EA Pangaea strategy

[Renojustin]

kasnavada said:
(100 + 21) / (100 - 21) ~= 153%, that's 53% more income.

Nitpicking. Yet it proves the validity of my argument. Here's some more math: 6000 (1.53) = 9180, close enough, even though my initial percentage assessment was 40% or more. Well, the OR MORE happened to be correct, yippee, even better!

The primary thing that Luck scales is dependent on is luck. You only have a chance for these events to be good. Luck 3 = 39% more chance that the event will be good. 50% (1.39) = 69.5% chance of a good event. So you have a 30.5% chance of a bad event; nearly 1/3 of your events will be bad.

Let's pretty safely assume that the Event bonus is additive. So you have a 30% higher probability of an Event with Turmoil 3, Luck 3. (100 - 15 / 100 + 30)... 65%. You have 2/3rds the number of Events with Order 3 as you do with Luck /Turmoil, or 150% as many events with the Luck-Turmoil scales.

Out of 100 rolled Events:

+3 Order gets 85 of them, 42.5 are good, 42.5 are bad.

Luck/Turmoil gets 130 events, 90.35 are good / 39.65 bad.

So in effect, you're getting twice the amount of good events, but the SAME amount of bad ones. An average turn with Order would look like: 1 good event, 1 bad event. With Luck/Turmoil: 2 good events and 1 bad event. Luck/Turmoil will have a smidgen better odds than that, but that representation is extremely close.

You really think that getting one more good event per turn outweighs 53% more gold? You'd need to be getting something like a +1000 gold event per turn above and beyond what the other one is getting. And as anyone who's taken Luck 3 would know, it just doesn't happen that way.

Having 1/3rd of the map is something that occurs regularly. Eventually, it comes down to two or three nations. This is an eminently probable situation. If you're in the running at that point, and you pop a Bounty, it either unites your enemies against you or it wins you the game, or both.

In defense of Nature's Bounty, not that it really needs it, it is a N7 spell, which is pretty straightforward to cast with a Pan once you do achieve Enchantment 9. Many strategies benefit highly from their requisite level 9 spells... this one happens to be probably the most effective one you can cast in EA Pangaea. As I said earlier, with your huge nature gem income, you can almost always afford to pump this spell past an even impressively charged Dispel. It can change the magical momentum when someone puts 100 astral gems into a dispel and it fails, especially against something that is purely beneficial to yourself and not inherently harmful to other players.

All in all, I think the reason that more veteran players prefer the Order scale is that it's more... well, orderly. You can plan your strategy without having to rely on randomness, and be fairly confident that you can execute it in nearly any given map... barring a Knight/Bogus party on your front lawn, of course!

[Renojustin]

In conclusion, I'd just like to say that EA Pangaea is one of my favorite nations in the entire game to play, and here's why:

Recuperation. It's a great relief to not have to worry about getting afflictions, confident that they will heal over time. I only ever worry about losses, not crippled, maimed, diseased, oozing pustules of units. You can concentrate them beyond any other army with your Pan nature mages, and even beyond that, knowing that even if they starve and get diseased, they'll be fine in another month or two.

Units. From the lowly harpy to the mighty minotaur, from the satyr warriors to the centaur archers (the best in the game beside poison bows), this army can do almost anything. And they do it with so little resources that you are almost compelled to take Sloth 3, which is great for your scales. Add to this Stealth AND forest survival, and you have a fast, sneaky, powerful force that is absolutely first rate.

Mages. Both Dryads and Pans can be recruited outside your capital. Dryads are super sneaky H2N1 units that you will find many, many uses for... and Pans are battlemages of the highest caliber. When I first encountered a Storm of Thorns-spamming Pan, I was annoyed. So I fielded 10 of them.

Magic. Earth and Nature are by far the most powerful buff magics, but they can be used for some pretty potent destruction and offense, giving them a lot of versatility. The items are effective and fun to use.

