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Messages - Cheese

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1
Dominion General Discussion / Re: 4/4 opening
« on: March 12, 2012, 05:40:33 pm »
Like RJ touched on with Sea Hag/Sea Hag vs TR/Sea Hag, there are other considerations than just how early you can get a gold.

I think TR/X looks attractive when it is analyzed in the short term, which is normally pretty reasonable, because big gains early lead to stronger decks mid and then late. But I don't think that adequately shows what's going on, because after the next reshuffle you now have 2 more cards in your deck, making collision less likely. Every card you add to your deck makes X/X better while making TR/X worse.

And TR/Masq...you do have a seven card hand instead of the nine with TR/Smithy, but you are also very likely to end up with two fewer estates than you started with. Now your deck has Silver instead of Gold, but two fewer estates. It's probably comparable chances for hitting $6 next hand, but because your deck is trimmed, every Gold you add is more useful. Now you can continue to trim your deck and even toss some coppers. So it's probably better. But even if you don't think it is, TR/Oracle is more similar to TR/Smithy and nobody does that.

2
Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Simultaneity
« on: March 12, 2012, 04:54:21 pm »
Oh, nice! And here I was expecting to be disappointed with a semantic hair-splitting solution.

3
Dominion Isotropic / Re: People to avoid on isotropic
« on: March 11, 2012, 04:27:33 am »
For some reason, a player named Murtaugh ALWAYS declines me in auto-match. It's happened during different play sessions on several different days. Does he decline other people, or is it just me? I can't help worrying he mistakes me for the supposedly evil Rambo888.

This same player seems to always decline me in auto-match as well. I am also not sure if it is something I've done.

I would be surprised if he plays anyone, ever. He's too old for this shit.

4
I agree that Apprentice doesn't make any sense.  Especially since one of the best things to do with your Apprentice is to get enough of them that you can use one to trash another.  What kind of sense does that make?

Clearly, you have several Apprentices, each one wanting to eventually succeed you in your job. They destroy each other in the process of proving who is the most worthy, all the while doing your dirty work for you.

5
General Discussion / Re: Dominion intrudes on real life
« on: March 07, 2012, 12:33:46 am »
Maybe not "real life", but same idea...

I was playing a game of Heroes of Newerth today and one of the guys on the other team chose a hero named "Scout". My first thought was, "Scout? But that's a terrible card..."

What's great is that in that game, Scout is an awful hero. There has to be some of sort of underlying structure in the universe that demands that anything named Scout sucks.

6
Simulation / Re: Project: Optimizing Big Money X
« on: March 05, 2012, 08:04:31 pm »
Excellent project! The compiled XML is dated in September 2011, is there a newer state of things available somewhere?

Also, I checked about 10 sample games of the Ironworks bot and...it didn't buy a single Ironworks. Even fiddling with the buy rules a smidge, I couldn't get the bot to purchase an Ironworks. Simulator bug?

7
Oh dear god, I'm addicted.

8
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: A slightly different card idea... Bluff.
« on: March 01, 2012, 04:57:13 pm »
Gambler in Cosmic Encounter is stupid fun.


I think this is a neat idea but might need revision to reduce politics, which is deliberately absent from the rest of Dominion. You have not only the issue of people arguing over "who called the bluff first" but also potential for kingmaking by intentionally calling bluff on blatantly legit plays.

9
Help! / Re: Possibly the worst game I have played as a Lvl 30
« on: February 29, 2012, 06:33:27 pm »
The best BM+Hoard bot over in the BM+X thread buys Duchies with one Hoard over Gold, and Estates with one Hoard over Silver. This is easily rationalizable because in a normal BM game you will never hit $1.5/card, there Estate+Gold is not only giving you points but increasing the overall quality of your deck.

Now with trashing...you could get over $1.5/card so maybe it would change, but Chapel is just so mediocre for BM...

10
Simulation / Re: Big Money completely revised
« on: February 29, 2012, 05:49:33 pm »
Interesting script. I guess it still ends pretty similar. Seems like the problem with tuning pure BM vs BM is that there are so few non-obvious decisions, where one script gets an opportunity to really prove itself. So, regardless of whether you use turns, deck position, or money, you end up calibrating the thresholds to get provinces after the third reshuffle and going hard green when provinces run low. Then the only opportunity to manage your luck is for a couple turns in the midgame where the decisions are very complicated and one variable probably can't tell you what to do. And even then luck will frequently still get the better of you.

