Big Problem - Unbalanced random events

[magnate]

Heh - when the temple in my capital got knocked down by an earthquake on about turn 10, I got pretty upset and wondered if it happened to anyone else (2.08, order 1, luck 0, events set to rare). Now I know.

I haven't given up, but by golly it's not easy. My prophet is my only remaining priest, and if he dies I will have real difficulty building any temples. At the moment my upkeep is preventing me having 200 to spare for a temple ...

I can appreciate the complexity of balancing the effects of the Order/Chaos and Luck/Misfortune scales ... but I fully support the idea of an Off switch for having no events at all.

CC

[Wyatt Hebert]

Didn't even look at that, Peter

Part of the point, however, is if he is attempting to use the Order 3/Misfortune 3, and he's complaining about bad events, we have an issue. I did try to raise generally useful questions on the topic. I guess that was my main point.

Wyatt

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally posted by Teraswaerto:
Getting one's temple destroyed on the second turn of an MP with 3 order is not a pleasant experience.

Heh. In my Last MP game as Pangaea (based on the free Maenad principle ), I got no random events round 1 & 2, then
#3 Young rebels started creating unrest: My home province rose to 58 unrest from 0
#5 A flood wiped out 25% of the population of my second province conquered in turn 4
#7 Home temple destroyed by earthquake

As the map had independents 9, that set back my expansion by 5-8 rounds compared to the opposition as I had virtually no income.

The settings? Turmoil 3, Sloth 3, Heat 0, Growth 0, Luck 3, Magic 3..... I guess I was begging for it with the turmoil and sloth scales, but I sure as hell did not feel lucky - and I might have been luckier (i.e. fewer random events) with luck 0.

It took over 30 turns before I got a +gold event.

Remember the "luck" blurb in the dominion scales? Seldom has a description of an ability been so thoroughly misleading:

Official description of lands with positive luck
A land of Fortune is a good place to visit. Good events are common, and no one seems to have any bad luck. On the other hand, a land of Misfortune is not a good place to visit. Nails find their way through the soles of your boots, and the fish let go of the bait. No matter how well a project is planned, trouble and ruin will undoubtedly strike. Lands of Misfortune are best avoided

"Good events are common, and no one seems to have any bad luck"? Propaganda without ANY base in gameplay, I am sorry to say.

[ March 24, 2004, 17:13: Message edited by: Peter Ebbesen ]

[Taqwus]

*shrug* Just wait until you get the Ancient Presence event in your capital -- it kills pretty much everybody, turns them into plant beings, and provides (IIRC) an astral/death/nature undead plant-thingy to lead them. Even after you take it back, that province still is radically depopulated.

[PvK]

I don't know if it's a combination of other scales causing it, or just my good luck or the complaining people's bad luck, but my positive-Luck games have been pretty lucky. No major bad events to my important provinces inside the luck aura, and nice positive events.

PvK

[LintMan]

The imbalance with events as I see it is that the bad events are much more damaging than the good events are beneficial, so even if you have equal numbers of both, you're still much worse off.

In my current game with Turmoil -1, Luck 0, I usually see several events per turn. At best, the good events give me a few gems, some gold, or maybe a new temple or some militia somewhere. I've never seen anything better than those, at all. The bad events, on the other hand, regularly destroy a sizeable fraction of a province population (permanently!), attack a province with a sizeable independent force, or creates a brigand lair that permanently generates unrest in the province. I've seen all those things multiple times, sometimes more than once in the same turn.

Those good things just don't come close to balancing out the bad ones. That means that those who take order 3, misfortune -3 will get very few good events, but it will hardly matter: the good events just aren't that beneficial, and overall with order 3, Misfortune -1, they probably will *still* get less overall bad events than I do with turmoil -1, luck 0.

I liked Saber Cherry's idea of events getting categorized into major/minor classes. I would add a suggestion to that to make sure that the good major events were as good to have as the bad major events are bad to have. (ie: an event that doubles your population should be just as possible as the 1/2 population death event. (Note that to the the fair inverse of the 1/2 pop death, it needs to be a doubling, not a 50% pop gain.))

-LintMan

[Slygar]

Originally posted by LintMan:

I would add a suggestion to that to make sure that the good major events were as good to have as the bad major events are bad to have. (ie: an event that doubles your population should be just as possible as the 1/2 population death event. (Note that to the the fair inverse of the 1/2 pop death, it needs to be a doubling, not a 50% pop gain.))

YES!! This is exactly my problem with the event system. The good events dont compare at all the bad events in terms of severity, especially the population gain/loss ones.

[ywl]

Originally posted by Slygar:

quote:

---

Originally posted by LintMan:

I would add a suggestion to that to make sure that the good major events were as good to have as the bad major events are bad to have. (ie: an event that doubles your population should be just as possible as the 1/2 population death event. (Note that to the the fair inverse of the 1/2 pop death, it needs to be a doubling, not a 50% pop gain.))

YES!! This is exactly my problem with the event system. The good events dont compare at all the bad events in terms of severity, especially the population gain/loss ones.

---

It depends... A lot of the good events are very significant too. Getting a hero is a big boost to some of the nations. You could sometimes get a random Lore Master, Animist or a Stalker (ethereal assasains). If you got lucky, you might get a Ring of Wizardary or Soul Contract from the item events - it did happen. I think the 1500 gold event only happens at Luck+3, but that's equivalent to the income of 3 to 4 turns (plus an item). You can sometimes get permanent increase of resource, gold income and gain an Earth gem site. If you're lucky enough to have a castle in the right province, it'll be 300 or 450 gold saved.

Getting a population loss event is depressing but on the other hand, it doesn't always hit your important provinces.

I don't know. So far, most of the judgement on the lucky event being too insignificant or the unlucky event being too harsh are very subjective. Can anybody suggest a more accurate measurement of their effects?

Unless there is a mirror image between the good and bad events, I don't know how you can balance the good and bad events out.

[Scott Hebert]

Well, I don't want to sound like there's an easy answer to this question, but maybe something to consider for the population events is to change them to fixed amounts. Starting provinces start with roughly 30,000 people, AFAICT. If you made pop. destroying events kill 3000 people instead of 1/4, then the effect on capital provinces would be far less. However, on small provinces, the population might be completely wiped out or reduced by half. This would address the problem of early events severely hampering performance in MP games.

Bayushi Tasogare

[Sandman]

I'd suggest that a fortress in a province should provide some measure of protection against bad events. It would obviously be more difficult for bandits etc to get a foothold in a fortified province, and a fortress could be used as a place of shelter in the event of flood, famine or blizzard. You can't pillage a province with a fortress in it, after all.

This would also open up a new strategy of taking misfortune and a cheap fortress type to 'cope' with the bad luck.

[ March 24, 2004, 23:54: Message edited by: Sandman ]