Income and Luck Scales for Megagame

[lch]

Death 3 and Misfortune 2/3 == looking for trouble.

The worse your bad scales are the more bad events get unlocked that can hit you. And some of the Death 3 ones are really bad.

[Folket]

I never take death/misfortune combo anymore. In the games I have taken it I have been crippled by plagues.

[Evilhomer]

In a large game like this death is not such a great idea. By turn 50+ or so you will be sitting with like 1/4 of the income of the nation that went with growth 3, that means a ton less mages/forts for you.

[Folket]

Evilhomer, you should learn to run your numbers. My calculations show that growth 3 gives 82% more income then death 3 by turn 50. This is in provinces with less then 10k pop. In provinces with more pop the difference is less.

[Evilhomer]

Yeah i was just taking a bit of a stab in the dark, therefore i did say turn 50+, not turn 50 (I admit they were exaggerated by more then i thought, must be influenced by playing the cb mod so much). However your numbers are not correct either:
pop:10000 at start, assuming no fort and no other scale modifiers:
pop at 50 (growth 3): 10000*1.006^50=13486
income/turn=13486*0.01*1.06=143 gold

pop at 50 (death 3): 10000*0.994^50=7401
income/turn=7401*0.01*0.94=70 gold

gold increase due to growth = 104 %. I dunno what you mean by the percentage being less or more depending on population since the income is directly proportional to you population, so you end up with the same % in the end. 1/4 income was obviously a bit exaggerated but money after upkeep might be cut that way. Anyway i think the benefit of taking growth in a mega game like this is pretty clear.

[Baalz]

Ah yes, but a couple other considerations when you try to extrapolate these results out to your kingdom rather than a single province:

1) This calculation is 50 turns from when your full growth/death scale takes effect. Even by turn 60 or 70 its unlikely that many of your provinces will have had your full scales on them for 50 turns. Your overall kingdom growth/death rate is always going to average less than the maximum difference implied by full scales, usually significantly so.

2) This calculation, if extrapolated out to your kingdom rather than a single province assumes that the extra 240 design points for going with a death scale resulted in no extra territories being held. For reference, this is the difference between having an imprisoned pretender and an awake one. If having an awake pretender allows you to snag a couple extra provinces then that will reduce this difference.

3) There is a quasi inflation that goes on as the game progresses because of the decreasing effectiveness of gold recruitable troops. At the beginning gold is extremely important, by turn 50 almost always less so (significantly less so depending on your strategy). Kinda hard to quantify numerically, but 100% more gold on turn 50 isn't worth the same as 100% more gold turn 1.

On the flip side of the coin:

1) Death scales greatly increase your chance of getting population killing random events, and thus permanently affecting your income, perhaps cripplingly early. Particularly with misfortune.

2) Death scales will kill off your old mages much faster, replacements cost gold.


All in all, even from a strictly gold income point of view the growth/death question isn't very well modeled by a simple exponential multiplication.

[jutetrea]

Understood Baalz, but does the consideration change in a longer term/highly populated game? If there are static borders for quite awhile you will see your net income go down as you recruit troops and your gross income is reduced slightly through death.

It may change strategy as you will be prodded to be continuously aggressive to conquer new territory. Not necessarily a bad thing, but a factor.

[Evilhomer]

Yeah i agree with all those points of course, but when you consider a choice you might start with a simple model i guess.

Anyway i really do think the value of picking growth increases with the size and expected lenght of the game, so this should be the optimal type of game to pick growth in.

You might add a few more in fact to the long list of considerations

1. growth gives added supply
2. A large chunk of your nation might have been conquered from dead/dying nations by turn 50.
3. The fact that time works for you not against you allows you to be peaceful if you want

Additionally it might be intresting to know that the percentage difference between growth 3 and death 3 becomes larger if you pick turmoil as well (and less if you pick order).