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Dominion Articles / Re: You have X buys on your turn. You are NOT required to use them.
« on: July 13, 2011, 04:13:39 pm »I think this site needs guidelines for what qualifies as an "article". This thread should probably go in general dominion discussion. Despite the fact that it contains a useful tip, there is not really enough substance to call it an article. Maybe if there was some analysis involved regarding when to use those extra goons buys, or when pawn or silver is better than nothing. Or if you ran some simulations for some of your examples to demonstrate *how* much buying nothing vs something can be... For example, you could have have two bots do village/smithy, and have differing buy rules for pawn: one who always buys it with $2, and one who does something smarter, and show the gap. Without this, everything that can be gained from this OP can be gained from the title alone.
Unfortunately these are often relatively complex situations which required ridiculously complicated play rules to model. I haven't yet seen a simulator that can repeatedly play out turn ten+ of a game with given state X, hand Y, and board Z vs opponent strategy A with B buys already made....
Where not obvious I attempted to give examples that were as specific as possible as well as highlighting why the given buy in each situation was -EV. True, it only highlights one niche aspect of game play however the way you shore up a leaky ship is one hole at a time.
The research that went in to the piece came from a few hundred games played and a few thousand games read and deconstructed. If the title seems to give away the body of the piece then I'm glad I could save some people the trouble of reading it!