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[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.