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26

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Venting about my luck

« on: November 02, 2012, 01:38:14 pm »

What you often miss are times when your opponent also has bad luck.

I'm well aware of that. You have a point about deck-watching, too.

The strange thing is that my rank still seems to be rising despite what appears to be a horrible win ratio.

That's true-skill at work. As you play more and more games, the system gets a more and more accurate idea of the overall range of your rating. So initially your rating/level will be displayed at the low end of your overall rating range (as determined by true-skill), and as you play more and more games your displayed rating/level will move closer and closer to the mid-point of your (decreasing) overall point range.

27

Dominion Isotropic / Re: Attention-whoring thread.... I did it!!

« on: November 02, 2012, 01:29:17 pm »

Yep, chain accounts together.. get one account up a few levels, create a new account and beat that first account soundly 30 games in a row.. create a new account and beat that second account 30 games in a row.. create a fourth account and beat that third account 30 games in a row.. repeat ad nauseum.

28

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Bizarre bot strategies?

« on: October 07, 2012, 09:50:33 pm »

I've been playing against the various Goko bots quite a lot, although just with base + Intrigue, so I haven't had the chance to see their behavior with many of the trash cards mentioned.. however I can definitely say that most of the bots play Masquerade very poorly, passing Coppers over Estates in most cases. A few of the higher-rated bots do it correctly, though.

In my opinion, probably the area the bots are weakest on is when to go for Duchies and Estates. They generally start too late. For example, most of them will spot a Workshop/Ironworks + Garden combo, and play it perfectly.. up until it comes time to finish out the Estate pile.. but when they see that they're tied on points, with just a few Estates left, they switch to Silver to try to grab a Duchy or two, and it's too late for that.

Similarly, they tend to continue buying cost-5/6 cards over Duchies sometimes even with as few as four Provinces left (occasionally even fewer than that).

29

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card

« on: October 06, 2012, 02:21:30 am »

And the Scout joke..

Man, going through the Intrigue Adventure on Goko, there's a big group of matches where Scout gets lots of play. Like four in a row with Scout, Great Hall, Wishing Well, Ironworks, Harem, and Nobles.

Chuck Norris must be somewhere in there, to make that happen.

30

Goko Dominion Online / Re: Google + Walled Village

« on: September 18, 2012, 05:14:52 pm »

That and it using me real name from my google account as my public in game name.

If this is true, it's definitely an issue for a lot of players. Various games (and game forums) have tried 'real ID' systems (where your real name is your public name) over the years, and it is *always* met with severe outcry/cancellations. You can find a good example of this in World of Warcraft, where a significant percentage of the player-base threatened (and actually started) to quit over it.

31

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Advanced Kingdom Selection

« on: August 30, 2012, 04:24:37 pm »

Hi Davio (and all),

Well, the features are a little more simplistic than the weighted combo method you were musing about, but I've been developing a Dominion card picker with a variety of options for artificial Kingdom selection for a while now. For example, one of the options specifically attempts to make sure that 100% of the features of all Kingdom cards present will be 'useful' (e.g. if there's a Moat there will always be an Attack card present, or if there is a Tunnel, there will always either be a discarding attack or a way to discard cards). For those interested, that project can be found here:

http://inprogressgaming.com/dominion-card-picker/

I'd definitely welcome suggestions and feedback on how to better eliminate 'dead cards', too.

32

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion Card Picker (forked from veto thread)

« on: August 20, 2012, 07:13:49 pm »

My friends and I love this picker, so thanks a bunch for working on it.  However, I liked having the HTML file available, so I could use it on a computer without an internet connection.  Is it still possible to get the file itself?

Hi Gamer2k4,

Certainly, I'll attach v1.1.5 to this post. I should mention that for Dark Ages, only about 50% of the cards are available so far.. only the ones with images currently hosted at dominion.dierstraights.com are included (but of course those won't show up if you're using the card picker offline anyway). I'm glad you like the card picker, too. Any other features or tweaks you'd like to see?

