[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Catquiet:
Originally posted by Saber Cherry:

quote:

---

I don't like the ideas of the luck scale causing increased gold income, or weakening Order's gold boost.

At the moment, even with common random events, events don't happen often enough to make + Luck worthwhile. If they increased the frequency of random events or made good events a whole lot better, Dominions II would depend too much on chance. That would take away from the strategy part of the game.

The +/- gold from the LUCK scale would represent all the tiny events that affect the income of your peasants but aren't quite newsworthy. One farmer's plow horse goes lame, moths get into a silk merchant's warehouse, ect. It all adds up.

Currently ORDER has the most important scale effect in the game. Positive ORDER also reduces the good and bad effects of LUCK. Together these things make LUCK very unattractive, it needs a +/- gold bonus to make it viable.

---

On the contrary, events happen quite often. The reason luck isn't attractive is that events aren't consistently positive even with strong luck, and the few crippling events (e.g. flood in home province - although I've seen it in the first year, it is crippling anytime; banning it from the first X turns wouldn't help enough) far outweigh the handful of extra gems or free militia.

That, and order is too valuable for its gold boost. Change it to +/-5% gold, +/-5% events, and make some of the worst events misfortune-only, and I think you'd go a long way toward fixing the order/luck problems.

Magic is another issue - as Saber points out, high levels of drain produce proportionally more decrease in research while high levels of magic produce proportionally less increase.

I'd like to see one or more of the following:
* more gems per site in magic (including home sites) - as Saber proposed
* reduced empowerment cost in magic (+/-10% per scale? Empowerment is pretty rare so you need a big effect to be noticeable)
* reduced ritual/forge cost in magic (+/-5% per scale? Ulm Smiths immune to drain for forging, perhaps not for rituals.)

obviously with the opposite effects in drain.

High levels of magic should make you a magical powerhouse, which currently they don't really - the dominant factor is your gem/slave income, which depends mostly on how many provinces you control and what mages you have available to search them. Research plays a part but not that big a part - and high magic levels don't help research that much anyway.

If magic scale influences gem income, it should influence blood hunting as well. Give Abysia somewhere to put all those points. Of course if the cost reduction approach is taken instead, it would already affect blood magic just like other paths.

I see no problem with the current heat/cold, productivity/sloth or growth/death scales. Different nations, themes and strategies have good reasons to take different positions on these scales, which IMO is how it should be. I have seen and played anything from +3 to -3 and consider them all viable for the right strategy. I wish I could say that for turmoil, magic, drain and luck. Any turmoil is likely to hose you, luck isn't worth the points, high magic isn't worth the points and high drain is too crippling except for standard Ulm.