[thejeff]

Thinking about how inefficient the "check for each possible event in a province" code would be, started me thinking about how else you could do it.

Seriously, you'd have to build a list of possible events for every province you wanted to check, they'd all be potentially different and then generate a random number and check against the probability for that province.
Why go to that trouble when you could just select 1 from the list? But then you'd still have to build the list and you'd always get one, which doesn't seem to match the results. OK, what if you just pick one from the full list and then check to see if it's valid for that province. If it is, great, if not you could give up and have no event or try again a limit number of times.

That seems to be a better mechanism for what chris is proposing, though I'm not sure if it makes any difference in results.

I still think there's some effect we're missing for the number of events, linked to empire size or possibly turn number.

We know some events that are linked to scales, but is there a complete list? Knowing which scale setting had the most and least possible events would help testing this.