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1

Dominion General Discussion / How green should your deck be before buying Copper starts making sense?

« on: December 27, 2021, 05:02:53 am »

Yeah, yeah, I know, never buy Copper.  But sometimes I feel near the endgame where I'm drawing 4 Victory cards and $1, that maaaybe I should be buying another Copper instead of passing.  Certainly if my deck is >80% green, buying Copper actually increases the average play power of a card in the deck, right?

Anyone ever done any rigorous analysis here?

2

Dominion General Discussion / Crestfallen Turn 3 hands

« on: December 15, 2021, 12:52:13 pm »

On turn 3, I draw this:



"Well, I'm f***ed."

What are your favorite examples of Turn 3 hands that instantly make you swear?

3

Dominion General Discussion / Any ideas for a lower-variance Black Market deck?

« on: February 01, 2013, 10:10:44 pm »

I'm starting to look at the Black Market rules again (no brownie points if you can guess why).

The biggest feature the way most people play Black Market is that it's very high-variance.  There's very little control over whether you will get a chance at a good card or not.  With a smaller BM deck, such as the 25-card "house rule" at isotropic, at least after 8 plays of BM you can have less variance over figuring out what's going to be there.

This feature can be frustrating if you don't like high-variance.  (If you do, this is actually quite fun.)

Now, the official rules for Black Market don't actually say that all the cards in the Black Market must be distinct -- that's just a suggestion.  It also doesn't specify the number of cards in the Black Market; it suggests 15 but again that's not a rule.

So, for example, if your group wanted, you could decide to make the Black Market deck a deck of 10 Villages (assuming Village is not in the Supply).  That would be an example of a very low-variance BM deck; each time you know you're going to flip over 3 Villages.  In fact, if that was the only +2 Actions card available in the game, it might actually be strategically interesting; if you want an Engine you have to commit to Black Market first.  It would be kind of like having a Potion-cost card in the Supply; players have to decide if they want a Potion card to enable those strategies.  I can certainly see even players who hate high-variance enjoy Black Market with such a deck in play.

Seems like to me there's a very wide range of possibilities between "a deck of 10 Villages" and "a deck of 25 different cards chosen at random", and some of them might have a managable-and-interesting amount of variance.  For example, just off the top of my head, imagine a BM deck that was "a deck of 10 distinct $5-cost cards that provide at least +1 Action; two copies of each".  This deck would potentially have Festival, Lab, Highway, Hunting Party, Treasury, etc.  It would add some interesting spice to the game but not feel swingy, sort of as if you had a Knights pile except that all the Knights are constructive instead of being Attacks.  It could be quite fun.

I'm sure you guys can come up with some other interesting ways to design a Black Market deck.  Want to try?

4

Goko Dominion Online / Possession in one-player games -- Important?

« on: January 23, 2013, 08:29:27 pm »

I'm currently working with Goko on doing an overhaul that will clean up the "when-buy" / "when-gain" bugs, as well as getting Possession into a playable state so that Alchemy can be released.  (By the way, Alchemy will probably be released before all the "when-buy"/"when-gain" bugs are fixed.)

One niggly bit that will actually require some substantial code change is playing Possession in a 1-player game.  Although the official rules don't allow for 1-player games, the codebase supports it and you can even do it on the live server (just go to the "Secret Chamber" room).  Most of the card rules generalize and work fine in 1-player games.

Possession is a bit of an exception.  Technically, if you go with the letter of the rules, you should be able to play a turn where you are Possessing yourself.  It would increment the round count differently, and the behaviour of cards you trash would be different on the Possessed turn.

Currently the implementation of Possession just ignores turns where you're Possessing yourself, which is clean and easy to code, and also means that internal routines can check quickly whether a turn is a Possession turn by checking to see if the controlling player and the current player are the same player.  If we want a more correct implementation, a bunch of code needs to change, and I'm not sure whether it is worth the effort to make all these changes to support a mode that isn't in the official rules anyway (namely, 1-player games).

So I'm throwing up this poll.  Please vote and I'll use the feedback to make a recommendation to Goko as to where to put this on their priority list (or if it's going to go there at all).

5

Dominion General Discussion / Dominion Set Generator Updates

« on: December 21, 2012, 08:30:13 pm »

I've added a few features to Dominion Set Generator ( http://dominionsetgenerator.com/ ) over the last week:

* The generator now has data for Hinterlands and Cornucopia.
* There's an "Overall Balance" numeric setting.  Normally it's at 1.  Set it to 0 and the generator will have no biases at all and select cards uniformly.  Set it to something negative and the generator will be more likely to generate strange decks, such as decks with no +Actions, or decks with everything the same cost.
* The generator now gives recommendations for Shelters, Platinum/Colony, and a Bane for Young Witch.
* The generator now saves some basic settings, such as what sets you own, what cards you want to force to include, and what the "Overall Balance" setting is.

As always, comments are welcome.

6

Dominion General Discussion / Announcing Dominion Set Generator

« on: December 07, 2012, 03:51:32 pm »

http://dominionsetgenerator.com/

I got a bit frustrated that a purely uniformly-random set generator sometimes makes sets that aren't fun.  This is a set generator that, by default, generates "fun and balanced" sets.  And if you don't like that you can customize it in lots of different ways.

I highly welcome feedback or any offers to help (especially if you want to help make it look snazzy and cool!).