Thoughts on making "luck" equally attractive

[kasnavada]

If you manage to find out that what the max limit of event is I'd be interested to know, and possibly make it bigger. It's rather silly that lucks would gets worse when the places where luck events can occur is made bigger...

[dirtywick]

MaxWilson said:
P.S. I'm not sure if I believe in the 3 event cap, but it seems low to me. I'm pretty sure I've seen up to 4 or 5 events on some turns.

Next time you do take a screen.

[trentzero]

Certain spells like Baleful Star show up in the message log as "events" even though they're not. If you're up against a particulary zealous enemy they might even spam those types of spells at you since they are "anonymous".

[Ironhawk]

kasnavada said:
Then when do you run that 40 province test ?

Because there is no need to run a test? There is a cap to events - be it 3 or 5 or 6... it doesnt matter. Whatever it is, at some point Luck stops scaling as your empire grows. Order never does.

Additionally, as the person challenging convention I think the burden of proof is on you, kasnavada.

[Xietor]

To be civil, I would like to say kas has a point that order is predictable, and many take the scale to get a predictable income.

That said, and with no empirical proof other than having played wayyyyyyyyy too many dominions games for years now, there is a hard cap on the luck events. That is based on experience. So I can offer no piece of code or any scientific
test.

But Kas is also correct in that you can exceed the cap at times, but not consistently. If you capture provinces, you sometimes get events that the other player would have received, resulting in an extra 1 or 2 events depending on how your war is going.

Of course you can get many many "bad" events per turn if your enemy is spamming spells on your provinces. But the lucky events are capped, and the number i believe the cap to be is 4. So on a 300 province map, if you own 50 provinces, 4/50 is not as good as when you owned fewer provinces.

Accepting the cap as a reality, and for the sake of avoiding argument, let us please get the thread back on track. For those who forgot what it is about, read the 1st post.

In particular, any thoughts about adding a luck event where mercenaries show up at your gate?

[DonCorazon]

Ironhawk said:
Whatever it is, at some point Luck stops scaling as your empire grows. Order never does.

One reason I like Luck is the converse of this - that Luck is overly helpful in the early game. So in the first few turns when +22% income may translate into 80/90 extra gold, a luck event can get you 1000gp. Admittedly it is unpredictable. I am in 2 games now with Luck 3 - one I am coming up short in. The other has been amazing. Every turn I have been able to buy everything I can with money left over. I have permanent income raising events, gems, one time gold events etc. And that is in less than 15 turns. It may not equate to the long-term advantage of order in a math analysis, but qualitatively it is leading to rapid expansion that my gut tells me is better than the bonuses I'd be reaping with Order.

[Chris_Byler]

It seems to me that the simplest way to adjust order/luck would be to raise the event per turn cap to an amount that is unlikely to be hit in the competitive stage of any game - say 50 events per nation per turn. The non-scaling of luck/misfortune to large empires is no longer a problem; large lucky empires could potentially get several free buildings a turn along with a few dozen free units, substantial extra gem income etc. Large unlucky empires, on the other hand... well, let's just say it's a good thing you have that extra gold from order.

Replacing the militia event with X gold worth of some national troop (hopefully a reasonably decent one) would be a nice change, too. I'd much rather have 20 free huskarls, city guards, marverni nobles, or hastatii than 40 militia - and that's just the mundane troops.

Even a decent indy troop would be better than militia.

[Coldshard]

Chris_Byler said:
It seems to me that the simplest way to adjust order/luck would be to raise the event per turn cap to an amount that is unlikely to be hit in the competitive stage of any game - say 50 events per nation per turn. The non-scaling of luck/misfortune to large empires is no longer a problem; large lucky empires could potentially get several free buildings a turn along with a few dozen free units, substantial extra gem income etc. Large unlucky empires, on the other hand... well, let's just say it's a good thing you have that extra gold from order.

Replacing the militia event with X gold worth of some national troop (hopefully a reasonably decent one) would be a nice change, too. I'd much rather have 20 free huskarls, city guards, marverni nobles, or hastatii than 40 militia - and that's just the mundane troops.

Even a decent indy troop would be better than militia.

Yes! I actually view getting random militia and such to be a bad event, even if it is listed as a good one. A bunch of guys who arent good at fighting appear without a commander likely several provinces away from a front line or any commander that could go pick them up.. so basically it is just an income drain until I can waste turns picking them up and getting them killed

[Xietor]

i wonder if the event cap, like the unit cap, is one we have to live with though. Other solutions may have to be sought.

And I think having 50 lucky events per turn would be way overpowered. heh.

[quantum_mechani]

One thing that has not been mentioned is a particularly nasty side effect of the event limit. If you own significantly more provinces than your dominion spreads to, your luck scale bonus can become almost negligible (bad events from the outer provs override whatever good you'd get). So that puts yet another burden luck- to reap your benefit at all you have to get your dominion everywhere. This is as opposed to order where you are doing fine as long as you get it over your population centers.