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26

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Online-Only Cards: can they happen?

« on: March 07, 2018, 05:23:29 pm »

A card could access hidden information (like the number of a certain type of card in your deck) and produce a resource based on that. For example:

Collectible
Treasure - $7
Worth $1 per Collectible you have.

This one could be tracked in IRL Dominion by including "Collectible" tokens that you take when gaining a Collectible and return when losing the Collectible to the Supply, Trash, or Opponent's Hand.

Edit: should've read the whole thread first. eHalcyon already pointed this out

27

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion:Cities

« on: March 07, 2018, 05:00:20 pm »

I actually don't agree that there can't or shouldn't be other cards with the Curse type. I think it's obvious by typical Dominion wording that "Gain a ___" refers to a specific card name, whereas "If it's a ___" refers to card types. So for example, Fortune Teller or Vagrant interacts with OP's Curse type cards. I get that it might make things confusing to have a Name and Type called "Curse", given that effects in Dominion can refer to Names or Types. But, be 100% honest: is that really OP's fault? Just saying, don't blame a fan card creator for a minor flaw with the game he's designing fan cards for.

Gendo, your critiques are spot on, but I actually think that a version of Cursed Store (or really any "Curse" type card) could create a fun little mini-game where you have a really strong card that you need to get rid of before emptying the Provinces or three-piling. I kind of think of Wine Merchant, only instead of the goal being "get this thing back into my deck", the goal is "get this thing into the trash". Though as it exists currently, I agree that it's too good relative to cost. It probably needs to be changed so that it's harder to trash and so the penalty for not trashing it is higher.

If I were to design a card with that mini-game goal in mind, I'd probably 1) Playtest it with -2VP so that you're less likely to just leave them in your deck at the end, 2) Make it a Reaction, give the player a specific goal that when met allows them to trash the card, and 3) Add specific wording that prevents you from trashing it any other way (maybe something like "When you do blah blah blah, you may trash this. If you trash this any other way, put it into your discard pile")

28

Dominion Articles / Re: What's stopping AI from mastering Dominion?

« on: March 06, 2018, 02:25:37 pm »

What's interesting, of course, is that for any given kingdom, the Provincial AI genetic algorithm needs to "chew" on it for a while, playing hundreds of simulated games, before it settles on an optimal strategy. It can only play pre-randomized kingdoms. For a really great Shuffle-IT bot AI that could play any random kingdom, it would likely have to say "please wait, thinking" for ten minutes or so before the game started while it ran hundreds of simulations! (Totally worth it, by the way.)

I'd want to avoid this if I were them. Especially for an offline version/mobile app. I can't fault anybody for doing it that way, as it's an effective way to eliminate one of the biggest challenges. But I think that if it's possible to train a bot such that it learns an intuition for the game as a whole rather than needing to be trained for each specific Kingdom, I'd want to pursue that.

Pre-generating Kingdoms is inconvenient. I think casual players would think the wait time is unreasonable. If it's done server-side then I would think that'd get costly for ShuffleIt. If it's done client-side then you have issues with users who have slower hardware (imagine the wait on mobile). You can't even save yourself time on future calculations by storing a result in a database when you're done, because there are just too many possible starting positions in Dominion.

29

Dominion Articles / Re: What's stopping AI from mastering Dominion?

« on: March 03, 2018, 12:09:59 pm »

How does the Lord Rattington AI work?

DXV said recently that the best way to think of ShuffleIt is that it basically doesn't have AI right now. Rattington is a placeholder that's just meant to be better than nothing. The logic is probably a combination of making random choices, with some very minor heuristics thrown in (I'm talking things as simple as "Don't buy a curse")

30

Dominion Articles / Re: What's stopping AI from mastering Dominion?

« on: March 03, 2018, 12:02:02 pm »

I've actually been working on utilizing Reinforcement Learning to make a strong Dominion AI. IMO, lack of training data is not an issue. I'm having it generate it's own data using self-play. The sky's the limit there. If you're wanting an AI to be better than the best human Dominion player, you wouldn't want to take the Supervised Learning approach anyway. Then it picks up on our bad habits.

I don't personally think Randomness is an issue either. It can learn to make predictions about the hidden information and build a model of the expected State.

As for this idea that I've seen a couple people throw around that it would need to be prepared for every little possibility, that's really just not how Machine Learning works. We use ML so that it won't have to experience every possibility. The goal is that it becomes good at discovering the patterns indicative of a strong Action or State. If you combine a strong learned intuition with MCTS, it should be far better than humans at spotting and adjusting for edge cases.

