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Messages - WanderingWinder

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26
Feedback / Re: Changing names
« on: January 28, 2016, 10:44:11 am »
Skilled Cardslinging Silver Naysayer

27
I played Haven/Treasure Map once. The turn my Treasure Maps collided was the turn I got possessed. I resigned. Then cried.

Clearly, you should have gotten Scout. Scout is a great defense against Possession. If your opponent possessed a hand of Scouts, what can they do besides improve your next hand? ;)
Draw your alt-vp :(
By that you obviously mean Nobles, right?
I don't get it :(
Only Alt-VP I could see buying while still trying to collide maps.

Great Hall? Maybe Island, too.

28
General Discussion / Re: STAR WARS
« on: January 26, 2016, 03:51:51 pm »
I went to see Avatar.

I made the wrong choice.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Hmm, I just noticed the subtle edit in WW's reply. Oh well, hivemind is 20/20.

I haven't replied at all.

Kappa

29
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion Records!
« on: January 25, 2016, 04:59:43 pm »
I think games with all human players where all people were trying to win the entire time is a good rule for this kind of thing.

The one thing I have to contribute to this thread is this game with Qvist, which is, by turns, the shortest game of Dominion I've ever heard of with these constraints. It was 7.5 turns.

I apologize in advance for eating popcorn while playing. It hasn't happened since.

Can't top that, though in the first two games I posted to YouTube yesterday, they BOTH ended before the end of the 9th turn...

30
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Key card or gainer first?
« on: January 25, 2016, 04:56:46 pm »
I think a corollary to this is how important is hitting $5 on turns 3 or 4?  Often going for the gainer will lower your $5 T3/T4 probability.  If it is imperative that you get $5 early, get the $4-cost first and then the gainer when opportunity arises.  If $5 is less crucial, go for the gainer.



Absolutely agree. This is one of the best reasons to delay your gainer (though in this case, you probably aren't getting the gainer for a 'key card').

31
Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Cards: Dungeon
« on: January 24, 2016, 02:58:12 pm »
I believe that Warehouse is generally a superior card to Dungeon for engines, because in an engine you would rather not use the sifting effect until you have to, rather than always doing it start-of-turn. I mean, you do get the offset that it doesn't cost you a card that turn, so that probably makes it slightly better for slogs and money decks. I think. It also misses shuffles a lot more often, which is a real cost.

32
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Key card or gainer first?
« on: January 24, 2016, 02:49:58 pm »
I think the question really ought to be whether you want the gainer at all. If you want the gainer at all, you probably want it first, since if you wait for a few copies to come off the stack, then the pile is close to empty, and when are you really getting the advantage anyway? What is the reasoning behind wanting a card, wanting to get some of that card, and THEN wanting to pick up a card whose purpose is to gain more copies of that card you've already started in on? (I'm genuinely curious, and there probably is a situation for it, I'm just not really seeing it right now).



As for whether or not you want to go for the gainer or go straight in for the "key card", that depends on a number of things. The rough gist of it is that you need to figure out whether you want to get the key card AFAP (as fast as possible), or whether you want as many as possible. Of course, sometimes both will be true, but usually it slides one way or the other as to whether it's more critical to get a "critical mass" or to get started. The trade-off you usually make is that you're down one 'key card' for a shuffle, then you're even the next shuffle, and it's only the shuffle after that in which you get ahead.

Interestingly, I think Junkers are one of the clearer cases, but in the opposite way of what you've said: You almost never want to get a gainer for a junker, but rather go for the junker straightaway. The point here is that you are trying to win a split, but it's not the junker split - it's the junk card split (e.g. curses). And because the junk hurting their deck is such a big deal, making the shuffles bigger and the decks worse earlier on seems like it's almost always going to be more important, than getting a bigger split. It's also important that junkers aren't really cards that you just want lots of, really. The exception would be cultist, because of the Lab clause, but the problem there is that there are so few gainers - University is clearly too slow, whereas Altar is actually an interesting question, but of course there are good chances you draw it dead, terminal collision, etc. which usually make you just heads-down rush the cultists.


