Thank you all for your prompt responses.
Gandalf, I had a lot of them in the first 40 turns. In the demo, where the human player is limited to level 4 research.
And they did include a flood of my home province. That was without any unluck scales.
I've toyed with order 1, luck 1 with Abyssia, and it's looking as if I should have gone with more order and no luck.
Also, I didn't realize the importance of productivity for Abyssia. All it seems the abyssians need is to find a source of cheap archers, preferably the shortbow kind that won't hurt their heavy infantry types much, and they will be golden.
I know you can "tweak" the number of random events in the initial game creation process. But somehow this seems a bit like cheating.