I think a resilient script would be really cool but I can't see how you would make a solid one based on any single one of the metrics available. Unfortunately, the simulator code isn't really built for multivariable approaches (i.e. take the total money in your deck divided by the cards and do the same for your opponent and add the result and...ad infinitum). Maybe at some point there will be user-scripted conditions?  :P

The Cheese script actually has a modified PPR and it took me a while to track down what this does. It ducks the penultimate province when 1 or 2 points behind even when there are no duchies in the supply. This performs badly against my turns + PPR script but is actually an advantage against the "betterer" script! I think there are some similar triangular issues with late copper purchasing if someone wants to investigate them, however the variance of the results makes my PC too slow to run enough tests.

Haha, didn't even notice that. Whoops. I don't think it is totally surprising that there is a bit rock-paper-scissors going on there, especially when we are talking about a different of small percentages. I don't think it means something significant, but rather is a byproduct of the fact that each script is so simple that it handles certain rare situations extremely poorly. If you make a move that inadvertently pushes another script into one of its degenerate situations you increase your chance to win by "confusing" it.

11
Simulation / Re: Big Money completely revised
« on: February 28, 2012, 09:55:17 pm »
Yeah, I guess the PPR was the kicker. I see what you mean about interaction-based matchups (attacks etc.). The number of turns or even number of reshuffles won't be an indicator that is resilient to said matchups. I can see how a threshold-based approach would be more resilient.

Doing a pure threshold-based approach has some weird consequences, however, where significantly different decisions get made on, say the second turn before the 4th reshuffle versus the final turn before the 4th reshuffle. Unless the game state changes significantly between those turns (i.e. one of the last few provinces gets bought), we wouldn't want that. It's also basically inscrutable.

I guess the question becomes whether our goal is...
  • To make the very best possible all-purpose BM bot, which I would expect would base itself on your economy, your opponent's economy, endgame adjustments, and some sort of calibrator that treats every turn on a given pass through the deck as roughly equal
  • Or, to make a bot that illustrates a basic principle for learning. For this goal, the fewer rules and the fewer numbers, the better.

I suppose I can see value in both goals, each of which would lead to very different methodologies.

12
Simulation / Re: Big Money completely revised
« on: February 28, 2012, 06:15:59 pm »
Certainly there are nuances, and the ultimate player would incorporate many variables. But by FAR the most important consideration when buying money vs green has got be "How many more times do I expect to see this card?"

The gold vs province decision here affects the first green card you buy. It's based on future spending and it comes down to "How many more times will I draw this card I'm buying?". I'd hazard a guess that the previous condition, total treasure in deck > 18, is a slightly inaccurate tally of 6 turns buying silver/gold.

Precisely. Total treasure in deck > 18 means either 6 silvers or 3 silvers and 2 golds. Therefore to get a province on turn 6 by this criterion, you'd have to not only buy gold on turn 3 or 4, but also buy gold on turn 5, and THEN draw $8 for a province on turn 6. That would almost never happen. On the flip side, it's almost trivial that you will have bought at least $12 in money by turn 7 on a 4/3 split. So it turns out that "More than $18" is almost identical to "Wait until turn 7".

The interesting thing to look at is the VP per turn graphs for BMU vs BMU(turns)
They are very different so probably the cause of the improvement?

See, this is a really good idea. If you look at the VP graphs for these strategies, you see that the two strategies are, as discussed above, basically identical until after the turn 9 reshuffle. Any noticeable differences can only be due to behavior starting at turns 10-11-12. At this point, the threshold strategy VP graph slopes upward hard on turns 10-11-12, while the turns strategy is obviously about consistent on turns 10-11-12. I think it is dubious that you could get significant information on turns 10 or 11 that would strongly affect your decision on turn 12, UNLESS you see the province stack start to empty.


So maybe the turns bot needs to be fixed to green harder when the province pile depletes. Here's a bot that consistently beats the optimized threshold bot by a small margin and is far easier to understand. It was winning even before I added PPR. It should probably play 5/2 starts differently than it does.