It's not so much that the variety of cards or openings is too much conceptually, it's just that the amount of needed training time seems like it will be outrageous. That's the biggest struggle as far as I can tell. You can build something great that can become better than the best human in theory, but you're going to need a lot of clever tricks to speed up its rate of learning.

31

Dominion General Discussion / Re: very short strategy article

« on: March 03, 2018, 11:27:08 am »

I think Donald is coming from a different perspective to this discussion than everybody else. He doesn't want to design strictly better cards, and can change the cost of cards to be tested. So of course he cares about costs.

You make a good point, although I don't think that his different perspective devalues any of the objections he has raised here. Whether you're sitting in the designer's seat or the player's, Donald's point about Dominion cards not actually being "Strictly Better" still applies. Case in point:

So, I have 5 coins, is there any reason I should consider a Village over the Bazaar?

Yeah there could be some reasons. How many buys do you have? If you have 2 or more buys, is there a $2 Card in the Kingdom? If so, does Village + that $2 Card work better with your deck than one Bazaar? Are you planning on using Forge and need some very specific costs in your deck? Do you want the option of turning those Villages into Duchies late in the game with Farmlands if you fall behind? Of course these are all edge cases, and the general rule of thumb is you'd rather have the Bazaar, but still, Dominion is a game of edge cases.

32

Dominion General Discussion / Re: very short strategy article

« on: March 03, 2018, 10:55:12 am »

Remember that the purpose of language is to communicate, not to satisfy language police.

I don't think that the reason that most people here are looking for a term is to satisfy language police. I think it's precisely because this concept has been hard to communicate in the past. People usually think that everyone will get what they mean when they say something like "strictly better", only to find an unexpected debate spring up. Then everyone starts talking past each other and it all just kind of falls apart. So when people are trying to figure out a term we could all agree on, I think they really are attempting to figure out how to use the language to communicate. Any "policing" taking place is (I think) an attempt to be proactive and say "Is this term really going to avoid debates like you think it will?"

And, speaking as somebody who tends to be too long winded, I think it's reasonable to want to try to find a succinct way to convey an idea. The bigger your wall of text, the less likely people are to read it and the more likely they are to miss some of the nuances of what you're saying. It'd be easy to say that they should read more carefully, but it's just an internet forum. Some people can't even get coworkers to read important emails, let alone pay attention to some very specific pedantic wording on a forum. People got stuff to do, so there's value in brevity.

33

Dominion General Discussion / Re: very short strategy article

« on: March 02, 2018, 01:52:12 pm »

Upon further reflection, I think the term I'd be using is that one card is a better version of another. "Festival is a better version of Woodcutter", "Mining Village is a better Village", etc. That term doesn't imply that the costs are the same, so I feel like it's close to what people are after.

But I could be totally off with how others would interpret it. Plus, I'm not completely convinced there could ever be one term that would totally satisfy everyone.

34

Dominion General Discussion / Re: very short strategy article

« on: March 02, 2018, 01:38:16 pm »

"Rarely worse" would get the point across just as well and probably cause less arguments

Fortune is rarely worse than Pearl Diver

If that's how you would choose to define "rarely", then I can't argue with that. It's not what I meant when I said it though.

So then setting the "rarely" idea aside: What I'm saying is that "never worse" is untrue, and just like "strictly better", people will argue about the technicalities. That doesn't mean I don't get what we're going for with this discussion. I get the goal, I just don't think it has been achieved by "never worse".

35

Dominion General Discussion / Re: very short strategy article

« on: March 02, 2018, 01:27:18 pm »

"Better (p < 0.05)"

I'm totally down to start p-hacking all of my Dominion arguments from now on.
"Buying a Duration within the first 3 shuffles while Baker is in the Kingdom causes Player 1 to be up a Province on Turn 16, Researchers say"

36

Dominion General Discussion / Re: very short strategy article

« on: March 02, 2018, 01:04:14 pm »

A fancy term obscures the meaning. You want to convey "better in at least one way; worse in no ways", with an emphasis on the "worse in no ways" part, I believe. So why not flip it around, "never worse"? Festival is never worse than Woodcutter. Worker's Village is never worse than Village.

