Luck/Order scales after 2.06 Patch

[Truper]

IMHO luck is now a beautiful thing. I have run 10 turns of a test using Order 1, Luck 3. In those 10 turns I have had: The province defense of my capital increased by 10. A 100 gold event. A 500 gold event. A set of militia join. A group of immigrants increase the pop of one of my provinces by 25%. No negative events yet.

I don't think this adjustment does much to address the issues.

A better method would be to remove the more dire events. There aren't corresponding good events. Plus nobody likes them. They do nothing to help the game, and they are unbalancing the luck/order scales.

I don't understand this. There *are* corresponding good events. And removing the dire events would increase the incentive to take misfortune 3, further unbalancing the luck/order scales, not helping to balance them.

[ywl]

I tested for only 20 turns, both Order+3/Luck-3 and Chao-3/Luck+3 were killers. I have only the capital and the population in both case was decrease to 20k by random events. Two babarians (in one turn!) for the Order, one emigration and one plague for the Luck.

I didn't do any recruiting and let the gold accumulate (the upkeep is similar for both). Overall, the Luck nation has more gold left in the treasury, some random gems and a minor items.

In this case, Order might give you comfort for having a larger income - but I'm not totally sure it has the edge.

[Saber Cherry]

Wow, I was testing luck 3, chaos 3 with Abysia... 2 good events until turn 6, then on turn 7 I got a magic item, hero, celebrant, AND... 1/4 of my population died from rain. So far, not good at all.

..then a witch cursed some units, then a quake destroyed the temple (by turn 19).

[ January 12, 2004, 18:25: Message edited by: Saber Cherry ]

[SurvivalistMerc]

I am a bit with apoger on this one, Kristoffer.

I wouldn't mind if the events were very bad, such as loss of half your tax revenues for the turn or something like that. Even a single-time loss of 500 (if you have 500 more than troop cost) would be ok with me. Because that corresponds to a good event. I think to some folks, "balancing" these scales would mean that for every bad event that can happen to you at luck-0, there is a corresponding good event that is equal in benefit to the detriment of the bad event and equal in permanence to the permanence of the bad event (and vice versa).

Maybe you lose 100 gp, some gems, and a magical item. Or you lose your best item in the lab.

All of my suggestions have one thing in common: they are very temporary. It's nothing you can't recover from. You haven't lost 1/4 your population in your home province due to flooding.

An alternate idea would be to let your luck scale affect where a bad event occurs or the extent of the bad event. Example: Unless you are -3 luck, you can't have a population loss event in the most populous 20% of your provinces. Unless you have -2 or worse luck, Bogus the Troll, if he comes, won't come on top of your largest army or in your most "valuable" 20% of provinces.

I think what has a lot of folks "turned off" to luck is that even with beneficial luck scales some really horrible events occur. And luck costs a lot of nation points. So you sort of figure you've bought some sort of "insurance" at a price and then something really bad happens and you get unhappy about it. On the other hand, if you took misfortune and got those 120 points from luck-0, you figure that you deserve for things like that to happen to you in your game. Or maybe that's just me.

[Saber Cherry]

OK, on turn 45 Abysia (Luck Turmoil) had the ancient presence event. Even though hundreds of militia had joined my army and the province defense had been boosted 3 times to 55 (HUGE defending army of abyssians, humanbreds, and militia) the invading mandragoras won and captured the capitol. And of course the population was reduced to 1000.

Atlantis (Misfortune Order) had fewer events, no major bad ones, and was much better off. Population was still 30K (rather than Abysia's 22k and later 1k), gold in the bank was 6.1k (abysia has 1.9k), and they had still gotten 14 random gems rather than Abysia's 69 random gems.

In conclusion:

Unless positive luck scales are immune (or highly resistant) to major negatives, I think turmoil-luck is too unsafe to consider except for Ermor / Pangaea.

[ywl]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:
Wow, I was testing luck 3, chaos 3 with Abysia... 2 good events until turn 6, then on turn 7 I got a magic item, hero, celebrant, AND... 1/4 of my population died from rain. So far, not good at all.

..then a witch cursed some units, then a quake destroyed the temple (by turn 19).

Witch cursing some units is a mixed event. You get gems out of it.

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by SurvivalistMerc:
I think what has a lot of folks "turned off" to luck is that even with beneficial luck scales some really horrible events occur. And luck costs a lot of nation points.

Yes - the problem with paying for good luck is that you still have bad luck. If I pay for a lucky domain, I don't expect my capitol to collapse from bad luck without any enemy action I'd pay for good luck if it protected me from that sort of thing, but I suspect that turmoil/luck has more catastrophies than order/misfortune... I just can't analyze it for certain because I don't understand how the luck percentages work.