in your deck. Also maybe Forge, although I guess that could be bought a lot in high junk games with not much other trashing, which would impede engine building, which is the Strong player's comparative advantage.

And all those Scout buys *must* come from really sloggy games where desperation sets in. :-)

138

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Individual player analysis tool

« on: January 21, 2015, 07:24:33 pm »

Data like this is interesting, but you have to be very careful about what conclusions you draw.
You only win 40% of the time when you buy Mountebank, so you should avoid buying Mountebank, right?

So when sample sizes are small, you have to be careful about a lot of things, but as a start, in some situations (like this one) it may be more useful to ask the question "Do I have a better chance of winning when I buy card X than when I ignore it". Here, you can compute a simple risk ratio (win rate when you buy the card divided by win rate when you ignore the card). If you do, it might turn out that you'll find that despite the fact that you only win 40% of the time when you buy Mountebank, you only win 20% of the time when you ignore it. That could suggest you should be buying it more regardless, or that you should work to improve your play when you buy it (and when you ignore it). Or that your sample sizes are too small to conclude much of anything.

Like any other kind of "profiling" analysis it doesn't necessarily tell you how to fix the situation, but it can point out your trouble spots. This being Dominion, it may also be useful to know how well you do with it in the mirror situation (both players buy or don't buy) vs. non-mirror. That said...you don't have lots of games here to work with, so without aggregating some, you'll mostly be looking at noise. But you might have enough data to get a handle on how you are doing when you and your opponent buy money vs. when you both play engines vs. the non-mirror cases. Or how well you do when strong attacks are on the board vs. when they are not. Or a lot of things; there are whole books written on these techniques.

139

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Can we make a real attempt to save Dominion Online?

« on: January 21, 2015, 06:48:23 pm »

The new version will be Java Applet and you need Microsoft's own buggy Java VM to play it.

Or worse, the new version will be in Flash.

Flash sucks.

However, it's funny because the majority of multiplayer Flash games out there function better and crash less than the current implementation of Dominion Online.

I heard asynch Facebook only.

No, stop it now.

Despite my earlier joke, I think it's been said explicitly that they'll be using Unity.

Is this the source for that comment?
http://www.pockettactics.com/news/ios-news/pocket-tactics-exclusive-dominon-coming-mobile-year-native-app/

Anyway, it looks like it is at least theoretically possible to develop games that can also use (e.g.) your Google credentials to sign in. In which case I honestly don't care how they implement it, so long as it works more smoothly. That said, the pockettactics.com article also suggested the new version would be available by the end of 2014...so I guess we'll see how things actually turn out.

140

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How do YOU process a kingdom?

« on: January 19, 2015, 09:52:48 pm »

A key thing for me personally is to never remember (or even look at) the 11th card with YW. It helps keep the games exciting.

? ? ? ?

I know you are one of the best ever Dominion players, but this is a joke, right?

Okay; so I don't know Mic Qsenoch from Adam, although I have grown somewhat addicted to his Dominion videos. That said, I am pretty sure that *could* be a joke.

But I did recently watch a stream of his League match against Stef, who is another of the best ever Dominion players, where in one game there was Baker on the board, and, as Stef, as player one, was plotting out his first move, Mic Q. was also contemplating the board and its possibilities, thinking out loud, giving brilliant insights at every turn but not acknowledging the fact that he had a coin token available. It...was maddening.

Although I only saw the stream weeks after the match had occurred, I was almost to the point of shouting "But...you've got a coin token!" knowing full well that only time travel would be of use.

Then Stef opened, and made a buy that required him to use his coin token, and Our Hero finally noticed that it was indeed a Baker board, and switched gears accordingly.

It was awesome.

141

Dominion: Adventures Previews / Re: Rio Grande page for Dominion: Adventures is live

« on: January 18, 2015, 03:22:23 pm »

Personally, I would be disappointed if the 15th box is not codenamed D:XV.

And, of course, DXV has to pump these out until there are DXV kingdom cards. 

They'd all have to be Dark Ages /Adventures size to come close to DXV kingdom cards by the D:XV expansion.

And your so-called point is? 