When you're talking draw engines, because those components you gain speed up how fast the shuffles go, it's often not worth going for the gainer at all. And this is usually when you go for delayed gainers - not in order to get a "key" card, but to improve consistency later in the game, where you are buying more expensive things and gaining out components to maintain your engine running.



In general, there aren't many cards you want to open gainer for, but the ones that exist are usually incremental advantage cards: cantrips with some little bonus, that don't help you draw that much.






As for the specific case of FG, the gainer regains the tempo on turns 3/4, and if you hit on turn 5 exactly as first player, you can win the split - IF you are contested. If you aren't contested, then the gainer is almost always going to get you to your 10 faster, or if you're lightly contested, it will help you win the split more. Keep in mind that you need the thing to actually give you an extra gain of an FG: Workshop is probably high enough chance to do so (though depending on what else you have to workshop after FG are gone, possibly dubious anyway), even though you could potentially hit Estate-Estate-Estate-Copper-Workshop, but Hamlet on turn 1/2 is probably a bit too much of a risk.


In general, gainers get helped a lot by having more than one target card to grab. An Ironworks won't help me win the Caravan split by much, and I'll behind until nearly the time they run out. But if there are both Caravans and then Advisors or Caravan Guards or even Vagrants, then the Ironworks gets a lot better.



33
Game Reports / Re: Madman/Counterfeit vs. Rebuild
« on: January 19, 2016, 08:47:52 am »
I would not count on anything beating Rebuild here, but I would be curious as to what else you do. Is a Witch worth it? If so, when? If so, do you also get Hermit? I don't think I want a Hermit if my opponent isn't going to be cursing me, as I don't want tons of Silver necessarily, and what silvers I do want, I want fast. Shelters would push me more towards Hermit, but I still don't think it's enough. I mean, I really want the silvers right away, because I want to hit 5 ASAP.

34
Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Adventures Cards: Distant Lands
« on: January 19, 2016, 08:35:53 am »
Full disclosure: I've never played a game featuring this card.

This has to be an engine card, and quite a decent (though not great) one.

It's enough points to make a slog kind of strategy work: 4 points per plus your Duchies means you need probably a province and maaaybe two, which isn't good for a slog, but it is a possible thing. But the real problem is, you need to pick it up with enough time to play it, which takes quite a long time in those kinds of decks, and it's a terminal, so if it collides with your other enabler terminal, that's pretty much disaster (or you need to get it even earlier so you'll have another shuffle to get it stored away and scored). In a standard kind of Big Money deck, it's even worse.

But in an engine, it's a pretty sizable reservoir of points you can spend a couple turns hacking away on without hurting your deck too much. This means a non-engine player has to get a massive amount of points to overcome. 6 Distant lands on the mat will cancel out a 6-2 Province deficit! Basically, this means you can spend a lot of time building building building up your deck, because there is plenty of time to get enough points to come back: they really need to empty out ALL the provinces. Of course, this doesn't really help you in your mega-turn engine, and it's not so great when 3-pile endings are happening in the engine mirror, but it promotes a 'normal' kind of engine against other strategies. When you're drawing your deck every turn, it isn't a big problem to get these things on your mat.

35
Well, this is more of a problem in BM games than engines, and it doesn't come up much except early on. It does come up in the first few shuffles, and it's one of the trickier things. You need to know how likely you are to get back to 5 (or whatever price point), as well as how much better the e.g. 6-cost is for you, and how bad missing 5 is.

In general, I tend to play it safe, because in most of these situations, or at least the ones I find myself in, getting back to my price point isn't likely enough, and it tends to be disastrous to miss it.

36
Dominion General Discussion / Re: 5 Ways to Win Dominion
« on: January 12, 2016, 08:32:40 am »
it encourages buying only Treasure and Victory cards. And apart from that it's a mixed bag. There's good advice like "Trash Coppers and Estates" as well as bad advice like "Always buy Gold with $6".

