Petition to change LUCK\ORDER Scales

[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Keir Maxwell:

quote:

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Originally posted by Chris Byler:
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.

I have been experimenting with a very wide range of designs than simply because Bless effects are new and I want to try them out.

I have taken drain 3 heaps with Dom II and will continue to do so. I consider it to be the best choice for the majority of race designs I'm looking at right now. When you have 0pts (or less) after designing your pretender you end up with some funky scales and a huge amount of research coming out of the (sometimes immobile) pretender (28 one time!) so drain 3 is one of the first negative scale choices. I would have to say though that I am having a harder time finding sage sites than I in Dom1 which is a worry.

I agree with you Chris though on the rest of the scales.

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Many cheap mages can't research at all in drain 3. I generally don't want to use my pretender as a researcher except in the first year or so, and I certainly don't want to be stuck in a situation where he is my only effective researcher ever (or I need to use celestial masters or archtheurgs to research because they are hit least by the drain scale). It's even worse if all your mages are horrendously expensive (Jotunheim except Utgard) or all your mages with decent magic are horrendously expensive (standard Pangaea - dryads can't research in strong drain).

I just had a new idea for making high magic scales more rewarding and cool; I'm going to start another thread with it since this one is supposed to be about luck/order.

[Keir Maxwell]

Originally posted by Chris Byler:
Many cheap mages can't research at all in drain 3. I generally don't want to use my pretender as a researcher except in the first year or so, and I certainly don't want to be stuck in a situation where he is my only effective researcher ever (or I need to use celestial masters or archtheurgs to research because they are hit least by the drain scale). It's even worse if all your mages are horrendously expensive (Jotunheim except Utgard) or all your mages with decent magic are horrendously expensive (standard Pangaea - dryads can't research in strong drain).

I just had a new idea for making high magic scales more rewarding and cool; I'm going to start another thread with it since this one is supposed to be about luck/order.

I think starting a new thread is a good idea. Your idea's for improving magic are very interesting but would require careful balencing. I think magic is a bit weak in the early game but too powerful later.

The reason I don't care much about drain 3 is that the majority of my present batch of races work on the theory that they start with awesome magic (bless effects) which other players will not achieve anything like for ages. By the time they do hopefully you have found sages who really don't care about scales that much. As long as I can crash up the reasearch ladder later, for wards etc, through mass input of gold the weaker starting scale is ok. My pretender can hit the few improtant early targets. Getting to con 4 for summer lions/fallbears etc is not a big deal anymore while starting with blessed monstrosities is pretty impressive - still its early days yet so its all preliminary assessments for now.

Ciao

Keir

[NTJedi]

I suggest making ORDER less effective with its current bonuses.

This would also be a quick solution... instead of trying to change all the others as well.

After almost 300 turns of tests (common events), it seems to me that the frequency of "disastrous" events should be balanced. A disaster means big (thus irreparable) loss of pop : floods, restless people, plagues, famines, etc, I'm not counting the minor events like hailstorms, or the provinces lost to rebels, knights, etc

To sum up :
- Order 0 & Luck 0 = 36 events in 82 turns. 20 good events (I've been lucky) but 5 disasters.
- Order-3 & Luck +3 = 88 events in 82 turns. 61 good events (including the 1500 gold, for a total of 3245 gp bonuses). But still 7 big disasters!
- Order+3 & Luck-3 = 6 events in 123 turns. Only minor effects.

Is that logical to get *more* disasters with max luck ? IMHO Illwinter should limit the frequency of those major events, something like 2 possible disasters with Luck+1, 1 with Luck+2 et 0 with Luck+3. As it is, the Luck/Disorder combo seems a poor choice (on average, 40 gp/turn dont compensate for disasters and 30% tax losses).
Cheers

[ November 25, 2003, 08:05: Message edited by: Sunray_be ]

[ywl]

Originally posted by apoger:
There have been many well thought out and excellent ideas here. Problem is that most of them are complex. It is hard to balance new complexity. Furthmore complexity is a very hard sell to Illwinter. I'm interested in seeing a fix this century.

To that end I offer the follwing thoughts.
The main issue is that dire events are -NOT FUN-. Nobody losses 10K population at the capital and thinks "Wow! I love Dominions". Secondly these events are not balanced. There is no 'population is increased by 10K' event. Gaining a cloak of displacement is sweet, but is no compenstation for the more serious dire events. These events add nothing to the game. I say a simple way to address the issue would be to *delete* them. It would only make the game better. Nobody would miss these events. Losing labs and chunks of gold is more than bad enough.

Without these catastrophic events, I suspect that Turmiol/Luck might be more balanced in respect to Order/Misfortune.

This might not be the best solution, but it is simple, and easy to implement. Often that has a 'magic' of it's own.

It's a very good idea. However, one side-feature of the major random events is to disguise those province-hitting spells. Though it's one feature that we could live without.

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Sunray_be:
After almost 300 turns of tests...

To sum up :
- Order 0 & Luck 0 = 36 events in 82 turns. 20 good events (I've been lucky) but 5 disasters.
- Order-3 & Luck +3 = 88 events in 82 turns. 61 good events (including the 1500 gold, for a total of 3245 gp bonuses). But still 7 big disasters!
- Order+3 & Luck-3 = 6 events in 123 turns. Only minor effects.

Thanks for running the tests! Normally, 1 test per scale wouldn't really be statistically valid, but in this case the vastness of those difference is enough to draw firm conclusions. First, they indicate (to me) that not only is something majorly unbalanced, but also that my understanding of the way luck and order affect event frequencies is wrong. Those results are like 5 orders of magnitude away from my predictions, and it almost seems like Unluck is causing fewer events, and Luck is causing more events. If you are up for more tests, I'd suggest Order 0 & Luck +3, and Order 0 & Luck -3, to see if the base event frequency changes. I'd do it but I'm lazy.

-Cherry

[SurvivalistMerc]

ywl,

I agree...I could also do without the disasters designed to disquise those province-harming spells.

NTJedi,

I would like to leave ORDER alone and fix the problem by truly balancing the events. Fixing the events is just as easy as changing the order scale. Or so it would seem to me.