Luck/Turmoil versus Nothing.

[Calahan]

I took Order 3 / Luck 3 in a few games last year and I never once got close to having a decent reward for the design points I spent. Since them I'm pretty firmly with Don C's opinion . Since as I see it now..

Order / Misfortune = Win / Lose, sometimes Win / Win.
Turmoil / Luck = Lose / Win, sometimes Lose / Lose.

Turmoil / Luck is at best Lose / Win, since you will always 'lose' from having less income due to Turmoil, but can sometimes 'win' from the good random events you get from Luck. But when you get bad events, it really is a case of 'Lose' 'Lose' on both fronts.

Order / Misfortune is usually Win / Lose, (Win from income boost, Lose from bad events). But it can also be Win / Win when you get good events from the Misfortune scale.

And for me at least, it is the Win / Win and Lose / Lose scenarios that is the real deal maker for 90% of nations when choosing these two scales.

[sector24]

There was a very long thread about this awhile back and the reason turmoil / luck is a sucker's bet is that there is a cap on random events, typically 3 per turn. If you have enough provinces you can hit the 3 event cap, even with order, plus get the consistently high income. Basically you shouldn't take scales based on the % chance of random events, which means you should always take order except for Pangaea.

[Edi]

Originally Posted by Calahan

I took Order 3 / Luck 3 in a few games last year and I never once got close to having a decent reward for the design points I spent. Since them I'm pretty firmly with Don C's opinion . Since as I see it now..

In the current game I'm playing I took Order 2, Luck 2, Growth 2, Magic 2 with Machaka and by turn 40 I've had at least 20 750+ gold events and a host of others.

I bought some of those scales with sloth and heat and a sleeping pretender with rather unimpressive magics but decent dominion.

I could have gone with magic 1, but would probably have had less good events. The growth scales with the others have guaranteed freedom from barbarian invasions and plague events, all of which cause poploss and if you have death or misfortune (or worse, both), those pile up fast and wreck your empire.

Not that this build would work in MP, but that's one anecdote against the other negative ones.