That sounds very much like an early Wandering Winder video, though he never placed such an emphasis on trashing.

Come on now

37
Game Reports / Re: Odds question
« on: May 01, 2015, 05:52:02 am »
So by opening Silver/Watchtower, you have a slightly better chance to hit 5 at least once, but by opening Silver/Silver, you expect to have slightly more 5s by the reshuffle.
You draw silver, watchtower, 3 copper on turn 3 then you can topdeck your 5 and potentially get another.

This is a good point I didn't account for, partially because it's way dependent on what 5 you get, which means it's not practical to actually calculate the whole thing. The chances of hitting SCCCW on turn 3 are 4.42%, though, which means that even if that guarantees you getting $5 again (which, in practice, it rarely will), my conclusions above about number of 5s would be accurate.

You do get a bonus 4.4% chance of playing your 5 a shuffle early though, so that's not nothing... but it's not a huge thing, either.

38
Game Reports / Re: Odds question
« on: April 30, 2015, 03:09:27 pm »
With Watchtower, as the only way you're not hitting 5 on either T3 or T4 is if WT misses the shuffle, in which case it wouldn't have helped you had it been a Silver.

Yes, Silver/Watchtower is a very powerful opening. You have an ~90% chance of hitting 5 (I estimate), and if they collide you can even topdeck it.

Silver-Silver has a 91.2% chance to hit $5 at least once on turns 3/4 (per http://dominionstrategy.com/2011/03/09/basic-opening-probabilities/), and Silver/Watchtower will be even higher than that.

Silver/Watchtower gets you a 94.94949494....% chance of hitting 5 at least once.

It's worth noting that it gives you a 0% chance of hitting 5 twice. If you check the link here, you get a 14.9% chance of having 2 5s opening Silver/Silver.

So by opening Silver/Watchtower, you have a slightly better chance to hit 5 at least once, but by opening Silver/Silver, you expect to have slightly more 5s by the reshuffle.


But the biggest thing to note is that it doesn't make a very big difference at all, so in practice, you should go with whatever will be better for your deck otherwise the vast majority of the time.

39
Death Cart/Vineyards is nice. Clearly you wouldn't build a deck around it, but if you have a strong Vineyards deck anyway, not only does Death Cart pump up your Vineyards by 1 each time (as long as Ruins remain), but they can help you end the game since you only need 5 of them to empty a pile.

Feels like a nombo to me.

Umm, no. I have played a few Vineyards game with Death Cart and most often I won. One DC buy increases each Vineyard in value by 1 point. If you tie the split, that's a 4 VP gain right there. If you somehow win the split 5/3, you're getting 5 VP right there. DC is pretty good in Vineyards  games.

So it's a $4 somewhat-better-than-duchy. Seems reasonably good, but by no means game-shattering.

40
Dominion League / Re: Handling disconnects
« on: April 22, 2015, 11:29:40 am »
First of all, I perfectly understand if you guys want to entirely ignore all my opinions here, given that I have resigned the league and thus don’t really have any kind of vested interest as whatever comes out of this won’t directly affect me. Nevertheless, I have some thoughts on this. So read if you want, ignore if you’d prefer to do that.

