[quote=“IirionClaus, post:18, topic:4096, full:true”]I talked to another player during the Cambridge regionals, and we reached a similar conclusion – like Marty McFly in Back to the Future 3, the best way to win a shootout is to avoid it.
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More seriously, the best way to win is to make sure the shootout is on your terms, and good play is to force shootouts you can win and avoid those you can’t (or that are crap shoots). I imagine that a Doomtown shootout is usually not a drawn out fight (that would be when you tie several times and both sides lose casualties), but rather that you compare hands to figure out who got the drop on the other side. Shoot first, and you also shoot last.
Couldn’t agree more on Jinteki as first Corp being a horrible mistake.
There is actually a solution to the shootout problem, and that’s to start one player off with a Landslide deck, maybe paired against Law Dogs with Bounty Hunters, or anything with Kidnappin’. Then you have one side that is aggressively trying to avoid shootouts because they have absolutely nothing to do with their win condition, and the other that’s trying to force them through card effects and exploiting the movement rules.
That approach has its own problems - some people find Landslide decks to be “poor sport” (they’re wrong, though) - but it does get over the turn two shootout hump with a little bit of prodding in the right direction.
I think the only area in which this is noticeable is with Cheatin’ punishment. For those who aren’t familiar with the game, a Cheatin’ hand is any one which wouldn’t be a legal poker hand, e.g. you have two copies of the Ace of Spades. It’s a balancing mechanism; if you stack your decks to hit four of a kind or full houses by including multiples of particular values, you’ll get higher hand ranks (i.e. better combat outcomes) but at the risk of making a Cheatin’ hand. There are cards that punish Cheatin’, such that you can’t just blindly always choose the highest rank available.
Some of the more recent Cheatin’ punishment cards are stronger than those in the core set. But that’s more tweaking a balancing mechanism than power creep per se, as it increases the risk of playing an extremely aggressive shooting deck that just runs 16 cards in 3 values and never pulls less than a full house.
I suspect that making the newer cards that punish this stronger was a conscious design decision to address 3x16 decks being a bit too strong in the early meta, but I’ll leave that to @db0 to confirm or deny
It has some really great ideas, but as many others have said it’s really challenging for new folks—even me, who has a huge game collection, works in the (video) game industry, reads rules for fun, and usually teaches new games to people—it’s a hard time wrapping my head around first all the cool rules for movement and combat and figuring out basic strategies that didn’t lead to huge shootouts in town square.
I love the theme and the elegance of the mechanics once you have them down, but there was a definite sense of “ok, now what do I do?” about it. It feels like basic game theory says “if we don’t fight now I’m not sure I’ll be able to win” pretty quickly.
That said, I’m definitely keeping my cards and would love to have a chance to play against people. I think there’s a group in my area, but it’s hard to find time even for ANR right now :).
I think the guiding heuristics are too hidden. It’s not too difficult (not easy either) to see who is winning, but it is difficult to determine what would be a good course of action. I think this is due in part to the nebulous goal of influence and in part to the sometimes unintuitive shootout mechanics (more bullets doesn’t always mean more cards, sometimes the number of bullets doesn’t matter).
It’s easy enough to say “you win by having more control than your opponent has influence”, but it then isn’t clear how to achieve that. Do you need to play more control yourself? Steal your opponent’s? Remove their influence? Keep pumping up yours?
And of course the answer is all, or none, of the above, depending on… many things. That’s pretty tough to grasp. No wonder it devolves to all-in shootouts, because that’s the single most obvious route towards your victory condition. It’s just not often a very sensible course of action.
I wouldn’t say there’s a power creep, some cards, in some situations, outclass ones from the core, but much of the same thing happens with ANR as well (e.g. Mélange or Wall of Static) but there’s a lot of others who are still heavily used, such as Sun In Yer Eyes, Coachwhip etc. Expansions have merely provided a lot of variety, especially in options for different values.
I’ve played the game quite a bit, and played with basically everyone who plays on OCTGN regularly often. I’ve seen a few people working on the doomtown math problems to determine what type of draw structure to build from what I’ve been able to math out, 16X2 15X1 or 16X3 or BUST in terms of 2 stud or lower combat, in terms of HUGE combat DMH or bust; But HUGE=14 or higher bullets, with at least 5 Stud. I’m actually trying to make a DMH or bust build to see if it A: insane or B: trash, basically there is no in between with this sort of thing.
16x3 actually has the best non cheating hands as well, since you need to realize that all hands below Full house succk
Shootouts are a massive source of output randomness, that is I make a decision THEN the result is itself random. The card draw is whatever because we draw enough cards that ghost rock is the real limiting factor, so card draw randomness is randomness that impacts WHAT I can do and not the RESULT of what I do.
Shootout avoiding however is a very suboptimal strategy indeed, each time you run away from a shootout you are conceding a property to your opponent, meanwhile the opponent gains in Ghost rock every turn you decide to not fight. As such it is game theory optimal typically to Go all in on town square turn one and fight the big game deciding shootout. People who try to run away and hide and do other nonsense have a very very low win% vs me.
