Message from Abysia

[Taqwus]

Oh, no worries there. I don't think there's a known perfect strategy for Go yet, and Go is a 2-player game with no hidden information and at most 361 legal moves from any legal state.

Dominions offers up to 21 players, has mostly hidden information, and has a far higher branching factor combined with a degree of deliberate measure-countermeasure in (that is, there are specific counters to different approaches... but exploiting the counters has opportunity cost. Pure minimax says you're screwed.)

Dominions offers a fair bit of variability, but when you're dealing with armies of 400+, the law of averages is going to come into play. It's mostly the random events hitting early that can make a huge difference (imagine the 1500 free gold + an item event at the start... or losing 99.9% of the population of your capital to the Ancient Presence event), and IIRC some events are restricted as to how soon they can happen, and that probability can be reduced on game creation.

Randomness frustrates me more in Diablo (farming monsters for item drops is tedious) and Nethack (which is pretty much the embodiment of 'arbitrary'). Here, I would be annoyed if an SC died to a randomly lucky arrow or Soul Slay... but it does mean that it's actually possible to counter SCs without resorting to SCs oneself, and that's probably a good thing.

[Valandil]

There is a nice proof that the person that goes first should always win. Unfortunately, there is no way to know how.