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[mee]

I have not written any strategy articles and I am not doing one here I just want to note some major changes that barrow a 0 costing event has on the game
1) as with baker it gives everyone the opportunity to open with a 5$ card
2)in order to buy a province you only need 7$
true that the money density is higher for a 7$ 4 card hand but this means if you have an engine drawing your whole deck you don't need to buy any additional money
3)for big money it has 2 advantages  the previous reason of you only need to get to 7 and a bm strategy should be able to do that even in a slogish game and it also helps with those really annoying 5$ hands to get a gold and break that cycle of to many 5$ hands (I don't know if this is a usual phenomena as I usually try to not do bm and I haven't played 1000s of games but It happens to me a significant amount of times I go bm I would also like to hear your feedback on that)

[DG]

How many people have used borrow because they want one card less in their next hand (and don't care about the coin)?

[sc0UT]

For the ppl who don't know the event card.

Borrow Wiki

[jomini]

How many people have used borrow because they want one card less in their next hand (and don't care about the coin)?

Well I cared about the coin, but I utterly frustrated an opponent by making his Pillages really expensive coppers. We both had engines and he was set up to buy a Pillage + Province each turn and play the Pillage the next turn. Minion has such a ridiculously weaker attack than Pillage's attack that inducing it via Borrow would be worth it even without using the coin.

I could also see a few combos like Menage/Top decker or Chouse/cheap non-terminal +buy that would be actively helped by -1 card in at least some situations even without the coin. I haven't done Possession with Adventures yet, but I imagine that Borrow is also a tactical play there.

[Marcory]

One possibility: you played Navigator and revealed two terminals. You make one of the terminals  be the 5th card of your deck, and then Borrow so you don't draw it.

[werothegreat]

One possibility: you played Navigator and revealed two terminals. You make one of the terminals  be the 5th card of your deck, and then Borrow so you don't draw it.

This one rather stretches the imagination: who's going to actually buy a Navigator?

[faust]

One possibility: you played Navigator and revealed two terminals. You make one of the terminals  be the 5th card of your deck, and then Borrow so you don't draw it.

This one rather stretches the imagination: who's going to actually buy a Navigator?

Especially in a game where you apparently have too many terminals...

[Marcory]

Maybe it was given to you by Messenger; maybe it's the only $4 in a Procession path; maybe it's a 4-player game where building an engine is difficult; who knows?

But are you seriously questioning a viable edge-case on the grounds of plausibility?

[drsteelhammer]

Different edge-case: Your Mountebank is one of the four last cards in the draw pile

[Awaclus]

One possibility: you played Navigator and revealed two terminals. You make one of the terminals  be the 5th card of your deck, and then Borrow so you don't draw it.

This one rather stretches the imagination: who's going to actually buy a Navigator?

It's decent with Royal Seal when there's nothing better going on.

[jomini]

One possibility: you played Navigator and revealed two terminals. You make one of the terminals  be the 5th card of your deck, and then Borrow so you don't draw it.

This one rather stretches the imagination: who's going to actually buy a Navigator?

Oh, I don't know maybe anyone using Mystic or Herald. You know two pretty nice cards that get phenomenally better when they pick up that huge reliability boost of knowing the top few cards of your deck.

In like manner, pretty much anything that cares about top deck order is reason to consider adding a Navigator to an engine - FarmV (make sure you skip a few green every time), Golem (skip the coppers & estates), Wishing Well (make them more into labs after they run out and your deck gets diverse from green), Journeyman (skip more stuff), Sage (skip the low cost stuff, get the card you need first).

I mean seriously there are near uncountable numbers of possible Dominion games, is it that implausible that someone might buy a Navigator as an early game accelerator planning to build a Herald engine later?

[Hugovj]

I mean seriously there are near uncountable numbers of possible Dominion games, is it that implausible that someone might buy a Navigator as an early game accelerator planning to build a Herald engine later?

Yes.

[ehunt]

yall im pretty sure wero's post was a joke.

the point of the joke was, edge cases for when you would actually want to make a move that ordinarily seems strange, as frequently asked for in the puzzle section of this board, typically involve highly unrealistic assumptions. for humor, wero, to mock the-often derided Navigator card, treated "it's a good board for a Navigator buy" as being on the same level as such an assumption.

[werothegreat]

One possibility: you played Navigator and revealed two terminals. You make one of the terminals  be the 5th card of your deck, and then Borrow so you don't draw it.

This one rather stretches the imagination: who's going to actually buy a Navigator?

Oh, I don't know maybe anyone using Mystic or Herald. You know two pretty nice cards that get phenomenally better when they pick up that huge reliability boost of knowing the top few cards of your deck.

In like manner, pretty much anything that cares about top deck order is reason to consider adding a Navigator to an engine - FarmV (make sure you skip a few green every time), Golem (skip the coppers & estates), Wishing Well (make them more into labs after they run out and your deck gets diverse from green), Journeyman (skip more stuff), Sage (skip the low cost stuff, get the card you need first).

