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1

Dominion Articles / Re: Challenge: write a Moat article

« on: March 31, 2017, 08:20:22 pm »

Didn't someone once upon a time simulate that in a 4-player game where 3 players go Witch/Moat, that Moat/Moat will win most often (perhaps only 30% of the time, but that's pretty good in 4P)?  At very least it's probably the best strategy available to Player 4: hope everyone else slows each other down more than you're getting slowed down, and benefit from having a slightly better deck due to spending 3 less on one of your Moats.

2

Dominion Articles / Re: A short blurb on each $2-$3 cost Adventures card

« on: March 31, 2017, 08:13:55 pm »

Guide works well:

1) Against discard attacks, Ghost Ship, and Haunted Woods.  Guide sits on the Tavern mat until needed to rescue a hand that's been torn to pieces.
2) When you want to rapidly cycle your deck, generally to play a junker and/or trasher more often without buying another one that will later clog your deck.  Guide will usually be called whenever you don't have the key card(s) in your original hand.
3) When you have start of turn effects that decrease your hand size.  Amulet and Ratcatcher are mainly what I'm thinking of, but I've even done it with Transmogrify trashing a Curse or some other junk when I didn't really care about the card I gained.

I've never been disappointed with it when I've bought it, but I generally only buy it when one of the above 3 situations makes it clear that it will be pulling its weight.  I suppose I may have just used it in general to rescue myself from crappy hands in a slog, but that's not the greatest use of it and it will often sit idly by in such situations given you're not really sure if using it will actually help or not.

3

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Naming cards

« on: January 27, 2017, 08:22:53 pm »

Just lost a game because of this.  Played Wishing Well, and I knew the top card was Warrior.  If I had been able to name Warrior, I would have been able to hit $8 and buy the last Province.  Instead I hit $7 for the turn, bought a Duchy, and eventually lost.

I don't expect this implementation to be perfect from the get-go, but I do expect that it should allow you to, you know, play the game as defined by the rulebook.

I mean Jesus H. Christ you guys.

I'm rather surprised you can't click on the cards that are visible that are part of the not-actually-the-Supply supply for the game.  I assumed you could but never needed to, but testing it out I confirmed that you can't.  That's very odd to me, but should be easily fixable.  For Shelters, Knights, Castles, and probably split cards they'll have to have an "additional cards to name" dialog or something, and it'll have to be able to handle Black Market with its 60 available cards (although perhaps it can help you out by only allowing you to name cards actually in your deck).

4

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: "Features" threads

« on: January 16, 2017, 12:18:22 am »

Another test for "Are you sure" - playing Crown in your action phase when it's the only Action in your hand.

I just saw this on the previous page; I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees this as a potential problem.  Is there any benefit to playing a Crown as an action while having no actions in hand?  Doesn't Peddler count it as an action in play regardless of whether it was played as an action or treasure?  Even if through some convoluted method involving, say, Bonfire, Cultist, and Villa, you return to your action phase, not having the Crown in your hand is pretty much always a net minus.  A very convoluted edge case I can think of is if you then draw Golem off the Cultist trashing, think you might hit Ambassador, and don't want to be forced to give your opponent a Crown if it ends up as the only card in your hand, and at the same time don't want to Crown the Golem so as to increase the chances of needing to Ambassador something you don't want to give away.  But that's so ridiculous to conceive of that I think having the game default to moving to your buy phase if you play Crown with no action cards in hand.  You probably should also be able to retroactively move to your buy phase by choosing to Crown a treasure even if you have another action in your hand.

5

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: "Features" threads

« on: January 16, 2017, 12:09:55 am »

The Undo feature is nice but if there was no new information revealed (eg didn't draw or reveal any cards, didn't play an attack that could trigger a reaction etc.), you shouldn't have to ask for permission. IIRC isotropic was like that.

This is why I was confused the first time that I tried an Undo against a human opponent (I had been playing bots and using it liberally).  I thought the point was that you would be able to undo anything that you changed your mind on due entirely to thought processes in your head (or more likely, misclicks), but not anything that generated new information for you.  Prismata you can undo your entire turn (including receiving damage!), but as a deterministic game of complete information, that's never a problem.  I would hope that it would be easy to determine exactly when more information is given to a player, even in a naive way that means forgetting that your opponent has a reaction and that your deck is stacked a certain way (from Apothecary or whatever), just so I don't have to be at the mercy of my opponent when I play my Crown in my action phase when attempting to use it on treasure (is there a better way to fix this perhaps?).

6

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: Dominion for Lazy People

« on: January 15, 2017, 11:56:11 pm »

I was just thinking today about how cool it would be if there were keyboard shortcuts like in Prismata.  I disagree with the philosophy of having everything done by keyboard (I never bought random units in Prismata with hotkeys, only base units), but being so used to DD, space, space it would be interesting to have something similar.

