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1876

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Incredibly stupid play on words

« on: December 10, 2012, 05:09:57 pm »

Obligatory off topic link to Choose your own adventure Hamlet by Ryan North, which introduces the excellent phrase "Ophelia has a +1 science stat, but a -1 weakness to water."

1877

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Listing Currently Playing Games...

« on: December 10, 2012, 05:03:42 pm »

If game spectating is added, it is considerably less useless.

1878

Non-Mafia Game Threads / Re: Convex Hull (a Single Submission Game, 14/15)

« on: December 10, 2012, 02:46:05 pm »

Oh sure, I need a minor distraction.

1879

Help! / Re: Seriously, I just cannot seem to figure out Village-Wharf games.

« on: December 10, 2012, 02:25:43 am »

But Salvager/Develop has a good chance to trash more sooner, and you can Salvage the Develop once you get rid of most the Estates. Although Mint changes things around...I still want to side with Salvager/Develop here for redundancy's sake.

EDIT: Actually, now I'm not sure. If I were playing it, I'd be opening Salvager/Silver to try to get early Wharves. Salv/Develop delays that, but will likely get you a Village along the way.

1880

Rules Questions / Re: Spoils and Mint

« on: December 10, 2012, 02:04:41 am »

Also, where is/are the Golduck(s)?

(To be fair, Psyduck is better than Golduck in every way, except for in an actual battle.)

1881

2012 / Re: What to do if someone isn't playing?

« on: December 08, 2012, 10:08:33 pm »

I have about 0 trust that the force-resign button comes up at a well-fixed interval, so I want people doing screenshots for this stuff.

Also if someone communicates in chat saying they need some afk time I think they should get ~30 minutes of grace.  If they vanish without explanation then they don't necessarily deserve that much time.

EDIT: This is totally and massively biased by a the high likelihood I'm going to have to afk for 15 minutes or so during a game.

I'm pretty sure that you will get auto-kicked by the server before 15 minutes have passed.

1882

2012 / Re: Chapel Division: Brackets and Results

« on: December 08, 2012, 06:46:04 pm »

Our final match was a rather interesting one even though tournament was in there. We both opened 5/2, and some different angles were possible here. Either go up for money right away with Merchant Ship, or go for a great drawing engine with Hunting Party, or start improving the deck with an Upgrade? My opponent went for Merchant Ship/Herbalist, which I consider by now a classic mistake. Never buy herbalists for less then $11. I opened Upgrade/-. He did not get to $8 fast enough, and then my deck got so small that I got two prices of my first province right away. This must have frustrated him somewhat, because all of a sudden he was gone.

Is there a reason you don't at least pick up Princess on turn 11? I can see skipping Duchy and Diadem in a Hunting Party deck, but the +Buy still seems really good.

1883

Game Reports / Re: Humiliation

« on: December 08, 2012, 12:17:49 am »

Now that I think about it, a Village opening isn't that bad here. You want Militia early to deny $5, you want Steward early to deal with potential curses, and opening Militia/Steward is pretty bad. Because if you keep trashing with Steward, you're just asking for terminal collisions early on.

I'm still not sold on it, but I can see why Village/Militia was chosen.

1884

Loser's Bracket / Re: Losers Bracket - Structure Discussion

« on: December 07, 2012, 12:31:56 am »

If you want a logistics nightmare, you could have a separate single elimination bracket for each round.

So there's a bracket for people who lost Round 1 (capped at 64)
And then a separate bracket of 32 for people who lost Round 2.
And a separate bracket of 16 for Round 3 losers, and so on.

From my understanding, this is just to have more tournament matches for people who lost early, and likely won't have a reward for winning (besides personal satisfaction). So if it's just for fun, it makes better sense for the participants to be around the same level, because that leads to closer/more interesting matches.

1885

Dominion Isotropic / Re: Using bots to hack your shuffle luck?!

« on: December 06, 2012, 03:23:44 am »

Actually, while we're on that topic, can anyone here construct a situation where you want to play Wishing Well, succeeding at your wish is worse than failing it, and you don't know the top card of your deck? The last condition is needed because you can easily fail the wish if you already know the top card, and the question is about ensuring a failed wish by naming a non-existent card.

1886

2012 / Re: Toughest Division

« on: December 05, 2012, 02:21:08 am »

I don't think the divisions are very different. It's going to be hard to keep advancing in any of them.

