[johan osterman]

[quote]Originally posted by Cainehill:

You think losing 1/4 population is bad? On one of my mosehansen games, turn 10, with Luck _3_, I get a random (Tidal Wave) that wiped out 40% of a province, leaving it with 9500.

I'm sure the people of the province are thankful they live in a land of such wondrous luck: "Ayup, half my family and neighbors were wiped out - but I'm lucky - I ain't got a nail in my boot."

Like you, I'm immensely bothered, upset, frustrated, by the random events and so-called "Luck" in Dom 2.

You have a 4:1 luck to unluck ratio with luck +3. While it doesnt make you immune it certainly alters the odds significantly in favor of luck events. And as you can see from some Posts in this thread not everybody agrees that the badluck effects hurts more then you benefit from goodluck. In dom 1 you could make yourself practically immune to bad luck events by choosing the correct scales, then people complained that they never got to see any bad luck events because because everybody allways played with those scales and there were requests for an adjustment of the scales so more bad luck events would hit you even with optimal scales. Now when that change has been made people are complaining for the opposite reason.

Many players tend to overvalue losses compared to gains (and I would argue that both Mr Cainehill and Mr Montya in this thread are guilty of this), a 25-40% poploss of the home province in one of the early turns is from time to time lauded in this forum as a reason to quit a SP or maybe even giving up in MP. That is obviously a setback but it does not come close to approaching the loss of income you will incur by choosing order 0 or even -3. Starting with order -3 instead of +3 represents a permanent 33% income loss in the home province, well on par with many of the worst events. And this income loss will come to affect most if not all of your provinces. The occasional poploss events is unlikely to ever come close to having such a negative impact on your overall economy. If anything both bad and good luck events should be cranked up.

EDIT: On pop loss in general: It is not an oversight that population decreses it is a design choice, there is a global war between would be Gods going on, people die. There is also game mechanic reasons why opportunities to farm population are sparse. We did not want dominions to have the sort of population farming and herding mechanisms that many civ like games have suffered from.

[ March 28, 2004, 20:56: Message edited by: johan osterman ]