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Messages - cascadestyler

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1
Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Bot freeze on Scepter play
« on: October 22, 2023, 02:22:44 pm »
Lord Rattington played a Scepter then just stopped. Game #132472959. Anyone else seen this

2
Thanks both - did not notice the in-game blocklist, which is helpful, and I'll be using that - though still no report there, which I'd say is probably more important for discouraging it.

3
I recently returned to dominion online after several years away. As well as a lot of new cards (and some sadly departed ones - plus a lot of not so sadly departed to be honest) and changes to the interface that in the main seem positive, though in some cases a lot to get used to, I've noticed one thing that's extremely annoying: A huge increase in the amount of malicious disconnection.

In the week or two I've been back, I've already completely lost count of the number of games where, having pulled off one particularly good turn or otherwise got into a position where I'm pretty safely ahead, for instance when the point gap is bigger than the remaining VP, I've just seen my opponent disconnect (sometimes with a derisory/abusive chat message), and had to wait out the force-resign timer. I'd say about 1/4 people whom I beat are beaten by this force-resign method at the moment.

This is, to say the least, really annoying. There's clearly no way to prevent it, and it used to happen very occasionally, but now it seems like near-standard behaviour for a lot of players, and it must be horrendously distorting the ratings because not everyone will sit there and wait to force a resignation (which I'd guess is why they do it). I was trying to work out why this might have increased so much over time, and then I suddenly remembered that you can block and/or report players, and that this was what I used to do.

So, I tried to do that after my most recent irritating force-resign situation (big Bridge Troll turn got me to an unassailable position on a board with no alt-VP to speak of), and realised I couldn't block or report them from the wash-up screen anymore. This is because, once they've disconnected, they seem to show up on the wash-up as "empty slot". In order to block the player, I had to manually go into my blocklist after copying the name from the log. I couldn't find any way to report them.

This increased friction in blocking players who are doing this, and seeming inability to report them, strikes me as a good explanation for why this behaviour seems so much more common now. It's bad enough I'm considering not really bothering learning all the new cards since I last played and continuing to play, because for every 30m or so spent actually playing there's a good 5-10m spent waiting out force-resign timers right now, and it's just irritating and dissatisfying.

So, am I right about this? Is there actually a way to block and/or report I'm just being too blind to see? If so, what *is* causing this situation? Have I just been tremendously unlucky? Am I working my rating back up after a long time away and just playing against a segment of the player pool that was always much more open to cheating, and really it's always been this way?

4
Not really. There is basically no such thing as a player 2 advantage. If there were, the first player would pass to become the second player. Sure, the timing of your shuffles don't quite make that always the best play, but that's a higher-order effect.

There's a second-mover advantage, though, which means that there's less incentive than usual to take the artifact first. By doing so, you're opening your opponent up to a much stronger play of stealing it from you. It's like taking Dame Josephine if she's the top Knight on the pile, but even more so.

I think this is totally wrong, and for a reason you have noted - the timing of shuffles. You seem to think this just occasionally might muck up your logic, but it totally nukes it every time. You don't get to pass in dominion. You get to put your hand into your discard pile and draw 5 more cards. That's absolutely not the same thing.

5
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Complexity of Dominion
« on: October 03, 2018, 08:34:50 am »
In Dominion, the complexity is there on the table in front of you. There are no complexity surprises lurking later in someone else's deck, and the kingdom can be fine-tuned to the tastes and skill levels of the other players if you like.

That's the key. This is what I can't handle with Magic. I don't even theoretically know what's possible at the start of the game. It's also one of the reasons I love Dominion so much. You can look at the board, read the cards, and you're theoretically on the same level of understanding as anyone else. Yes, you won't notice some of the interactions straight away, but you theoretically could. There's nothing your opponent knows that you couldn't find out by thinking it through.

