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[Herald/Necromancer/Zombie Spy]

Modifications in September 2019:




 
• 19-09-03:
  
     
  • Added Herald/Necromancer/Zombie Spy bug that freezes the game if Herald plays Necromancer which plays Zombie Spy on an empty deck.

 
• 19-09-05:
  
     
  • Added (now fixed) Encampment/Captain bug that returns an Encampment played via Captain (and no Gold/Plunder revealed) to its supply pile, even if it has been gained in the mean time and is in somebody's discard pile.

 
• 19-09-07:
  
     
  • The Encampment/Captain bug from two days ago has been fixed.

 
• 19-09-15:
  
     
  • Finished adding bugs described by Jeebus in this forum post. They mostly deal with problems on landmarks and with cards like Band of Misfits that can be triggered with Innovation.

Thanks for the report!

Interestingly, the problem doesn't happen when you play the Zombie Spy directly or just via Necromancer on an empty deck.

I guess it has to do with the Herold playing the card from the top of the deck, and some bookkeeping going wrong.

Diplomat as Reaction reduces your hand size by 1. Also, Diplomat can only be revealed when you have 5 or more cards in hand.

That means normally, when you have a 5 card hand, you get to use Diplomat once on the first attack, then have 4 cards in hand and that's it.

In your case, you had a 6 card hand due to Flag. That means after using Diploamt once (reducing your hand size to 5), Diplomat was still applicable, so you got asked again.

Note that in an IRL game nobody could tell if you were revealing the same Diplomat, or another one. So the ruling was made early (for Secret Chamber) that you could reveal a Reaction again and again (without stalling).

The example was you react to an attack with revealing Secret Chamber (draw 2 cards, put 2 cards on top of the deck), then reveal a Moat (which you may have gotten from the draw) to be unaffected by the attack, then react with Secret Chamber again (maybe putting the Moat back on top of your deck so it is ready to stop an attack later).

Thanks for the reply. I'll try to set up a similar game and see what happens.

Thanks for reportig this issue, and sorry that you had to go through this.

Any kind of threat is of course unacceptable. I assume it happened in the second of the games you played togother, can you confirm this (that makes it easy to confirm what happened). I assume a ban will happen (I can't do it myself, I pass this on).

In the meantime, to make sure you are not paired with that player again, blacklist them, if you haven't done yet (go to the "Friend list" tab, then switch to your black list and enter their user name).

Thanks for the report, fp!

Unfortunately, the game doesn't load, which can be a sign that something strange is going on.

Do you remember what triggered the game end and caused Fleet turns? Provinces gone or 3 piles empty?

I tried a few scenarios (end on 3-pile, buy last Province in first fleet turn and vice versa), but all of them worked out as they should. Your kingdom had Experiments and Encampments, which may fool a player into thinking the game is over to early on a 3-pile, but this shouldn't happen to the game.

When you say the game ended abruply, I assume it ended after the first fleet turn, or did it end mid-turn?
From the Dombot info it seems that nasmith99 started the game and it ended after a turn they took. Can you confirm this?

Thanks Ingix,
If I understand you; you are saying that Small Castle only works (ie, getting another castle after being trashed) if you play the card and then trash it.  It will not work if it is trashed by playing another card (eg, Chapel, Remodel, Cemetery, etc etc etc., right?

Yes, that's correct.

[do not click "login".]

Do the following:

1) Open a private window (Firefox) or incognito window (Chrome).
2) Go to dominion.games
3) Enter your credentials (name/password) as usual, but do not click "login".
4) Instead, below the login button is a small row of text. Click on "Kick and resign" there.
5) You should get a message "Kick successful". You can now close the private/incognito window and go to your usual tab, where you can now login normally.
6) If you messed up step 3 and reflexively clicked "login", you must close the private/incongnito window and start again with step 1.

[only]

What you experienced is the correct behaviour!

Small Castle says:

Trash this or a Castle from your hand. If you do, gain a Castle.
---
2VP

Compare this to Cultist:

+2 Cards
Every other player ...(not important here)
---
When you trash this,+3 Cards.

Cultist has a triggered ability that happens when you trash it. You know it has a triggered ability because it is "below the line" (which is a strong hint) and it mentions a condition ("When you trash this") and something that happens as a result of it ("+3 Cards"). (Other common triggered ability mention a time, often "At the start of your next turn" on Duration cards).

Cultist's triggered ability works if trashed for The Flame's Gift (the Boon you got), if you Remodel it, if you are forced to trash it via opponent's Swindler, it even works when you trash it with Lurker from the Supply.

Now compare this wording to Small Castle.

That doesn't mention a condition (or a time), it just flat out says "Trash this or a Castle from your hand." Because it is an Action card and the text is "above the line", it happens only when you execute the card by playing it. Then, it makes an additional effect dependend on the successful execution of that previous sentence, by saying "If you do, gain a Castle." This is also different from a triggered ability, which says "When you <do X>" or "At <time Y>".

Wordings are meant to be parsed by humans, not machines, so they vary a bit and one cannot say "It absolutely must have these words to make it a triggered ability".  The most important sign of a triggered ability is that it describes a condtion/time and then says what should happen. In contrast, things that happen during a card's execution will directly state what is supposed to happen, then add a clause of "If you do" or "If you did" to make further effects dependend on the successfull execution of the previous effect.

That seems strange, I had no problem logging and connecting to all 3 game play servers right now (from Germany).

What exactly happens when you try to login? Do you get the login screen or the spinning castle?

