Thoughts on making "luck" equally attractive

[MaxWilson]

What makes you think it's a cap instead of sublinear growth?

-Max

[Xietor]

That is a another very good point QM.

And one that does not necessarily have to be addressed through the event cap limit, however. If you have luck 3, maybe weight can be given 1st to provinces in which you actually have the highest luck. that may be complicated.

Or maybe your provinces that have any positive dominion, can be treated as having your max luck in them. And enemy luck can be coded not to count against your own event limit.


Not having a clue about coding, i have no idea about the scale of difficulty any of these items presents.

[JimMorrison]

On mercenaries - It would be fun if a "mercenary" company were formed around each nation, using one of their actual randomly appearing heroes as the leader, and a thematically sensible contingent of high end troops from that nation. At game start, each nation IN the game would have their company turned off, all the nations NOT in the game, would exist in that form, as "adventuring warriors from a far off land".

On event cap - Ultimately I think this is the #1 thing that NEEDS to be done. Misf2-3 players consistently state that the idea is to grow so fast anyways, that you meet and exceed that limit as early as possible, thus your relative gains are past the fulcrum of statistical balance for most of the game. I am not so sure about 50 events, but if the cap were even raised to 10 events, it would greatly alter the overall perspective on Luck scale, I'm sure, and find it not only more competitive in larger maps, but more enjoyable to play with. If it were possible to cap "territory loss" events at the same time, that would be nice though..... Say on a 400 province map, 5 players left in contention with ~80 provinces apiece, someone suddenly gets 10 barbarians deep in his back territory where he hasn't been producing troops - ironically sieging his nearest castles in the area..... Luck needs to be made more relevant, without suddenly having the power to decisively win or lose the game due to 1 turn worth of completely unexpected events (I know, if you have 80 territories, you should be able to afford some PD, but what if you are Nief or a monkey nation? then what! ).


Oh and Xietor, you do know they finally raised the unit cap? So don't lose hope yet.

[kasnavada]

I think the same that testing 9 provinces for 30 turns should be equal to having 270 provinces in a single turn. That would "balance" luck better than anything else...

The single problem with having 50 events a turn would be your lab size actually. Since it's limited to 50 pieces and that random events happen after forging you will lose some of the items on a big map. But some people already lose item on a large map because their construction needs exceed 50 item / turn anyway, so, sooner or later it will have to be made bigger as well.

Some of the good events that actually are not good like the militia have been changed : you get fewer and fewer militia these days, actually most of the time you get national troops instead, so it's not completly useless.

And the population grows events should be far more numerous too... there is about a dozen spell and bad event that reduce population and AFAIK only one that rise it.

[Chris_Byler]

Not all events give an item, I don't think the lab size would necessarily be a problem there. (Although it still wouldn't hurt to raise it for people who want to play obscenely huge games.) Since the events happen after your own forging, you would never lose a deliberately forged item because you got too many event items, only the reverse (which is just equivalent to no event at all).

When I suggested 50 as the cap, I was deliberately intending it to be a number that you *wouldn't* actually reach - so that for programming purposes there might still be a cap, but for gameplay purposes there effectively wouldn't. But maybe on those 1000+ province maps, a T3/L3 empire could actually have 50 events, I don't know. At that point the game would probably be out of its competitive stages anyway.


A player with a mere 80 provinces would be very unlikely to get 10 events, I think, let alone to have them all be indy attacks, even if they have heavy misfortune without any order at all. To get 10 events of any kind with any regularity you'd probably need hundreds of provinces, and even then, most would be unrest, loss of tax revenue, population death, gem loss, building destruction, and other minor annoyances.


Oh yeah: if IW is reading this thread, IMO troop events should always come with a leader, if they don't already. Don't make the player waste a turn (or more than one) getting a commander there to pick them up - some of those troops are going to be slow enough to reach the front as it is (where they may or may not be good for anything more than arrow bait/lancebreakers). Even a generic indy commander would be enough to lead the units somewhere else where they can be placed under someone else's command.


P.S. I just had an idea for a new event: {Commander}'s magic item {item} has mysteriously lost its power and crumbled to dust. (Artifacts should be immune; drain scale makes it more likely or is required.) Considering the fact that your luck scale is unlucky for enemies invading your dominion, this could make it rather unpleasant to invade a lucky Ulm. (Or worse, a lucky sea nation!)

Also, terrain-dependent events that work similarly to Lure of the Deep/Beckoning, or have units buried by avalanches, rockslides, drowned in bogs or get lost until they die of exposure in wastelands. (Appropriate survival abilities protect.)