Unfortunately, I cannot get the game to end properly with Firefox.  Unless they fixed it recently, the game hangs for me when a victory condition is reached without displaying the results screen.  I like Firefox better than Chrome for one really stupid specific reason (that's not Greasemonkey), but I just play on Chrome so that the game ends properly.  Are you actually using Firefox and finishing games normally?

7

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Wiki moving into the 2nd Edition

« on: January 15, 2017, 11:04:09 pm »

Speaking of the Wiki and 2nd edition, I edited the Masquerade article's section on pins to reflect that the empty-hand pin technique does not work any more.  I added in a mention of the pins that can still theoretically work: Cutpurse, Taxman, and Bureaucrat, noting that as the order in which they are likely able to be put together.  Feel free to expand, rewrite, revert, or mock my attempt to update the Wiki.

8

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: The Dominion online 2017 thread

« on: January 07, 2017, 09:30:14 am »

I think the traveller's thingy, as is, is superintuitive.

You mean how I can click on exchange like I want to exchange them, and the game will think that I want to keep them because the parity of clicks on that card is odd?  Why should the number of times I click matter?  What should matter is *where* I click.  The color scheme is of no help at all in figuring out which one is active; the only way to really know is to know that they default to "exchange".  Factorio had this issue with the automatic/manual train toggle, and decided to use a slider whose ends were labeled.  You could also put a check mark next to the one that will be done.  Or you could just just, you know, have the same interface regardless of how many travelers there are.  The only time order matters that I'm aware of is if you need to return one in order for there to be one of ones you're going to upgrade to, so just doing them in order from most traveled to least will always be optimal.  I don't think your decision will ever need to depend on knowing exactly how many of each you have available to upgrade; the decision is generally going to be based on how many total you have of each in your deck, which is generally not something the game will be able to show you and you need to keep track of yourself.  If it really matters, the interface could allow you to be able to look at all the cards you've played this turn.

9

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: The Dominion online 2017 thread

« on: January 06, 2017, 09:34:30 pm »

Oh, given that there's no way to access the log after the game screen is left, perhaps my rant about how useless the log is in recreating the game is rather moot at this point.  Nevertheless, I expect at some point that we will be able to have full access to our past games and be able to replay them, just like on the Prismata client.  While they're dealing with a simply deterministic game and Dominion has shuffling, shuffling is the only randomness (ok, Black Market, anything else?), so all you need to do is have each shuffle encoded into the log.  Getting such a fully comprehensive log would be a major project if it was not initially planned, but having played Prismata for a while, I'm really missing that whole ability to go back and luck at each game stage by stage.

10

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: The Dominion online 2017 thread

« on: January 06, 2017, 09:04:15 pm »

I am seeing few to none of the Base cards and tons of new cards with new being defined as Dark Ages and newer. I'm getting tons of exposure to cards I've not played with. I'm not sure how Raz is getting a bunch of Base games.

As I've played a bit since my first post, I can say now it's definitely better than it was when I played back at the beginning of the week.  Perhaps people are discovering why they were getting Base-heavy games and managed to fix it.  I will note, however, that I had one game of about 10 that was very heavily weighted towards Base, so I think it's something that's still a process new players have to go through.

11

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: The Dominion online 2017 thread

« on: January 06, 2017, 08:57:30 pm »

Ok, I just played about 3 shuffles of a Page board always getting at least two of them, and was wondering where the hell my treasure hunters were when I apparently had been telling the game constantly that I wanted to keep them.  The multiple traveler dialog box is really, really, really, really bad.  Why would clicking on exchange, changing the coloring, cause it to go from being exchanged to being kept?  It literally makes no sense at all.  And this isn't even the first time I had multiple traveler turns.  The interface is so counter-intuitive, that I didn't even remember how it works a few days later.

12

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: The Dominion online 2017 thread

« on: January 06, 2017, 07:42:35 pm »

Going back through the discussion about the log reminded me that there's a lot that actually isn't in the log.  I'm of the opinion that the log (or at  least *some* log, if not the default one) should have the information to be able to reconstruct the entire game (although with some information hidden before the game ends, obviously).  Right now it doesn't tell you about people's choices with cards - at least, not all the time.  For instance, with Courtier, you don't know if they chose +1 action, +1 buy, or +$3.  Only the gain a gold creates a log event (as far as I can tell).  Similar things are true with Pawn.  You can tell what someone picks with Steward only if they didn't choose +$2; they probably did if you can't see, but they might have decided to draw from no cards for some reason (is there any actual good reason?).  When someone discards for Hamlet, you don't know from the log whether it's for an action or for a buy.  Thus, as you read through the log, you don't know how many actions, buys or coins someone has if it's due to cards with choice effects that have no other effect on the game, or in the case of Hamlet, no difference in effect between two options.  While the game will display the relevant information at the time to make necessary decisions, it's harder to analyze the log after the game.  This may not be a huge deal, but I'll point you back at my opinion in the second sentence of this paragraph.