[accounts]

The accounts can easily be banned. The players behind them then just make a new free account, unfortunately.  >:(

Familiar cards are *not* respected when you play a rated game. So if you go to the "Matching" tab and under the "Automatch" section either click on "Two player" or "Three player", you try to enter the queue for rated games and when you find opponent(s), you enter a rated game and nobody's Familiar Cards are respected.

In order to have your Familiar Cards respected you need to click on "Practice game" (for a game against another human player) or choose 1-3 AI bots as opponents under the "Bot game" section in the "Matching" tab.

There are various advanced options you could change but the basic rules is the same: If you play a rated game, Familiar Cards are not respected. Of course, if the opponent you find via the automatch for rated games has (like I assume is true for you) no subscription to an expansion, then the game will select a kingdom on the combined set of cards that both of you are subscribed to, which would only be the base set because that is free for everybody.

All official communication will be here. Unlike the league, there is no requirement to have a discord presence.

Mods are likely to be active on discord as usual, and there might be a channel dedicated to the tournament, where players can communicate. Contact your opponent via PM in this forum. Of course, if you see a discord name equal to your opponent's name, you can check if they are your opponent.

English:
The main point of my answer is that forum activity is at the moment so low that
a) one or two German threads (or any other language) should not be difficult for English speakers to ignore and
b) finding German content will be easy if you use the forum ability to mark new content: It's maybe 2-3 new posts per day generally, so looking through them and finding any German content should be easy. A German only subforum would probably get only new 2-3 threads a month, after maybe an initial phase.

Deutsch:
Hauptpunkt meiner Antwort ist dass die Forumaktivität im Momement so gering is, dass
a) 1 oder 2 deutsche (oder anderssprachige) Threads es für englischsprechende Nutzer nicht besonders schwer macht, diese zu ignorieren und
b) das Finden deutscher Inhalte auch einfach ist, wenn man die Forumsfunktion nutzt, sich neue Beiträge extra markieren zu lassen. Bei vielleicht 2-3 neuen Beiträgen pro Tag sollte das machbar sein. Ein rein deutschsprachiges Forum würde geschätzt nur 2-3 neue Threads pro Monat haben, nach einer gewissen Anfangsphase.

[If you buy the last Patrician/Gladiator, Talsiman is not supposed to give you the next card in the pile, because it is differently named card!]

The main source of problems is often the design of something, that makes an apparently easy change complicated.

To give you an example, when I did a bit of Dominion programming for myself years ago, I just started with the base set. In that time, a supply pile during the game could easily be described by 2 things: The card it represents, and the number of cards still in it.

When you start with this and continue and do work, then everything is fine, until Dark Ages comes out and suddenly you have 2 piles that contain different cards (Ruins and Knights), later of course more (split piles, Castles).

What's easy to do and handle in real life becomes a problem in your code. In real life, you always had to put down 10 cards per pile, that doesn't change with Kniths. But in the code, you just had 2 things representing a pile: The card in it and the number of cards left in it. That has to change, you must now represent each card in a pile by its own thing (thats an object in todays programming paradigm).

That's some busywork, but usually doable. The big problem is that probably in some places in your code you have assumed that only one kind of card can come from a pile. Consider Talisman, a Treasure card that when it is in play and you buy a card costing $4 or less, you gain another copy of that card.

So, what you could have done in the Dominon world before Dark Ages is to check, when you buy a card, how many Talismans are in play (call that number X), and how many copies of the card you want to buy are still in the supply (call that number Y).

If X+1 is less than or equal to Y, then you give the player X+1 copies of the card from the pile (one bought and one each for the X Talismans). If not, then you give them the remaining Y copies of the card, emptying the pile. That would have worked pretty well.

When Dark Ages comes around, you implement the changes I outlined above. You will have to change how to represent a supply pile and probably have a function that gives a player the top card of a pile, because that is needed very often (gaining cards happens regularly). If you don't have a special function that gives a player several cards from a pile, you'll change the check I described above to give the aditional cards from Talisman out one at a time. Everything works, even after extended testing.

So, on the surface all is well, until Empires comes out a few years later. You implement the split piles like you did Knights and Ruins. But 1 day after the online implementation goes life, you get bug reports. One player is complaining that their opponent got a Fortune in addition to the Gladiator they bought. Another says they don't think it is correct that they got an Emporium with the Patrician they bought. You look up the games and see that in both cases the players had a Talisman in play.

So what happened? The old assumption that you only need to count the cards in a pile to handle Talisman is now incorrect. If you buy the last Patrician/Gladiator, Talsiman is not supposed to give you the next card in the pile, because it is  differently named card! That situation could not exist when you  programmed Talisman, so you did not take it into account. Such kind of problems are the source for many bugs, one of them the loss of an Ariadne 5 rocket: https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-ariane-5-disaster
What happened was that an assumption that was correct for Ariadne 4 rockets was no longer true for Ariadne 5 rockets!

What I want to show with this is changing things that appear easy may have consequences that are not easily understandable from an outside perspective, because that doesn't take into account how the current behavior has been implemented. Maybe the part of the program that plays out the Treasure cards for bots isn't really part of the bot code, but some other code that needs to exist anyway for other reasons. Then you have to make new code (because the old code is still needed).

Sometimes information needed is not available at the place that executes that code, or it is complicated to bring this infomation to the place (think of transmitting someone who is physically away from you a lengthy shopping list, in the days before mobile phones; usually you had to talk to them on a (fixed) phone and they had to write it down, if they had something to write with and on). Information flow in a program is restricted for good reasons, so sometimes things are harder to do than then they appear.