Messages

1

Interface Issues / Re: Kingdom display feature

« on: 05 April 2018, 06:47:03 PM »

Uhh sure, I suppose the bottom cards of split piles shouldn't be under something that says "non-supply piles" or something. I'm glad you're on it -- this feature vastly improves the user experience.

2

Interface Issues / Kingdom display feature

« on: 05 April 2018, 01:23:34 PM »

This feature looks really good and I'm glad I can finally uninstall the extension :-D It works really well for almost all of the kingdoms.

There is still one place where it is a little weird, though. For split piles (Encampment/Plunder, Patrician/Emporium, Catapult/Rocks, Settlers/Bustling Village, Gladiator/Fortune, Sauna/Avanto), both of the cards in the pile appear in-line with the supply cards, meaning that it looks like there are 11 or more cards in the supply. This causes there to be more than two rows, and then there ends up being a row on top with just one card on it.

The point of this feature is to be able to display all of the cards on-screen that are in the kingdom, this is a lot less effective when there are more than just the two rows of five cards visible. With the only exception being Young Witch, the main ten kingdom cards should just be displayed before anything else at all.

Page, Peasant, Knights, and Castles work beautifully. The interface for any of these would work just fine for the split piles. It could just show the top card of the pile in the two main rows and then have the bottom card appear below, or it could show the randomizer card in the two main rows and show the individual cards below.

This feature is really important and I'm glad it was integrated into the main client -- I don't know of any other tool for visualizing kingdoms at all that exists anywhere (and has all cards from all expansions), and I use kingdom visualizers at least one a week consistently (not even including all the times where this is useful to have up when broadcasting games). Having two rows that just tell you what kingdom cards are in the pile is the heart of this feature, so having it work for split piles would make this feature complete.

3

Feature Requests / Re: Any hopes for better AI w/ personalities?

« on: 04 April 2018, 01:44:18 PM »

OK, so you want to do *only* buy rules at the moment, and keep the actual playing of cards and other decisions to the existing bot. Did I understand you correctly?

Yeah. I mean I want all of the things but that's probably not realistic, right?

I assumed that it would be a tough sell to do anything like this because there's so much else to do, but I would also assume that it would be a very small amount of work to be able to just do the buy rules. And only buy rules would still go a super long way towards crowdsourcing the AI (and improving the user experience), and doing it soon would give the community time to generate lots of bots.

The rest of the stuff would be great to have eventually, and maybe the devs make some implementation choice now that makes that stuff easier down the line, so yeah it's probably good to keep in mind.

4

Feature Requests / Re: Any hopes for better AI w/ personalities?

« on: 04 April 2018, 02:11:39 AM »

In theory, a great idea. In practice, its *really hard* to basically invent a programming language that 'speaks' the game, then implement it, test it, document it a.s.o.

What *might* be doable is to use the data structures already present in the client, but have them not interface with a human player, but javascript code that makes the decisions required. I assume that's how it works with the current AI, as initially it had a few cases where bots can get stuck (Lurker used to be such a case), which I think is the AI just giving no or an illegal answer.

If I understand you correctly, you want say one player write an AI that uses Village and Smithy, which cam then be  expanded by other player to include more Villages-likes and Smithy-likes. The problem I see is that that needs to be able to 'deal with' (on a technical level, not just for playing well) all cards an opponent can use against it. If you only know about the base cards and Village/Smithy, what is the AI supposed to do when it has to do something for Militia, or Contraband or any number of cards that require a decision for the game to continue?

I don't know details of the implementation, but in theory, all of the decisions other than buy rules are currently handled by the bot already, and using an XML or something similar to describe buy rules has already been done by Geronimoo's simulator. I would hope that it's not terribly hard to just substitute the bot's current buy rules with something a user could program. Other things may be more difficult but this one thing I think would go such a long way towards an AI and is so little effort.

5

Feature Requests / Re: Any hopes for better AI w/ personalities?

« on: 03 April 2018, 04:06:27 PM »

So I think it would be really helpful to be able to program my own bot and play against it. I feel like it would go a long way if the client only added the ability to import something like a text file with buy rules (much like the inputs to Geronimoo's simulator) and then had the bots play it out in a game with you (forcing in the cards that the bot requires). Adding in the ability to specify simple play rules other than "play non-terminals first, then terminals" could be useful as well.

Not only would this feature be really useful on its own, but if you make it easy for people to share and rate their bots, it could become a great way to crowdsource a Dominion AI...

Let's be realistic, the devs don't have the time it would take to write a competent AI because that's an extremely difficult and time-consuming problem. If you allow users to make bots, I feel like a lot of the work of making a somewhat competent AI could be offloaded onto people other than the developers. With a library of enough decent bots that are good on specific kingdoms, you can pretty easily take a random board and just cherry-pick the best bot you have that has all of the cards it requires.

Some particularly important people would be really happy if Shuffleit had a decent AI, and I think that implementing this feature now would be a very small time investment that would pay off in a huge way.

6

Feature Requests / Re: Upside down cards from opponent

« on: 14 March 2018, 12:57:51 PM »

also, i was wondering if this was only me: whenever i see my opponent has 6(/9) cards left, i always think it's 9 (/6).

This so much. It drives me crazy. The best solution is probably to underline 6 and 9 when they appear by themselves, but who are we kidding...

7

Feature Requests / Re: Upside down cards from opponent

« on: 13 March 2018, 04:36:18 PM »

But we're not at a table. We're sitting at a computer.

8

Feature Requests / Re: Upside down cards from opponent

« on: 13 March 2018, 03:40:10 PM »

Well of course we still want to see relevant information on the card -- name and artwork, we just don't want it to be upside down.