Other things about the log:

When you top deck with Scheme (or Herbalist, or Walled Village, or something else in cleanup), it doesn't say what's being used to top deck the card.  While I'm not sure that it's relevant to know exactly which effect was used, it would be nice for clarity.

The non-action card revealed off Scrying Pool is listed first instead of the more obvious last.

Secret Passage always says "top deck" even if that's not where you put the card.

13

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: The Dominion online 2017 thread

« on: January 06, 2017, 06:57:30 pm »

You guys are going to play on Shuffle iT no matter what happens, you all love Dominion.  Casuals aren't going to play if they don't like it.  So maybe listen to their complaints and cater to them a little bit.

I may love Dominion, but I like Dominion as it was on Isotropic.  I stopped playing Goko when it was clear they weren't going to make it anything like that, and came back to try once on MF's client, which wasn't all that much different.  I just wasn't interested in paying to play Dominion on that kind of interface, especially not buying all the sets again.  And I definitely don't like Dominion enough to play a bunch of base set again and again (which is why I'm annoyed at how many Base cards seem to be in game with most people).  I care more about being able to play quickly and crisply, and against players of similar skill from whom I can potentially learn things.  Most people aren't like me, I understand that.  But my opinion is still valid.

What I failed to mention before that was brought back up was the promise of a pared-down interface.  That's something I'd definitely like to see, but certainly it shouldn't be a priority; fixing things that are broken is the priority.  Nevertheless, I was under the (perhaps greatly misguided) impression, based only on my own thoughts about how I would be doing this, that you'd first build a developer's interface version primarily for testing the game engine, and then build the graphical interface over top of that, while making the developer's interface available to players who for some reason might want to play that.  It might not even have been all that great to start, but it at least would have been in the minimalistic style of Isotropic's text interface that I had come to love and enjoy.  But if that's not how things actually turned out, then I guess it needs to be left on the back burner for a while.

I also was under the impression that Donald X played with Inheritance on some version of the new client, and yet it's not available when the client is released.  Did something in Empires break it, was that implementation completely separate from what you came up with later, or was it actually not implemented very well originally?

14

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: The Dominion online 2017 thread

« on: January 05, 2017, 07:42:41 pm »

For the most part, I like the ShuffleIt interface far more than Goko's.  I think I played one game on Making Fun before determining it wasn't actually an improvement over Goko.  There are a couple of things that bother me beyond the bugs (like naming cards) that still need to be squashed.

First, the familiar cards concept, while an interesting idea, needs to be brought to the attention of people.  I am getting absolutely sick of playing every game with the same base cards, especially Chapel.  Chapel just stops being interesting when your last 6 games have also had it.  I personally marked everything as familiar because I don't want to be gently led into all the cards that have been released since Hinterlands (the last set on Isotropic).  If people aren't actively marking cards as familiar, the feature is very very annoying to people like me.  I think maybe it's better on Good Match than Quick Match, but if that's the case it's not very clear, and I'm worried since I didn't play on Goko/MF that Good Match will be matching me with mainly newbs and I won't get to see decent players actually using all the new cards. 

Second, on a more minor note, I don't like the Ruins being grouped in with the kingdom cards.  It just doesn't feel right.  It feels like it should be next to the curse pile.  Maybe that's not an option if you want to keep it as the same size as the other kingdom cards given that it's a mixed pile and theoretically people might want to buy Ruined Market, but it just doesn't look right.

Of course, there's a lot more that needs to be done that I alluded to in my couple of posts on the ShuffleIt forums.  There needs to be a ranking system.  The game needs to be completely playable, including being able to name any card you want.  You need to be able to see your journey token.  The trash needs to be easier to access.  The selection of a card from your discard (like with Scavenger) needs to be made easier; it's borderline impossible to tell which card is which since they aren't sorted.  There's other things that you already know about from others (multiple Traveller exchanges, poor tavern mat access).  I only subscribed for a month to start since I'm not really sure I want to invest long-term (especially given my job that's going to ramp up the next few months) when I don't know what the release schedule is for all the features that will make the game much more enjoyable overall.  As it stands, I think took probably 3 weeks to many to start, because I'm simply frustrated now that the novelty has worn off and there's other things I can do while I wait for ratings, better matchmaking and user familiarities, and functional fixes.

15

Mafia Game Threads / Re: Mafia Game Index

« on: April 23, 2013, 10:44:45 pm »

I have no idea if I'm going about this the right way, but I have to start somewhere.

