Simulation won't exactly duplicate real-world play, obviously, but for some strategies that doesn't seem to matter all that much. Double-Jack is Double-Jack. But there's a very subtle problem I encountered recently that I think demonstrates the limits of simulation when determining the power of a strategy.
I was attempting to see how good a "Workshop Gardener" strategy was against other standard strategies, and I tweaked it in all kinds of ways. I finally found that against standards like Big Money, Village-Torturer, Double-Jack, etc., the best strategy was to buy all the workshops first, and
then buy gardens, buying up estates with spare cash as you can along the way.
{
name: 'Fastest Workshop-Gardener'
author: 'Quadell'
requires: ["Workshop", "Gardens"]
gainPriority: (state, my) -> [
"Workshop"
"Gardens"
"Estate"
"Copper"
]
torturerPriority: (state, my) -> [
'curse'
]
}
This is
very fast, and seemed to beat nearly every simulated strategy I could throw at it. It beats Big Money 96% of the time and Double Jack 59% of the time, whereas other Workshop-Gardener strategies (such as the one described in
the Gardens article on DS) were slower and had lower percentages. I thought I knew how to win Dominion (at least when Workshop and Gardens are on the board) better than the experts.
But...A very small number of real games showed me how wrong I was. Although this strategy is the best at beating players who ignore Workshop and Gardens, few decent players will do that (unless they see something better on the board). And when "Fastest Workshop Gardener" goes up against a similar strategy that switches to Gardens earlier, it loses badly. For instance, I call the following strategy "Workshop-Gardener switch after 4", and it more closely simulates what's described in the Gardens article:
gainPriority: (state, my) -> [
"Workshop" if my.countInDeck("Workshop") < 4
"Gardens"
"Workshop"
"Estate"
"Copper"
]
Although it only beats Big Money 83% of the time, and Double Jack a measly 34% of the time, it beats "Fastest Workshop-Gardener" 72% of the time. So is "Workshop-Gardener switch after 4" the best strategy? Not against "Workshop-Gardener switch after 2"! It seems to me that the best Workshop-Gardener strategy depends entirely on what your opponent does. I like to open double Workshop, and if my opponent does as well then I immediately switch to Gardens. But if my opponent starts with only 1 or even 0 Workshops, I keep buying Workshops instead of Gardens until I feel I have to switch. It's almost a game of chicken: it's best to put off Gardens buys, but you really don't want to be the second player to buy one.
And this is for trying to find the best strategy for a very simple artificial situation, where Workshop and Gardens are the only things I buy. In a real game I'll buy a good $2 or an excellent $3 instead of Estates, and there are probably other card interactions that will effect this strategy in subtle ways. There's obviously a lot about this strategy that I'll only learn through real-game experience, no matter how much simulation I do. But even for this artificially constrained situation, it's easy to overestimate the value of simulations in the absence of experience.