1.   The most important thing by far is the mutual agreement of the players. If the players both think a game was too far gone, go with that. If they both think they should replay, go with that. Overriding a mutual decision of the players involved is not something that should be done.
2.   I strongly feel like which player disconnects shouldn’t matter. Adam basically already covered this, but I will add that, yes, this is potentially abusable, theoretically, yet I don’t feel that anyone would really do so. And further, it’s not like there are any prizes or anything – if there were, maybe more would need to be done. But if there were, it would really be necessary to have a more stable system which would allow reconnects.
3.   I believe that the default position should be to replay the game. Adam has made some points here, but the biggest thing to me is that with replays, the result is actually decided by a game of Dominion between the players, which is not something you can say for the other options. Now, I do think that there is a point at which you just award the game to the leading player, but it’s very difficult to say exactly where that should be (one of many reasons I want to underline point number 1).
4.   Having the players assign percentages is reasonable, but I am against it for a number of practical reasons. The biggest thing is that this is very difficult to do with any kind of accuracy. The Mic Q – SCSN situation has already been referenced, and if you were watching that, you know that Mic Q didn’t really want to assign a percentage. While you can stress here that it’s not that he had a problem so much with the concept of assigning percentages as it was that he had no idea how to come up with a  percentage, I think this is an endemic problem with the whole method. And even when people can come up with numbers some times, they’re very often going to be wildly inaccurate. I’ve seen tons of times where people think they are just winning or just losing when the game is completely unclear. Moreover, this leads to the nasty situation where you’re actually encouraged to disagree and haggle for extra percentage points. If a placement ends up getting decided by someone being able to haggle better, or being more persistent than the other player, this is going to be a really feel-bad moment. Yet having ‘assign percentages’ be the way things are done really does encourage this, to the point where you would almost have to push for this, and anyone who doesn’t overpress (which is I think a better way to act, in general) is going to be actively punished for this.
5.   Having third parties decide or adjudicate really seems the worst option of all. You can try to not take into account who the players are, but this is really inaccurate to how the game would play out. Do you assume perfect play? That seems very strange to me, since all players are really fairly significantly far off of that ideal. I’ve won LOTS of games I should be less than 5% to win if my opponent played perfectly. On the other hand, you can try to take that into account, but this leads into even more problems: suddenly the opinion of how strong the player is in the mind of the adjudicator is an enormous factor in determining how a ruling would go. Not only is a good evaluation thereof incredibly difficult to achieve, it’s also basically inviting the feeling that the decision is a personal one, even if the person arbitrating is trying to act as fairly as possible. Of course, the biggest elephant in the room is that the judgment of whoever is making the adjudication is very liable to be flatly wrong, on top of which all the time and effort those people would put in, as well as this leading to potential scheduling issues.
6.   How far into the game it is should be a real factor. While a player could easily be pretty far behind on turn 4 or even turn 2, I think that in these situations, you should be even more apt than usual to re-play such a game. The more of a game that’s been played, the more you want to just count that as ‘the official game’, the less that’s been played, the more of a preference there should be for playing a new one. You can’t really use turn numbers here, because some games will be over a lot more quickly than others.
7.   As a corollary to the last couple of points, there are going to be lots of situations where one player is, in actuality, way way ahead of the other player, because they’ve gone in for a much better plan, but the fruits of that aren’t necessarily borne out yet. I think these games are really poster-children for not adjudicating and indeed for going for a replay. Essentially, by awarding the game to one player or the other, it is just a nod of agreement with one plan or the other. And I feel very strongly that games should not be thusly decided, even if one plan really is much better. Of course, after game-state has played out enough to make it very clear whether the one side is going to ‘get there’ or not, it might be a different story. But it is still quite a tricky thing.
8.   Clear leads don’t necessarily mean the game is over by any stretch. There are loads of situations where deck A is clearly just better than deck B, say in a mirror, but shuffles can do a lot. Very simple example is having a 5/2 and getting just ambassador against a 4/3 player’s amb/amb. Amb/Amb is clearly ahead, but that game can really go either way. Obviously that’s a really simple example, but there are loads of things which are similar.

In general, I don’t believe that any solution whatsoever is actually fair. But (and tl;dr) the number one principle is that mutual agreement of the players involved trumps all else, and I strongly prefer deciding things with actual games of Dominion than by adjudication as  a default

41
Dominion Videos and Streams / Re: Dominion Live Streams
« on: April 18, 2015, 11:08:51 am »
Talking Adventures now. Link in sig.

42
Dominion: Adventures Previews / Re: Adam's Adventures Preview video
« on: April 18, 2015, 11:08:33 am »
Live now. Going to start talking soon.

