Balance: Some thoughts on Events and Scales

[tinkthank]

Some people had posted recently about "standard" scales, or about some scale choices being "no-brainers"; so there does seem to be some consensus as to which scales are "worth it" in a competetive MP environment where winning may be more important than other game features. This goes particularly for Luck/Misfortune, Order/Turmoil, and Sloth/Productivity, from what I can gather.

Here are some ideas on how these issues can be addressed in a global manner, without necessarily tweaking the individual scales themselves.

- Make events occur on a per-province, not per-nation basis. If a nation has 200 provinces, 100 events per turn would not be unthinkable under a Turmoil scale.
Of course this presupposes a type of UI overhaul as I suggested in previous posts on the Wishlist thread (mail window, events window, forge reports window, spell reports window, etc.) so that the "message" screen is not flooded.
- Then, increase the intensity of bad events, so that misfortune is truly something to fear if very high.
Then, greatly increase the number of special events which only happen if you have a certain type of scale (preferably: those which are currently considered underused as "no-brainers"). Such things could be, for example, to greatly increase the number and intensity of events which require Misfortune 1, Misfortune 2, and Misfortune 3 respectively. Ditto for Luck 1, 2 and 3. (Fun and interesting would be, for example, neat types of helpful units which join your cause: assassins and mages of various types, perhaps those which are not available anywhere else, as well as sages.) One could make many more certain events requiring Productivy 1, 2 or 3: new items are transported to your lab (perhaps those not forgable by ordinary means), perhaps a group of units get a boost to armor; perhaps a special event requiring Prod 3 will yield you a castle (or maybe: only if it occurs in a province with a castle already in it, although this would tend to encourage "mad castling") in which you can recruit your national units which all automatically have +1 protection or something, or adds a special Heavy-Infantry type unit to that castle. I think that would be neato. Of course, this last bit would require a different way of attributing units protection stats.
- Make quite a number of nation-specific events (or even better for modding: nation-type specific events, e.g. for tree-huggers, blood-worshippers, cold-lovers, underwater, etc.)

(EDIT: hm, maybe this belongs in the wishlist?)