I've thrown together an idea for what I assume would be labeled as a bastard game as it involves some players having changing win conditions, some players being potentially lied to, and other assorted weirdness.  It currently involves aliens, psychics, rocket scientists, and tin foil hat wearers.  It was not initially designed with that flavor in mind, but it became a way of coalescing all the mechanics together.  It might just have too many different things going on that would be better served in different games.  And I have no clue if it's even close to balanced (whatever that means for bastard games).

I also have a few other half-baked ideas that I think would be interesting bases for bastardish games but haven't fully developed yet, some of which I'd spoil by even mentioning the basic concept of.

I also also have very limited ability to actually mod a game, as I have no internet access at work (where I am 9+ hours a day) and no fancy phone (I'm actually surrounded by thousands of fancy phones with internet access, I just can't actually use them except to do what I'm supposed to do with them).  I have a fairly set schedule, but it's quite narrow for internet access times.

So basically, I'm looking for someone(s) to look things over, bounce other ideas off of, and co-mod any actual games that become reality.  This is a long-term project that could involve various other people for various different games. 

16

Forum Games / Re: MXXIII: Second Chance Mafia (Gathering interest/Signups)

« on: April 23, 2013, 09:22:46 pm »

I'd be interested in playing, pending the announcement of the actual format.  (I can't sign up for the original game)

17

Mafia Game Threads / Re: Civility Pledge

« on: April 15, 2013, 10:01:44 pm »

I try to live by these standards every day. 

I pledge that I will attempt to follow these guidelines as much as possible.

18

Innovation Articles / Re: Innovation Card List / Icon Analysis

« on: April 15, 2013, 09:41:59 pm »

You can always use the null effect dogma of a figure to trigger any echo effects of that color, and that dogma action uses the featured icon of the figure.  Or you could even without any echo effects because you actually want to do nothing.  Yes, I actually have been in such a situation where my preferred move was "pass".  I think I ended up drawing, but it was pretty much only because it was the only thing that wasn't actively bad.

19

Innovation General Discussion / Re: I think my wife has a secret isotropic life

« on: April 14, 2013, 03:26:33 pm »

If it was 98% luck he wouldn't've lost 6 times in a row.

You'd be surprised how much that 2% comes up...lol

I'd guess about 2% of the time.

Nah, I'd say more like once every fifty times.

20

Mafia Game Threads / Re: BMIX: Conspiracy Theories, London Edition (Day 3)

« on: April 13, 2013, 08:11:50 pm »

I feel the need to state that my forum title is currently Conspirator.

21

Innovation Articles / Re: Innovation Card List / Icon Analysis

« on: April 13, 2013, 08:09:17 pm »

Overall it looks like Echoes was the "Splay your cards, damnit" expansion, and Figures is the "Share your Dogmas, damnit" expansion, as if the designers thought those things weren't happening as often as they envisioned in just Base.

22

Innovation Articles / Re: Innovation Card List / Icon Analysis

« on: April 13, 2013, 07:48:46 pm »

Amina Sukhera you have as saying "When you meld this card, score all opponents’ top figures of value ."  I assume there's an actual value there.

Napoleon Bonaparte has a couple spaces missing in "If you would score or return a card with a <Factory>, instead tuck it and score a top card of value6from anywhere." 

23

Mafia Game Threads / Re: BMIX: Conspiracy Theories, London Edition (Day 3)

« on: April 12, 2013, 09:42:54 pm »

For once, someone lies in their QT and tells the truth in the game thread.  Isn't this game hilarious?

24

Mafia Game Threads / Re: BMIX: Conspiracy Theories, London Edition (Day 3)

« on: April 12, 2013, 07:51:20 pm »

vote: jotheonah

No one else seems to be interested at going after the group with the claimed NK and we need the CTs dead, so I'm fine with this.  I don't approve of the suggestion to kill one of my fellow Masons for obvious reasons, but I guess everyone will feel a bit more at ease when it happens and there's not much I can do about it if people are really still concerned about a cult.  I suppose you can count me in on agreeing to it for diplomatic reasons, but I fear it's leading down a path to a Town win.  Of course, since it's Town making the kill I suppose they're just fine with that.  I just hope we can share victory with Town. 

25

Innovation General Discussion / Re: isotropic stuttering?

« on: April 11, 2013, 08:56:44 pm »

I noticed this as well and was quite annoyed with it when it didn't auto-meld my one card in hand with Domestication.  It's a nice idea to work around the info leak, but more logic is needed to determine if the pause is warranted given the public game.  And as has already been mentioned, it would be nice to have an "ok" button or something to move the game along just a bit quicker and to not have it be an info leak itself.  Perhaps the time until the game moves ahead on its own could be randomized.