But I'm going to go with Witch because I'm in Witch, so it'll make me feel better when I lose.

1887

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Pet tricks you haven't tried yet

« on: December 04, 2012, 08:58:58 pm »

Amassing a Treasury stack and gaining Victory cards without buying them to get free money every turn. 6 Treasuries, buy Border Village is a Duchy every turn! And completely impractical.

1888

2012 / Re: Witch Division: Bracket and Results

« on: December 04, 2012, 07:49:22 pm »

Titandrake wins 4-1

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/04/game-20121204-155156-eafe804c.html
IGG. I open 5/2 and go first, so yeah. Some fun Develop shenanigans here though. Buy Nomad Camp, Develop it into IGG + Develop, Develop that into Harem + Nomad Comp! khanh93 pointed out that you could develop Nomad Camp -> IGG + develop, buy Nomad Camp, and repeat, but no one did so.

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/04/game-20121204-160457-de41cf5a.html
Another IGG game. I miss $5 on both turns 3/4, so I Embargo IGG to stop the snowball (albeit in a bad spot), then Embargo Duke when I see khanh93 is going for Duchies. Should probably have been Embargoed Duchy in retrospect. Try an amazing comeback attempt with a Xroads-Nobles engine (I'm surprised it actually worked as well as it did), but didn't quite make it.

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/04/game-20121204-162241-f032776d.html
Really weird game. I try Remake -> Villages + Pirate Ships. Game completely breaks down, ends super close after ~30 turns with 6 VP Fairgrounds and everything.

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/04/game-20121204-162736-008a9359.html
THIRD IGG game of the set. This time khanh93 gets the 5/2 and goes first. Except I get Woodcutter-Gardens as a fall back plan, so I'm not in nearly as much hurt. A bit of a shame: switch around a few cards and it turns into a very intricate engine game.

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/04/game-20121204-163535-8f5235c5.html
Chapel, Tournaments, Nobles, and Bridge. Considered Bridge-Gardens, but it's way too slow here imo. The snowball starts rolling and it doesn't stop for anything.

The slogs in the middle part of the match are some of the weirdest + closest games of Dominion I've ever played. Thanks for the match!

1889

Game Reports / I have no idea how I won this?

« on: December 04, 2012, 05:57:41 pm »

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/04/game-20121204-144619-628ecf80.html

Early on, my Swindler hits dead, and I fall behind really quickly, but then my Swindler's started hitting a little bit and I started winning?
Seriously, I have no idea how I came back this game. Was it just nice shuffle luck or what?

1890

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card

« on: December 03, 2012, 09:08:41 pm »

Edit: I did not catch them. A new game is not coming out.

1891

Help! / Re: Mandarin BM fails

« on: December 02, 2012, 07:33:23 am »

Turning those Estates into Silvers and Villages is really really good, think of it as playing Jack 3 times, trashing an Estate each time. Except a bit more reliable, and at the cost of your turn.
With Remake as a trasher, you can trash your Coppers out pretty quickly. Remodel can be pseudo +buy, although it wasn't picked up here.
Although I'm no good at Mandarin-BM, it sounds susceptible to Rabble chains, and considerably worse when there are Colonies. Both in that the game is going to be longer, and that $9 is a lot harder to get than $6 or $8. Mandarin + 3 Copper + whatever = Gold. To get Platinum, you need Mandarin + $6 from 3 cards, which is actually quite strict from the sounds of things. The topdecking is only as good as the frequency in which you have excess $.

1892

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Reason enough to skip Mountebank?

« on: December 01, 2012, 08:30:48 pm »

I can't think of a situation where you want to skip Mountebank: giving 2 bad cards is just so strong. (EDIT: Okay, maybe Ambassador, but picking it up in the middle of the game if there isn't a strong engine can hurt.)

I've skipped Familiar in a game with Steward, Throne Room, and some other engine pieces. By the time I was getting cursed, my deck drew itself fast enough to trash them as they came in, and I had the actions to still trash Treasures as well.

I've also skipped it in a Hunting Party/Lighthouse game. Bought 2 Lighthouses, played every other turn, skipped Gold until I had to to maximize my chances of drawing my deck.

The trend here is that strong engines can sometimes handle skipping the cursers for a bit. But odds are that you want to pick cursers up later anyways, and it's very easy to underestimate how bad Curses are.

1893

Dominion Isotropic / Re: Using bots to hack your shuffle luck?!

