Petition to change LUCK\ORDER Scales

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Zen:
Perhaps if Luck when adjusted at all (The Balance of All things) Event occurance increased.

That was the case at one time in Doms I, but I've been unable to confirm it for Doms II.

[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:

quote:

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Originally posted by Zen:
Perhaps if Luck when adjusted at all (The Balance of All things) Event occurance increased.

That was the case at one time in Doms I, but I've been unable to confirm it for Doms II.

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I is not in Dom II, but I'm starting to believe it should be. There is a risk of a turmoil/luck default with this setting, but the use for luck-0 is more obvious and order/misfortune-3 is less viable.

[Keir Maxwell]

I consider Militia turning up to fight for me to be a bad thing. Not only do the useless blighters make me pay for them but sometimes they turn up where my army is blowing its carefully calculated supply and causing horrible trouble. Like when I moved moved my starving veterans into a rear province to recover and the the militia turn up, eat the food, pocket your gold, and laugh at the poor diseased veterans. ^%@#!

In Dom1 I could use Militia for patroling and I still didn't like them. I sure do dislike them now. How about that event just improves the provinces defense rating significantly. That might even be useful sometimes and at least it will never be bad.

Sometimes you do get incredibly good events. Like the time I got 1000gps on the first turn with my crazy Niefelheim Ice Age race - would you like to wear that in MP? Then there was the time I got Chainmail of Deflection on the first turn and stuck it on the Prince of Death. So sometimes luck can be very good - lets not forget this in our hurry to rebalence. If you get one bandit camp every year playing luck/turmoil I wouldn't complain. Now that earthquake on the first turn I got the other day would have hurt if it had been MP.

cheers

Keir

[ November 23, 2003, 08:51: Message edited by: Keir Maxwell ]

[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:
Having them modify the chances of units gaining afflictions in lucky/unluck provinces, though... that would be interesting too.
-Cherry

Is it the attacker that should be lucky or the defender? Get a lucky strike and take his eye out, or get lucky and get hit in the forehead instead of the face.

Perhaps growth to avoid afflictions, luck to hit where it hurts. But these are changes that are difficult to evaluate and possibly to implement.

[Nerfix]

I don't find magic weak. If you have cheap(or cost effective) mages, you can easily get huge amounts of research points with magic. Jotunheim is a good example of this. Besides, sometimes you would give a kindom for -1 Mr when that buffed up Nataraja invades your lands...

[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Catquiet:
Originally posted by Saber Cherry:

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I don't like the ideas of the luck scale causing increased gold income, or weakening Order's gold boost.

At the moment, even with common random events, events don't happen often enough to make + Luck worthwhile. If they increased the frequency of random events or made good events a whole lot better, Dominions II would depend too much on chance. That would take away from the strategy part of the game.

The +/- gold from the LUCK scale would represent all the tiny events that affect the income of your peasants but aren't quite newsworthy. One farmer's plow horse goes lame, moths get into a silk merchant's warehouse, ect. It all adds up.

Currently ORDER has the most important scale effect in the game. Positive ORDER also reduces the good and bad effects of LUCK. Together these things make LUCK very unattractive, it needs a +/- gold bonus to make it viable.

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On the contrary, events happen quite often. The reason luck isn't attractive is that events aren't consistently positive even with strong luck, and the few crippling events (e.g. flood in home province - although I've seen it in the first year, it is crippling anytime; banning it from the first X turns wouldn't help enough) far outweigh the handful of extra gems or free militia.

That, and order is too valuable for its gold boost. Change it to +/-5% gold, +/-5% events, and make some of the worst events misfortune-only, and I think you'd go a long way toward fixing the order/luck problems.

Magic is another issue - as Saber points out, high levels of drain produce proportionally more decrease in research while high levels of magic produce proportionally less increase.

I'd like to see one or more of the following:
* more gems per site in magic (including home sites) - as Saber proposed
* reduced empowerment cost in magic (+/-10% per scale? Empowerment is pretty rare so you need a big effect to be noticeable)
* reduced ritual/forge cost in magic (+/-5% per scale? Ulm Smiths immune to drain for forging, perhaps not for rituals.)

obviously with the opposite effects in drain.

High levels of magic should make you a magical powerhouse, which currently they don't really - the dominant factor is your gem/slave income, which depends mostly on how many provinces you control and what mages you have available to search them. Research plays a part but not that big a part - and high magic levels don't help research that much anyway.

If magic scale influences gem income, it should influence blood hunting as well. Give Abysia somewhere to put all those points. Of course if the cost reduction approach is taken instead, it would already affect blood magic just like other paths.

I see no problem with the current heat/cold, productivity/sloth or growth/death scales. Different nations, themes and strategies have good reasons to take different positions on these scales, which IMO is how it should be. I have seen and played anything from +3 to -3 and consider them all viable for the right strategy. I wish I could say that for turmoil, magic, drain and luck. Any turmoil is likely to hose you, luck isn't worth the points, high magic isn't worth the points and high drain is too crippling except for standard Ulm.

[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:

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Originally posted by Catquiet:
Would you be happier if Magic gave a straight %20 percent bonus to the research pool per tick?

Possibly. I'd have to think about it for a while. The way it works now is more interesting, with weak mages affected more than strong mages, and the pretender rarely affected much at all... really, I think I'd prefer for the research effects to stay the same, and rebalancing of scales done more at the scale-cost level than scale-effect level. Though magic/drain affecting gem output seems logical and interesting to me.

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Although I usually agree with you, I don't want to see scale costs changed. 40 points per scale, for all scales, at all levels, is one of the few simple and easy to understand mechanics in Dom II, and I don't want to see it go away.

I'd rather see the scale effects become nOnlinear (if they have to) than the costs.

What would you say to +1/+2/+4 rp for magic, and -1/-1/-2 for drain? (keeping in mind that the MR effects happen at +/-2).

Extra luck increasing income would be logical to help fix the system, by making +Luck/+Order suddenly a viable choice... but it makes no sense conceptually to me. Why should luck and unluck predicatably affect your income?

They shouldn't predictably do so (in my opinion). Instead they should unpredictably do so.

I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with the event system - but really bad events should be much more rare in luck scales, or not be allowed at all. Currently turmoil/luck is not viable, and order/unluck is too good, primarily because luck doesn't provide enough protection from game-losing events, and good events don't provide enough benefit to offset the very bad events.

Having them modify the chances of units gaining afflictions in lucky/unluck provinces, though... that would be interesting too. Right now the affliction chance for a hit is this: (Damage/HP). So a 20 HP unit taking 5 damage has a 25% chance of gaining an affliction. Something like (Damage*(10-Luck)/(10*HP)) would change that, so that the same situation in a -3 Luck province would give (5*(10+3)/(10*20))=32.5%, and a +3 Luck province would give a (5*(10-3)/(10*20))=17.5% of gaining an affliction.

Unluck would be a good scale for light-unit Machaka and BK Tien Chi, while Luck would be better for Ulm, Abysia, and Ermor... and everyone would be afraid to invade Unluck nations

-Cherry

Hmm, that could be interesting. But I think having it affect both sides indiscriminately might largely negate the effect (at least, if you want to make it something that adds to the benefits of luck and the pains of unluck).

Also, I wouldn't call Machaka a light-unit nation. I make extensive use of spider knights and black hunters, both of which are heavy units that I would hate to see get extra afflictions. (Nature-9 is pretty awesome for black hunters...)