What generates gems?

[Endoperez]

Dominion spread affects the early game. All test nations should have equal dominion, and preferably not too high. Dominion 9 will take a long time spreading everywhere, because the provinces have to max out before the extra faith "spills over". I suggest using dom 6.

Luck nations will be vulnerable to bad events early on, and Misfortune nations may get good good events, before the dominion has spread and scales have set. Running the games for longer will descrease the dominion factor, but there's bigger chance of province rebellion etc.


EDIT: I've been testing MA Ulm, Luck 3 Drain 3. You still get gem events, but magic items and mages are rare, and I think you get fewer gems but that could be just a feeling. Luck 3 was about equal to Order 3 as far as generating income over time goes, when you've only got few provinces, in addition to the other events. And Production happens to work well with Luck, because the mine events and traders' guilds give you permanent boosts to income and/or resources.

[JimMorrison]

But with Dom 9 and an awake pretender, your temple checks, of which you will get quite a few, will nearly always succeed.

I should go through and give them each a prophet in the first turn.

Also, there was a recent thread where IIRC KO states that Luck scale only matters in your home province, and once it has determined what kind of events you will have for the turn, it selects what province they happen in, and determines which exact event happens.

(Edit: Here it is, it was JO - [url=http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/threads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=dom3&Number=612131&Forum=)

It's a few posts down, I have no idea how to get a link to a specific post on the page.

[dirtywick]

JimMorrison said:
But still, if taking Luck + Drain ends up giving no clear benefit, in effect negating the effects of the luck, those points would be hands down better in a +income scale. I hardly see anyone saying "I consider my points in luck to be well spent if I get 1 hero in the first 20 turns of the game", you know?

No, I don't really take luck for heroes. It's the gems, and the occasional income event. If a nation doesn't have expensive mages outside of the capital or expensive units intregal to a strategy, I value the gems much more than the gold; you can't buy gems.

~70 gems on average more over 20 turns is pretty significant to me (that's 3 a turn without turmoil!). I think that a better test is to pit order/misfortune against luck/turmoil point for point. Luck 3/Turmoil 3 will probably yield a lot more gems than plain Luck 3, I'd imagine. The more common random good events are, the more gems you'll get; it's probably the most common good event you'll see. Don't most people who take high order balance it with misfortune and vice/versa? I'd think so. Those results would probably be more representative.

Or maybe most people don't do that? I know I do.

In any case, I will say that Luck is much worse on larger maps because of the event limit.

[JimMorrison]

~70 average over 20 turns? Where do you see that, my breakdown for that test showed an average of 21 over 20 turns. That was spread across the full range of Luck1-3 and Misf1-3, but the irony here is that the Misf3 nations BEAT the Luck3 nations in this test. And that's not even taking into account that some of the territories that were lost in events and never reclaimed, may have had lvl0 sites in them, further depressing the Misf incomes, even though a player would have recovered the site in real play.

As I said, I WILL however be doing more in depth testing with more sets of scale combinations, though I won't do them today, I am busy testing variations on a dual bless right now, so probably tomorrow.

And again, the large/small map argument is not really the point of THESE particular tests. I am including income figures simply because any chance to gather them is useful, but the primary goal here is to quantify the benefit to your gem income, and therefore your magic capacity. In that sense, in many combinations of scales the difference will in fact become more profound as you climb over 10 provinces, as I hardly can imagine that 9 is enough to guarantee you max events each turn (on the turn 21 that I gathered my data from, all 14 nations had between 0-2 events up).

[dirtywick]

Yeah, I read it wrong. My bad.

The map size comment was in general. Long/Large or Short/Small games make luck less atractive.

[JimMorrison]

When I do the further tests, I will do a quick check on each nation (egads this is going to be tedious ) and do a check on lvl 0 sites, to get an accurate reading of their gem income on turn 1, and compare that to income listed on turn 21.

I do agree that the impact of luck is going to be less (or less welcome!) in smaller games. Not sure I agree so much on the long games though, the point in the long games, is that the luck is hopefully going to help you build up and operate more efficiently in the early/mid game. Yes the luck scale, and associated events impact less on a turn for turn basis later in the game, but if you got enough gems by then to get 1 more wish, or to get a couple more artifacts before other players, or to build out your first SC with top shelf gear rather than "what we had kicking around in the lab", then luck did its part to give you a better late game.

That is, IF it IS doing its part. With 1 test run, the overall variability of the events is seeming to have too wide a margin. The disparity between the L3 and Misf3 nations in gold in that first test is ~6000g apiece, which at that point is 300/turn, and is undeniably huge (L3 nations had 40% more gold than Misf3), but the Misf 3 nations had ~30 more gems apiece, even after losing territories. I'm not saying that's a fair trade, but when you're trading 6000g for 30 gems AND 240 design points, it starts looking like something one could work with.

At any rate, my deeper testing will involve running 7 games of 21 nations in each (yes I am insane), each game will be one luck scale at a time, and within each game, will be 3 nations set to each of the possible magic scales. So, 3 nations at each combination of Luck +/-3 and Magic +/-3. It will still be far from conclusive data, but it will give a broader picture.

If I'm ever making games, I will make sure this sort of testing can be automated, to pinpoint balance issues with minimal effort, but I'm looking for a lottery ticket for that to happen.

[dirtywick]

Wow, that's quite the test. I play with Luck a lot, and I see those gem events pop up the most frequently of all of the events. Hopefully a larger sample will show that I'm not delusional

You're right about both long and short games. I should have just stuck with the map size. I think moderate games benefit the most, at any rate. Enough provinces to grab the 3 events/turn consistently is the sweet spot. It would probably turn out to be a bell curve if you graphed the benefits, there's a point where luck operates at it's most efficient. Small maps you're not hitting the 3, and large maps you (should) gain many gems from many provinces making the total gain from random events a very small percentage of your total gem gain each turn, and the percentage increase from order would offer a larger gain because there's no cap on that.

The gold income from luck will also be interesting to see, although it's not related to this thread.

Good luck, hope you don't turn up insane somewhere after this

[JimMorrison]

dirtywick said:
...
Good luck, hope you don't turn up insane somewhere after this

There's a reason that I like R'lyeh.

If these tests give interesting results, I might run some on other scale combos, to fill in more of the blanks on how reliably those scales will actually affect gameplay.

[TheWetFish]

Great work guys. I think we can safely say that random events can (possibly) generate large amounts of gems. Fair bit of testing but no complete or detailed breakdown of mechanics or exact stats, so I'm going to leave it at that.

The random event issue deserves it's own thread.

Are there any other sources not already covered?

[Endoperez]

JimMorrison said:
Luck scale only matters in your home province, and once it has determined what kind of events you will have for the turn, it selects what province they happen in, and determines which exact event happens.

I see. Luck still affects what exact event you get. I'm not sure if the gem events are luck-neutral or if they require luck, because I don't play with Misfortune. Gem LOSS events definitely won't happen in provinces with Luck, and I don't think I've seen blood slave rebellions either.