Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[AJD]

[ftl]

A part of the reason Big Money (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Big_money ) is so effective is that it's very simple to get right. Often, especially in the base set, the engine that will beat big money has many interlocking parts - Geronimoo's First Game engine (linked earlier in the thread) requires proper use of Remodel, Village, Smithy, Market, AND Militia to do better, and you have to get the pieces in a good order and use them right (including thinking ahead when deciding when to buy villages). So someone learning to build engines will probably have a lot of losses at first - when you get too few villages, or too many, or forget trashing or buy green too early or too late, etc. Lots of places to go wrong, compared to the simple "Buy silver, then gold, then province" rules of Big Money.

So for a newer player, a situation where "a properly played, intricate engine will crush big money, but a badly-made engine will lose" is often indistinguishable from a situation where Big Money is straight-up dominant, without asking the internet or something like that.   

So there are a few ways to go.
1) Pick up an expansion or two. Seaside has some of the most powerful cards that make engine-building easy - fishing village and wharf. Prosperity has Colony/Platinum and Goons. If you have Fishing Village and Wharf on the board, it's pretty easy to just buy fishing villages and wharves and do better than big money.
2) Deliberately pick more engine-y setups. In the base set, if you include chapel, you'll instantly enable engines on lots of boards.
3) Play to improve rather than playing to win. It might take you a few tries to play the First Game engine well enough to beat Big Money, but once you do you'll start being able to do similar things on other boards.

For me, I ended up going with the first option. I started playing online with a few expansions, and at first I would just play lots of Big Money. I started with just playing engines in the places where engines are obvious (Fishing Village+Wharf; Steward+Minion; Village+Torturer); then I started making more subtle engines like Remodel-based ones. But for IRL play, (2) or (3) would also work if you don't want to add expansions.

[Robz888]

Yeah, it should be pointed out, even buying just one single expansion DRAMATICALLY scales the game away from Big Money strategies. Subsequent expansions do that as well, but the gap between "just Base set" and "Base set plus any big expansion" is huge.

[Warfreak2]

No, Time is Cubic!

[elahrairah13]

I would recommend Prosperity as your first expansion - Colonies help make the game longer because you build for $11 not $8

[sudgy]

Well, say your game was 10 minutes and you put in ghost ship.  Then it would take 100 minutes to finish your game (according to whoever said this).  Let's find this in seconds.  So, 600 seconds^2 is 360000 seconds, converting that to minutes is...6000 minutes...100 hours...4.17 days.  Let's find it in hours.  So .167 hours^2 is .0278 hours, which is 1.67 minutes...

So, in conclusion, if you want a short game with ghost ship, measure the time in hours.

[liopoil]

but..... but...... you can't do that!

I guess if the premise is squaring time...

[markusin]

Well, say your game was 10 minutes and you put in ghost ship.  Then it would take 100 minutes to finish your game (according to whoever said this).  Let's find this in seconds.  So, 600 seconds^2 is 360000 seconds, converting that to minutes is...6000 minutes...100 hours...4.17 days.  Let's find it in hours.  So .167 hours^2 is .0278 hours, which is 1.67 minutes...

So, in conclusion, if you want a short game with ghost ship, measure the time in hours.

The flaw in your math is that you end up with 360000 seconds^2, not 360000 seconds. Big difference, because there are 3600 seconds^2/minute^2, and 3600 minutes^2/hour^2. (0.167 hours)^2 is 0.0278 hours^2 = 100 minutes^2 = 360000 seconds^2. So, it's the exact same thing.

So let's agree that adding Ghost ship results in a game lasting a number of minutes equal to the square of the number of minutes it would take to finish the game without Ghost Ship.

[liopoil]

But the idea that ghost ship increases the amount of time a game takes exponentially doesn't make any sense, that's the real problem.

[sudgy]

So I make a joke and two people misunderstand it at two different levels...  First, I know the problem is that I didn't use time^2 units, I was talking about the earlier conversation.

And lio, somebody earlier mentioned how Ghost Ship squares the time taken in a game, joking as well.

[liopoil]

no, I got that you weren't being serious.

[WalrusMcFishSr]

Exactly, like if a normal game would take 1/4 hour, then with Ghost Ship it would only be 1/16. Right?

[2.71828.....]

So I make a joke and two people misunderstand it at two different levels...  First, I know the problem is that I didn't use time^2 units, I was talking about the earlier conversation.

And lio, somebody earlier mentioned how Ghost Ship squares the time taken in a game, joking as well.

What would this forum be if people didn't take things like this serious?  Why do you think there are so many math and computer science people on this forum.  To follow rabbit trails just like this

to deggertsen:  You have to excuse all of this as you sift through to find the answer to your original post.  There really are some great responses such as this and this and this, but as you see, it is so easy to get distracted.