I mean seriously there are near uncountable numbers of possible Dominion games, is it that implausible that someone might buy a Navigator as an early game accelerator planning to build a Herald engine later?

The problem with all of those is that you need a Village to pull it off.  For what you're using it for, Scout (*shudder*) is actually better at doing that.

[Marcory]

Here's an example of a plausible hand in a plausible kingdom.

Soldier, Peasant, Gold, Curse, Estate. You don't want to get behind in the Traveler race, so you don't want to discard your Travelers with the Navigator, and you want to be able to play both of them

The reason you bought Navigator on this board is to accelerate your Travelers, and there are multiple Villages on this board; you just happened not to draw one this hand.

(Btw, Wero, I know that your initial post was a joke, which is why I +1'd it).

[jomini]

One possibility: you played Navigator and revealed two terminals. You make one of the terminals  be the 5th card of your deck, and then Borrow so you don't draw it.

This one rather stretches the imagination: who's going to actually buy a Navigator?

Oh, I don't know maybe anyone using Mystic or Herald. You know two pretty nice cards that get phenomenally better when they pick up that huge reliability boost of knowing the top few cards of your deck.

In like manner, pretty much anything that cares about top deck order is reason to consider adding a Navigator to an engine - FarmV (make sure you skip a few green every time), Golem (skip the coppers & estates), Wishing Well (make them more into labs after they run out and your deck gets diverse from green), Journeyman (skip more stuff), Sage (skip the low cost stuff, get the card you need first).

I mean seriously there are near uncountable numbers of possible Dominion games, is it that implausible that someone might buy a Navigator as an early game accelerator planning to build a Herald engine later?

The problem with all of those is that you need a Village to pull it off.  For what you're using it for, Scout (*shudder*) is actually better at doing that.

Umm, Herald is a village, by definition Herald/Navigator has a village on the board. Golem/Nav and FarmV/NavScout are also village combos. Yeah Mystic requires a village, but then Mystic/Village/Nav is up there with Grand Markets for efficiency.


Scout is not a bad buy with Mystic and I have done decently with it using Herald; while Nav is terminal it also comes with +$2 which means it doesn't tank your early game with a lot of sub-$5 hands. Like anything else, there are boards where +actions are non-existent (not even Trusty Steed) and boards where +actions are trivial (e.g. Champion or most Kc boards). When top deck ordering is important, Navigator is good. Normally that means engine (which means village most often) and some fraction of Navigator boards make it a good buy.

[werothegreat]

But you want to use Navigator's top-deck-looking before you use Herald.  You're trying to use Navigator to make sure Herald goes off properly, because if it doesn't, it isn't even a village anyway.  And as I said, Scout does this better since it can always be played before Herald.

[jomini]

But you want to use Navigator's top-deck-looking before you use Herald.  You're trying to use Navigator to make sure Herald goes off properly, because if it doesn't, it isn't even a village anyway.  And as I said, Scout does this better since it can always be played before Herald.

You have to play a village before the first Nav; for Herald it need not even be this big - if you hit a Nav with your first play (so it does not function as a village), you can then stack cards to let your next Herald be a village. If you need cash anyways, then Nav is a no brainer for a Herald deck - it doesn't give you a dead card like a gold and makes the Herald or two after the you play Nav vastly more efficient.

It is arguable if Scout does this better for Herald - on the one hand Scout is non-terminal (so you get village when you hit it) and as noted you can play it before the first Herald has to hit anything. On the other hand, Scout has no buying power and looks at one card fewer so it is much harder to setup two Heralds to hit cantrips.

[LastFootnote]

I could see Navigator+Herald being a thing. But Navigator+Mystic/Wishing Well/Farming Village/etc. doesn't really seem worth it.

[jomini]

I could see Navigator+Herald being a thing. But Navigator+Mystic/Wishing Well/Farming Village/etc. doesn't really seem worth it.

And this is why the quality of discussion continues to die here. "Worth it" is such a bogus quantity you can basically shut down any fruitful discussion.

Just because a card combination isn't strong enough to build a deck around doesn't mean that the interactions are beneath discussion nor that you should just dump them. You will note in my original post that for FarmV and the like I already specified that we are talking about a pre-existing engine. So say Golem rocks because you have no draw but cantrips, some sifting (e.g. Cellar), and a nice attack like Militia, you can either try to add cash via treasures (which have major problems with them being skipped), other +coin actions (and Militia does nothing the second time you play it but Terminal Silver) or something like Scaling TfB (which are risky and often slow with Golem). Navigator is an extremely nice form of action cash, which is often what your engine wants (e.g. FarmV/Lib/Trashing).

Over 90% of the card interactions are not "worth it" as in some board dominating combo. Somewhere you have to decide things like which source of value gaining do I want to use. Do I go treasure, actions, TfB? For the 90% of card choices that aren't mind numbingly overpowered, it behooves you to actually consider the full value of the card. Sometimes, bad combos are made workable by their low opportunity cost (e.g. Port makes it really easy to turn Mystic/Navigator into something better than activated Conspirators). Sometimes you are just asking yourself is this $4 silver replacement better in my pre-existing FarmV/Journeyman engine worth spending an action.

Navigator gets a bum rap because it is relatively small number of cards that care about top deck ordering and the boards are fiendishly over-invested in discussing deck-defining combos. Yet it gives you good odds of $5 (like any terminal silver), has not insignificant sifting potential in the early game, and is very useful when deck order really does matter. So no, it is not a card with a killer power like trashing or slowing down the other guy and it will never be bought like Steward or even Develop, but it does have a useful place when you are already considering cards that synergize with it.

[werothegreat]

Honestly, I'd rather just have Chancellor.

[LastFootnote]

I could see Navigator+Herald being a thing. But Navigator+Mystic/Wishing Well/Farming Village/etc. doesn't really seem worth it.

And this is why the quality of discussion continues to die here. "Worth it" is such a bogus quantity you can basically shut down any fruitful discussion.

Dude, I was not trying to shut down your discussion. I was just contributing my opinion! I'm sorry it wasn't verbose enough for you, but you ain't gotta be such a jerk about it. An apology would be nice.

I wasn't even dismissing Navigator as worthless! But the main value of Navigator is NOT to reorder your deck. The only reason it can do so is so that you don't have to track the order of cards while you're looking at them! The point of Navigator is to skip bad hands entirely. Playing Navigator as one of your last Actions is practical. Playing it before playing more draw is much less practical. It's not made for that purpose. Usually there's something better to buy at the $4 price point. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but that's the way it is.

EDIT: Navigator/Loan, now there's a nice combo. Navigator/Venture is OK too.

[jomini]

I could see Navigator+Herald being a thing. But Navigator+Mystic/Wishing Well/Farming Village/etc. doesn't really seem worth it.

And this is why the quality of discussion continues to die here. "Worth it" is such a bogus quantity you can basically shut down any fruitful discussion.

Dude, I was not trying to shut down your discussion. I was just contributing my opinion! I'm sorry it wasn't verbose enough for you, but you ain't gotta be such a jerk about it. An apology would be nice.

So let me understand this right. You threw up a worthless comment that was utterly devoid of actual substance using language that routinely shuts down discussions, but hey it is just supposed to be "your opinion" and no one is allowed to take issue with it.

Me saying "And this is why the quality of discussion continues to die here. 'Worth it' is such a bogus quantity you can basically shut down any fruitful discussion." Is likewise stating an opinion. However me stating an opinion is offensive and demands an apology. Or perhaps more simply your opinions are valid however stated and mine are not.


Nothing I said there, mind you, actually speaks, at all, to your motives. I never said you intended to shut down discussion, merely that such comments devoid of substance create an atmosphere where people feel constrained about what is acceptable discussion. I have watched that happen again and again on threads on this board, people talk about things that do not cross some utterly arbitrary threshold of likelihood or strength and then along comes somebody who drops a one-liner that ignores the discussion above it and pressure builds to drop the topic.

I neither know nor care what your motive is. Nor do I care how verbose you are (and you'd think if you are going to try to call me out for misreading your intentions, you might have the basic courtesy to not presume to grossly misstate mine). What I care about is the result of your comments. Much like how this appeal to your alleged victimhood will play out. I could not give a rat's ass if you feel aggrieved by my statement of my opinion, but this board (and frankly much of life in general) could do with far less clamoring about what is "mean" or not of the right "form" and more focus on substance. This juvenile crying about somebody taking issue with what you say is bad for board culture and will serve you horridly in real life as well.

But the main value of Navigator is NOT to reorder your deck.

Who cares? There has been an ever growing body of cards that do care about reordering your cards and Nav can be extremely useful with them. Even with a simple village, Nav greatly increases your deck reliability. E.g. your engine is Bank/Border village/Hunting grounds/+buy tossing in a Nav is much better than a silver - it allows you to convert Bv/Bv/X/C/C hands into Bv -> Nav -> Bv (draw Hground) -> Hground.

And deck reliability is worth paying for on some boards. Scheme, after all, does nothing once you have a deck drawing engine ... except increasing its reliability. Yet I will gladly drop $6 and 2 buys on Schemes on most such boards. 

The only reason it can do so is so that you don't have to track the order of cards while you're looking at them! The point of Navigator is to skip bad hands entirely. Playing Navigator as one of your last Actions is practical. Playing it before playing more draw is much less practical.

Practicality is highly variable. If I'm playing FarmV/Wt, you better believe that Nav is one of the best terminal silvers that can be added. It is far more "practical" than silver or competing terminal silvers (like Duchess, a second Militia, Woodcutters/Nomad camp, a Cutpurse if coppers were trashed, Black market after the Bm pile has been sucked a bit dry, etc.)

Sure, reordering is usually weak, which is why we are specifically talking about using it in decks where you are already getting the complement card for some other reason (e.g. Golem is the only village on the board).