6
So I tried a few things, including these suggestions, and nothing worked; later, it just started working fine again. Guess it's just one of those things. Roll on previews. Thanks guys for your suggestions. Also, is this the kind of thing that I should probably post on discord rather than here?

7
Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Cannot reliably get Rennaisance Previews
« on: September 28, 2018, 06:46:18 am »
So I've been happily playing Rennaisance Previews games all week.

However, today (Preview day #5), I've searched for Preview games four times (2P, Wait for Expansions) and three of the four matches have been games with no Rennaisance cards. These games are unrated like the Preview games would be, and so as I really wanted to play Previews, and didn't have much time, I explained the problem I was having in chat and then resigned. To make things worse, the one game I matched that did have Rennaisance cards started with my opponent randomly abusing me in the chat then resigning, which was baffling. I don't want to keep searching for Rennaisance Previews only to keep getting games with no Rennaisance cards. Is anyone else having this problem?

8
Mountain Village is superb with Messenger. It's probably the best synergy with the "discard your deck" mechanic that I've seen.

9
Recruiter looks disgustingly strong on a 5/2.

Yeah. At first I thought it was super mega-strong, but I realised that was just because I got 2/5 on my first game. It's still strong for sure, maybe even very strong, but as a 5/2 opener it's just utterly and completely ludicrous. Only Mountebank pops out at me as reliably stronger and I'd even consider Recruiter better than Mountebank on a 5/2 on a few boards. I can't think of another $5 for which that's ever the case.

10
Recruiter seems ridiculous to me. I just played one game with it. I opened Recruitor/Nothing and quickly trashed out my estates while rolling up to 6 villagers and getting a second Recruiter. I then got Envoys for draw and Bandits to gain me gold plus more Recruiters. I was then able to fire a Magic Lamp pretty quickly with Recruiter/Envoy/Bandit/Copper/Gold/Lamp and around that point my opponent resigned. They had gone for a pretty nice-looking Talisman/Experiment strategy and at that point I was worried I'd done a "first time playing with Rats" kind of mistake and that my deck would die, so I played it out against the bot. I trashed through the rest of my coppers occasionally trashing a gold to add extra villagers. I had 6 provinces after T12. I'm sure if I did it again I could do it a few turns faster. I know ML will have helped me speed up, but I don't think it was key at all. I think I'd have slowed down by a turn or maybe two without, but I think I could make that time back up with practice. I've never played with a card that seemed so OP from the word go. I finished with more than 10 spare villagers, only ever purchased terminal actions (Druid was strictly a soft terminal as it had Field's Gift). It didn't feel like dominion at all. I'm psyched about this expansion in general but I'm a little worried that villagers make some really simplistic decks very powerful. They're crack for terminal draw, with which you normally have to be very careful, and the fact that Recruiter is terminal draw (and trashing) itself makes it ludicrously self-synergistic. Maybe this was a really odd game and actually you can barely ever do this. We'll see.

11
Dominion Articles / Re: Feodum
« on: August 25, 2018, 05:52:21 pm »
Ah yeah I’d failed to notice the fact that Colonies, or other really high-scoring games (Goons, Dominate, Groundskeeper, Vineyards) would make TH/Feodum less viable. As for the counter with Warriors, it seems like it would go one way or the other quickly. Taking out one or two THs early would be gg, but if the Warriors whiffed a few times, the TH deck might get so padded out with silver that it would become increasingly hard for the Warriors to do much.