Edit: I also wrote up a brief post about what's new in v1.1.5, if you're wanting to see. That can be found here:

http://inprogressgaming.com/dominion-card-picker-v1-1-5/

33

Dominion: Dark Ages Previews / Re: Dark Ages Retail Store Availability

« on: August 17, 2012, 06:24:34 pm »

Anyone know when physical stores will have Dark Ages available to buy? I assume if I go into a store today it won't be there...

Amazon says September 1st, so I'm guessing about then for physical stores too.

34

Dominion: Dark Ages Previews / Re: Dark Ages Preview #1: Graverobber, Poor House, Sage

« on: August 09, 2012, 06:33:09 pm »

*bleh* Is it just me, or is Graverobber a *total* trap card.  I've been testing it fairly extensively, and I'm pretty sure I have lost almost every game I've gone for it in now. I'm strongly suspecting that a sim will find that BM + Graverobber loses to BM, for one. It really seems the card requires a very specific deck: a high density of high-value action cards that you both want in your deck *and* want to trash.

35

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Game I lost with Hunting Party/Alchemist/Mountebank--what did I miss?

« on: August 09, 2012, 03:40:06 pm »

Simulator says:

 - HP/Monument gets crushed by HP/Mountebank, around 2:1.
 - Buying HP over Gold is very important; if you let HP/Monument do this but make HP/Mountebank get 1 gold first, this makes it about breakeven.
 - Monument/Mountebank/HP/one gold after all the HP are gone beats HP/Mountebank about 2:1 and HP/Monument about 3:1, and most of the time the game ends on piles (HP/Curse/Estate).

i.e., what Toskk said.

Hi Mischiefmaker,

Thanks for running those sims! I did some testing with a few RL games, but it's better to have sim data. Out of curiosity, what order did you have the sim buy the Mountebank vs. the first Hunting Party? From the testing I did, it seemed preferable to spend the first $5 on Hunting Party (assuming the $4/$3 opener went Monument/Silver), and then pick up Mountebank with the second.. although maybe I just got really unlucky on Monument/Mountebank collisions on turns 6-7.

36

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Game I lost with Hunting Party/Alchemist/Mountebank--what did I miss?

« on: August 08, 2012, 05:19:02 pm »

I think I would have skipped MB and stuck with Monument.  Prefer HP to Gold until HP stack is gone.  Definitely skip Alchemist.

I'm pretty sure that the optimized Monument/Hunting Part engine picks up one Gold preferentially to Hunting Parties, and then just keeps buying Hunting Parties. I'd still definitely suggest adding a Mountebank, though.. being able to put even one curse in the opponent's Hunting Party engine will significantly slow it down, and Mountebank is a good stand-in for the +$2 terminal slot in your Hunting Party engine.

37

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Game I lost with Hunting Party/Alchemist/Mountebank--what did I miss?

« on: August 08, 2012, 04:59:20 pm »

Monument/Hunting Party is also amazingly strong (I think it rates as the #2 strongest Hunting Party pair, after Baron?).. your opponent only played it four times, but without those points the game would have been a lot closer.

 I feel like I probably would have just skipped Potion and Alchemist altogether, and gone straight Monument/Silver -> Hunting Party -> Mountebank -> more Hunting Parties..

38

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion Card Picker (forked from veto thread)

« on: August 08, 2012, 12:05:49 pm »

Toskk, I've checked out your card picker, and it's quite nice.  Have you ever thought of adding a card tracker to it, for taking notes of card purchases and scores? I often use the point counter extension on Iso, and my f.riends and I want to take notes IRL because of the added strategy & learning.  (I'm familiar with javascript myself, so if you aren't interested in writing this, but you are willing to host it, I might be interested in implementing it for you.  I do have my own site, but I think it makes sense to put both tools in one place, if possible.)

Hi Engineer,

Yes, I too like using point counters.. in my experience they lead to higher-quality and more competitive play in RL games, however I really haven't found a good easy-to-use system for tracking in RL games. Ideally, what would you like it to look like?

