Luck test, v 1.00

[Forrest]

2 players 9 provinces , just hosting

Man/ Manticore/ Dom 10/ Luck +3/ dormant

Ulm/ Manticore/ Dom 10/ Luck -3/ awake +200pts
Ulm only province left by turn 60. Other 8 taken by Indies.

Trn 40

Man
Treasury 35,926 Inc 910 Up 52
Air 98 Water 5 Astral 30 Death 7 Nature 152
27 good events 8 bad 2 mixed 3 national heroes 2 standard heroes with troops.

Ulm
Treasury 23,213 Inc 374 Up 12
Earth 203 Nature 10
8 good events 23 Bad 4 Mixed NO HEROES
4 provinces lost to Knights 1 to Barbarians 1 HELD against Villains(2 heavy inf routed them, very strange)

I suspect hidden sites had a big effect

[Gandalf Parker]

Keep in mind that Tien Chi has 3 different luck boosting pretenders to add on top of these figures.

[curtadams]

Remember in the nine-province runs there's variance based on the other 8 provinces. In Trollman's run above, Arco's (order) initial advantage over Pan (luck) is too low, so Pan's initial provinces are better. Even so, it looks like only a 5% advantage so they're very close in outcome after adjustments. So far it's looking like luck is overall coming out better, although the advantage is slight and the startup and variability issues are important and difficult to catch in these tests.

Forrest's run points out a problem with these test runs - misfortunate invasions. Just "next turning" overstates their effect, because you'd actually send an army out to recover it. But, that's a big pain, and managing the reconquest armies makes it harder to make different nations comparable. You'd need similar cost armies at some standard level - probably with similar resource costs as otherwise "same gold" is a very different power level.

I think the money quote is:

Sheap said:Sure, order/prod is probably better overall but not so much so that everyone will take order 3/misfortune 2 all the time like in dom2.

[dirtywick]

Good test and it's pretty much what I've observed through playing. You're trading gold for gems by taking luck. Gold can get you a lot of things in Dominions 3, but not gems. It actually seems like a pretty balanced tradeoff.