Now, you could complain that "never worse" is not technically correct, because of edge cases. But the same thing applies to "strictly better", since "strictly" means "with no exceptions; completely or absolutely". You could also complain that two cards that are identical could be compared using "never worse", but when are you ever comparing two identical cards?

I like "never worse" because it means the same thing as "strictly better" (well, modulo equality), and the goal here seems to be to come up with a term other than "strictly better" that can be used to mean 'strictly better'.

"Never" is a strong enough word that people will absolutely argue about it. "X is never worse than Y", "oh yeah, how about in this edge case?"

"Rarely worse" would get the point across just as well and probably cause less arguments

37

Dominion General Discussion / Re: very short strategy article

« on: March 01, 2018, 03:42:33 pm »

Honestly, I think the only real use for "strictly better" is when critiquing people's fan cards i.e. "This made-up card is no good because it's strictly better/worse than this other actual card."

I've used it another way before when teaching. "Bridge and Highway make cards cheaper. If you play enough of them, Mining Village becomes strictly better than regular Village".  Other than my example and yours, I can't think of any other ways I would use it.

38

Dominion General Discussion / Re: very short strategy article

« on: March 01, 2018, 01:47:31 pm »

About Mandarin, though, did people complain that Count was a strictly (way, way) better version of it without the on-gain?

Back to the "Perception is key" idea: my reaction at the time was that Count was really unique. Between the whole "Choose one bad effect, Choose one good effect" thing, and having a card that straight up said "Trash Your Hand", it didn't occur to me that it might be a better Mandarin. In fact, when the full set of spoilers came out, I distinctly remember thinking that it was one of the craziest cards of the set. Though I was only lurking back then, and I don't recall other people's reactions to Count outside of some IRL friends who also thought it was bananas, FWIW.

39

Dominion General Discussion / Re: How good is Goat?

« on: December 30, 2017, 03:32:11 pm »

People only seem to be talking about Goat trashing Coppers/Estates (obviously because they're the thing you most often need to trash), but of course it also trashes Curses, Ruins, and other Junk too.

Loan's strength is also part of it's weakness. Loan guarantees treasure trashing, but it can only trash treasure. Goats eat anything.

40

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Christmas Kingdoms 2017

« on: December 29, 2017, 02:13:40 pm »

So maybe I need talking down from the ledge, but, Tree is actually a decent Landmark, right? I really want to print one out and play with it. The other cards here are obvious jokes, but it feels like you could include Tree in an official expansion and I wouldn't think it was out of place.

It's pretty redundant with Labyrinth. Otherwise sure. I preferred Labyrinth because it also works with +Buys, meaning it's dead in fewer games.

Oh right, that's true. I like Tree a lot because I irrationally love on-gains and gainers (who doesn't like free bonuses!?), but from a design point of view, the fact that it will do nothing in many games makes it less desirable. I guess it wants to have a secondary ability... I've got it! Let's make it so that it gets you the VPs on-gain and on additional buys! Oh, wait...

41

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Nocturne Cards: Cursed Village

« on: December 28, 2017, 04:03:14 pm »

If you start your turn looking at Cursed Village and four +1-Action cards, you can play them all then play Cursed Village for +6 Cards, +2 Actions.

I'm glad you said it. It seemed like the detractors were implying that at best Cursed Village is equivalent to a Lost City, which just isn't true. Of course, Lost City is reliable at what it does whereas Cursed Village is more variable.

As for the question of whether I'd rather give my opponents +1 Card or receive a Hex on-buy, I think at this point in time I'm inclined to say I'd rather give my opponents +1 Card than have to take the Hex. Although that could change as I get a better feel for the Hexes. I will say, it seems like the first Hex of any turn is the most painful and giving out multiple yields diminishing returns. When I've bought Cursed Villages, that Hex tends to be the first one I've received on the turn, but maybe Cursed Village would hurt less if you happened to also be building a deck with Leprechaun. Dunno.

42

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Christmas Kingdoms 2017

« on: December 28, 2017, 03:27:29 pm »

This is hilarious! Thanks DXV and LastFootnote!

So maybe I need talking down from the ledge, but, Tree is actually a decent Landmark, right? I really want to print one out and play with it. The other cards here are obvious jokes, but it feels like you could include Tree in an official expansion and I wouldn't think it was out of place.

43

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: Ice Age

« on: December 10, 2017, 01:45:28 pm »

which may also have something to do with the fact that doing so has gotten easier over time, as later expansions have better enabled it by focusing more on Engines.