More seriously, I would think there would have to be some additional major mechanics or game play changes to get enough useful design space for, what, 260 additional cards? I think Adventures only gets you like half-way there. And the physical randomizer deck would be like a Vegas-style shoe for Blackjack. And Hobby Lobby would have to start selling design supply steamer trunks for people to convert into Dominion storage.

But the really cool word "daunting" would get used a lot with respect to the game, so there's that.

142

Dominion: Adventures Previews / Re: Rio Grande page for Dominion: Adventures is live

« on: January 17, 2015, 05:07:44 pm »

Personally, I would be disappointed if the 15th box is not codenamed D:XV.

And, of course, DXV has to pump these out until there are DXV kingdom cards. 

143

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Always Losing.

« on: January 17, 2015, 09:39:11 am »

http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?/20150116/log.5139535be4b0cd4b5a40dccd.1421474488643.txt

This one stung. I think what I should have done was first off, NOT buy Squire. I didn't want more Silver, but I should have just gotten nothing there I think. Also, I for sure did not get enough Bridges early on. I think my buying was not optimal, though I rallied for this awesome comeback for a second there. In the end, he won. It's hard to overcome a 3 Province deficit, and I didn't want to Green yet because I just wasn't ready, I felt.

Last post for me on this thread, I swear.

Okay, so your commentary here is focusing on what you bought/didn't buy rather than what your overall strategy or approach was. Again, it's easy to tell what what your opponent was up to: Big Money with Lab for additional draw, aided by Haggler. Also note that this is pretty fast: four Provinces in 13 turns as played, and six Provinces in 17 turns, aided somewhat by a 5/2 opening. But wait: as you note, there is Bridge on the board, and cards that can help you acquire and play a lot of them.

So: imagine (say) turn 15 where you play (say) 6 Bridges and $12. Opponent already has 4 Provinces, but you can buy the other 4 plus 3 Duchies and, of course, you acquired another Duchy with Ironworks earlier in the turn. Game over, and Seprix wins! It could happen...now how might you try to make that happen?

144

General Discussion / Re: Random Stuff Part II

« on: January 16, 2015, 12:15:13 am »

I have never heard someone use "literally" in a way that did not make it immediately clear to me whether they meant "actually" or were exaggerating. Whereas, it comes up all the time that someone says "you" and you don't know if they mean singular or plural. What was wrong with "thou" for the singular, that's what I'd like to know.

Apologies in advance; still new here. Is this literally a request for an explanation of how the T-V distinction destroyed the singular/plural contrast in most English dialects in the first half of the seventeenth century and therefore actually an opportunity for me to cash in on my dearly gained knowledge of obscure points of the History of English, or is this more a "get off my lawn" kind of thing?

145

Dominion General Discussion / Re: More Kingdom Design: Very Fast Kingdom

« on: January 15, 2015, 09:12:50 pm »

Well, whenever I see Peddler I think "Trash for Benefit", and whenever I think "TfB", I am now primed by another ongoing thread to think "Apprentice". Swap Apprentice for (say) Rogue, and I think you can get up to warp speed.

Disclaimer: I'm not that great a player.

EDIT: Oops, my suggestion probably turbocharges Highway/Market more than it would juice any alternative strategy. Is there a place for Stone Mason here to generate a faster win by the usual slicing and dicing techniques?

146

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Always Losing.

« on: January 15, 2015, 08:57:04 pm »

Okay, so here's another recent Seprix game:
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20150112/log.54109627e4b0750ebc1f6911.1421080732514.txt

Any thoughts on this one? Note: I will allow you did not get the very best shuffle luck.

147

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Always Losing.

« on: January 15, 2015, 07:51:47 pm »

One thing that you should always keep in mind in weak kingdoms with Apprentice is that if you jump out to an early lead, you can drain the most valuable VP pile pretty quickly by trashing VP -> buying VP.

EDIT: I'm out of practice but 5 Colonies in 18 turns probably isn't that bad.
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20150115/log.516d4fd3e4b082c74d7b96c1.1421347148441.txt

Okay; I declare this board solved. :-) I also saw Forager/Salvager to start, and assumed you would be trashing Gold or whatever 5 cost card you bought when you didn't get 6, but I also assumed you might need a village or two to get cranking. Guess not. In the mirror, I definitely would have lost to the Champ, since I would have wasted a turn or two being inefficient, but I felt I would have been within striking distance of the right plan.