12
Dominion Articles / Re: Feodum
« on: August 23, 2018, 06:43:43 am »
I disagree with not really considering Treasure Hunter to be a strong Feodum enabler. In order for your opponent to prevent you from using TH as a good Feodum-enabler, they have to play a fairly slow game without much gaining, which is exactly what one shouldn't be doing on a Page board. A good Page board engine building towards doing a lot with Champion is very vulnerable to allowing a TH-as-Feodum-enabler rush, and if the TH player gets 3-4 TH then realises that the opponent is doing something low-gain to block it, then the TH player is set up to quickly switch into a Warrior/Champion engine and crush them that way. Every time I've seen a Page/Feodum board, I've seen no other feasible option than TH/Feodum. The only way I can think that it wouldn't work is if there's a pretty decent low-gain strategy and the board isn't Champion-friendly. These boards are pretty rare. A mess of cantrips with Hermit/MS, Minion, or maybe Governor would be such a board, but I reckon ~80-90% of Page/Feodum boards will find TH/Feodum to be the dominant strategy. Even if this isn't the case, it probably deserves a mention just for how super-powered it is when both players do go for it. My opponent and I both gained 14 silvers in a turn in the fairly early midgame once. I know that isn't what would happen outside the mirror, because the gains don't snowball in the same way, but it's still pretty crushing non-mirrored against and enginey strategy and, as I mentioned, it's unwise to try to block it with a low-gain strategy because that's so vulnerable to the Warrior/Champion pivot, so you're generally going to see massive silver gaining on a Page/Feodum board.

13
Dominion Articles / Re: Groundskeeper-- Draft
« on: August 22, 2018, 10:38:44 am »
- Mention the classic Groundskeeper-Silver Engine

Is this a joke I'm not getting or is there some reason I can't think of why this would be a good idea?

14
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Most hated attacks?
« on: August 21, 2018, 04:56:30 am »
Disappointed that Hauted Castle didn't make the list in the "not really an attack" category.

Only happening once makes it pretty bearable.

Hey, I had a game recently were I "attacked" with it multiple times.

That happened to me recently - having your opponent repeatedly gain it from the trash it really nasty

15
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Most hated attacks?
« on: August 17, 2018, 08:22:00 am »
It's a bit unclear whether this should be "which attack do I hate having played against me the most?" which is essentially just "which is the most powerful attack?" or "which attack do I hate seeing on a board?" The latter question is much more interesting, and I've answered it accordingly, but I have a feeling enough people will interpret it the first way that we'll just have a poll to find out that, hey man, Torturer and Mountebank are really really powerful, who knew?

16
Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Possible Scheme/Archive Bug
« on: July 25, 2018, 12:54:28 pm »
It's my understanding that I should be able to Scheme an Archive if that Archive is going to be discareded in the clean-up in which I'm resolving the Scheme. In this particular game, I have two Archives in play, one of which was being discarded that turn, and one of which wasn't. They appeared stacked on the interface so, for Scheme selection, I couldn't select which Archive to Scheme. I went for it, hoping it would work it out, but it didn't, and I had to undo and Scheme something else. I really wanted to Scheme an Archive, and believe the rules allowed me to do so, but the interface didn't. Am I right about this? Game #16705918, end of turn 13.

17
Mint + Pooka / Cursed Gold

A mint opening will always be possible with CG, and in all but the CG/C/3E + 5C situations, it will take out your CG before the 1st shuffle at the cost of gaining just one Curse. There might be boards where this isn't what you want to do, but I don't think there will be that many of them. I had the CG/C/MLamp/2E + 4C/E opening split and opened Mnt/Slv. A deck of 3E/3C/MLamp/Slv/Mnt/Crs got underway pretty nicely as I quickly picked up a Lookout and Market Square, used them to gain a gold, and was able to activate MLamp and buy a Wharf pretty quickly and Wish my way into a 2nd Wharf and 2 more Golds. MktSq and Lkt helped me trim down a bit more and get a 4th Gold and I just walked that home (there was no splitter of any sort). It seems to me that such an opening would be very nice on most boards.

I fail to see how getting rid of Cursed Gold to replace it with an actual Curse is good. As always with Mint, its strength is getting rid of Coppers, and Cursed Gold allows you to do that earlier at the cost of a Curse... and a Mint. Now you have a deck of three Estates, a Curse, a Mint, and at least two Coppers. Although in this case Cursed Gold was worse than Copper, as a hand of five Copper can buy Mint just as well without getting a Curse. Or perhaps you drew CG together with 3 Coppers. Well, now your deck is still mostly junk. I guess you can buy Mint with a Cg/C/C opening, but honestly, I'd rather just have a trasher that helps me get rid of the non-money junk.

