Balance issue: order-luck, a no brainer?

[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Wendigo:
Maybe these scales should be tweaked a bit, right now it seems that order is the most valuable scale for living nations because of the snowball effect of a healthy early economy, and its trade-offs with luck obviously influence the choices regarding this 2nd scale.

Nobody seems to invest in luck, and experienced players are claiming to go for high order & neutral luck or even missfortune regardless of the event rarity setting, which seems to point out to the existance of some imbalance in the respective value of the scales.

Is there any solid incentive to invest in luck apart from the heroes? Order offers too much of a protection vs bad events, or too much of a reduction of good events regardless of the luck setting IMO.

IMO the scales should be modified as follows (regarding events):

Order: +/- 5% chance of event (instead of the +/- 10% current)
Luck: +/- 15% chance of event being good/bad (instead of the +/- 10% current)

The other problem is that good events aren't nearly as good as the bad events are bad. I have had (with luck 2) a flood and mass emigration in my home province in the first ten turns, which cumulatively lost me about 1/3 of my home province population. I've had various good events too, but 25 militia and a handful of gems doesn't really make up for losing 6000 population (10000 if you count both bad events).

Maybe some of the really bad events (like anything that causes massive population loss) should require 0 or less luck (the same way the vine men attack requires growth/magic, etc.)

As Saber pointed out on another thread, if you focus mainly on preventing bad events, order is better for this than luck (which seems wrong to me, especially since order has other benefits). And given the far larger magnitude of the bad events, it makes sense to focus on preventing them.

Either luck needs to provide a stronger bias at least against the seriously crippling events, or misfortune needs to negate the event-reducing effect of order (as it did in Dom I), or both. Or perhaps there should be some major good events - those 6000 people who emigrated from my home province had to move somewhere, right? Why doesn't a province ever randomly get 5000 immigrants?

Turmoil 3 luck 3 should get more good events and less bad events than order 3 misfortune 3 - both cost 0 points and the former has much less steady income. Currently it gets more good events, but also more bad events, which still dominate the good events and yield a net loss - on top of the steady income loss. The only reasons to even consider turmoil are special themes that require it (which is very costly at the moment), or maybe maenads.

I don't have any major problems with order/luck not working together well, although I wouldn't mind seeing positive and negative luck raise event frequency as in Dom I. I haven't tried turmoil/misfortune but I expect it would be at least as catastrophic as in Dom I (due to the generally higher frequency of crippling events in Dom II).

[Nagot Gick Fel]

For reference, here's how JK explained luck in Doms 1 when I asked him 2 years ago:

>"Fortune: 5% more events. 20% greater chance of event being good in friendly
>provinces."
>OK, but 5% and 20% of what? Without a base value to refer to, these
>percentages are pretty useless.

Base chance of an event happening is this:

event1 15%
event2 2% * #provinces owned
event3 2% * #provinces owned

These chances are then modified by the scales of your home province. And
chances are slightly lower the three first turns.


The good or bad event selection has changed to be somewhat simpler
in the coming Version of Dominions (1.04) and I will describe
the new system.

Chance of an event being good depend on the scales of the province that
gets the event. Basic chance for it to be good is 50%, then it is
modified by the scales also.

The old system was very hard to figure out, because it also depended on
the number of event that could possibly happen in a given province with
the current settings of scales, population, unrest etc.


And yes, the luck scale is very important. But so are the other
scales and I only think it is fair that the luck scale should be
equally good.

/Johan

>> Base chance of an event happening is this:
>>
>> event1 15%
>Hmmm.. there should be 2 different values here - for the 2 different game
>setup options (rare/common).

The chances mentioned are for common random events. If random events are
set to rare, divide chances by 2.

/Johan