Anyway, this board had +Buy, trashing, and arbitrarily good draw if you catch on to Apprentice. Salvager is gravy. So the plan would revolve around those strengths.

148

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Can we make a real attempt to save Dominion Online?

« on: January 14, 2015, 10:13:40 pm »

Making Fun is committed to making online Dominion a good thing that's profitable and everything. I secretly know that two (2) people started working on a completely new version in the fall (autumn). I feel like now is about the time they must have been hoping to be ready to launch it (based on them hoping to have the next Dominion expansion online at the same time as it comes out in stores). That may have caused them to hope extra hard that the current issues would go away without devoting a lot of time to them.

Anyway you don't need to do anything; yes right now it's having awful issues, and I don't know what will happen there in the very short term, but at some point, I expect in the near future, this awfulness will be replaced by whatever experience the new version provides, and then we can worry about what that version needs.

Thanks very much for the reply; it was very useful.

I will admit that I was a bit worried the problems were deeper, and with my Genetically Related Opponent heading back to school, I was facing the prospect of playing a lot less Dominion, hence the panic.

I am too young in the game to have known Isotropic, and, to be honest, when Making Fun came and appeared to stabilize the Dominion Online situation in Spring of 2014, so you could predictably play the game, I didn't really have too much to complain about, so I didn't.

149

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Can we make a real attempt to save Dominion Online?

« on: January 14, 2015, 10:07:40 pm »

Oh hey I recognize you from the Temporum reddit. Incidentally: for the moment, I recommend putting Temporum rules questions on BGG.

Replying to Throwaway_bicycling here! I am not saying anything negative about the Temporum reddit or any such thing. Forums with a low amount of conversation may still be doing something for somebody. I don't need to judge that, the people using those forums can work it out for themselves. I will similarly have no complaints if you start up rec.games.temporum.

I was just saying, rules questions for Temporum, at this point in time when the game is young and there are things left to ask, are either going to be answered by the rulebook, or will depend on me to answer them. And if I'm the only one with the answer, well, I'm not on reddit. I will not be appearing to answer the question. Currently I'm just on BGG and here. Either place is fine for rules questions, I'm not picky.

Well, if we were teleported back to Golden Age of Usenet (Can't believe that's not a zone in the game, btw) I probably would have spent a lot of time and effort to get the votes for rec.games.temporum but settled for alt.temporum. :-) My severe rn addiction back in the day did not do much to speed work on my dissertation.

Good point on the place to pose rules questions, etc. I do try to limit the number of forums I follow and participate in, so I understand your position here. I may yet bite the bullet and go for a BGG account since there is, as you note, more activity over there than on reddit as present and I appear to be one of the game's biggest fans. :-/

150

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Always Losing.

« on: January 14, 2015, 09:47:59 pm »

Post some logs here or in the Help board where you think you clearly had the best strategy but lost anyway.  Even the process of writing something like that will often help you see things you've missed before.  And if it doesn't cause you to have inspiration yourself then sooner or later someone will look through the log and tell you whether you were just unlucky.

I am not the OP, but I just looked at some of the games on Salvager, and I feel this one might be an interesting starting point:

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20150112/log.54109627e4b0750ebc1f6911.1421094317185.txt

(I will now switch to addressing OP.)

Lots could be said here, including the point that you committed suicide there at the end (draining Colonies when behind), but my general sense reading over this game is simply: I just really don't understand the strategy. Your opponent did not play flawlessly or anything, but I can articulate the basic strategy: Big Money using Apprenticed Silver for draw.

Now, whether or not it's the best strategy on the board (I'm pretty sure it's not) you can see where it's going, note that it's making progress, and even think of how to optimize it. This is much less easy for me to do for your game. You start by Foraging things (okay, that's kind of a plan of sorts), then go deep into the Wandering Minstrel pile...then buy some money (not a great match for WM by itself), buy some Cities and, yeah, have enough stuff and a slim enough deck to get some Colonies by the (untimely) end. But overall, I just see somebody buying a bunch of cards that are "good" with no strong cohesive plan.

Disclaimer: I am not a great player by any means, so I will leave it to those people to give you better advice than I can, but I recognize the style here since it is kind of what my losing games look like. :-)