iterating on mr. clus's idea of
lsd, or
lengthy strategy discussion, i am creating a thread for
payload.
the wiki has this to say:
An engine needs three parts: +Action (normally through villages), draw, and payload. The +Action is necessary to play everything, and the draw is necessary to get everything you want to play into your hand. The payload is the reason you built the engine in the first place; a deck that only has +Action and draw will usually be outpaced by big money. The most common payload is +Buy; simply adding the ability to buy more than one card per turn can make a Village/Smithy deck viable. Equally useful are terminal silvers (and other terminal +Coin.png cards), which give you the buying power to make use of extra buys, and trashers, which trim your deck down and make your engine run more smoothly. Other payload categories are gainers, cost-reducers, and Attacks; Treasures can also function as payload.
Some villages and draw cards have additional abilities that can function as payload; a Fishing Village/Wharf deck does not need any other cards to win. Outside of these situations, most payload cards are stop cards.[/font]
this is a definition that makes enough sense. in short, there are things that are good for action phases, payload isn't those.
dr. winder has said on his nether realm:
If you can get to the point where you are drawing every card in your deck every turn, the way you look at your economic output on a turn changes completely. Now, you don’t need to look at average coin per card; you can actually just add up the sum total of all economic production in your whole deck.
...
Now, there are reasons why it’s not quite so rosy for engines as the above might make it sound. As it relates to the discussion above, the most notable thing is that if you are adding payload cards which don’t help you to draw (like Gold), you will have to get more pieces that do so you can continue to draw your deck every turn (terminal payload also requires getting more villages). This diminishes the ability to really add as much economy as you might otherwise be able to. On the other hand, being able to add to your per-turn payload so quickly self-synergizes, exploding in on itself in a chain reaction – getting that extra $3 now means I have more that I’m able to spend next turn to keep increasing my economic capabilities without falling behind on draw. This ramping effect virtually always more than compensates for the need to get extra pieces to keep drawing, at least if you have the capability to get extra buys – otherwise making $30 on a turn doesn’t do much for me. On top of that, there are ancillary benefits – if there are cards which are much better in combination or in multiples, you get to reliably do that, and you get to hit them with your attacks every turn. Engines also give you better control of ending the game just when you want.
payload is a weird thing. people use the term to mean different things, and discussions about what it means specifically are much less frequent and developed than those that attempt to evaluate it. intuitively, it is mathematically a quicker way to get provinces when you build first; this is one of several invariable truths this game offers. another thing that we are all familar with is, the amount of time and cards you use to do this varies with each game. perhaps within the concept of payload is where evaluating the power level of cards matters most and individual power level (the qvisty one) is trumped by the comboey one (ironmonger, bridge and hunting party are good but don't really like each other, whereas horse traders and duke do).
the question of when do i do payload is thus
so weird, in that it depends on what the good ones are. this can be demonstrated by the fact that attacks fit into the definition of payload that we have. ambassador is payload; you will often buy a curse to keep playing them after you're drawing your deck. however, the other thing that it does happens to be good at the beginning as well.
so, although it is sort of a thing that we do where we try to be able to draw a lot of cards and play a lot of actions before you do payload, there is some quality a card can have that tosses that to the wind; sometimes it is clear and tangible why you would do that, such as familiar: i will temporarily skip ironworks to gain advisors (which is not payload until you use it to gain silk roads?) in favor of potion to gain familiars because curses are not only just really good to distribute but also will eventually not be able to be distributed, so sooner is good, but there will eventually be a reason to stop.
however, sometimes it isn't clear why exactly you will do payload before you can draw your deck: it is intuitive, for my village/wharf engine, to pick up a horn of plenty after the second-thirdish wharf because
. i suppose that is the point where i will start being able to draw it with 4 other differently named cards reliably (copper, village, silver, wharf, maybe one of the other 7 kingdom cards) but why is that the amount of reliableness that makes me decide to do horn of plenty, not only that but also it seems to be correct in practice?
and maybe that's what i like about cornucopia, is that there is a whole other layer of arbitrarity to the payload question, since card variety is not a property of cards anymore.
consider this kingdom:
Lookout, Village, Mining Village, Remodel, Counterfeit, Margrave, Merchant Guild, Soothsayer, Wharf, Witchthis one is trying to, for one, further illustrate how weird ordering is with payload, and also, be a thing that is straightforward to talk about and then use in a broad sense to understand payload.
