A second Baron is actually fine in the early game. Also, you want to get Estates a little sooner.
Thanks!
With those comments, Baron actually looks reasonable, pretty close to stuff like Library and Council Room.
Despite being, now, the only one to lose to the out-of-place Bureaucrat! Knew B-crat's attack was good for something... stifling Barons!
Could you give information about what optimized play method is used in these simulations? I assume, for instance, you're just buying one or possibly two Smithies, but all the Vaults you can get. But I'm honestly not sure for Courtyard. Even a short-hand description of the optimized play would be helpful.
The bot opens silver/courtyard. It has the standard rules for greening (buy provinces once you have a gold, buy duchies/estates when there are a 4/2 provinces left, respectively, buy duchies over silver but not over gold when there are 6 provinces left.) It never buys courtyard over gold, but buys courtyard over silver when it has fewer than one courtyard for every eight treasures in the deck. I guess this would roughly mean a second courtyard sometime between turns 4 and 6, and probably a third one around turn 10-12.
I didn't write it, just summarizing.
This is great work. You should think about writing an article for the blog when everything is done.
Thanks!
Not sure it needs to be an article in its own right, for the reasons Geronimoo posted; but, I'm glad it draws attention to some underappreciated BM cards, that's why I made it.
For me there are two astonishing things on this list:
Courtyard: Of course it is known that Courtyard is a great BM+ card. But i didn't think it is better then Envoy or Masquerade. Why do we see BM+Envoy and BM+Masq so often and never BM+Courtyard?
Of the things the simulator tells us right, I think this is one of them.
Bureaucrat: It is known to be a bad card. Since I've been watching WW's Dominion videos I already thought it is underrated, because he buys it more often than I would do. But looking on this list it seems to be even overrated. It's comparable with Moat and worse than everything else.
Yeah, on putting it in this list, I realized it probably doesn't belong here at all; I guess you should never go Bureaucrat if you're aiming for a standard Silver->Gold->Province game. I didn't realize that until making the list, though, I didn't realize it would even lose to, like, Moat.
I think it would be interesting to compare all strategies depending on the starting hands. I would expect $5 cards to be stronger on 5/2 split and $4 cards on 4/3 split. If you have 5/2 it may be better to pick a usually inferior $5 card to start with.
Yeah, probably. Obviously, a big reason why the $5 cards lose to some of the $4 cards is that they spend a few turns buying Silver before getting the enabler.
I'm not sure I want to go back and reenter all that into the sims, though!
Thanks for making this list! You should probably also list the exceptions (i.e. next to a card, list the lower ranked cards that beat it) I think Ghost Ship loses to Jack and Oracle (not in sim because Oracle is played bad), and Jack and Torturer lose to Masq. Any others? Also, if you're including Discard attacks, you might want to include Goons, which should beat everything but Wharf and Ghost Ship.
Added goons. It loses to Wharf, Ghost Ship, and DoubleJack (?!). I'm not sure it really fits, though - when going for Goons, I'd probably open with one of the cheap BM options if available.
Also, I realized that the way I do the rankings, adding more cards changes the relative rankings - adding goons pushes Jack above Courtyard, because Jack beats Goons but Courtyard does not. Which then also pushes it above Goons and Ghost Ship, since it beats them both, which instantly makes Jack heavily overrated at #2...
Oh well. That's why I made a chart, originally I just had a linear ranking but that was susceptible to stuff like that, the chart keeps that info around.
There are plenty more terminals that you could add: mandarin, harvest, island, bridge, chancellor, mine, bishop, horse traders, nomad camp, watchtower, tribute, and even cards like ironworks. None of them would shatter your existing list though though and some of them need 'optimised' scripts in the simulator.
Yeah, I don't think I want to add all of those.
Tribute and Bishop are good ideas though.
Probably not Island... Island+BM isn't something that's relevant to think about, you'd potentially go Island into some other BM+X, or buy islands over estates at the end of a BM+X...