39

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion Card Picker (forked from veto thread)

« on: August 06, 2012, 04:42:17 pm »

Well, I've begun the process of updating the card picker program for Dark Ages.. I'll try to add the newly-revealed cards each day, if anyone is interested in using proxies of them in RL games. Currently, the program doesn't display any image for the Dark Ages cards.. the images themselves for current cards are all hosted by dominion.diehrstraights.com.. he doesn't have the new card images uploaded yet, and I'm a little hesitant to host them myself (as I haven't asked for permission for that). Anyway, the permanent home of the card picker program is still:

http://inprogressgaming.com/dominion-card-picker/

Oh.. if you do use the Dark Ages cards, you'll want to turn off the 'minimize the 5/2 vs. 4/3 split variation' checkbox.. that feature uses Councilroom.com data (which comes from Isotropic) to evaluate the strength of each opener, and of course there is no data for Dark Ages cards (and probably won't be).

40

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Android App that allows veto mode?

« on: August 06, 2012, 04:36:58 pm »

Well, it's not an App, but I do have a web-based card picker program (it uses Javascript) available, and it *does* include a (blind) veto mode. I've also just added the first cards of Dark Ages to it (although no image support yet). If it would work, and you're interested, it can be found here:

http://inprogressgaming.com/dominion-card-picker/

41

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion Card Picker (forked from veto thread)

« on: July 16, 2012, 12:19:16 pm »

Sorry for the long delay in updating the card picker.. yes, v.1.1.4 is done, although a few requested features (e.g. sort by expansion and a few redundancy filter tweaks) aren't in yet. I did, however, finally place the card picker program online. Here is the address for the project:

http://inprogressgaming.com/dominion-card-picker/

New features include a 'include at least one card that gives +2 cards' option, a line of text at the bottom for Isotropic, and one or two changes to the redundancy filter list. As usual, I welcome feedback and suggestions on the program.. the site uses Wordpress, so comments can be directed there, too.

42

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The game's largest structural flaw, imho

« on: May 04, 2012, 03:25:36 pm »

Slightly related to the OP's idea of the game's largest 'structural flaw', in my opinion there are three 'big' (yes, this term is relative) flaws with the game:

1). Level of variance, particularly with terminal actions (essentially the OP's argument) but also with specific cards. For example, opening Sea Hag + Masquerade.. both good cards, and with good shuffle luck *very* good.. but quite poor if you, for example, draw the Sea Hag with the Masquerade. I don't know if anyone here has played a lot of fantasy RPG games (anything based off of Dungeons & Dragons), but over the decades of digital versions of these games, the concept of a 'critical hit' has been the classic example of the problems of high variance events. For those not familiar with the concept, typically every attack has a small (often 5%) chance of dealing double damage. This variance, both in frequency and power, has the effect of trivializing encounters when the player gets 'lucky', and causing balance issues when they don't.. the problem being predictability. The more rarely critical hits happen, the greater the impact they have in those rare fights where they actually happen. The solution? Well, D&D 4th edition chose one of the two routes: weaken the effect of critical hits. Critical hits in 4e only deal maximum rolled damage, instead of double rolled damage. The other option, chosen in games like World of Warcraft, is to increase the probability of the critical hit event. If, for example, critical hits happen roughly 40-50% of the time, they can be relied upon to happen numerous times each fight, and thus can be correctly balanced for. For a game like Dominion, however, realistically adjusting variance of action collision (as well as dead actions) would totally remake the game.. plus simply weakening the impact of action collision by making actions overall weaker sounds like a bad plan.

2). Single cards and 2-card combos that are optimal in exclusion of anything else. I'm talking here about 'combos' like Minion + more Minions.. or Hunting Party + $2 action + more Hunting Parties.. or Fool's Gold + more Fool's Golds.. or Bridges + Native Villages.. or Chancellors + 4x Stashes.. or any number of specific 1-2 card 'combos' that really can't be improved upon by adding any other (action) card to the deck.. or sometimes any other card at all. Cards like these really defeat the function of a 10-card Kingdom.

3). First-turn advantage. For a high-quality competitive game, a first-turn advantage of the scale that exists in Dominion seems to defeat the function of the game from a purely competitive standpoint. What I'm getting at here is that all games fall somewhere along an axis of luck vs. skill.. 'casual' games typically fall closer to the 'luck' end, while 'competitive' games typically fall closer to the 'skill' end. In my opinion, for the depth and complexity of discussions and the playerbase of Dominion, the game is surprisingly higher on the 'luck' side than most other purely 'competitive' games.

43

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion Card Picker (forked from veto thread)

« on: May 03, 2012, 06:04:58 pm »

The Bane card is specified as *<card>.  e.g. Village, Young Witch, *Pawn

Ok, that seems to work fine for Young Witch.. but I'm not sure it works right for Black Market and selecting the bane card for it. It gives a "Prohibited: x card; Bane: x card" in the Isotropic game log.. is that correct?

Edit: where x is the card with the * in front of it.

44

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Great responses / counters

« on: May 02, 2012, 06:19:50 pm »

I tried a couple of solitaire games with NV/Bridge and it takes some getting used to. The strategy article I read said to always put stuff on your mat whenever you play NV. The problem I ran into was I sometimes got unlucky and put too many coppers on my mat, causing me to hit $4 less often, and as a result I wasn't able to buy as many Bridges as I was NVs. So I wound up with maybe 1-2 Bridges and 6-8 NVs. Wasn't sure when to pull the mat contents and start over. In other solitaire games I was luckier and was able to keep pace, drawing enough Copper early to buy more Bridges, and thus being able to play the Bridges to buy more Bridges.

I believe the rule of thumb is:  (1) Never pull the mat contents and start over, ever.  (2) When you go below $3* total in your deck, prefer purchasing Silver over Native Village.  Even a Copper purchase might be a good idea on occasion.

(*I'm not sure if $3 is optimal threshold, but the idea is right:  buy money rather than starting over or getting too unbalanced with your ratio of Bridges to Native Villages.)

I haven't ever found it necessary to grab Silver in a Bridge/NV game, barring two cases: 1). Your first/only/last Bridge gets sent to the mat.. i.e. terrible luck, or 2). There are no more Bridges to buy (due to competition). Otherwise, as long as you keep your total Bridges and Native Villages roughly equal, you shouldn't ever need to buy anything other than more Bridges and Native Villages. As the optimal Bridge/NV play seems to come up a lot, I have a longer list of suggestions on how to play it here:

http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=2335.msg36131#msg36131

Also, as an aside, from a heck of a lot of testing on the combo, there really aren't any other (non-Bridge/NV) cards that actually make the combo faster. Throne Room is maybe the one exception.. although it bears a slightly greater risk of having your (smaller number of) Bridges sent to the mat, especially if you end up Throne Room'ing NV a lot. Other Actions like Workshop are better than Silver in the rare cases of sending all your Bridges to the mat, but otherwise won't actually speed up the mega-turn (they will, however, give you a larger point total when you do finally trigger the mega-turn).

45

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion Card Picker (forked from veto thread)

« on: May 02, 2012, 03:04:26 pm »

Another feature request: A text list of the cards in the chosen set, that can be copy/pasted into Isotropic!

Hi BaruMonkey,

That should be very easy to implement. Oh.. how does Isotropic handle the bane card, though? Is there some extra syntax needed to artificially select a bane card?

46

Introductions / Re: Ithaca

« on: April 30, 2012, 02:15:56 pm »

Like, I know his subtleties, so I know that at this point of the game, he's much more likely to be bluffing, or he's playing more aggressively, or he's now calling for me to do X. But, I really don't see why I should have to tell you that. And maybe that means I don't want to play bridge. But what I'm describing is also not 'degenerate', as you say.