It's not made for that purpose. Usually there's something better to buy at the $4 price point. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but that's the way it is.

and in other news water is wet and the pope is Catholic.

We get that, 50% of dominion cards are weaker than the average dominion card! Your last sentence can handily be said for over a third of the $4 cards.

The real trouble with Nav is not the reordering being weak, it is that it gives coin as its primary benefit. Coin is always available in the kingdom as gold or silver. When you can get silver for $3 (and need no action) or gold for $6, anything becomes pretty often "not worth it". If we had a kingdom card that was always out which said "trash one card" it would drastically increase the number of $4 trashers that generally has something better for you to buy.

This is why Nav/Venture actually isn't that hot on its own - you need 40% of your deck to be green before an average Nav -> Venture play will let you skip more than a single green (which makes Nav basically an activated Conspirator + Scout). Sure you can arrange your Ventures to line up ... but at the end of the day you are just getting cash and you can spend $8 and 2 draw slots to get up to $5 ... or just buy a Plat. It has to be an awfully barren board for Venture/Nav to be your goto.

[LastFootnote]

I could see Navigator+Herald being a thing. But Navigator+Mystic/Wishing Well/Farming Village/etc. doesn't really seem worth it.

And this is why the quality of discussion continues to die here. "Worth it" is such a bogus quantity you can basically shut down any fruitful discussion.

Dude, I was not trying to shut down your discussion. I was just contributing my opinion! I'm sorry it wasn't verbose enough for you, but you ain't gotta be such a jerk about it. An apology would be nice.

So let me understand this right. You threw up a worthless comment that was utterly devoid of actual substance using language that routinely shuts down discussions, but hey it is just supposed to be "your opinion" and no one is allowed to take issue with it.

Me saying "And this is why the quality of discussion continues to die here. 'Worth it' is such a bogus quantity you can basically shut down any fruitful discussion." Is likewise stating an opinion. However me stating an opinion is offensive and demands an apology. Or perhaps more simply your opinions are valid however stated and mine are not.

We're both allowed to state our opinions. In my opinion, you're being insulting, which is what I take issue with.

And apparently my remark actually sparked more discussion between us, rather than shutting discussion down! Look at that! However, I'm not really interested in reading the rest of your post because of your verbal abuse. Hopefully somebody else can step in and continue this fascinating discussion about Navigator in this thread about Borrow.

[eHalcyon]

I could see Navigator+Herald being a thing. But Navigator+Mystic/Wishing Well/Farming Village/etc. doesn't really seem worth it.

And this is why the quality of discussion continues to die here. "Worth it" is such a bogus quantity you can basically shut down any fruitful discussion.

Dude, I was not trying to shut down your discussion. I was just contributing my opinion! I'm sorry it wasn't verbose enough for you, but you ain't gotta be such a jerk about it. An apology would be nice.

So let me understand this right. You threw up a worthless comment that was utterly devoid of actual substance using language that routinely shuts down discussions, but hey it is just supposed to be "your opinion" and no one is allowed to take issue with it.

Me saying "And this is why the quality of discussion continues to die here. 'Worth it' is such a bogus quantity you can basically shut down any fruitful discussion." Is likewise stating an opinion. However me stating an opinion is offensive and demands an apology. Or perhaps more simply your opinions are valid however stated and mine are not.

We're both allowed to state our opinions. In my opinion, you're being insulting, which is what I take issue with.

And apparently my remark actually sparked more discussion between us, rather than shutting discussion down! Look at that! However, I'm not really interested in reading the rest of your post because of said verbal abuse. Hopefully somebody else can step in and continue this fascinating discussion about Navigator in this thread about Borrow.

I don't know about abusive, but incredibly condescending for sure.  Wanting to foster and encourage more discussion is a worthy cause, but the attitude and utter verbosity actively works against that goal.  I hope that it's unintentional.

[theright555J]

I don't know about abusive, but incredibly condescending for sure.  Wanting to foster and encourage more discussion is a worthy cause, but the attitude and utter verbosity actively works against that goal.  I hope that it's unintentional.

To me, at least, the words "not worth it" in LastFootnote's post clearly hit a nerve with jomini, hence the tone of the subsequent post.

It didn't hit a nerve with me, so I don't have the major emotional outpouring, but I will concur that when a good player puts down a short, terse, blanket statement about something, the tendency is for discussion to dwindle or stop (and for said post to get a bunch of +1s).

jomini clearly disagrees with LastFootnote about the usefulness of Navigator's reordering power and both of them have some substance to their positions.  If it were never useful it would be almost a strictly worse chancellor for $4 and probably wouldn't have been published.  Yet it is much more often useful for the discard function, which is turn is often less useful for the opportunity cost than getting some other card in the kingdom.

Now how about buying Borrow to get a Navigator in a kingdom with chancellor also on the board? #stillnotquiteontopic

[jsh357]

That art, though. I mean, how do you even begin?

