[SelfishGene]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
Nearly everyone takes misfortune, as a living nation, because it's the easiest source of points you can get after taking Order...which nearly everyone must also do, or they'll be making half the income of anyone who doesn't. While Misfortune-3 maybe be too much of an ouchie, Misfortune-2 is a pretty decent source of points to partially offset the costs of Order, since Order helps to suppress the annoyance of random events in the first place, which makes it anti-synergistic with Luck.

Eh dunno, the good luck events are really pretty good. Everyone guffaws at free gems but they can easily lead to site searching paths you wouldn't have been able too, at least easily without hot-footing it on the map. The gold events are unpredictable but quite nice.

I had been making test runs with nations for PBeM games, and i found lots of bad luck completely unacceptable, especially the 'province is attacked by barbarians' sort - and even with 3 Order. Those just really damper you expansion if you have to circle back and recapture them, sometimes 4-5 turns have been lost, not to mention the income during occupation and unrest after recapture. This is especially true for nations weak in the early game that really NEED to expand to gain enough capital momentum to move further on their tree to better casters or summons (hi Mictlan!).

And after being burned by Rain in my Home Province in my first email game, i just don't like the risk.

In fact in one game im taking Luck AND Order. We'll see how that works out.

I believe that bad events are triggered by other scales as well. Even with Luck 2 i would get several especially annoying bad events, because another scale was set to -3. Its like there are thresholds for bad events.

For me the 'freebie' scale is either Sloth or Hot/Cold; well, ill take a peg of cold if i just have to have 40 points, but ill take Sloth 2 or 3 if something has to give, over Misfortune. I may well be wrong if you look at the formulae, but its what seems to work best from my experiences and methods.