Without reform to the event caps etc., new events won't necessarily fix the order/luck balance. But they're still cool. Why shouldn't bad luck in harsh terrain include the sometimes-deadly mishaps that go with that terrain?

Given the effect of enemy luck, unlucky events that strike directly at an army in the field would actually help a lucky nation defend its dominion from invaders - in addition to indies attacking your rear and potentially cutting your supply lines, you'd also potentially lose troops to deadly accidents and lose magic items *at the front* that might be hard to replace quickly before the next battle. In the meantime the lucky nation is getting free reinforcements to help fight you, and a hero to lead them.

[Endoperez]

Chris_Byler said:
Given the effect of enemy luck, unlucky events that strike directly at an army in the field would actually help a lucky nation defend its dominion from invaders

This only works in practice if the really bad events require Misfortune, or at least are prevented in lucky provinces.
As an example, something that would destroy magic items is extremely dangerous, if you consider the investment some items represent. If it's a bad event that requires Drain, nations that, in theory, will encounter it most often are Misfortune nation with commanders under Drain, e.g. in Ulmish lands. In practice, it might be that nations that nations that choose Drain are under the threat of losing key items from the very beginning, and actually suffer the event far more often than those who are under Drain for just the short while they spend in the conquest.

Luck should protect you from the nastiest events, because otherwise Luck nations may meet them more often than Order/Misfortune nations.

[MaxWilson]

I like the idea of natural disaster events that survival scales protect against. Sounds thematic.

-Max

Edit: Er, I meant survival traits. Like "forest survival," "wasteland survival," etc. It was suggested by Chris Byler a few posts up.

[Endoperez]

MaxWilson said:
I like the idea of natural disaster events that survival scales protect against. Sounds thematic.

What are survival scales? Something like people in Drain being able to resist magical sleep spell and burning the evil witch, while people under Magic would be put asleep, 3% of the population would die and the witch would steal some of your gold?

[Chris_Byler]

Endoperez said:

This only works in practice if the really bad events require Misfortune, or at least are prevented in lucky provinces.
As an example, something that would destroy magic items is extremely dangerous, if you consider the investment some items represent.

Well, that's the point - there's widespread opinion that misfortune isn't painful enough. Any bad event will hit a misfortune nation more often than it hits a luck nation (unless it's otherwise impossible because of other scales of each respective nation).

If it's a bad event that requires Drain, nations that, in theory, will encounter it most often are Misfortune nation with commanders under Drain, e.g. in Ulmish lands.

Or commanders in enemy Luck/Drain dominions (since enemy luck is your misfortune).

In practice, it might be that nations that nations that choose Drain are under the threat of losing key items from the very beginning, and actually suffer the event far more often than those who are under Drain for just the short while they spend in the conquest.

Hmm. Possibly, but lucky nations don't get many bad events at all, so they would get any particular bad event even more rarely than that. When you did get the event it would often be an item that isn't that important - especially if you're a luck nation and every Joe Random Commander has a bane blade you got for free or something like that.

Anyway, any drain nation has, by definition, chosen to sacrifice some magical power for (a) making things more difficult for enemy mages in their dominion too and (b) points to spend elsewhere. Drain is supposed to be a negative scale, and combining it with misfortune would make it worse, which is fine IMO.

If you're in or near a friendly lab you can usually reforge and replace that item in a turn or two so it's not much worse than losing the gems equivalent. (Which even a luck nation will do sometimes, but they'll gain far more event gems than they lose.) If you're three provinces deep in enemy territory, sieging their castle and then your enormous cauldron of broth crumbles to dust just as Bogus cuts your supply line, you've got problems. (If you're sieging Atlantis's castle and your water breathing item crumbles to dust you've got BIG problems.)

Luck should protect you from the nastiest events, because otherwise Luck nations may meet them more often than Order/Misfortune nations.

I disagree - turmoil/luck gives you more events, but it doesn't give you more bad events, because of the adjustment in the good/bad percentage. You get many more good events and slightly *fewer* bad events. People really, really notice the bad events they get with luck, because they think luck 3 should be 100% good events or something, but there really are very few compared to the almost constant stream of good events.

In this specific case, though, it wouldn't hurt for the "item loses its power" event to require, say, Misfortune-1 Drain-1. The terrain-dependent troop-killing disasters (avalanches, quicksand, etc.) would be fine as regular bad events with no particular scale requirement, I think. Lucky nations would get them only rarely, like any other bad event.

[LDiCesare]

If there could be more than 3 events per turn per nation, luck would be more interesting.