Changes to misfortune/luck in latest Version?

[Graeme Dice]

Tuidjy said:
My scales are
the 'no-brainer ones' Order3, Sloth3, Death 2, Misfortune 2, Magic 3.

I fail to see how those are "no-brainers". Order 3 is obvious. Sloth 3 is suicide for Pyhtium unless you don't expect your enemies to expand at all (ie. they will only manage 1 province per turn for the first twenty turns instead of 1 per turn till turn 5, two per turn to turn 10, then three per turn sometime around turn 10-15.) Death 2 can be worked around, but you've thrown away 4% of your income just to start with there, and will now be much poorer than where you started. This is especially bad when combined with your sloth 3, as you've thrown away 10% of your income, and essentially nullified 1.5 order scales. Misfortune 2 is a gamble, but it looks like it paid off and you didn't have a couple of bad events ruin you at the start. Magic 3 was probably a waste though, since the scale has diminishing returns and you can overcome it by simply spending more money on mages to research faster. I probable would have either gone with magic 2 to make acolytes research more effectively than theurgs, or magic 0 and just stuck to theurgs.

[Kel]

While I don't think they are no-brainer scales, they do tend to be what I take when I have a strong pretender in mind (which is most of the time). Sloth is the only one that, for me, varies a lot (anywhere between +3 and -3) and I go to Death 3 occasionally if I need the points.

- Kel

[Tuidjy]

No-brainer may be an exageration, but I have found it works well for me.
I have all the turns from that game, so here is how I expanded:

Turn 1: 0
Turn 2: 0 (vampire count, but I was patrolling, no harm done)
Turn 3: 1
Turn 4: 0 (knights took a province)
Turn 5: 2 (temple went poof)
Turn 6: 1
Turn 7: 2
Turn 8: 0 (gems found in the wind)
Turn 9: 2 (rumors in capital, nasty)
Turn 10: 2

And then I contacted both my neighbors, and stuff slowed to one per turn.
But I was site searching as I was going. By turn 10, I had more than tripled
Pythium's starting gem income.

It is true that these scales leave you moderately poor, and force you to
expand agressively, but in return you get good research without relying on
accolytes. I never buy these unless I am out of cash, because a theurg is
a combat mage, while an accolyte is nothing but a cogwheel in a machine that
may fail to materialize. I think I made a total of three accolytes that game.

I rely on my pretender to defend against early intrusions. I also try not to
rely on gold income much. I instead try to quickly develop a gem economy, and
get my research to the point where troops do not matter in the least. In most
of my games, I trail on provinces, but it's been awhile since that bothered me.

[Cainehill]

Tuidjy said:
In most of my games, I trail on provinces, but it's been awhile since that bothered me.

Heh. When you're en route to becoming a powerhouse in your game, it's really best to trail provinces, or research, or armies, or income - at least one of those, preferably provinces, otherwise you get the dogpile syndrome.