Old age and growth
 

Does anyone know exactly in what way growth affects old age?

Re: Old age and growth
 

Someone did a test on this a long time ago, and I don't really want to dig up the post.

The short of it: Growth makes old age less likely to result in a disease. Death makes it more likely. If you take a nation where you need to recruit a large number of old age units that you want to stick around for a long time, death scales are not your friend.

Magic paths also effect how this works out (not that you have any control over that, so it's really less relevant). I think fire makes it worse, while earth makes it better.

Jazzepi

Re: Old age and growth
 

I am familiar with this thread. I was just uncertain what the exact effect of growth is. So everything that is known is that disease is a less likely affliction and this knowledge is based on a few experiments? I was hoping for a better answer.

Fire makes it worse, nature and death make it better.

Re: Old age and growth
 

The experiments were extremely clear. 100 mages for 50 turns, I think. I'm not sure what you expected to get besides that.

Unless you're asking for someone to go and look in the code (IE the developers), which no one has access to except for maybe Edi on rare occasion involving fixing typos, you're not going to get a better answer then what's been given.

If you /really/ wanted to, I'm sure you could take the experiment results and try to correlate a relationship between the change in the size of the G/D scale between the change in the speed at which mages received the diseased affliction. THAT would give you a more accurate idea, but it's also something that you can do on your own with the data available.

Jazzepi

Re: Old age and growth
 

Here is that old age test thread:

Some Old Age Tests

Re: Old age and growth
 

Growth scale reduces chance of disease, death scale increases it. Death magic on a mage makes afflictions (including disease) from old age less likely. That's the only relevant stuff. Exact percentages are unknown and may depend on how far over the old age threshold a unit is proportional to it. I do not have access to code regarding this and would not give any details even if I did.

Re: Old age and growth
 

I expected that KO already answered this in some old thread burried somewhere deep in the forums and that someone remembered it and posted it here.

Not all those test are good. The first ones assume that BoT ages
everyone by one each month. But that is not how it works. I did some tests a while ago testing its effectiveness. It works by aging everyone 1d6 (probably not open ended) years per month. And if I remember correctly this random number is calculated per unit, so one philosopher may age 1 year and another 6 years in the same turn.

I wasn't looking for exact numbers, just the effect. It's enough for me to know that the chance of disease is reduced. I just wanted to be certain that is the only effect. Thanks everybody who answered.

Re: Old age and growth
 

Hey, one thing: during one of my Pythium campaigns, I was playing under (among other things) a nature 4 bless, which brings regeneration, which, on shrouded arch-theurgs, increased survival a lot by itself. After casting Gift of Health regenerating archies were pretty much set, as as a general rule the diseases they got dealt no damage, and disappeared after one or two turns anyhow...

I was thinking, maybe, when playing nations with aged commanders, it´s a good idea to bring in a nature blessing just to keep them around? (that, or full throttle into blood and construction, and lots of youth boots)

Re: Old age and growth
 

I did some tests of my own. I tested with MA Caelum and 100 high seraphs. I did tests for growth 0, growth 1 and growth 2. I did 4 tests for each, that is 12 total and I am giving just mean value results. I only counted the number of still surviving seraphs on winter turns (10, 22, 34, 46, 58, 70), because they get diseased on late winter and by next winter all those diseased die. First late winter is turn 11.

It seems to me that the effect of reducing disease affliction is rather weak. I don't feel that taking growth just for the benefit of your old mages is worth it.

Also you cannot rely on growth to cut down on afflictions. I didn't calculate variances, but I'll say that the worst growth 2 result on turn 70 was just 50 mages and the best 69 mages; the worst growth 0 result on turn 70 was also 50 mages and the best was 61 mages.

Re: Old age and growth
 

I think the point isn't that G2 is far superior than G1, but that there was a palpable difference between say D2 and G2.

In any case, if you're playing an old age nation, you can just think of the D-G difference as subtracting/adding more money than the 2% they normally give, since if more mages live longer with growth, you don't have to rebuy them, or if more mages dies faster with death, you will have to buy them.

Jazzepi

Re: Old age and growth
 

I was looking more from the side of research, where taking +1 magic would mean a lot more that taking +1 growth (working on a pretender build), but you have a point.

Re: Old age and growth
 

For blood economies growth can be important. G3 can boost rather fast populations of 4000 above the 5k line needed to get bigger slave yields...

Re: Old age and growth
 

After trying recently two nations with Drain 2, I have to say I'll never do that again. Magic is so fundamentally vital to a nation that any restriction in its development is a mistake. Every time I make a nation I begin with Magic 1 scales, and go from there.

Jazzepi

Re: Old age and growth
 

Yes, you're right but there're some exceptions the most obvious being MA Ulm (which in skilled hands should be played in a different way than any other nation) and Shinuyama. I am playing Shinuyama currently and I must say that my Magic 1 was a mistake because you get a splendid sacred recruitable everywhere 10-11 RP mage. Magic is drastically effective for low-RP mages and if a mage is rather expensive (being the best researcher for the nation and one of the best in the game) you still cannot recruit many enough to benefit from your magic scale.
So, if I created my pretender again, I would leave everything intact instead of magic scale. It's better to invest those 120 points into extra production and growth which would mean more money and more mages.

Re: Old age and growth
 

Obviously Ulm does not fall under the guise of what I mentioned. Being able to pump out mages that aren't affected by drain makes it much easier to set it to -3, just like having Abysia unaffected by fire makes it a easy choice to set it to +3 heat.

Even with high research mages, I still think magic 1 is a must. I played Bogarus with drain 2, and it was a mistake. With magic 1 I would have been /much/ farther ahead on the research scales, especially in a game with difficult research. It also combines well with an awake pretender that can buff himself. Or to scramble up the construction tree to equip him, and then sell gears to others.

Jazzepi