No, we have better enabled it by getting better at the game.

Why not both? Hasn't Donald X stated that he's focused more on Engines than BM as time has moved on since they are more interesting?

44

Dominion General Discussion / Re: New German Promo 'Abbruch'

« on: December 09, 2017, 12:41:18 pm »

If you can write such an extension, you should get in touch with AI developers, I hear they are stuck with NLP algorithms :p

Having an AI search through these jokes would raise ethical concerns. The poor machine.

The Dutch translation of mining village, when pronounced, is a homonym for 'my village'.
Nearly every time someone plays a mining village someone will ask 'whose village'?

Dutch mining village reskin please.

Every year at my wife's family reunion, we play Bingo. Every time B4 is called out, the older members shout out "Before what?"

Naturally, this has led the sarcastic younger members to start doing it for everything except B4, as in "B6 what?", etc. The sarcastic response was funny for a while, but now it's just as stale as the B4 thing. As is always the case with a sarcasm arms race, it got ramped up to such absurd levels that now some people do it for every letter/number, like "I18 what?"

As if Bingo wasn't a bad enough game already...

45

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: Ice Age

« on: December 09, 2017, 12:32:40 pm »

I think the assumption that engines are basically always able to draw your deck is coming from the fact that many fds posters play almost exclusively 2P games, and holds no water when applied generally.

I was thinking the other day, we could make a drinking game out of the number of posts on f.ds that use the phrase "if you're already drawing your deck". It's definitely taken for granted, which may also have something to do with the fact that doing so has gotten easier over time, as later expansions have better enabled it by focusing more on Engines.

I personally always enjoy a good Slog or Big Money game, if only because Engine now feels like the norm. Variety is the spice of life. I kinda hope as time goes on, we get a bit more of Slog/BM in the card pool, just so drawing your deck isn't a no-brainer.

Also, I'll save Awaclus the trouble: "something something, 2P is the only mode that matters"

46

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Empires cards I still don't get

« on: December 08, 2017, 09:51:00 am »

I'm also one who struggles to see why Triumph is so good. It seems like you need a lot of things in place for it to work. You need a deck that can gain a bunch of cards in a single turn, and then you need to deal with the Estate. I doesn't seem like something that's always going to be good.

True, but how many cards are always good? When it is good, it's something that you shouldn't ignore. But it's not Chapel or anything.

47

Dominion General Discussion / Re: New German Promo 'Abbruch'

« on: December 08, 2017, 08:53:47 am »

I like Dominion Card name puns, Mine has just gotten a little stale since it's the lowest hanging fruit. I mean, I still laugh and give it a "respect", so I don't find them as stale as Asper does I guess.

If anybody were to make a browser extension that removes these puns, I'd like to know what your solution to the Scunthorpe Problem is

48

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Dominion: Ice Age

« on: December 07, 2017, 05:15:18 pm »

Love this idea!

I do notice that in a sense, Frozen Cache is inversely proportional to Glacier. The amount of happiness I get from having a newly purchased Victory set aside for 4 turns is going to be roughly equal to the amount of unhappiness I'm going to get from having my newly purchased Treasure set aside for 4 turns.

I personally think Frozen Cache is weak but isn't 100% worthless, because it is gaining you an insane amount of treasures, so there will be niche situations for it. I wonder if it may be fine at $5 (still weak, but fine).

I do think Glacier is a bit too good. A 4 turn delay on a VP entering your deck and a free coin token every* turn feels a bit much. I think it would honestly be good if it were modified to something like "When you gain this, set it aside with 4 Ice Tokens on it. When all of the Ice Tokens have been removed from this, take 2 Coin tokens". That said, Glacier may be my favorite card of the lot. I love alt-VP, and this is a neat concept.

49

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The 5/2 rule

« on: November 25, 2017, 01:06:31 pm »

To the OP: is there perhaps a corollary to this argument that you would like to make? Hint hint, it relates to starting with 3 or 4 coins instead.

50

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The 5/2 rule

« on: November 25, 2017, 01:04:25 pm »

If you start with 2 coin your next hand has 5 coin. If you start with 5 coin your next hand has two coin. Seems consistent.

My take is that this is true whenever it is true, and false whenever it is false.

But if the antecedent is false then I would actually call it "vacuously true"

(...Making obscure references to a thread that you accidentally ruined by bringing up the philosophy of mathematics before it got heated and Donald X had to move it to RSP is how you make friends, right?)