43
Game Reports / Re: Dominion VP ....glitch?
« on: April 18, 2015, 10:21:03 am »
You have 4 Provinces, 2 Harems, and a Farmland, totaling 30 points. Your opponent has 3 Provinces, 6 Nobles, and 7 VP chips, totaling 37 points. He played 2 Nobles on his turn before you resigned. The log displays your opponent as incorrectly having 33 points because he played 2 Nobles.

When the game ended, the screen showed that I was only down 33-30. Are you saying it would have shown that I was ahead 29-30 if he played 2 more Nobles?

Yes.

This obviously doesn't matter since Resignation is the overriding factor on who won. But it does look weird.

44
Dominion: Adventures Previews / Re: Adam's Adventures Preview video
« on: April 18, 2015, 10:01:38 am »
Would anyone like to chat around 8 pm eastern? 

Possibly. I'm not 100% sure at this point though.




It's also pretty likely I will stream something in the next few hours or something.

45
Goko Dominion Online / Re: Features Thread
« on: April 18, 2015, 08:56:57 am »
I'm not sure if it was stated here, but if we are talking about an always visible game log, we are talking about an always visible log of the current and last turn (I assume).  Otherwise you have people all the way scrolling back to turn 1 to count how many points they have, which is not what you want.

Which is why you enable the point counter so that people know how many points they have without having to scroll back to turn 1.

There are players who use this to figure out the exact contents of decks (search for "Awaclus gains Wandering Minstrel" and count the results).


I am just going to leave this here without any comment, because I don't really feel like getting in that debate again. But this makes it very similar to the drheld thing from years back.

46
Governor/Black Market/Minion

I've only pulled this one off once, but the idea is as follows:

Play a village (doesn't matter which one)
Play multiple Governors for +3 cards
Play Black Market, dumping all your Treasure on the table
Play Minion for the discard attack *opponent discards his huge hand for a random four-card hand*

Any opponent draw (Council Room, Governor, etc.) + any discard-to-x work.  Example:
http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20150319/log.51201cbee4b04e88c8da4f9a.1426811891226.txt
(Okay, ya got me, all I really wanted to do was show a game where I beat Mic Q.)

But I can see how Minion is usually even more brutal than, say, Margrave because it doesn't let them choose which cards to keep.

When someone has that plan working against you: Moat. (Useful defense is a useful interaction, yeah?) You are more likely to be defended than normal, given your increased handsize, and you're getting a bigger benefit than normal.

47
I don't understand why this thread was moved here.

48
Rules Questions / Re: Trashing Hand w/ Count + Market Square
« on: April 17, 2015, 11:57:58 am »
When you Chapel or Forge a Copper + OE, the trashing of both cards and the on-trash effect of OE happen before you can react to it, so you draw 1 card from your empty deck before you can discard the MS for a Gold.

I don't think this is correct. The on-trash effects of OE and MS happen at the same time, so you can decide the order in which you do them. Not sure if Goko has this right though, probably not.
I wouldn't be so sure they don't have it right. I agree that you should be able to choose the on-trash triggers though. Cards with on-trash effects shouldn't have priority over MS.

I'm pretty sure the way they handle it is that they let you trigger the Market Square, then if you pick "done", you draw the card, after which you get another chance to trigger Market Square. This is based on remembering a game I played yesterday.

49
Rules Questions / Re: Trashing Hand w/ Count + Market Square
« on: April 17, 2015, 11:02:25 am »
I guess the thought in my mind is a bit different. I've drawn my deck, now I'm trashing things. One of those things is an Overgrown Estate or Rats or Cultist (something that draws me cards when I trash it). I have a Market Square in hand. How is this different with Count, Market Square, Chapel, Forge, Remake? I'm trying to get at the same-sentence vs separate sentences thing.

50
Rules Questions / Re: Trashing Hand w/ Count + Market Square
« on: April 17, 2015, 10:42:37 am »
Can someone explain how this is vis a vis Chapel, Remake, Forge?

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