Income and Luck Scales for Megagame

[Evilhomer]

Yeah i was just taking a bit of a stab in the dark, therefore i did say turn 50+, not turn 50 (I admit they were exaggerated by more then i thought, must be influenced by playing the cb mod so much). However your numbers are not correct either:
pop:10000 at start, assuming no fort and no other scale modifiers:
pop at 50 (growth 3): 10000*1.006^50=13486
income/turn=13486*0.01*1.06=143 gold

pop at 50 (death 3): 10000*0.994^50=7401
income/turn=7401*0.01*0.94=70 gold

gold increase due to growth = 104 %. I dunno what you mean by the percentage being less or more depending on population since the income is directly proportional to you population, so you end up with the same % in the end. 1/4 income was obviously a bit exaggerated but money after upkeep might be cut that way. Anyway i think the benefit of taking growth in a mega game like this is pretty clear.

[Baalz]

Ah yes, but a couple other considerations when you try to extrapolate these results out to your kingdom rather than a single province:

1) This calculation is 50 turns from when your full growth/death scale takes effect. Even by turn 60 or 70 its unlikely that many of your provinces will have had your full scales on them for 50 turns. Your overall kingdom growth/death rate is always going to average less than the maximum difference implied by full scales, usually significantly so.

2) This calculation, if extrapolated out to your kingdom rather than a single province assumes that the extra 240 design points for going with a death scale resulted in no extra territories being held. For reference, this is the difference between having an imprisoned pretender and an awake one. If having an awake pretender allows you to snag a couple extra provinces then that will reduce this difference.

3) There is a quasi inflation that goes on as the game progresses because of the decreasing effectiveness of gold recruitable troops. At the beginning gold is extremely important, by turn 50 almost always less so (significantly less so depending on your strategy). Kinda hard to quantify numerically, but 100% more gold on turn 50 isn't worth the same as 100% more gold turn 1.

On the flip side of the coin:

1) Death scales greatly increase your chance of getting population killing random events, and thus permanently affecting your income, perhaps cripplingly early. Particularly with misfortune.

2) Death scales will kill off your old mages much faster, replacements cost gold.


All in all, even from a strictly gold income point of view the growth/death question isn't very well modeled by a simple exponential multiplication.

[jutetrea]

Understood Baalz, but does the consideration change in a longer term/highly populated game? If there are static borders for quite awhile you will see your net income go down as you recruit troops and your gross income is reduced slightly through death.

It may change strategy as you will be prodded to be continuously aggressive to conquer new territory. Not necessarily a bad thing, but a factor.

[Evilhomer]

Yeah i agree with all those points of course, but when you consider a choice you might start with a simple model i guess.

Anyway i really do think the value of picking growth increases with the size and expected lenght of the game, so this should be the optimal type of game to pick growth in.

You might add a few more in fact to the long list of considerations

1. growth gives added supply
2. A large chunk of your nation might have been conquered from dead/dying nations by turn 50.
3. The fact that time works for you not against you allows you to be peaceful if you want

Additionally it might be intresting to know that the percentage difference between growth 3 and death 3 becomes larger if you pick turmoil as well (and less if you pick order).

[Baalz]

I think the biggest factor, much more than length of game, is static-ness of borders. Doesn't matter near as much how long the game goes on, what matters is how long your dominion has effected the provinces you hold. If you're an aggressive player and more or less constantly expanding (or less optimistic - trading provinces) then a good portion of your kingdom is always freshly under your dominion (or still under an enemies) so hasn't had time for that exponential growth. If your borders are fairly stable and your dominion covers most of your territories, you'll see much more of an effect from growth/death.

Personally, I wouldn't take death and misfortune unless you're playing a nation/strategy not reliant on income from population (like LA Ermor).

[Shovah32]

Death and misfortune arent very nice together. In a recent single player game i got a plague at my capitol on turn 2, reducing it to 14000 population...

[Evilhomer]

The term DOH comes to mind

[MaxWilson]

Ouch! I thought severely bad events weren't allowed to happen for the first 10 turns or something, but maybe a plague isn't considered really severe.

-Max

[RamsHead]

I never had a really bad time with a misfortune/death scale. I always go with three order in those cases though, and I never go with three misfortune and three death. It is usually more like one in one and two in the other, max.