Spending Villagers - edgecases

[Stef]

...This will be sufficient in >99% of the games...

In theory there are 3 exceptions:
- If you are possessing your opponent, you probably want to waste their villagers.
- If you are scared of being possessed, you may want to waste your own villagers.
- If you intend to play Diadem and you prefer coins to Villagers, you may want to use them.

Two things you can do:
- If you're in your action phase and nothing else is currently happening (= you're not in the middle of playing some card) you can click the villager icon in the status bar to use a villager.
- If you manage to play diadem in your action phase (Black Market or Storyteller) it will simply ask you how many Villagers you want to spend before getting the coins from Diadem.

Unfortunately this still don't cover all these edge-cases. Most notably, maybe you have Diadem in hand but no actions whatsoever, and the game will automatically skip your Action phase. We'll figure something out before Renaissance goes live for real to fix that.

[santamonica811]

Stef,
What are you quoting from?  If it's another thread, can you include enough information here so that we readers know what you are talking about?  :)

(Or a link to the other thread...that would be fine as well.)

[markus]

It's from today's release notes.

[Stef]

Stef,
What are you quoting from?  If it's another thread, can you include enough information here so that we readers know what you are talking about?  :)

(Or a link to the other thread...that would be fine as well.)

actually the forum software automatically makes that "Quote from"-line a link you can click. I will admit it doesn't look like a link though.

[jeebus]

The confusing thing is that I can't spend Villager tokens after playing my last action card, because it goes immediately to the buy phase. (I'm playing with Diadem.) I had to undo four times before I figured out how to do it.

[Ingix]

As Markus wrote elsewhere, the requirement to confirm "End Actions" in all the cases where you have Villagers but no use case as with Diadem was a much bigger nuisance. Due to cards like Venuture, the Diadem might not even be in your hand for it to be relevant.

People have different ideas what to do about this, we'll see what will be implemented until the full release.

[JW]

As Markus wrote elsewhere, the requirement to confirm "End Actions" in all the cases where you have Villagers but no use case as with Diadem was a much bigger nuisance. Due to cards like Venuture, the Diadem might not even be in your hand for it to be relevant.

People have different ideas what to do about this, we'll see what will be implemented until the full release.

When I have Diadem in hand, the game still goes straight from my actions phase to my buy phase when I have no more actions, so it doesn't give me a chance to spend Villagers.

- If you're in your action phase and nothing else is currently happening (= you're not in the middle of playing some card) you can click the villager icon in the status bar to use a villager.

Thanks for this tip. However, if I hadn't come to this thread, I wouldn't have had any idea that I could do this, because it's not documented anywhere (or an option that I can envision using in any other situations).

[Ingix]

Yeah, the whole Villager edge case problematic got not resolved, and the Villager/Coffers UI is still in a flux between using sliders (as originally used for coin tokens) and using the mat icon explicitely.

[quackman]

Was there ever a resolution to this?

On game 86152913 turn 17 I had no actions, one villager, Patron, Diadem and Gold. I used the villager to play the Patron, which gave me another villager. The game took me straight to the buy phase and would not let me use the villager to get an extra action. As a result when I played the Gold and Diadem I had a total of 7 coin - if I had been able to use the villager for its action, the Diadem would have granted 3 coin, and I would have been able to buy a Province.

Am I right that this ends up being an edge case the software doesn't address, or is there a way I could have made this work?

[Ingix]

As far as I understand, there was nothing you could have done in that case.

My personal idea to solve this problem would be to have an "anti-autoplay" in the sense that selecting that option would make sure you always get an "End Action" button if you have Villagers, no matter if the game thinks doing anything else would be "useless". In that case, you could have converted the last Villager to an Action, then ended the Action phase, and gotten $1 more from the Diadem.

I don't know how hard that would be to do.