Big Problem - Unbalanced random events

[ywl]

Originally posted by Slygar:

quote:

---

Originally posted by LintMan:

I would add a suggestion to that to make sure that the good major events were as good to have as the bad major events are bad to have. (ie: an event that doubles your population should be just as possible as the 1/2 population death event. (Note that to the the fair inverse of the 1/2 pop death, it needs to be a doubling, not a 50% pop gain.))

YES!! This is exactly my problem with the event system. The good events dont compare at all the bad events in terms of severity, especially the population gain/loss ones.

---

It depends... A lot of the good events are very significant too. Getting a hero is a big boost to some of the nations. You could sometimes get a random Lore Master, Animist or a Stalker (ethereal assasains). If you got lucky, you might get a Ring of Wizardary or Soul Contract from the item events - it did happen. I think the 1500 gold event only happens at Luck+3, but that's equivalent to the income of 3 to 4 turns (plus an item). You can sometimes get permanent increase of resource, gold income and gain an Earth gem site. If you're lucky enough to have a castle in the right province, it'll be 300 or 450 gold saved.

Getting a population loss event is depressing but on the other hand, it doesn't always hit your important provinces.

I don't know. So far, most of the judgement on the lucky event being too insignificant or the unlucky event being too harsh are very subjective. Can anybody suggest a more accurate measurement of their effects?

Unless there is a mirror image between the good and bad events, I don't know how you can balance the good and bad events out.

[Scott Hebert]

Well, I don't want to sound like there's an easy answer to this question, but maybe something to consider for the population events is to change them to fixed amounts. Starting provinces start with roughly 30,000 people, AFAICT. If you made pop. destroying events kill 3000 people instead of 1/4, then the effect on capital provinces would be far less. However, on small provinces, the population might be completely wiped out or reduced by half. This would address the problem of early events severely hampering performance in MP games.

Bayushi Tasogare

[Sandman]

I'd suggest that a fortress in a province should provide some measure of protection against bad events. It would obviously be more difficult for bandits etc to get a foothold in a fortified province, and a fortress could be used as a place of shelter in the event of flood, famine or blizzard. You can't pillage a province with a fortress in it, after all.

This would also open up a new strategy of taking misfortune and a cheap fortress type to 'cope' with the bad luck.

[ March 24, 2004, 23:54: Message edited by: Sandman ]

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by LintMan:
In my current game with Turmoil -1, Luck 0, I usually see several events per turn. At best, the good events give me a few gems, some gold, or maybe a new temple or some militia somewhere.

Well, you didn't pay for a luck scale, so you can't expect to get good events any more often than the bad ones.

Those good things just don't come close to balancing out the bad ones. That means that those who take order 3, misfortune -3 will get very few good events, but it will hardly matter: the good events just aren't that beneficial, and overall with order 3, Misfortune -1, they probably will *still* get less overall bad events than I do with turmoil -1, luck 0.

That's is extremely unlikely, since they will get only 5% fewer events than you will, and 80% of the events they do get will be bad events. They could expect that about a quarter of their games will be severely impacted in the first 10 turns by their scale choice, and they will have to continually deal with random attacks on their provinces. You get 5% more events in total, and only 50% of them will be bad. You also have 40 more nation points than they do to work with, so you can't expect yourself to benefit as much from the scales as they do.

I liked Saber Cherry's idea of events getting categorized into major/minor classes.

They already are, and always have been classified as such. This is an _old_ thread, and much of the information is not correct. It dates back to considerably before the first patch was even released.

[LintMan]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:

quote:

---

Originally posted by LintMan:
In my current game with Turmoil -1, Luck 0, I usually see several events per turn. At best, the good events give me a few gems, some gold, or maybe a new temple or some militia somewhere.

Well, you didn't pay for a luck scale, so you can't expect to get good events any more often than the bad ones.

---

I'm not saying that I expected to get any *more* good events than bad events. What I was saying was that the *negative impact* of the bad events was stronger than the *positive impact* of the good events, so that the *net impact* of Luck 0 was overall negative.

Intuitively, I would expect that at Luck 0, over the long run, you'd more or less expect to pretty much break even on good things vs bad things happening to you; the good outcomes would more or less offset the bad ones, and the bad outcomes would more or less offset the good ones.

I'm not talking about the number of good vs bad events, but the effects of those events.