'Bluffing', per se, doesn't really exist in Bridge.. there's incomplete information problems (where you overbid because of insufficient information to know if your partnership can make a bid or not), and there's times where you might intentionally overbid even knowing you have a high probability of failure (typically by a single trick) to keep the opposition from winning a game bid that you are certain they can win (e.g. you know your partnership can win a 4 heart bid, and you know that your opponents can win a 4 spades bid.. so you bid to 5 hearts anyway to keep them from pulling as far ahead). Plus, as I mentioned above, you really have very limited space to bid with.. the existing systems all take into account a vast understanding of the point structure for the game, average distributions of cards and values, and attempt to maximize the amount of useful information that can be conveyed to your partner to identify the optimal bidding level without revealing excess information that the opposition can make use of. Honestly, the optimization that has already gone into Bridge conventions is pretty incredible. If you're interested in reading, I found this book very accessible and informative on the function of conventions and how they were designed:

http://www.amazon.com/Bridge-Conventions-You-Should-Know/dp/189415407X

47

Introductions / Re: Ithaca

« on: April 30, 2012, 01:44:21 pm »

There's no limitation on using alternative strategies, only limits on trying to conceal information from your opponents.  A game where your opponents don't know what you're bidding would entirely revolve around concealing information and degenerate into a weird mess of people constantly changing their conventions.  It would swamp out all other skill involved in the game.

I suppose maybe that's what you really want to do, is to compete in a game of who could come up with the strangest conventions.  But that's not bridge, that's a totally different competitive partnership game shoe-horned into the bridge framework.

Just to add to this a little, I think you'd find as you start down the path of trying to conceal information that what's actually much more important is efficiency and optimal use of the available bidding space. Attempts at obfuscation are ultimately going to be less efficient at conveying hand information, and thus ultimately not in any players' best interest anyway.

48

Introductions / Re: Ithaca

« on: April 30, 2012, 01:39:29 pm »

But if you don't play Bridge seriously (and I assume you haven't, since your previous posts), how can you criticize those conventions for being the way they are?  The rules of the game are the rules for a particular reason -- they aren't arbitrary, but rather arrived at over the course of a hundred years of play.  Your proposal might be better short-term but not long-term.

It feels like you're a BigMoneyIsOverpowered Dominion player who wonders why no one else adopts his house rule that kills Big Money, which is that every Action you play gives you a +Buy.  Maybe you could play Dominion that way, but that's not the way it is for a good reason.

I haven't, but the thing is, I don't need think I need to understand the high levels here. I find quite distasteful the idea that you need to explain to your opponents what it is that you're doing. Takes a lot of the fun out of it. I mean, I understand why the rules are in place. I get why they think they're needed. But the things they're trying to avoid, largely, are the things I think that are fun. My problem isn't that there ARE conventions, or even that the conventions are what they are. My problem is that your conventions are LIMITED, and you're expected to use one of the pre-set ones. I don't like the limitations on ingenuity. So it's more like the way it already is the house rules to stop you from playing BMX, except instead they actually force you into BMX.
But maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Hi WanderingWinder,

There are actually numerous 'systems' of conventions out there, all of which are modifiable in numerous ways with specific one-off conventions.. I strongly suspect that for *any* method of bidding or conveying hand information you would care to employ (especially once you start looking at how these system were designed) there's some system already in place for it. For example, a lot of high-level Bridge play in countries outside the US involves 'relay systems', or a method by which typically only one player of the partnership describes their hand during bidding (instead of both players attempting to do so).

49

Introductions / Re: Ithaca

« on: April 30, 2012, 01:09:42 pm »

Having said that, there's really two major problems I have with the conventions. One, people somehow assume that I'm playing convention X, even having given them absolutely no indication that that is in fact what I'm doing. And then they get upset when it's not what I was doing. Now probably this is people being jerks, but it was pretty pervasive...

In my opinion this is why online pick-up Bridge (the rough equivalent to Iso) is totally lame. When you don't know the people you're playing with/against and don't have a way to quickly look at which conventions they use, you definitely get a lot of people getting upset/being jerks.

50

Introductions / Re: Ithaca

« on: April 30, 2012, 12:29:25 pm »

I'm learning Bridge now!  It is very interesting.  Do you have any recommendations for an online resource to aid the learning process?

It's totally off-topic for this thread, (and not actually online) but other than books the best resource/program I've found on Bridge so far is the Bridge Baron program:

http://www.bridgebaron.com/

While the interface is just so-so, the AI scales up very nicely, and there's a nice option to help you practice specific conventions to your heart's content.

Also, my grandparents lived in Ithaca.. it's a beautiful place. My grandfather taught/researched genetics (corn hybrids) there.