Luck/Order scales after 2.06 Patch

[Catquiet]

Population loss events should kill a set number of people. Multiplied by Misfortune or divided by Fortune.

[ywl]

Originally posted by apoger:
>So your solution to misfortune being a no brainer is making it better?

>I take it you would prefer to leave misfortune without effect so you could have high incomes and many events that are mainly good

No, but I see luck/misfortune differently than you guys.

Good Event: Gain a lab
Bad Event: Lose lab

On the surface these look equal and symetric.
However the lost lab will often happen at a protected location where mages are being produced and research is being done. The gained lab occurs at a random spot that is vastly less likey to be helpful. Effectively, losing a lab is much more hurtful than gaining a lab is helpful. The luck tables you are using don't account for this at all, and this skews things towards bad luck.

Furthermore there are events like losing 1/3 of a population or being attacked by powerful armies. These events are much worse and more common, than their opposite effects.

Honestly, we could agrue forever about this.
What I'll do is play with the mod tools and see if I can make a formula that make me happy. That way everyone wins.

The same can be said for the unlucky events though. Losing 1/4 of population in the mostly unpopulated mountain province is not significant neither. When your Kingdom get bigger, those population event is less likely to hit home.

But as you said, just have numbers that everybody agreed beforehand. They're now mostly modifiable now.

Alex, that is not a very deterministic test.

Luck is modified by terrain. If you wanted to do a realistic test, try getting one of each base type of province (1 Forest, 1 Coast/Riverland, 1 Mountain, 1 Barren/Desert).

Then test.

Then you can more accurately judge the effects of both luck and unluck. Just doing a home province test is more like shooting in the barrel. Because if one of your 'testers' is on a river province/coastline and the other is not, suddenly that coastal province has terrible luck no matter what because it gets hit by flood/hurricanes while the mountain province gets 'good' events like mines.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by Zen:
Alex, that is not a very deterministic test.

Luck is modified by terrain. If you wanted to do a realistic test, try getting one of each base type of province (1 Forest, 1 Coast/Riverland, 1 Mountain, 1 Barren/Desert).

Then test.

Ouch. Feel free to use the mini map for that. The game doesnt really care what the TGA says so editing the terrains in the .map file would be fast and easy.
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ions2/Mini.tga
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion...ions2/Mini.map

[ywl]

I got one very interesting lucky event in my test. Basically, it adds another site to the province "The Deepest Cave" that give 1 earth gem per turn. And because of that, I need to fight off a small Troglydate (that trampling underground thing) army.

[SurvivalistMerc]

I think a real test would be to control the entire world except for about 5 provinces (the same ones in each case) and let it run for about 30 or so turns.

Large numbers of provinces seem to dramatically increase the number of events.

The most positive thing about bad luck is that its worst effects are usually delayed until you are winning.

But not always. I've lost my lab in my home province on turn 6 or so if memory serves, and I've had that horrible flood event early on also.

I don't even want to think about ancient presence in the home province. I haven't had that one yet, and I wager it is linked to a positive magic scale, which I seem to seldom use. Drain isn't that hard to overcome if you put a bit of death magic on your pretender.

There is a maximum of 3 Events per turn, so having more than say 10 or so doesn't dramatically increase the frequency.

[Keir Maxwell]

I'm suffering from hay fever so my brain is not working particularily well but here is my two cents (I'll spend a dollar later):

As I remember the old system was order adjusted event frequency by +-10% and luck adjusted the likelyhood of a good/bad event by +-10%.

Turmoil3/luck3 - nothing has changed has it? You get +30% on event frequency and +30% on likelyhood they are good.

Misfortune3/order3 - you now have the normal chance of events instead of -30% and there is a modifier of+30% on the chance they will be bad. Eeeck. I got hit by an earthquake second or third turn with Mictlan Last night and I didn't like it. This is not the sort of thing I want to increase the likelyhood for MP so I'm wary of this choice. Over an empire it could be disastrous and I'm not sure tests on one province mean very much because of this.

Order3/luck0 - chance of events has gone up by+15% as orders event supression has become less effective. Weaker than it used to be but more likely to be chosen.

Order0/luck3 - this has got heaps better with an extra +15% chance of events.

Order3/luck3 - this has got better but it still doesn't appeal much due to the cost and order working against the luck.

Of course more subtle options exist but thats a useful bunch to look at.

Cheap order options have got weaker, order0+ and luck stronger (should be its expensive), and turmoil/luck stayed the same. In general I think we can safely say that races in general have got weaker and so the ones who have stayed the same have got better.

Not what I was hoping for but its more balenced. I had already accepted that my order based dual bless effects races, milking misfortune for free points, were history (one or two of the best might survive without misfortune) so thats not to sad. I'm a bit dissapointed that turmoil/luck races haven't had more of a boost as I was hoping for more possibilities there to make up the loses. I'm not sure we have gained as much as we have lost in terms of race design options. Still need to have a better look.

I never felt returning to the old scales was THE answer but it could be part of the answer if high luck could guard you from devesating events - at least in your capital.

Cheers

Keir

[ January 13, 2004, 00:08: Message edited by: Keir Maxwell ]

[SurvivalistMerc]

I'm hoping that they will eventually let us mod the events. I can come up with events of my own, and I might produce a Survivalist Mod of just the luck scale and events that folks might decide they like enough to use. I think it would be fun. And I would limit the worst catastrophes to misfortune 3 such that those who want to reap points out of misfortune would want to stop at 2.

I would also generally mod up the national heroes...say double their hps and increase their defense and protection. So that luck would be desirable to get the heroes faster. As things stand now, some races get a lot more out of their heroes than others, making losing the heroes something some races can do rather cavalierly. I think that, while some heroes should be more powerful than others, even race by race, the heroes should be good enough that no race would cavalierly cast them aside but would rather realize they are making a choice with positive and negative consequences.

[Jasper]

I agree the Order scale balance is better, but still off. I actually think Luck is ok now compared to the scales other than Order; bad events are still effectively more prevalent than good ones, but that just shifts the scale so it's not zero centered.

Drop Order's economic effect down to to perhaps +/- 5% and I think it'd be fine. As it stands now Order is IMHO still clearly the "must have" thing to spend points on.