The real interaction here seems to be centered around Mint, Market Square and Lookout. Similar to, let's say, Mint, Tunnel and uh, Navigator.

You may be right - but I think you're interpreting my understanding of the benefit slightly wrong. I'm not saying Mint is a great way to trash CG, but that CG means you're going to be able to open Mint, and thus trash coppers, in any opening (though I'm not sure you'd want to on 5C vs CG/C/3E unless there's, say, Remake). It may well be that this is only normally useful on CG/3C/E (and that it only worked well for me on CG/2C/2E because of the Lookout/Msq side of things), but, even then, that's a huge improvement on only being able to do it on 5C and needing a convenient $2 on the board to boot, which is the standard Mint opening situation.

18
I had the CG/C/MLamp/2E + 4C/E opening split and opened Mnt/Slv.

I'm confused about how you did this without trashing the Lamp to the Mint. Was this a Baker board? CG+C only gives $4 on its own.

Good confusion. My opening split actually was CG/2C/2E and 3C/ML/E

I'll edit my post. Thanks.

19
Emporium + Duplicate

You can choose to call Duplicates before checking to see if you have enough Actions in play to gain 2VP, apparently.  So if you call enough Duplicates, you can get VP for all the Emporia you gain, even if you didn't have enough Actions in play when you actually first gained one.

That's bally unintuitive but once I think about it there's no particular reason why the on-gain effect of "+2VP if..." should happen before the on-gain effect of "call a duplicate..."

20
Mint + Pooka / Cursed Gold

A mint opening will always be possible with CG, and in all but the CG/C/3E + 5C situations, it will take out your CG before the 1st shuffle at the cost of gaining just one Curse. There might be boards where this isn't what you want to do, but I don't think there will be that many of them. I had the CG/2C/2E + 3C/ML/E opening split and opened Mnt/Slv. A deck of 3E/3C/MLamp/Slv/Mnt/Crs got underway pretty nicely as I quickly picked up a Lookout and Market Square, used them to gain a gold, and was able to activate MLamp and buy a Wharf pretty quickly and Wish my way into a 2nd Wharf and 2 more Golds. MktSq and Lkt helped me trim down a bit more and get a 4th Gold and I just walked that home (there was no splitter of any sort). It seems to me that such an opening would be very nice on most boards.

NOTE - Edited as I'd got my opening split wrong for the example

21
Has this gone down? I've not been able to use it today or yesterday.

22
Haggler + Me when I forget that Haggler's gain is mandatory

Haggler + Me when I forget that Haggler's gain is mandatory + Irritating butt-ass opponent who doesn't grant the simplest of no-info undos

I know that's a 3-part combo so might cause thread derailment arguments over what's a useful combo but I would plead that the second component is super-common and the third component is also much more common than any given card so the chance of this occuring is at least as high as any given 2-card combo.

23
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Favorite/least favorite Landmarks?
« on: June 08, 2018, 06:30:15 am »
I ruddy despise Keep

24
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Trashing the Engineer
« on: May 24, 2018, 03:41:27 am »
I trash Engineer if either of these conditions obtains:

1 - I want the second gained card more that I want the Engineer

2 - I can pay down debt this turn and have a buy that I can't use on something that I want more than the second gained card, plus the Engineer pile is not empty

(1) normally means winning key $4 splits or just having no further use for the Engineer

(2) is true more often than not and will mean I trash and rebuy the Engineer. Too much debt or the need to get a $5 or Donate are the most common reasons this won't obtain

25
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion Confessions
« on: May 18, 2018, 10:19:16 am »
Witch is sort of like Sir Destry but it always hits a Lab.

This is why we're not supposed to say cards are like other cards

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