9

Interface Issues / Re: Game end, log

« on: 02 March 2018, 10:27:01 PM »

So when this whole game end thing came up the first time, I thought it wasn't going to last several months. Not being able to see the kingdom or the game log on the game end screen until I click a super-annoying button, and not being able to chat while that button is up, these "workarounds" are really annoying. When is this going to be fixed?

10

Support / Re: Loan card glitch?

« on: 27 February 2018, 03:14:33 PM »

Would be nice if whenever a card is gained or trashed on an opponent's turn, there was an animation to draw attention to that. And it would be nice to be able to have this animation without having to see each individual copper played on my opponent's turns.

11

Feature Requests / Re: Disable Pretend to Think In Bot Games

« on: 27 February 2018, 01:42:17 PM »

Please disable all "pretend to think" options

+1

Really the problem is inconsistency. Gladiator is the only card that allows you to pretend to think, but whenever Moat is on the board and my opponent plays an attack it doesn't prompt me to pretend to think when I don't have a Moat. And that would be silly. The solution is just to get rid of this prompt entirely. It's confusing, can come across as condescending, and it takes away from the user experience.

12

Feature Requests / See opening split sooner

« on: 23 February 2018, 04:16:14 PM »

At the beginning, the game shows me the contents of my starting deck, and I have to click a button to move past that. This is great.

However, if I click the button I have to wait for my opponents to click their buttons before I can see my first hand. I'd like to be able to see my first hand before they click their buttons.

13

Feature Requests / Autoplay for the play all treasures button

« on: 19 February 2018, 04:54:35 PM »

Many times during a game I wish the "play all treasures" button would stop showing up -- it's reflexive to just click the thing at the start of my buy phase, and then all of a sudden I have to ask for an undo because I forgot about Farmland or any of the other 55 cards that make me want to think about which treasures to play.

It would be nice if I could have an autoplay, similar to the ones for all the kingdom cards where I can right-click and tell it to do X for the rest of the game, that stops this button from showing up.

14

Interface Issues / Can't see States when it's not my turn

« on: 31 January 2018, 02:01:09 AM »

I can only see states for the current player, so if it's my opponent's turn and I want to see which states I have (Miserable is the one that I care about the most) there's no way for me to do that.

15

General Discussion / Re: feedback, Dominion Offline & free subscriptions for old MF users

« on: 09 January 2018, 06:48:47 PM »

I'm Adam Horton on the client.



1. An offline client, allowing you to play campaigns against bots

I would like this. I wouldn't really be into the campaigns but just the ability to play a specified kingdom against a bot would be very useful for me to do offline.
Particularly, I want to do playtesting for kingdoms I design for my IRL tournaments and it would be nice if I knew there was no online record of those games being played.
 
Personally, I don't think a campaign would be all that useful -- just the ability to play a recommended set by just selecting from a menu would be way better.


2. A bot with a setting for different play styles

The only setting for a specific play style that I would want is a bot that can play big money with one kingdom card, and is optimized for that. So I could tell the Fun Police Bot to find the best single-card big money enabler on a given board and play an optimized strat for that.

Aside from that, easy/medium/hard might be useful but I would say only if it's very easy to code.


3. A strong bot.

I would like for a strong bot to exist, but I don't think it's a reasonable thing to ask. I think this is difficult enough that it will take so long to do; and there's enough other stuff on the client that needs work that this should be the lowest priority.


4. Options for timed games

I wouldn't use this.


5. Options for undo settings

I would like a setting (similar to the game-specific autoplay setting) where I could grant all undo requests for the rest of the game without having it ask me. I'd also like a setting (similar to the regular autoplay settings) where it will grant every undo request that doesn't reveal additional information without asking me.


6. Online mini-tournaments; the option to easily create one for you & your friends.

I wouldn't use this.


7. Option to invite specific players to your table

I would use this pretty much every time I played Dominion.


8. More translations (to what language?)

I wouldn't use this.


9. Better animations when cards are gained/bought/played/...

An option to have this enabled (and have it enabled by default) is the one single thing that would improve the software the most, in my opinion. Whenever a card is gained on an opponent's turn, that card should dance in front of me. Perhaps a similar animation for if they trash a card. I really don't care about other animations (in fact I'd turn them off) but having this animation would improve the player's experience more than anything else.


10. Better visualization of split piles, Archive/Crypt contents, Prince targets, ...

Archive/Crypt/Haven, etc. contents, yes there needs to be a way to see that.

Split piles, eh, I don't care as much. The King's Courtier plugin does that well enough for me.


10. Option to hide the log

I'd never do it, but I think that option should be there for sure. I would use an option to hide the log and pop out another window that contained an auto-updating log.


11. Android app (or just improved compatibility?)
12. iPhone app (or just improved compatibility?)
I wouldn't use these.


13. Downloadable game logs

These would be great.


14. Improved moderation (dealing with chat abuse, slowplayers, ...)

I'd like a way to squelch the chat. I'd also like a button for "report abuse", mostly because I'm tired of trying to defend the software from people who are frustrated because everyone is a jerk and they don't know how to report abuse. A lightning bolt icon with no explanation isn't enough.


15. Tutorial on how to play Dominion

You can just link mine!


16. Tutorial on how to play dominion online.

The second most important thing for me -- In fact, if the animations were better and this existed, I'd start recommending the software to a lot of people. I'd even make it for you at no charge, provided someone pings me when there are changes to the interface that would affect the tutorial, just so I could keep it up-to-date.

I should make the distinction that I would use this heavily for myself, in addition to showing it to other people.


Edited to make it more readable