But - I don't expect this to be used - because it discourages zapping.
I don't imagine they will make the system flat-out discourage zap use, although I wouldn't rule it out, they might if it sounded good enough. But I think they have come around to my argument that they are not going to make money from zaps and should stop trying in favor of making the campaigns fun; the dominion coins product will be campaigns themselves rather than zaps.
At the moment it seems like they will use my campaign levels, where zaps can be a crutch but shouldn't be needed (except the free zaps, you need those in acts 2-3), except for level 20s, which they changed to require more zaps, I guess thinking, wait this is where you get a pile of VP tokens. And from my perspective that makes no money but makes level 20 bad, because I mean, okay, I can buy some zaps with dominion coins which were free, to joylessly beat the level 20's. But uh that's how it looks. Nineteen playable levels per campaign, well it's a big improvement.
Again I don't know when this stuff will go up, because one thing was, they plan on adding more things you can muck with in campaign levels, based on my suggestions, and so I used a little of that stuff in my levels, and so they won't go up until that stuff is programmed.
Anyway uh it's possible they are still clinging to the idea that someone will buy up zaps to get three stars. I haven't discussed the stars thing with them. Number of turns sounds like a reasonable measure if what you want is something very simple, which possibly you do, but it just has different bad cases than score. You cite the case where I end the game on piles and win before we've gotten into the Provinces, but what about say a Duke strategy? I lock up the game by getting eight Duchies before the bot is anywhere near to cleaning out the Provinces, but I don't get three stars because this strategy is too slow.
And the game is about scoring more when it's over - it's not about ending the game quickly. It's more natural to use score than turns then, right? And for some games score does tell me how well I did. OTOH, a lot of games will end with close scores, and the point to stars is to say how well you did vs. other instances of this game being played, and well can score do that?
I guess it could be, well your graph with score instead of zaps. Reward either having a high score or short game. And try to factor in Goons / Witch / etc. into the defaults.