As an exagerated example, lets say I played 10 hands of poker at a casino, and tell you I won 5 and lost 5 hands. You say "So you broke even, then?", and I say "No, I lost $750: on the hands I won, I got $50 each time, but on the hands I lost, I lost $150 each time". That's sort of what Luck 0 feels like to me: about even numbers of $50 wins and $150 losses.

This is all subjective, of course, but I've seen posters in other threads make similar comments, so I don't think it's just me.

(Note: I don't expect things to work out perfectly evenly, but it's not even close. At luck 0, I'm seeing what I'd consider major misfortune events *regularly*, while I've yet to see even a single lucky event of the same magnitude.)

quote:

---

Those good things just don't come close to balancing out the bad ones. That means that those who take order 3, misfortune -3 will get very few good events, but it will hardly matter: the good events just aren't that beneficial, and overall with order 3, Misfortune -1, they probably will *still* get less overall bad events than I do with turmoil -1, luck 0.

That's is extremely unlikely, since they will get only 5% fewer events than you will, and 80% of the events they do get will be bad events. They could expect that about a quarter of their games will be severely impacted in the first 10 turns by their scale choice, and they will have to continually deal with random attacks on their provinces. You get 5% more events in total, and only 50% of them will be bad. You also have 40 more nation points than they do to work with, so you can't expect yourself to benefit as much from the scales as they do.

---

Four steps on the order/turmoil scale only amounts to a 5% difference in number of events? So for my 100 events at turmoil 1, they'd have 95 at order 3?

I'm no expert, but from the postings I've read on these forums, I'd gathered that order had a much stronger effect on events than that. (I'd also gathered that Order 3/Misfortune -3 was a fairly common choice among players, with the misfortune paying for the order benefits, while the order scale reducing the misfortune pains).

Is there anyplace that explains the current system of how the luck/order scales tie into events? I searched and found a lengthy thread from January, but didn't see any exact descriptions of the way it works.

quote:

---

I liked Saber Cherry's idea of events getting categorized into major/minor classes.

They already are, and always have been classified as such. This is an _old_ thread, and much of the information is not correct. It dates back to considerably before the first patch was even released.

---

Doh!

Even so, my suggestion that the good events should be as good as the bad events are bad still holds. My suspicion is that if you compared good and bad events side by side, either the good events will look fairly pale in comparison to the bad ones, or some bad events that I consider "major" are actually getting classed as "minor" ones.

-LintMan

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by LintMan:
I'm not saying that I expected to get any *more* good events than bad events. What I was saying was that the *negative impact* of the bad events was stronger than the *positive impact* of the good events, so that the *net impact* of Luck 0 was overall negative.

Sure. But it's overall negative for just about everybody since everyone has a similar set of events to draw from.

Four steps on the order/turmoil scale only amounts to a 5% difference in number of events? So for my 100 events at turmoil 1, they'd have 95 at order 3?

(Mis)fortune affects event frequency by 5% per step.
Order/Turmoil affects event frequency by 5% per step.

I'm no expert, but from the postings I've read on these forums, I'd gathered that order had a much stronger effect on events than that. (I'd also gathered that Order 3/Misfortune -3 was a fairly common choice among players, with the misfortune paying for the order benefits, while the order scale reducing the misfortune pains).

Order 3 misfortune 3 is asking to have your game plan ruined by negative events. If you want to test it, you have to consider that a MP game doesn't usually start over if your temple is destroyed on turn two.

Originally posted by LintMan:
I'm no expert, but from the postings I've read on these forums, I'd gathered that order had a much stronger effect on events than that. (I'd also gathered that Order 3/Misfortune -3 was a fairly common choice among players, with the misfortune paying for the order benefits, while the order scale reducing the misfortune pains).

I do not feel this is the case. But I may not be the majority. Previously to Patch 2.08 you may have been correct. There was no reason not to take Order 3/Misfortune 3 because it was free 21% Income increase with no real drawback.

However now that the scales have been modified I can only think of one game I have played since then that I have dared take Misfortune 3 while trying to compete. And I was burned by it.

That isn't to say I take more Turmoil than I ever did (since the only times I play Turmoil are for the hell of it, trying ideas, not with any serious intention) but that I tend to think of the Luck scale less on it's coupling with Order, but more on it's own merit and what level and frequency of events I am trying to avoid/gain.

Order3/Misfortune3 can still work like it used to, due to the factors of luck in general. But that is part of the game, if you play with Luck you tend to play with the dice. Sometimes it likes you even when you are playing Misfortune and other times it hates you even if you are playing Luck.

[ March 25, 2004, 06:30: Message edited by: Zen ]