As such I think moderately high level doomtown devolves very quickly into one big shootout destroy’s the game, since whenever you avoid shootouts you cede control of your town area to the opponent, and that is a very very bad situation to be in. Instead you should go for the gusto and fight the opponent in a single large shootout, or a series of smaller ones.
I played vs many landslide decks played by BD_Flory and Mplain I don’t lose to landslide. 8-T-Q based 4th ring is strong at controlling things yes, but one thing it’s AMAZING at is using paralysis mark to snipe down an enemy dude
Pray tell, how do you respond when I send ramiro mendoza at yan li’s talioring? do you run away and hide? IF you do, how do you avoid losing while I can develop my economy using cards like extortion, A coach comes to town, Other jobs, my own deeds ect. Steven wiles throws a wrench in these sorts of plans but not as much of one as one would hope.
One thing is that deeds ARE more efficient than dudes are at “killing” them. That’s why playing your own deeds is important, it lets you stay afloat in the early-midgame economically.
I can do many things. I can send someone to pistol whip your ramiro and deny you 1 GR while getting back my production. I can boot Ramiro with a Paralysis Mark and force you commit another dude there or let me get its production. I can use Androcles to still make money out of your dudes camping my deeds. I can play my own extortion or simple defend against your coach while Ramiro is hanging out at my deed. I can send an expendable Travis to throw some Sun in Your Eyes and then Take Ya With Him if you manage to win anyway.
Or, more often than not, I can wait 1-2 turns and keep playing deeds, I’ve done the latter mutliple times while I was on the defensive. The truth is that it’s impossible to camp everything and losing 1 or even 2 turns of production is not a big deal if your upkeep is not overwhelming.
16x3 is not actually a good deck structure. If you play that deck structure, you guarantee me 4 production a turn while you have only 2. This allows someone to take their time to build defensively and get a good shootout hand to fight you, and the big issue of the 16x3 deck is that it crumbles against bullet reduction + anti-cheatin effects, since it can’t help but cheat. A Law Dog starting Tommy and Wendy has often spelled a short end to many such shenanigans
Could you recommend two decks for us to play with? We got two cores and the first expansion. We played with the precons a bunch (all four), but felt that they were one-dimensional. Perhaps with a better deck we’d get a different feel for the game.
The problem I have with Doomtown is that it came out at the same time as Conquest, and I like Conquest more both mechanically and thematically. If Doomtown had come out significantly earlier I might have headed there instead, but the timing was really unfortunate.
Also, the art is really bad. It doesn’t feel like the art standards went up much from the old Doomtown (which is now 15 years old), but the rest of the card game world has definitely been upping its game since then.
I don’t have anything like that available immediately but I know people have designed such decks before. Might I suggest you inquire at the Gomorra Gazette forums? There’s a lot of regulars there I’m sure will be able to point you to the right direction.
I did try it, still have the core set. Was also playing on OCTGN from the start to about time when EDS was released. We actually even played a few games against each other.
Here what I think.
The game is amazing. Love the theme, love the core mechanics.
Unfortunately what kills it for me is the fact that waaay too many cards are like mini rulebooks. Without reading multiple threads on them you won’t be able to play correctly.
Rules team also didn’t impress me a bit. Example: I asked if it was possible to do something with Auto-Revolver which can contribute to the fight in the town square even from out of town deed, which is absurd, and received the following answer: “you realize this is the weird west, right?”.
We generally have a conscious effort to not do too much of this, except when the effect is interesting. I think this kind of thing is unavoidable in card games (e.g. look at Personal Workshop or Awakening Center in ANR), but as long as the game is not full of these, it’s manageable. And I think DTR isn’t really that full of these.
Can’t speak for the story team but you have to remember they’re also volunteers and they tend to get pestered a lot by rules lawyers . I think AEG seriously is going out of its way for community outreach compared to other companies, but that’s the flipside of that. .
I followed DTR several months before release and had it highly anticipated. Bought a Deluxe set and a core set, have all the Saddle Bags, run our local tournaments and got us a Sheriff Event.
I really like the game, it is still just my secondary game, after ANR, and I do play it too little. I am going to start playing on OCTGN…Iäve said for some time but time and barrier to get used to the interface (I do play ANR, but think that DTR is a bit harder to do on OCTGN). Evey once in a while I feel like I get to play too little and think about stopping, then I play a small tourny or just some casual games and snap out of it, it really really is a great game.
Like somone said, it is not a game about shootouts, it is a game about position, out manouvering your opponenet. If you can do that you do not need to have the best draw structure. The biggest “problem”, aside from the lack of players (I do my best to grow tha local player base, we had 8 players in the last tournamen which I am happy with, even a few regulars that could not make it), is the barrier of entry. It is similar to DTR in rules complexity, but on top of that, like many people say, the game ends during the first day in one big shootout, so there is an additional barrier on top of the rules which is learning to understand the game, like I said, it is not about shootouts, it is about position.
Really hope to get more time to play and hope we get a lot of players for the Sheriff Event.
. I think AEG seriously is going out of its way for community outreach compared to other companies, but that’s the flipside of that. .