Old age and growth

[Psycho]

Does anyone know exactly in what way growth affects old age?

[Jazzepi]

Someone did a test on this a long time ago, and I don't really want to dig up the post.

The short of it: Growth makes old age less likely to result in a disease. Death makes it more likely. If you take a nation where you need to recruit a large number of old age units that you want to stick around for a long time, death scales are not your friend.

Magic paths also effect how this works out (not that you have any control over that, so it's really less relevant). I think fire makes it worse, while earth makes it better.

Jazzepi

[Psycho]

I am familiar with this thread. I was just uncertain what the exact effect of growth is. So everything that is known is that disease is a less likely affliction and this knowledge is based on a few experiments? I was hoping for a better answer.

Fire makes it worse, nature and death make it better.

[Jazzepi]

Originally Posted by Psycho

I am familiar with this thread. I was just uncertain what the exact effect of growth is. So everything that is known is that disease is a less likely affliction and this knowledge is based on a few experiments? I was hoping for a better answer.

Fire makes it worse, nature and death make it better.

The experiments were extremely clear. 100 mages for 50 turns, I think. I'm not sure what you expected to get besides that.

Unless you're asking for someone to go and look in the code (IE the developers), which no one has access to except for maybe Edi on rare occasion involving fixing typos, you're not going to get a better answer then what's been given.

If you /really/ wanted to, I'm sure you could take the experiment results and try to correlate a relationship between the change in the size of the G/D scale between the change in the speed at which mages received the diseased affliction. THAT would give you a more accurate idea, but it's also something that you can do on your own with the data available.

Jazzepi

[Redfrog]

Here is that old age test thread:

Some Old Age Tests

[Edi]

Growth scale reduces chance of disease, death scale increases it. Death magic on a mage makes afflictions (including disease) from old age less likely. That's the only relevant stuff. Exact percentages are unknown and may depend on how far over the old age threshold a unit is proportional to it. I do not have access to code regarding this and would not give any details even if I did.

[Psycho]

I expected that KO already answered this in some old thread burried somewhere deep in the forums and that someone remembered it and posted it here.

Not all those test are good. The first ones assume that BoT ages
everyone by one each month. But that is not how it works. I did some tests a while ago testing its effectiveness. It works by aging everyone 1d6 (probably not open ended) years per month. And if I remember correctly this random number is calculated per unit, so one philosopher may age 1 year and another 6 years in the same turn.

I wasn't looking for exact numbers, just the effect. It's enough for me to know that the chance of disease is reduced. I just wanted to be certain that is the only effect. Thanks everybody who answered.

[Poopsi]

Hey, one thing: during one of my Pythium campaigns, I was playing under (among other things) a nature 4 bless, which brings regeneration, which, on shrouded arch-theurgs, increased survival a lot by itself. After casting Gift of Health regenerating archies were pretty much set, as as a general rule the diseases they got dealt no damage, and disappeared after one or two turns anyhow...

I was thinking, maybe, when playing nations with aged commanders, it´s a good idea to bring in a nature blessing just to keep them around? (that, or full throttle into blood and construction, and lots of youth boots)

[Psycho]

I did some tests of my own. I tested with MA Caelum and 100 high seraphs. I did tests for growth 0, growth 1 and growth 2. I did 4 tests for each, that is 12 total and I am giving just mean value results. I only counted the number of still surviving seraphs on winter turns (10, 22, 34, 46, 58, 70), because they get diseased on late winter and by next winter all those diseased die. First late winter is turn 11.

turn       growth 0 avg.      growth 1 avg.      growth 2 avg.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
 10            100.00             100.00            100.00
 22             87.75              88.25             90.75
 34             78.50              80.75             81.25
 46             69.00              71.25             73.25
 58             62.00              65.25             67.25
 70             54.50              58.25             61.00

It seems to me that the effect of reducing disease affliction is rather weak. I don't feel that taking growth just for the benefit of your old mages is worth it.

Also you cannot rely on growth to cut down on afflictions. I didn't calculate variances, but I'll say that the worst growth 2 result on turn 70 was just 50 mages and the best 69 mages; the worst growth 0 result on turn 70 was also 50 mages and the best was 61 mages.

[Jazzepi]

Originally Posted by Psycho

I did some tests of my own. I tested with MA Caelum and 100 high seraphs. I did tests for growth 0, growth 1 and growth 2. I did 4 tests for each, that is 12 total and I am giving just mean value results. I only counted the number of still surviving seraphs on winter turns (10, 22, 34, 46, 58, 70), because they get diseased on late winter and by next winter all those diseased die. First late winter is turn 11.

turn       growth 0 avg.      growth 1 avg.      growth 2 avg.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
 10            100.00             100.00            100.00
 22             87.75              88.25             90.75
 34             78.50              80.75             81.25
 46             69.00              71.25             73.25
 58             62.00              65.25             67.25
 70             54.50              58.25             61.00

It seems to me that the effect of reducing disease affliction is rather weak. I don't feel that taking growth just for the benefit of your old mages is worth it.

Also you cannot rely on growth to cut down on afflictions. I didn't calculate variances, but I'll say that the worst growth 2 result on turn 70 was just 50 mages and the best 69 mages; the worst growth 0 result on turn 70 was also 50 mages and the best was 61 mages.

I think the point isn't that G2 is far superior than G1, but that there was a palpable difference between say D2 and G2.

In any case, if you're playing an old age nation, you can just think of the D-G difference as subtracting/adding more money than the 2% they normally give, since if more mages live longer with growth, you don't have to rebuy them, or if more mages dies faster with death, you will have to buy them.

Jazzepi