Is the 2 event limit just recommendation by Donald X. or considered law?
I should have actually used negative hyper geometric instead of a naive binomial in my last post. Real probabilities are (for all cards):
0 events: 43.5%
1 event: 35.5%
2+ events: 21.0%
I can't believe Counting House is still last. I'm going to cry.
Congratulations to Stef, the designer of kingdom #5, and the winner of the 2014 Kingdom Design Challenge!
This is a well-deserved win against quality finalists who approached the design challenge in different ways.
Stef put together a great kingdom that has something for every level of Dominion player. While the kingdom first appears to be a Mountebank-Gardens game, there is a crazy Counting House-Storeroom based engine for the experts to find. You have to turn engine building rules on their head: Coppers are good. The goal is to draw your discard pile. Trigger the reshuffle so there is a bunch of junk in my deck? Yes, please! And what a spectacle to pull off.
Even though the crazy engine seems to be a dominant strategy among the very best players, it is really difficult to find and execute correctly. That gives the kingdom added replayability.
Young Witch is already too high though. I think it's a lot worse than Sea Hag - it can be blocked by a Bane, doesn't leave the Curse on top of your opponent's deck, and the sifting is way too weak to make up for it.
Sea Hag is awful at hitting $5, Young Witch is actually pretty good at it (YW/Silver hits it exactly once unless YW misses the reshuffle), and that makes a far more important difference.
What other useful auto-play scenarios are there other than the three I mentioned? I'm talking about auto-play for trivial logistics only; I'm not going to include stuff that auto-builds you a game-winning engine (pretending for a second that I could).
Pretend you have 99 actions and only 2 Estates in your deck, with one Estate on top. So the other Estate has a 1 in 100 chance of being in each spot of your deck. 3 possible situations:
1) If the Estate is the very bottom card, then it makes no difference at all what order you play them in; you draw your whole deck. (1% chance)
2) If the Estate is the second from the top, then playing your Scrying Pool first means you draw nothing. Playing your Peddler first means you draw your deck. (1% chance)
3) If the Estate is in any other position at all (X from the top), then playing your Peddler first means drawing X cards, and playing your Scrying Pool first means drawing X+1 cards. (98% chance)
As you can see, 98% of the time it is better to play your Scrying Pool first. However, it is only better by 1 card. The 1% of the time where playing your Peddler first is better, it is 100 times better.
Are you sure you got it right though? I also tried to brute force it and I get significantly better results when you play the pool first.
Which also happens to be what I always do when playing dominion, and what my intuition tells me what is best.
Do you:
1) Play the Peddler so that you can use the Scrying Pool on a "fresh" deck, increasing the chance that the spy effect combs chaff out of your way and hits a stream of action cards.
2) Play the Scrying Pool first so the friendly spy effect is guaranteed to actually discard a card that is bad. And the Peddler draws a "fresh" card later so this is really the better play.
The sad thing is, there's a pretty good chance this wasn't even someone trying to exploit their way to the top of the leaderboard. It was probably just some guy who wanted to play Serf Bot a bit and ended up on top of the leaderboard as a result.
Does pile count as the black market pile?
Exchanging must happen both ways; there must be somewhere for the discarding card to return to. If a Traveller is bought using Black Market, there is no pile to return it to and therefore it cannot be exchanged.
2) Logpretifier only works with this Chrome extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/allow-control-allow-origi/nlfbmbojpeacfghkpbjhddihlkkiljbi (DISABLE this extension after using logprettifier, it can be a security hole)
Reason MF does not add Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header as Goko did.
Today I played a game on a board with Cultist, City, Black Market and Altar. I was a bit in doubt whether to keep it simple with money+cultist or build the engine.
My opponent certainly decided to keep it simple, as he skipped all kingdom cards! Now that first Gold may have been a misclick, but those early Duchies over Cultists...
Relevant joke I stole from somewhere:
Donald X. once told me about the worst opening he'd ever seen in Dominion.
In someone's first game, on his first turn, he played two Coppers. He thought carefully for a while and took an Estate.
Everyone chimed in at this point. "Oh, it's too early for that." "Oh, you want to buy Victory cards later in the game" etc. etc.
Chagrined, on his next turn, he played five Coppers. After thinking even more carefully, he took a ... Feast.
The normal patch just gives the updated log and changed Masq highlight color, nothing else.
Everything is a poor use for a promo! If the card is good then it should be in an expansion, and if it's not then it still isn't as a promo.
I played a few Solitaire games with nothing else in the kingdom. In all games, I limited myself to 7 Royal Carriages (important) and 5 Bridges (less important) - to simulate some contention over these cards. Because the strategy involves rushing to Royal Carriages, I think it is fair to suppose that one wins the split, but it's worth testing how good the strategy is with 5 or 6 Royal Carriages. My best game resulted in 8 Provinces on turn 12. I recorded what I bought on each turn, but not what I had in hand or played.
Thanks. Well, the old one is defunct now of course. So I'm looking at the new one, and I see I'm at level -28. I just started playing like 5 days ago, and I only played like 5 games, but I haven't lost a single one. How can I be below 0? I guess this leaderboard was handled the same way as Makingfun..?
Then I wonder how the Isotropish leaderboard handled this. I'm not even on it any more. Don't tell me it was handled in the same stupid way...
use http://gokosalvager.com:6080/leaderboard/ for old 1.0
use http://gokosalvager.com/leaderboard/ for 2.0
Stef is getting such bad opponents he is just playing solitaire instead of fighting.
His brain is gonna atrophy and we will lose a Dominion genius due to this software(((((
I've played a bunch of games today too. Very similar experiences all the time.
People buying coppers because the have buys to spare (goons not included), people building up their fairgrounds score even though it's not on the board.
Players not answering at all when you chat to them.
It was sort of fun for a day, but it won't stay fun very long.
Goko Salvager was there for us to brighten our darkest moments. It was there when the log was a hidden and unreadable mess; it was there when the chat window popped up over our hands; when we were forced to scan dozens of lobbies for an appropriate game; when the ratings were laughable and the kingdom selection was primitive; and it was there when we were faced with the maddening horror of having to play a single game without our beloved servant—the VP counter. In short: whenever we needed something, Goko Salvager was there to provide it.
Fun fact: 9% of all blacklist entries are tgorm
