What happened to the AI?

[Loren]

Edratman said:
I suspect that the AI nation got an invasion on the first or second turn. I've seen it two or three times to the AI and had it happen to me once. When it happened to me I had bad settings. From that occurance, I guess that the same thing happened to the AI. I remember one time when the AI was stuck at one province they were under the knight siege when I got to the province.

Both the knight and barbarian events are too strong for starting armies to relieve the siege.

I like the chance that bad things can happen on the first turn. Unpredictability is one of the charms of the game. Pretty much everyone has learned to recruit a mage the first turn with bad scales because of the lab destroyed event.

But that would have shown as the loss of the province early on. That's not what happened, though.

[Edratman]

I do not remember exactly what the score graph showed when I encountered it. I know the nation was low, but the graphs are not large enough to read much better than that.

And when a castle is besieged, ownership is not really decided in some game terms. Although the beseiger is nominally the owner, neither side can recruit in the province. The castle still owns the lab and can research and summon. I don't know who gets the gems, but I think it goes to the castle. The besieger gets the taxes. So it is possible for the graph not to reflect besieging, specially when the siege drops the number of provinces to zero, but the god is still alive.

[PvK]

Ok, so I ran a test game as LA C'tis with Turmoil-3, Unluck-3, Growth-2, Heat-3, Prod-3, Magic-3, just staying in my home capital, and here's what happened.

All went well enough until brigands started hiding out in the province, which turned up the unrest, and then lots of events started wiping out or driving away my population, cursing my pretender and troops, causing my income to vanish, etc. Two barbarian hordes tried to take my province but were defeated by my provincial defense force. I tried lowering taxes and patrolling, but my economy collapsed and my population plummeted.

Finally, in the last month of year 2, an earthquake hit and trogs swarmed out and seiged my castle.

The provinces graph DOES go down when a province is seiged.

However, I had no income and no lab and no way to pay to rebuild it, or to recruit troops, for many months before that happened, due to having only one province and unluck/turmoil/unrest/brigands in my capital. I have 4910 population left in my capital, no temple, no lab. Unrest is 94, gold income is 2 with tax at 50%. I do happen to have a large undead army which I could use to break out with, but not every nation would have any such thing.

[Aezeal]

Endo: I have nothing against bad luck and it's events in most of the game, but I do think the impact it can have on the first turns is too much so I think it should not happen the first turns or at least not happen to the starting prov the first 3-5 turns.. after that luck will still be worth it's points without the option of getting your game ruined by misfortune (or even with luck as mentioned) and in MP some events would ruin your game in most cases

[Loren]

Edratman said:
I do not remember exactly what the score graph showed when I encountered it. I know the nation was low, but the graphs are not large enough to read much better than that.

And when a castle is besieged, ownership is not really decided in some game terms. Although the beseiger is nominally the owner, neither side can recruit in the province. The castle still owns the lab and can research and summon. I don't know who gets the gems, but I think it goes to the castle. The besieger gets the taxes. So it is possible for the graph not to reflect besieging, specially when the siege drops the number of provinces to zero, but the god is still alive.

But going from 1 to zero should have been clear in the graph. It did happen but long afterwards.

[silhouette]

Loren said:
But going from 1 to zero should have been clear in the graph. It did happen but long afterwards.

Probably just a coincidence of actions that makes it look like that. For example, the AI sent its initial army and took a capital-adjacent province with very heavy losses, and on the same turn a indep. event sieged their capital. That could leave them with 1 province still, but very low income and low ability to recruit for a looong time, making them easy pickings later. Did they finally die from another AI, or from dominion death, or ?

Sill

[Aezeal]

does the besieger get the taxes?

[Sombre]

Yes.

[MaxWilson]

Mostly. The besieger gets the base taxes, and the besieged gets the admin bonus taxes. So in a 200 gold province with an Admin 40 fort, you'd normally get 240 gold per turn. If you're besieged, you'll get 40 gold and he'll get 200. So Saith KO.

-Max

[Edratman]

Pvk has proved that the graph goes down when besieged so I have no realistic explanation for your observations.