[drsteelhammer]

That art, though. I mean, how do you even begin?

It's strictly worse than chancellor's, how did that get even published?

[Deadlock39]

That art, though. I mean, how do you even begin?

Well, you begin by drawing some circles.

[Mic Qsenoch]

There's nothing wrong with discussion stopping when the idea in question is terrible. And of course if someone else thinks it isn't terrible then they're free to write whatever wall of text they feel like. But it's not like anybody's proving anything by listing off facts about cards, or lists of interactions or whatever. They're just not really informative about how these things play out in games of Dominion.

Which isn't to say that talking about card interactions isn't interesting or people shouldn't do it. But it's weird to treat such discussions or arguments as evidence that a card or card combination is good or bad.

[Beyond Awesome]

Sometimes I buy navigator. It almost never happens though. The card is bad

[LastFootnote]

It didn't hit a nerve with me, so I don't have the major emotional outpouring, but I will concur that when a good player puts down a short, terse, blanket statement about something, the tendency is for discussion to dwindle or stop (and for said post to get a bunch of +1s).

I think this is where either I or jomini erred. I don't consider myself a top player, so when I wrote that short post, it didn't occur to me that others might take it as some kind of authoritative statement. Sometimes I'm on my phone and just want to chip in to a discussion without writing a wall of text. Perhaps I should have put more emphasis on the fact that I like the idea of Navigator/Herald and look forward to trying it someday.

[werothegreat]

I don't consider myself a top player

Says the man who invented Summon

[jomini]

I could see Navigator+Herald being a thing. But Navigator+Mystic/Wishing Well/Farming Village/etc. doesn't really seem worth it.

And this is why the quality of discussion continues to die here. "Worth it" is such a bogus quantity you can basically shut down any fruitful discussion.

Dude, I was not trying to shut down your discussion. I was just contributing my opinion! I'm sorry it wasn't verbose enough for you, but you ain't gotta be such a jerk about it. An apology would be nice.

So let me understand this right. You threw up a worthless comment that was utterly devoid of actual substance using language that routinely shuts down discussions, but hey it is just supposed to be "your opinion" and no one is allowed to take issue with it.

Me saying "And this is why the quality of discussion continues to die here. 'Worth it' is such a bogus quantity you can basically shut down any fruitful discussion." Is likewise stating an opinion. However me stating an opinion is offensive and demands an apology. Or perhaps more simply your opinions are valid however stated and mine are not.

We're both allowed to state our opinions. In my opinion, you're being insulting, which is what I take issue with.

And apparently my remark actually sparked more discussion between us, rather than shutting discussion down! Look at that! However, I'm not really interested in reading the rest of your post because of said verbal abuse. Hopefully somebody else can step in and continue this fascinating discussion about Navigator in this thread about Borrow.

I don't know about abusive, but incredibly condescending for sure.  Wanting to foster and encourage more discussion is a worthy cause, but the attitude and utter verbosity actively works against that goal.  I hope that it's unintentional.

If I make short statements, people spend forever quibbling over what exactly meets some arbitrary threshold like "small synergy". If I go into detail into becomes "utter verbosity" and for reasons unspecified it must be condescending.

Quick one liners without any substance beyond opinions are little better than mindlessly trolling for +1s.


Worse, claims of "abuse" and the general protestation of victimhood really do derail all kinds of fun discussions. I'm ex-military (USMC), so please don't tempt me to actually demonstrate my hard won expertise at dishing out verbal abuse. Do feel free to trash me with all sorts of unkind words - you cannot possibly come up with harsher insults than I used to hear every day before breakfast.

I stand by my initial reaction - one liners by perceived experts - and LFN is that good - tend to kill conversations. You are never going to build a deck around Navigator, but there are a growing number of cards that care about deck ordering and some of the recent additions that might even make Nav generally good with them. Herald/Nav can much more reliably become an engine than just Nav alone. I think there might even be something there for village/Magpie/Nav ... but then I haven't played enough Adventures to have the option to try it.

TheRight: without deck reordering, I'd still tend to rate Nav above Chancellor. Chancellor is a blind discard, at best you can track your discard + any gains this turn vs your draw deck. Navigator lets you pitch crap, but also keep awesome hands. I suspect that LFN is totally right that reordering was included primarily to allow players to not worry  about deck order when they return the cards ... I just think that deck ordering is more useful at increasing reliability in some decks than LFN and a lot of players. I wish they'd justify their opinions with something more than "I'm good and it wouldn't play out that way" because when I have tested such statements in the past (either by tracking down logs or doing quick matches) the elite players do most of the stuff I talk about or are using their tacit skills to offset a small strategic deficit (i.e. if LFN is 2x as good as me, I basically need a strategic error to be around a 25% swing in win rate for it show up in the statistics when we play the board in question; the better LFN is relative to me, the bigger the swing in win rate you need to see the effect of actual card interactions).

[schadd]

this was about borrow at some point right?

[eHalcyon]

If I make short statements, people spend forever quibbling over what exactly meets some arbitrary threshold like "small synergy". If I go into detail into becomes "utter verbosity" and for reasons unspecified it must be condescending.

I've never seen you make short statements.

You posted some lengthy thoughts, LF chipped in his own opinion (which actually agreed with you on some parts), and then you called it worthless and basically told him that he shouldn't have said anything at all.  You bagged on him for creating "an atmosphere where people feel constrained about what is acceptable discussion" while posting a wall of text explaining why his discussion was unacceptable.  You described LF's protestation against your insults as "juvenile crying" while you yourself complained about his comments in the thread. 

Maybe condescending isn't the right word for it, but it's certainly not inviting of discussion from others, expert or otherwise.  It's like when you say "discussion", you mean your own thoughts and ideas rather than those from anybody else at all.

I'm going to leave this thread alone though.  It's incredibly off-topic already (because wero made a joke, oh no) and I learned my lesson last time.  Cheers.

[werothegreat]

(because wero made a joke, oh no)

This describes like half of my posts

On topic: Borrow can be nice, but can also really just bite you in the ass.  It can spike up to something you really want, but then you're hobbled next turn, and often that hobbling can outweigh the + you get.  Think carefully if you really want to Borrow or not.

[SCSN]

We're on a forum about Dominion strategy, so, unsurprisingly, people are concerned about things being strategically useful. Obscure edge-cases and endless lists of theoretical interactions are not.

The proper place for arguing for the sake of arguing is a debate club.

[Awaclus]

Obscure edge-cases and endless lists of theoretical interactions are not.

Concerned about things being strategically useful?

[Accatitippi]

We're on a forum about Dominion strategy, so, unsurprisingly, people are concerned about things being strategically useful. Obscure edge-cases and endless lists of theoretical interactions are not.

The proper place for arguing for the sake of arguing is a debate club.

Which in this case would be the puzzles subforum. 

[drsteelhammer]

Continuing on the off-topic road: I just had a Herald-Navigator board and now I can safely say it's the best thing going on on a board with the other cards being powerhouses like Pirate Ship, Mandarin, Chancellor and Coppersmith.

[SCSN]

Yes:

A single Navigator is like a lone Fool's Gold, you need a lot of them to make them shine:

Game Over
SheCantSayNo   cards: 10 Herald, 7 Navigator, 4 Worker's Village, 2 Rogue, ...

http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20140326/log.505d732a51c359e6597efeb8.1395875733087.txt

(Those Rogues should have been Navigators too).

[drsteelhammer]

Yes:

A single Navigator is like a lone Fool's Gold, you need a lot of them to make them shine:

Game Over
SheCantSayNo   cards: 10 Herald, 7 Navigator, 4 Worker's Village, 2 Rogue, ...

http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20140326/log.505d732a51c359e6597efeb8.1395875733087.txt

(Those Rogues should have been Navigators too).

I remember seeing that on the ranking card thread, altough I can't open the log anymore. I wish I had a WV to play with tough.

[jomini]

We're on a forum about Dominion strategy, so, unsurprisingly, people are concerned about things being strategically useful. Obscure edge-cases and endless lists of theoretical interactions are not.

The proper place for arguing for the sake of arguing is a debate club.

Thank you, this is a perfect example of terrible advice to which professional strategists would never subscribe.

I have a Masters in Strategic Studies from MCWAR and did a stint with the Strategic Initiatives Group; modeling the theoretical interactions of elements is the vast bulk of professional strategy development. Whether it is OODA or netwar, good strategists sweat the details.

This is why professional strategists do things like study obsolete military campaigns, not because the actual actions taken at Gettysburg, Badger's Mouth, or Salamis have much bearing on modern warfighters, but because the relationship networks have proven to be transferable over time.

Sure, if you just want to play well then you should ignore the boards pretty much entirely and engage as much as possible in real play against superior opponents with the odd livestream thrown in. Dominion is still exceedingly high on tacit knowledge (e.g. articulating when to green is very hard, but knowing when to green is something all elite players tend to have mastered) and futzing around with actual syllogistic understanding is highly time inefficient.

Besides if one of us who actually likes to understand the game at a deeper level comes across something that helps you play more games at a slightly higher win rate, it is not like that insight will stay cordoned off for long.

Though one wonders in a topic that asks specifically about when getting a -1 card token, itself, is valuable why on earth you are even in the thread. It is obviously discussing a rare edge case as the entire point of the thread.

I suppose you could object to such threads overrunning the boards, but then it has been months since anything that come remotely close to your threshold has shown up on the boards.

[theright555J]

Even I found that response a bit surprising...Especially since SCSN linked to a game in which he used Herald and Navigator to make a great engine, basically proving your point...

[werothegreat]

There's a balance to be struck between practicality and obscure hypotheticals.  I'm not a professional strategist myself, but it would seem that you study older campaigns to see why the people in charge made the decisions they did, given the information.  It's not like they're saying "well, what if the 300 soldiers at Thermopylae had, like, bazookas".

[SCSN]

Even I found that response a bit surprising...

Oh he just saw an half-open window of opportunity to show off his "Masters in Strategic Studies from MCWAR" and his "stint with the Strategic Initiatives Group" and jumped through it, the shattered glass be damned. It's sort of understandable, as you don't get to flaunt with experience like that too often.

I am curious though about where his unremitting pursuit towards a deeper understanding of Dominion is going to lead us. He's been going for so long that he must be right on the brink of a massive break-through.

why on earth you are even in the thread.

It was a misclick.

[Deadlock39]

It was a misclick.

You've been playing Dominion Online too much SCSN, it's starting to leak into the forums.

[jomini]

Even I found that response a bit surprising...Especially since SCSN linked to a game in which he used Herald and Navigator to make a great engine, basically proving your point...

I have not now, nor ever cared about others agreeing with me. I'd far rather have  vigorous opposition who makes fleshed out arguments than one-liners in agreement. I learn, far more from having my thinking challenged than having people agree with me.

SCSN is completely right that learning about a card combo (or even 12) that will arise in <1% of your games will have no discernible impact on your stats. What annoys me is that he confuses winning with strategy. Yes dominion is a strategy game, but what makes you good at winning is much more tacit knowledge (something SCSN excels at from all I have seen) than formal strategy.


Learning how obscure parts interact is a good way to understand Dominion strategy, eventually Dominion will likely go the way of chess where tacit skills will become formalized. Evaluation functions will stop being obscure things used to solve puzzles, and become things to run human crushing AIs on. But that day is a long, long ways off. It will be a slow organic process of some odd ducks sitting down and formalizing things and eventually backing it up with math. That happens because you figure out how to relate a lot of disparate elements (like value of isolating a queen pawn vs rook on seventh rank). Going out into the weeds is the normal way for formal strategy to come about.

As to what I hope to happen? Mostly Dominion theory is a hobby of mine. Routinely I will say there is some synergy about such and such, people will balk ... and then when I check against actual games I often find people who disagree with me already did what I suggested. The gap between tacit skill and most players theory knowledge is just that large right now. This should not surprise us, we cannot even achieve consensus among elite players about what are the five most powerful cards for a given cost point.

There's a balance to be struck between practicality and obscure hypotheticals.  I'm not a professional strategist myself, but it would seem that you study older campaigns to see why the people in charge made the decisions they did, given the information.  It's not like they're saying "well, what if the 300 soldiers at Thermopylae had, like, bazookas".

Actually, one of the thought exercises for a class was indeed how much kit would 300 marines need to win at Thermopylae against 150,000 Persians. It was a thought experiment about the interelationships between force multipliers, numbers, and later psychology, unit cohesion, and propaganda.

A large portion of military history is to examine how a particular instance can give us a general concept. This is most obvious with OODA. Boyd looked at the specific instance of fighter engagements where superior hardware and training were less decisive than most experts (e.g. combat aces) had predicted. His insight was that the speed of integrating new information, deciding how to act, and the executing that decision was a major determinant in who won dogfights. From an extremely obscure edge-case where decision timing was vastly faster than anything else in combat and far less complicated (little cover, few ancillary threats, minimal collateral concerns) he developed a formal theory that was then extended to pretty much every level of military operations. To this day, people go back WWI dogfight accounts to try to refine OODA theory into a more useful and more formal framework. Similarly, modern deterrence theory (e.g. Perfect Deterrence Theory) extrapolates from a number of sources that are extremely obscure.

For Dominion coming up with something formalized like that would likely take 20,000 man-hours as a WAG (this is optimistic, it took much longer to introduce the formalisms of hypermodernism to chess). I, however, enjoy the process. What I resent, is the seemingly obnoxious need of elite players to shut down any discussion that doesn't clear some arbitrary threshold, mock those engaging in it, and derail such discussions with pithy jabs that ratchet up +1s & reinforce a culture that only discusses a very limited range of Dominion topics.

SCSN:
Are you kidding? I've been paid to think about nuclear strategy for a living; every damn thing I wrote back then had the credentials stamped on it. Stuff I write up now that is utterly unrelated still gets them stamped into my bio blurbs.  Heck, I have had people ask me about them at black tie fundraisers because they read some CRS report that cited me. In the circles I work in, those of us on the inside mock the credentials, those in the middle are in awe, and those on the outside are unaware.


What I was going for was injecting some perspective that you cannot flippantly dismiss and assert that somehow your pet definition of strategy should be normative. You are very good at winning Dominion games. You are very poor at articulating formal strategy for Dominion (largely, I suspect because you don't even try to articulate formal strategy). You are very good at making your opponents sound foolish. I had hoped that I might encourage you to engage on substance instead of style or failing that to not elide some rhetorical barbs and good diction at me. We all know that you are the board's best rhetorician, could you perhaps try to foster discussion with it sometime?