« on: November 30, 2012, 09:25:33 pm »

The funniest part of that topic is that if you read the next couple posts, you get this.

Gotta try this for the official app. 

Edit: And if you read further down, you see a post about specifying cards in the Kingdom, and how at least Iso doesn't force you to click 10 boxes out of all possible cards. Which last I heard is how Goko tried to handle Wishing Well with emptied piles.

1894

Dominion Isotropic / Re: Using bots to hack your shuffle luck?!

« on: November 30, 2012, 08:01:32 pm »

you missed a golden chance to pretend that you are a robot!

Damn, you're right.

And thank you for confirming my suspicions, jsh.  Although I'm almost a little disappointed that my theorized "shuffle luck bot" doesn't really exist.  I was all excited to learn about how it was done, and what the Iso devs did to close the security hole

There was an exploit a while back that let you buy whatever you want since purchases were done clientside.  Platinum/Platinum opening for the win!

Of course, that was on Goko, not Isotropic. AFAIK, there hasn't been a bug like this on Isotropic.

There was, a long time ago. You could only buy as many cards as you had buys that turn (so no 8 Colonies turn 1), but you could buy whatever you wanted. It wasn't a well known exploit, and it was brought to Doug's attention pretty quick. So now you can't.

1895

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Goko is offensive to actual fans of Dominion

« on: November 29, 2012, 12:34:39 am »

New record for topic start to total derailment.

The last time I've been in a roundabout was several years ago. It's only four-way intersections for me.

1896

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Shall we rank the Mint openings?

« on: November 27, 2012, 10:41:15 pm »

I tried Mint/Mandarin a little bit, and it's not that good. The first time, I got an early Gold and got 4 Provinces in 14 turns. The second time, I didn't, so I Minted a bunch of Silvers instead and got 4 Provinces in 17 turns.

It might be a rare case where you actually don't want Silver after a certain point, because Minting Gold is massively better. It sounds counterintuitive, which is why I'm hesitant about it.

1897

Dominion Articles / Re: Combo: Grand Market and Quarry

« on: November 27, 2012, 04:59:49 pm »

Just so we're clear, this isn't just a cool interaction. It's actually very very strong. Think of it like Treasure Map in a sense. Two Quarries in one hand is a Grand Market. The difference is that one Quarry isn't dead by itself, you can add terminals to help line it up, and once you get the 1st GM you can snowball the advantage with more Grand Markets instead of relying on the 4 Gold to carry you through to the end.

If you see Quarry and Grand Market, you need to have a very good reason to not go for it.

1898

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Price This Card

« on: November 27, 2012, 02:25:25 pm »

Well, yes, but those all fall off as the game progresses unless you actively try to make it work. Credit Union consistently gets better, because you'll have a bigger deck with few victory cards.

I think it has to be $5: it's almost always at least worth $2, and is worth $3 enough of the time to require a cost boost.

1899

Dominion General Discussion / Re: House rule for reducing luck factors?

« on: November 25, 2012, 09:34:11 pm »

The reason I'm not a big fan of rules about limiting reshuffle luck is that I feel that the strategy in managing reshuffles is more than worth it.

In a lot of games, "strategy" usually includes setting up safety margins so that luck doesn't horribly destroy you. Dominion is no different. Really, a lot of Dominion strategy is about adding in redundancies and accounting for as many factors of luck as possible.

Consider the situation you describe about a Witch that misses the reshuffle. Yes, in this instance, it sucks. But what about a game where you have an engine, you've played most of your action cards, and you're just before a reshuffle. Do you keep going, or no? In the Dominion we play now, this is an interesting choice because you have to balance a better reward now + worse hands later with decent reward now + consistent hands later. And it's not at all clear which is better, and that rewards skill with the game. However, if you know that you can simply reshuffle, you can just keep going, and shuffle all your engine pieces in. This removes the risk in "risk and reward."

Still, in a tournament setting there do need to be some limits on luck. Identical hands is useful on some boards (but arguably detracts strategy space on others). But overall, the tendency for reshuffle-skipping is to create interesting decisions, and trying to stop reshuffle luck removes some of those decisions that help separate skill levels.

1900

General Discussion / Re: Computer and Video Games

« on: November 23, 2012, 11:29:32 pm »

I'm very late to this party, but
1. Portal and Portal 2 are really good
2. Portal 2 is on sale for $5, ending in ~12 hours.