Concept. Old Nature rises to claim the age. Wild, naked women are compelled to join the Pans in their revelry. Pangaea can be anywhere, the dominion can be anywhere. The children of the groves and dark bowers of the land will consume everything in their anger and lust!

[vfb]

renojustin said:
....
The primary thing that Luck scales is dependent on is luck. You only have a chance for these events to be good. Luck 3 = 39% more chance that the event will be good. 50% (1.39) = 69.5% chance of a good event. So you have a 30.5% chance of a bad event; nearly 1/3 of your events will be bad.
...

Testing (and experience) gives around 90% good events with Turmoil3-Luck3 scales. I'm pretty sure "event is good +39%" means you get 89% good events.

Also, comparing Order3 with Turmoil3-Luck3 is unfair. That's a difference of 120 design points.

[Renojustin]

You're definitely right, but it has to be compared because those are two of the main ways to set up your EA Pangaea. Figure what you'd do with those points and for what reason, and plug it into the equasion [+53% gold VS Maenads + 1 more good event per turn + (?)]. I have to admit that Maenads look a lot better after they've been tested as having no upkeep. It's probably the same for LA R'yleh too.

I don't think that 90% good events is accurate. I get a heck of a lot more bad events than 1 in 10 with Luck 3.

[vfb]

I'm counting events where all the provinces are Turmoil3-Luck3. If you're counting total events in a real game, you'll get different numbers, depending on how fast your dominion and scales spread. Let me rephrase that ... you'll get more accurate numbers.

Later in the game your scales should have stabilized, but if you invade enemy dominion, then you'll get bad events in those provinces while waiting for your scales to catch up.

[Lingchih]

Luck 3, even with Turmoil, is temperamental. I always play with luck for Pan, but rarely get the good gold events. Still, the 3000 gold event is nice when it comes along.

[Endoperez]

It's really hard to tell what's going on with luck on big games. The maximum of 3 events probably isn't hard-coded any more, but I have no idea how Luck scales.

I think I'll have to do a custom map for testing. Some ~100 province map with no/few seas, remove terrain and small/large tags, set two nations to start with 25 provinces, a temple in all of those to spread dominion and PD of 21 in all to lessen the effect of invasion events and perhaps a mapmove 10 flying supercombatant for both sides to get conquered provinces back in few turns.

[Valandil]

Its pretty silly to compare turmoil/luck with order, on the assumptio nthat gift of natures bounty will be up. I mean, that isn't even going to be my first reseach priority. Actually, I'm probably not even going to cast it.

Compare Pangaea, Ord3, 1/3 map, Gift of Nature's Bounty, with
Ermor, Turmoil 3 Luck 3, 1/3 map, Arcane Nexus.
Its just not reasonable to include 9th level globals as part of the scale- how many games have you actually got and kept the gift up in? Maybe... 10%? 5%?

If Endoperez does that test, we will have pretty conclusive statistics, until then, it seems to me as though the two scale sets are fairly balanced, and in light of Pangaea's Maenads I would have to conclude that Turmoil/Luck is the superior choice.

Personally, I prefer it anyways- always liked gems more than money, as you can see below.

[vfb]

Endoperez said:
It's really hard to tell what's going on with luck on big games. The maximum of 3 events probably isn't hard-coded any more, but I have no idea how Luck scales.

I think I'll have to do a custom map for testing. Some ~100 province map with no/few seas, remove terrain and small/large tags, set two nations to start with 25 provinces, a temple in all of those to spread dominion and PD of 21 in all to lessen the effect of invasion events and perhaps a mapmove 10 flying supercombatant for both sides to get conquered provinces back in few turns.

That's pretty much what I did in the attachment above to get the six-lucky-event turn, Endo: level zero indies with a dom10 Caelum, dom 10 Helheim, both Luck-3 Turmoil-3 on a big map. I didn't bother taking back lost provinces, and ran it for about 150 turns.