[Verjigorm]

I've played around with Luck/Turmoil several times. You don't need fortune tellers. You will generally get fewer bad events than a player with Order/Misfortune. However, the nation you select has to be able to absorb the loss of revenue caused by the turmoil scale.

Frequently, when taking Turmoil/Luck, I found it's extremely unwise to go heavy on Turmoil because there's no way to repair the loss of tax revenue.

Keep in mind that a lot of this is just strategizing and hasn't been put into practice.

You lose 7% income per shift toward Turmoil so sticking in the 1-2 Turmoil range will allow you to balance (up to 12%) the revenue loss with increases in Production/Growth.

I messed with T'ien Chi with this pretender (Keep in mind I'm not crazy about him overall right now, he was a test candidate):

Lord of Plenty (Body 1339, 150 hits)
Magic: Earth 8 Astral 4
Dominion 5
Scales: Turmoil 1 Productivity 2 Cold 1 Growth 2 Fortune 3 Magic 1
Imprisoned

Why I like MA-TC for Luck/Turmoil:

TC has incredible magical versatility and some relatively cheap basic mages and regular units. They have a need for extra production to build archers well since their archers are kind of resource intensive, so they are naturally predisposed toward Production scales, and they have old mages (not withstanding their national age reversal spell), so growth works too.. Taking magic scales allows for special events to occur. I'm not sure which events take which levels, but I'm sure there's a table somewhere (in fact I know there is). I think Luck-3, Magic-3 has a special event associated with it.

Ignore the magic picks and focus on the scales. That was an interesting but not very useful experiment.

The experiment showed that you can sustain very good mage and unit production with a flat income bonus (0% total). The money drop specials are the bomb, but it's the gem drops you're looking for. The gems are random but occur frequently enough to be useful and will put you ahead of the curve especially since TC can site search everything except blood and death naturally and they can use virtually any gem type.

TC Also has excellent Immortal national heroes.

Now, TC is recommended to take order because of free PD, but I still get PD bonus events. After all, I'm lucky!

So after my rambling.... What I'm essentially looking for in the Turmoil/Luck combo is:

1. A nation that can use a wide variety of gems.
2. A nation that deals well with good scales and slightly decreased money supply (e.g. no bonus money). Cheaper common troops, with higher production requirements otherwise we're wasting the Production scale bonus.
3. A nation that can tough it out with a Dormant/Imprisoned pretender.
4. A nation that can select the Lady of Fortune pretender since she causes good events, not just prevents bad events.
5. A nation that benefits in some other way from Turmoil like Pangaea that gets extra Maenads.
6. A nation that has patrol units that can be used effectively to increase provincial income with growth scales (say 120% tax rate) to supplement the revenue loss from the turmoil scale.

Methodology:

1. Don't overdo the Turmoil. It only gives you a boost to event frequency, but you lose a lot in exchange. Leave the scale flat (0%) or take 1 tick, and 2 ticks cautiously and only if you're taking a patrolling nation.

2. Balance the income loss from the Turmoil with Production/Growth.

....

Now we'll get back to the magic path weirdness:

What I was looking into was the possibility of taking a Bless strategy (which doesn't necessarily work well with TC b/c their Sacreds are cap-only), in conjunction with the luck scale. Certain nations may be able to pull off such an oddity and it could prove to be an extremely useful strategy since:

1. The bless strategy makes for an excellent early to mid game with no need for significant magic use, and therefore, no significant gem expenditures which...

2. Will leave you with a massive and diverse gem horde in mid to late game which is INVISIBLE to your opponents since luck gems don't show up on the graphs which can also let you fly under the radar a little but not too much since a good player will see your scales and anticipate magical diversity, but will give you a head-start when magic starts to take over.

Just some thoughts. I usually like to play with the Lady of Fortune when I take Luck, but with Pangaea, pretender choice doesn't matter as much. The Luck/Blood combination provides for an excellent benefit with Crossbreeding which is my favorite spell in Pangaea (I use Crossbreed fodder in all armies). The "lucky" breeds are formidable and common especially for what you're paying to get them.

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Oh! As for the Fortune tellers, I always look at fortune tellers as a license to take Misfortune scales. The very first fortune tellers were the Fortune Tellers of Black Forest Ulm in Dominions 2 which forced you to take Misfortune scales. Anyone who has frequently hired cap-only fortune tellers or hire-anywhere fortune tellers can easily take Misfortune scales because you will mitigate bad events simply by research process. Fortune telling is also a cumulative percent chance to avert a bad event per province rather than each individual having a certain chance to avert an event. For example, if you have 20 Sibyls in your capitol each having Fortune-teller (5), you cannot have a bad event in your capitol, ever, regardless of your misfortune scales.