[Fragasnap]

Ghost Ship will square it!

So if your games lasted 10 minutes before, they'll now last 100 square minutes? What?

Yeah, that's right.

I don't know, dude. 100 square minutes is a pretty big area of squared time.

Did anyone else notice the game's length is measured in "minutes minutes"?
Physics students in the room can read that as, "minutes squared." Apparently, Rio Grande has admitted to how grossly off the 30 minute length was and has started measuring time in the fifth dimension as well. Has anyone else figured out how square minutes work? I certainly can't.

[Witherweaver]

There are a lot of exciting games to play in base alone, to the point where other members of the forum will probably confuse you for a troll.

Some people have trolled saying this...

There have been a lot of people who think this, but it's not the case.  There are basically four stages to learning Dominion strategy:

1. The noob stage, where people make mistakes and buy random action cards.
2. The Big Money stage, where people think the best strategy is buying just money and victory cards (and maybe one or two kingdom cards).  This is where you are.
3. The "intermediate" stage, where you realize some kingdom cards can compliment big money, or especially each other.
4. The "expert" stage, where you start utilizing kingdom cards in the best way possible and start building amazing decks such as engines, combo decks, etc.

Most people are in either stage 1 or 4 (4 has a very wide range of skill).  Reading the articles on the main site can help you through the stages a lot.

Yeah, I distinctly remember when we first started playing in my group of three people.  One of the guys loved action cards and tried to draw his entire deck all the time.. it seemed to me like he just wanted to shuffle all the time.  But he really liked combos and made things work most of the time.  Another guy decided, "screw this, I'm just going to buy money and smithy(/courtyard once we added the next expansion) all the time.  It works a lot better".  I took somewhat of a middle road, biased towards actions. 

Action guy had the most 1st places and the most 3rd places. Big money guy had the most 2nd places.  I was tied with action guy in terms of points (we started keeping track, assigning some number of points depending on how many people you beat), but mine were more evenly distributed between 1st, 2nd, 3rd.  I think big money guy had the best points normalized for games played, but we ended up all pretty even.

[flies]

if i had to choose between being "action guy", "money guy", and "middle of the road guy" _{based on nothing but the name} I would definitely not choose "middle of the road guy".  "Action guy" sounds pretty cool.  I'd go with that.

[Jimmmmm]

if i had to choose between being "action guy", "money guy", and "middle of the road guy" _{based on nothing but the name} I would definitely not choose "middle of the road guy".  "Action guy" sounds pretty cool.  I'd go with that.

Action guy: Bear Grylls. Money guy: Donald Trump. Middle of the road guy: Iron Man.

[Stealth Tomato]

No, Time is Cubic!

When the object enters the timestream, time begins to correct itself. Let me use this example: Imagine four balls on the edge of a cliff. Say a direct copy of the ball nearest the cliff is sent to the back of the line of balls and takes the place of the first ball. The formerly first ball becomes the second, the second becomes the third, and the fourth falls off the cliff.

Time works the same way.

[flies]

if i had to choose between being "action guy", "money guy", and "middle of the road guy" _{based on nothing but the name} I would definitely not choose "middle of the road guy".  "Action guy" sounds pretty cool.  I'd go with that.

Action guy: Bear Grylls. Money guy: Donald Trump. Middle of the road guy: Iron Man.

How is iron man middle of the road?  He's fantastically rich and a genius...

[Jimmmmm]

if i had to choose between being "action guy", "money guy", and "middle of the road guy" _{based on nothing but the name} I would definitely not choose "middle of the road guy".  "Action guy" sounds pretty cool.  I'd go with that.

Action guy: Bear Grylls. Money guy: Donald Trump. Middle of the road guy: Iron Man.

How is iron man middle of the road?  He's fantastically rich and a genius...

Well yeah okay. I took middle of the road to mean both.

[AJD]

No, Time is Cubic!

When the object enters the timestream, time begins to correct itself. Let me use this example: Imagine four balls on the edge of a cliff. Say a direct copy of the ball nearest the cliff is sent to the back of the line of balls and takes the place of the first ball. The formerly first ball becomes the second, the second becomes the third, and the fourth falls off the cliff.

Time works the same way.

So you're saying it's made of balls of timey-wimey stuff?

[flies]

if i had to choose between being "action guy", "money guy", and "middle of the road guy" _{based on nothing but the name} I would definitely not choose "middle of the road guy".  "Action guy" sounds pretty cool.  I'd go with that.

Action guy: Bear Grylls. Money guy: Donald Trump. Middle of the road guy: Iron Man.

How is iron man middle of the road?  He's fantastically rich and a genius...

Well yeah okay. I took middle of the road to mean both.

Action Guy:


Money Guy:


Middle of the Road Guy: