they pulverized these natives so hard that all of their victory spewed out
i told my friend who plays magic that there was a superevent that cost 14 big ones, and mentioned that some of the forum people conjectured that it would be something to the effect of gain two provinces. and then once we learned what it actually was he was all like, the gain two provinces thing was more elegant. and i was like no, you dorko. this is cool because it's like another thing after colony that uses the same pile as provinces, incidentally. and also, $14 gain two provinces isn't really that impressive. you would get it pretty often as engine in sort of the same way that you get harem pretty often in the one other strategy. that event rewards you for doing engine by giving you $2 and a buy once you want to get provinces, whereas merchant guild rewards you by giving something like 4 coin tokens each turn more or less indiscriminately (well, less indiscriminately. but still.)
but the dominate we see printed really makes any strategy that can condense its cash dominate a simple money strategy. 2 dominates and 2 duchies goes even with 6 provinces—that's $34 and 4 junk cards that you get slowly versus $48 and 6 junk cards that you get linearly. what is a lot less clear about it, though, is how it affects engine mirrors. i mean, we already have colony games to compare it with somewhat but i mean dominate is still very much different than that. in a game without alt-vp then i would conjecture that the game proceeds as normal, except you maybe just want to spend more time building.
with alt-vp, it is of course just another interesting option. with vineyard, all the sudden buys and gains are more important than money, usually, but then dominate is an option that might be better than that.
-so how interesting
is it when it's clearly the way to go? we've learned colony already, is dominate gonna be all that different?
-how strong is the swing towards engine compared to power engine cards, like remake, bridge, border village, etc? or is it possible that you could attempt to pick up a few of them in a money strategy? i've randomly gotten to $14 in e.g. embassy games before
-was it just the one guy holding an axe in some field that they dominated? i don't think that's worth 15 victory points, usually you count how many guys there were at least on each side to determine how much victory there was instead of just total guys