Code: [Select]
<player name="Big Money Turns (with Endgame and PPR)"
 author="Cheese"
 description="A Big Money strategy that uses the turn number to dictate buys. It also adjusts for when a game is nearly over.">
 <type name="Province"/>
 <type name="TwoPlayer"/>
 <type name="BigMoney"/>
 <type name="SingleCard"/>
 <type name="Optimized"/>
 <type name="UserCreated"/>
 <type name="Bot"/>
   <buy name="Province">
      <condition>
         <left type="countTurns"/>
         <operator type="greaterThan" />
         <right type="constant" attribute="6.0"/>
      </condition>
      <condition>
         <left type="countCardsInSupply" attribute="Province"/>
         <operator type="greaterThan" />
         <right type="constant" attribute="2.0"/>
      </condition>
   </buy>
   <buy name="Province">
      <condition>
         <left type="countCardsInSupply" attribute="Province"/>
         <operator type="equalTo" />
         <right type="constant" attribute="1.0"/>
      </condition>
      <condition>
         <left type="countVP"/>
         <operator type="greaterOrEqualThan" />
         <right type="countMAXOpponentVP"/>
         <extra_operation type="minus" attribute="6.0" />
      </condition>
   </buy>
   <buy name="Province">
      <condition>
         <left type="countCardsInSupply" attribute="Province"/>
         <operator type="equalTo" />
         <right type="constant" attribute="2.0"/>
      </condition>
      <condition>
         <left type="countVP"/>
         <operator type="greaterOrEqualThan" />
         <right type="countMAXOpponentVP"/>
      </condition>
   </buy>
   <buy name="Province">
      <condition>
         <left type="countCardsInSupply" attribute="Province"/>
         <operator type="equalTo" />
         <right type="constant" attribute="2.0"/>
      </condition>
      <condition>
         <left type="countVP"/>
         <operator type="smallerOrEqualThan" />
         <right type="countMAXOpponentVP"/>
         <extra_operation type="minus" attribute="3.0" />
      </condition>
   </buy>
   <buy name="Duchy">
      <condition>
         <left type="countCardsInSupply" attribute="Province"/>
         <operator type="smallerOrEqualThan" />
         <right type="constant" attribute="3.0"/>
      </condition>
   </buy>
   <buy name="Duchy">
      <condition>
         <left type="countTurns"/>
         <operator type="greaterThan" />
         <right type="constant" attribute="12.0"/>
      </condition>
   </buy>
   <buy name="Estate">
      <condition>
         <left type="countCardsInSupply" attribute="Province"/>
         <operator type="smallerOrEqualThan" />
         <right type="constant" attribute="2.0"/>
      </condition>
   </buy>
   <buy name="Estate">
      <condition>
         <left type="countTurns"/>
         <operator type="greaterThan" />
         <right type="constant" attribute="12.0"/>
      </condition>
   </buy>
   <buy name="Gold"/>
   <buy name="Duchy">
      <condition>
         <left type="countTurns"/>
         <operator type="greaterThan" />
         <right type="constant" attribute="9.0"/>
      </condition>
   </buy>
   <buy name="Silver"/>
</player>

Turns is probably the best basic indicator of "How many times do I expect to see this card?" But, the other two main factors would be the economies of your deck AND that of your opponent. It would be interesting to something working on all three, or at least an economy-based bot that considered both your economy and your opponent's...

13
Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas
« on: February 15, 2012, 05:07:53 pm »
Famine
Action $4

Trash this card. Gain a card costing up to $3.

14
Dominion Isotropic / Re: Decline of civility on isotropic?
« on: February 14, 2012, 09:35:16 pm »
In terms of "gg" in particular, I see it as sort of the post-game handshake, not an actual statement about the quality of the game.  In that context, leaving immediately after the game without saying anything strikes me as rude and unsporting.  So, saying nothing says something.  If "gg" feels vacuous, say something respectful that doesn't.  If it was a particularly bad game, well, hate the game, not the player.

I think this is precisely correct. I think anyone who believes these gestures are vacuous is looking at it through the lens of friendliness rather than that of respect.

Friendliness is when you are happy, energetic, and engaging. It is hugging. It is smiley faces and exaggerated positivity. It is generally a given among, well, friends, but certainly not restricted to them.

Respect is when you are courteous and acknowledge that the person you are interacting with is neither above nor below you. It is shaking hands. It is "please" and "thank you", "sir" and "ma'am".

Friendliness can be great, but respect is mandatory. When we go out to eat, my sister is friendly but disrespectful. She is always bubbly and engaging, but she calls waiters "hon" or "sweetie" and generally wastes their time. I am the exact opposite. I am terse and rarely engage the staff in any meaningful way, but I am always extremely polite and never get visibly upset about anything. She has at least three stories of waiters or waitresses who had "attitude"; I eat out far more often and have never had anything close to such an issue.

tl;dr Just say "gg", it's a respect thing. If you want to be friendly, which is a choice, of course there's no harm in going the extra step.

15
Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Exception to the rule puzzle
« on: February 14, 2012, 05:29:31 pm »
You have a 3-card hand (militia'd) of Highway/Adventurer/Tunnel. Your only two treasures are two Platina in your discard pile. There is one Colony left and you will win if you purchase it.

16
Game Reports / Re: Shortest Game Ever
« on: February 14, 2012, 02:43:19 am »
Nicely done. I think he probably felt that at this point, with no treasure except copper, that he was just too far behind.

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