But any ways, I am sure the gallery is waiting for your next pithy comment, so give us a good one. Show us what all that rhetoric training can do.

[GendoIkari]

All this tension... can't we just have a nice, lighthearted discussion about the best way to let MF know we have issues with their version of online Dominion? I'm sure nothing could go wrong with that....

[werothegreat]

Well, jomini, your walls of text are just intimidating, even to experienced players.  Most of us try to be fairly succinct with our strategic ideas.  I'll admit that most of the time when I see your huge paragraphs, I usually just scroll right by, because I know you're going to be indulging in intimate minutiae.  I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that - you obviously enjoy the hell out of it - but most people, even those who would consider themselves professional/good/experienced players, are not really interested in that.

Think of it like this: I'm in the sciences.  I love science just for the fact that it's science.  But when I start nattering on about quantum field theory, most people just kind of zone out and stop caring.  But if I tell them scientists have figured out how to make a functioning warp drive or a cure for cancer, they're all ears.  Most people don't really get the concept of research for research's sake - they only care when you have something tangible that effects their lives.

In Dominion terms, people care if you come up with a game-shattering combo, or figure out if a card is really good.  They don't really care about niggly little interactions, unless they're in the Puzzles subforum.  They don't care about elaborate statistics or whatever else.  And oftentimes, the interactions you come up with seem overly involved, when there are simpler ways to do it - like I was saying about Scout being a better enabler for Herald than Navigator, because Navigator is a terminal, and then LastFootnote raised the point that it was designed as an end-of-turn style card.  That's not to say cards can't fill roles they weren't designed for (Donald X isn't omnipotent or omniscient), but that until your out-of-the-way, involved, depending-on-multiple-things-going-right interaction actually bears fruit in actual gameplay, most people just don't care.  And for the most part, keeping it simple tends to work better in Dominion.

[SCSN]

SCSN:
Are you kidding? I've been paid to think about nuclear strategy for a living; every damn thing I wrote back then had the credentials stamped on it. Stuff I write up now that is utterly unrelated still gets them stamped into my bio blurbs.  Heck, I have had people ask me about them at black tie fundraisers because they read some CRS report that cited me. In the circles I work in, those of us on the inside mock the credentials, those in the middle are in awe, and those on the outside are unaware.

Waving your unrelated credentials in front of my face without me having asked for them and subsequently qualifying yourself when I'm not impressed reeks of extreme insecurity and does the opposite of convincing me of any competence.

You strike me as someone who's thoroughly lost in the woods and stumbles around aimlessly yet has somehow convinced himself that he is a great explorer of unknown lands, citing his swimming diploma as evidence. A Don Quixote if you will; I'm sure you've studied his battles.

Which is not to say that I wouldn't love to be proven wrong. If you respond with some promising steps towards a formal mathematical theory of Dominion I'll be the first to applaud your efforts and we could well have a productive discussion. Because contrary to what you appear to believe, I'm quite interested in mathematical underpinnings and actual theoretical advancements (see e.g. my posts in this thread, where I try to define the concept of card strength in terms of Nash equilibria. I'm not quite convinced by my own arguments looking back, but I do think it warrants further exploration). It's just that I know that things like long treatises on Navigator-Herald are a completely dead end, which you—if you are as ambitious as you proclaim yourself to be—shouldn't allow yourself to waste your time with.

[jomini]

SCSN:

I think there is no doubt in anyone's mind about your opinion of my competence. Can we dispense with the theatrics and just have a discussion of substance rather than playing to the gallery?

You excel at what is the Dominion equivalent of S-3 work (operations). This is how to accomplish a goal (e.g. winning tournament games or maximizing your rating) with the tools at your disposal. Properly speaking this is the application of strategy.

My inclinations, training, and experience is more with strategy proper. This has always been in both military and game contexts been an esoteric subject that is distinct from application. In chess, this is typically the composition and problem community. In the military this is typically special groups attached to the service head or high level special commands.

Getting to the sort of generalized evaluation function your post is looking at in the other thread has historically run straight through edge case territory and pondering obscure issues. E.g. Nunn did a lot of work with obscure chess end games that show up in < 1/10,000 high level games, but his compositional work resulted in both improvements to human and AI play.

Ruminating on obscure cases is very common method to clarify thinking about the game, long before you can deal with Nash equilibria outside of brute force calculations you need a good framework of how to value things. Thinking about when Nav is better than alternatives (Silver, Chancellor, Militia, Cutpurse, Scout, etc.) is precisely the sort of compositional problem that has previously worked out to advancement of formal theory in many other fields.

I have never made any bones about my methodology being a slow and inefficient way to become good at winning, though I would note that reading anything on these boards is likely to be of limited utility with very high diminishing returns compared to just playing the game. All I ask is that people stop posting again and again "this is too trivial" in threads where the title, OP, and most of the posts already acknowledge that. I doubt I will be the one that turns ruminations into formalism, but I would not mind being part of a community where those types of ruminations can happen.