Print

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

[rrenaud]

Given both theory and my losses at WBC were partially due to over-reliance on ambassador, I think it might be good to get players feedback on the strength of Ambassador in >2p games.

There are at least two reasons why I believe ambassador is worse in 4p than 2p.  When 4 player games end on provinces (assuming all players are competent), you'll tend to have fewer turns than in 2p, since there are only 3 provinces per player rather than 4.  Since ambassador sacrifices a slow early/mid game for a really strong (and weak opponents) late game, shorter games work against ambassador.  There is much less late game to capitlize on the ambassador.

Second, games can end on piles much more easily in 4p, and ambassador can actually drain piles in 4p unlike 2 player games.  If you constantly give away an estate in 2p, the pile takes forever to drain.  But when you give them away in 4p, the 12 estates can deplete very quickly.  The estates meant to gunk up opponents decks just make them win in short games.

[WanderingWinder]

I'm by no means a multiplayer expert, but... I would guess that it's still a good card on most boards. It's not going to be the uber-card it is in 2-player. You probably don't want to try to double-ambassador. And if there are things that suggest 3-pile endings might be imminent anyway (often ironworks with any other good cheap card, gardens, great hall, even island), you may well want to bypass them altogether. Those estates 1 VP estates against you can kill.

[DStu]

I think that is true, not only for ambassador but for trashing in general. Remeber a game where I played with 3 quite inexperient player. It was way before Isotropic, but anyway I knew that Chapel is totally overpowered and thought I would crush them as no one bought it. Managed to win closely by 1 point against the guy who started Duchy/"something which is not Chapel".

With Ambassador and 4p I remembered a game where the guy who bought no ambassadors at least almost won in 3pile including Great Hall. Without ever buying VP.

The game is usually faster, and it's much more difficult to get to the expensive cards as you are more likely to be attacked. So you really have to consider the possibility of a fast ending and have a plan how you get your VPs fast when the piles are running out. If you're trashing heavyly (incl. Ambassador) it might take too many turns to recover.

@WW: I guess additionally cheap cantrips in combination with strong attacks also make 3pile-ending likely, as if everybody is stucked at 3/4 and take 2 of them, the pile is almost gone and whoever is in front might just finish them.

:e Grammar

[rod-]

You probably have to play your ambassadors differently, but if you are the only person running ambassadors in a 4p game, you can still profit - you just have to make sure you dont singlehandedly empty the estate pile...

Ambassador coppers over estates.  Ambassador estates only when you have 2 in hand.  Etc...

My most recent multiplayer experiment went really well for me being the only person with ambassador, but that likely was due to the board itself rather than ambassador - It was really slow, militia and torturer.  Even so, by the time my deck was trimmed down, one opponent was already buying provinces with 3+ gold in deck. (He was the 1st player, of course, so his militias were a lot better)

On that topic, I'm interested in how the seating order was dealt with at WBC.

[philosophyguy]

Would a better strategy in >2p be to preferentially Ambassador Coppers instead of Estates? You still get the advantage of deck thinning and opponent deck bloating while not giving VPs to your opponents and running out the Estate pile. The disadvantage is that you're decreasing your deck's buying power, but if you're returning 2 Coppers, you're gaining some decent trashing in return.

[Superdad]

Indeed, I don't think it was so much that you two lost because of Ambassador itself, but rather by overlooking the effect that emptying a pile did to the game (while giving your opponents some quick VP gain).

As long as you keep an eye on how much VP each opponent has, how close the game is to 3-pile end, I think if you adjust your province/duchy buying rules to account for it, you'll still be way ahead using ambassador than not using it. Giving coppers instead of estates is an okay idea, but I would still give estates back for the first few times.

A simply duchy or two (or province or two) should be enough to offset the short-term VP you just gave your opponents. They will then be in the position of catching up to you in VP, but have slower decks than you.

I think the error was likely made in missing the need to buy a province/duchy slightly earlier as the game was not expected to end so early? I could be wrong, I'm only going off my own experience.


I posted this in the other thread as well, but I played a similar game this weekend against some kids I was teaching the game to. It was a 4-player game with pawn/great hall. Mostly being accustomed to 2-P games, I was taken back by how quickly that game 3-piled (10 or 11 turns). Infact, the player that won the game opened Duchy/pawn believe it or not!

[rrenaud]

The seating order thing is reasonably well handled by WBC.

You play two games every round against the same 4 players.  In turn order is reversed from game 1 to game 2.  You advance based on some number points per place formula, with tie breaker being sum vp (I would much rather have it difference vp from winner), but as a whole, it seems pretty fair and reasonable.

[DG]

The ambassador does seem to change in multiplayer, as usual depending upon how many people play them. If everyone has them then you do not want to lose the size war or you deck will become a mountain. On the other hand, even if you're winning the size war you'll be unlikely to ever completely control your deck since other people will always be feeding you more cards or hitting you with other attacks. In that respect I think you need to look for ways to accelerate out of the ambassador stage and find some income without waiting for the perfectly contracted deck.

[theory]

I think it's really just that Ambassador suffers from the Chapel effect, i.e., you sacrifice a lot of early game power for a lot of late game strength.  Sometimes it doesn't even work in 2p against a fast accelerant deck, because you fall behind too much to catch up later on.  (I had a game vs WanderingWinder where I nearly lost because of that.)  In a shortened 4p game, Ambassador/Ambassador probably just gets stomped every time against 3 non-Ambassadoring opponents.

[rls22]

I got killed recently in a 4p offline game that had Ambassador on the board.  All the reasons why have been alluded to already, but I really think my critical mistake was not understanding when I needed to shift to buying VPs (because I thought there would be significantly more turns left than there actually ended up being).  One of my opponents started buying duchies and I thought, well, he's killing his deck right now.  But, of course he won.  Also, turns out getting 2 Ambassadors is usually not a great move in 4p. 

I play almost exclusively 2p on Isotropic, so I'm not that great at 3p or 4p (I don't have as much experience with how powerful attacks are, I'm not as good at sensing when the transitions to "mid-game" and "end-game" happen, etc.) . I actually don't mind this, though, because when I play offline, it's almost always with more than 2 people.  And, the people I play with don't play nearly as much Dominion as I do, so it's sort of nice for me to have a "handicap" so everyone has a good chance to win (and people still want to play with me... :>).