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76

Dominion General Discussion / Re: A classifcation system of trashers, gainers and remodelers

« on: August 21, 2012, 11:04:13 pm »

I also find this post to be quite helpful.

When scanning a set of Kingdom cards, your mind goes through many calculations. One of the things that needs to be spelt out is the number and quality of trashers on board. Sometimes your perspective is just to improve your deck quality, but sometimes your perspective is to achieve a target deck size (usually small, for crazy engine shenanigans). Having a quick and easy classification system in your mind for deck size manipulation cards can let you be a little more clear-headed when figuring out your strategy.

For example, in my mind, I think of Jack of All Trades as a trasher among other things. But clearly, it's never a net negative in number of cards in your deck, and some engines would not really benefit from having that Estate replaced with a Silver. Having it explicitly live in a different category in my mind may make it less likely that I mistakenly count Jack as an actual honest-to-God trasher for an engine.

77

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion uh...misconceptions

« on: August 21, 2012, 10:40:45 pm »

Flashing back to an earlier, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed me:

Vault - So this card lets you turn all of your awesome cards into copper? Uh, good luck with that. +2 cards whoop-dee-doo. Witch does that AND it curses your enemies!

(it took me an embarrassing amount of games before I figured out that Vault will always get you Gold, and that Vault + Gold will always get you Province)


Loan - Paying 3 for a copper?!?! Are you serious?!?!

(I've now logged games where one Loan has killed 5 copper all by itself... still a junky card most of the time, though, I think)


Mine - Wow this card is so awesome, I better use my extra Buy on Copper so it won't run out of targets!

(no comment)


Thief - OK, it's kinda mediocre on its own, but if I chain a bunch with Villages and Smithy...

(in my defense, I learned pretty quickly how horrible this idea was)


Nobles - OK, I'm no chump anymore, I know that Village + Smithy is kind of meaningless, but Nobles is a self-combo that gains you victory points!! Nobles all the way FTW!!

(learning moment: I ran out the 8 Nobles pile all by myself vs. an opponent who was already up to 6 Provinces & did the math - I'd need 2 Provinces and 3 Duchy to catch up, all on a single Buy per turn. I did not win that game)

78

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Cards you think are underrated/overrated

« on: August 21, 2012, 10:03:43 pm »

Governor: ridiculously overrated

Can you explain?

I've been finding that spamming Governor (for Gold) keeps winning me games, especially if my opponent doesn't value the card as much. The ability to get double Province turns ridiculously early is pretty spectacular. Of course you can only safely use the +3 cards on the last turn, but that should be a double (or even triple) Province turn to close it out. I will do +3 cards earlier if I'm reasonably confident it will be a double Province turn and my opponent doesn't have an engine that can match that, even with an extra card.

And this route to victory is fast - in the absence of cursers, the games end around turns 11-14 with a majority of Provinces gained.


To answer the OP: I think Navigator may be slightly underrated. It's pretty nice in a heavy attack and deck clutter game with no good trashing available. The $4 price tag is just right in that environment, as $5+ can be difficult to reach. With bulky decks filled with crap, the +$2 is also pretty nice, and the ability to discard the next hand of (Curse, Curse, Copper, Copper, Estate) can be a virtual extra turn. Might make the difference in a low-money game that's going to end on piles, giving you an extra shot at those Gardens/Duchies/Islands/Tunnels.

And speaking of Tunnel, Navigator is one of the best enablers. But note I do still think it's a pretty bad card, just not *that* bad.

79

Dominion General Discussion / Re: A Completely Unreasonable Proposal To Save Isotropic

« on: August 21, 2012, 03:39:07 pm »

The utilitarian in me wants something, anything, besides the trash bin to be the final destination for iso's code.

My dream scenario:

- Isotropic's front-end gets reworked as an optional replacement for Goko's front-end, possibly as a browser extension (because then Goko's devs don't need to do any work).

- Isotropic's back-end gets an API that allows AI's to play each other.

Also it'd be a great learning experience to read the code, because dougz is a much better programmer than I am.

That's basically my dream scenario, too, and I came in to post just that. To add to it, why couldn't Goko just buy the right to use Isotropic's code anyway, and use what they can? Obviously they'd make the default view look really nice, but there's something to be said about the speed and stability of the current isotropic engine. Users could have the option to turn off animations and use a more text-based interface, and that should meet most people's needs, right?

Note that I know very little about programming, so I don't know how easy it is to adapt code from one framework to another...