Goons.
I'm so bad with this card. I never veto it because I know I need to get better at playing with it, but I always get completely slaughtered when it's a heavy Goons game and at the end of it I know I'm totally beat but I have no idea why.
Last night I played a bunch of games, which ended with two Goons games. I'll link to those games here and offer my commentary, but it would be great if people could tell me what I should have done and/or why my opponent's strategy was better than mine.
GAME 1:
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201211/11/game-20121111-182743-fe7f34a1.html
Thoughts when I looked at the board: Goons is present with villages. The goal for this game is to play as many Goons as possible. All right. Villages for extra actions, Rabble for draw, Forge for trashing, so all the components are here for a draw-tons-of-cards/play-tons-of-Goons engine, and there are even lighthouses to defend myself against the attacks! This is the direction I want to go. Now, how to get there?
I opened Silver/Lighthouse instead of Silver/Silver because I wasn't losing early economy by doing that (is this true?) I thought I was slightly more likely to spike an early $6 (or maybe even $7) by doing this, and I know I'm going to want lots of Lighthouses. Good idea/Bad idea? Turns out I got a Turn 3 Goons anyways without it mattering; at this point I was pretty happy with my play.
I saw my opponent building his Village/Rabble stock up, and I knew this was the next step in building my engine. Then, Turn 6 I hit $7 thanks to a lighthouse. I though I was very lucky and picked up a Forge. "Great!" I thought, "The two best terminals I wanted are already in my deck! I can trash heavily now and focus on picking up villages and Rabbles, and then more Goons." I thought I had the game won at this point.
From there, it just becomes gradually more obvious that my opponent's deck is improving rapidly whilst mine is staying the same, at best. What happened? I feel like I got some unlucky draws, but at the same time I felt like I was far enough ahead I should have been doing better. The only thing I think I should have done differently is perhaps thought of Menagerie as a better counter to Goons than Lighthouse, but I'm not even sure of that. Help?
In short, Menagerie happened.
As you observed, you needed +draw to go with the +action and the goons. Goons is an excellent card but to really click you want to play lots of them.
Each time you draw Lighthouse you're drawing a dead end card, so thats one less card to draw with. Relying on Village + Rabble to draw was always going to be a slow drawing strategy, as thats two parts out of three of your engine just to get the Goons drawn, and some of the actions needed for the Goons used up on the Rabble playing. Thats not to say villages and rabble didn't have a role to play, but overall I would have said that the $4 slots you spent on Walled Village should mostly have been on Menageries. Menagerie kickstarts the drawing without using up an action.
Also, as you observe, Menagerie is a better counter to Goons than Lighthouse.
SITUATION:
Your previous turn: Play a lighthouse.
Your next turn: Attacked by Goons, benefit from lighthouse.
Result: -1 card over those two turns, for the benefit of +$1 both turn.
SITUATION:
You previous turn: Not playing a lighthouse.
Your next turn: Attacked by Goons, discard 2 cards. Play menagerie, +3 cards.
Result: -0 cards over those two turns, and 2 cards cycled for better ones, probably.
Menagerie is one of the top $3/4 cards in the game. Walled Village isn't.
Lighthouse is a solid defensive card, one of the best, but comes at cost of lowering your mid and late tempo (though as you said, it has minimal slowing effect on early game tempo). Menagerie would have provided the same defence without slowing your mid-game tempo, though in first or second turn the lighthouse is a better option, for its better early pace and for its later synergy with Menagerie. Just one though, IMHO.
GAME 2:
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201211/11/game-20121111-184827-e1e83a9a.html
Assessing the board: There's Goons and Villages, so it seems like the goal is to play Goons as much as possible. But, upon further review, even though we have Goons and Ambassador for deck-thinning, the only way to get +Actions is through Hamlet, and there is no way at all to increase hand size. It seems like the best you can hope for is to play two Goons in a turn, and then you only have $4 plus one treasure card to spend, and all of this is only if you don't get Goonsed yourself. This doesn't seem dominant to me. So what's next?
Well there's no massive engine to build, that's for sure. But I still think Ambassador is important because having double-Goons turns whilst Ambassadoring the bought junk to your opponent is probably still better than being of the receiving end. I have to fight the Ambassador war, but winning it isn't a huge priority. So the plan is to open Amb/Silver, hope to pick up a second Amb before the next reshuffle, Aim for a Goons, or maybe two depending on how well things are going. Stashes are nice because even if my deck starts to bloat, I can still get Provinces (well, unless I get Goonsed, in which case I cry. A lot.)
How did it go?
I picked up a second Ambassador one shuffle later than intended, but it didn't feel like a huge deal at the time. In retrospect, I think this was a problem. My opening Amb missed the reshuffle, and I was never able to pair an Amb with two cards that I wanted to send over. I feel like my decision was sub-optimal, but my draws punished me for it.
In the end, my opponent focused on punishing me for not Ambassadoring enough. He bought tons of Hamlets, and built the lackluster engine that I had decided not to go for. He also bought Curses a couple of times to send over to me, which I thought was a mistake, and he also bought a Fortune Teller which would only cycle me enough to play my Stashes more. I thought I had a chance still, since I'd be able to buy Provinces, and I kept up for a while, but somehow he was able to buy just as many provinces even though he only had two(?) Stashes.
I understand pretty well what happened here, but I feel like my strategy might have been better. Did this really just come down to luck, or am I missing some other things I did terribly wrong?
Tough game.
You did have some bad luck, as your opponent hit Ambassador + 2 estates early on, and then drawing Hamlet the first time he drew both Ambassadors. Broadly though, I'd say that in a game with any +action, the deck with 2 ambassadors to 1 ambassador early on is the deck with the advantage. Unless there's very good reasons otherwise, I try never to let my opponent have more Ambassadors than me in the early game.
Then there was the rejection of Hamlet... to me, there's nothing lacklustre about that card in a goons deck! Sure, you're not going to be playing masses of goons in a single turn, but its a card that can be a worker's village or a village or just a buy, as and when needed, and when each goons activation is earning points, thats too tempting to turn down. At worst, its a cantrip. Its also a safe buy WITH goons.