refuting common wisdom on scales everybody knows

[Lingchih]

Man, I am getting tired head on this topic. Can't we just fight it out? I'll stick with Order 3 Misfortune 2.

[Omnirizon]

Lingchih said:
Man, I am getting tired head on this topic. Can't we just fight it out? I'll stick with Order 3 Misfortune 2.

I've been reading this thread, watching ppl beat the dead horse, rez it and beat it some more; wondering when they would start talking about something different. I did learn some things about opinion on Order/Turm and Luck/Mistfort; but in the end nothing said was really something I didn't already know, and didn't see anything that was going to change the way I think about scale design. I tried starting a convo about heat/cold analysis, but only one person bothered to comment. I was going to comment back, but it felt pointless because the convo would simply get buried underneath piles of dead horses.

its nice to see someone else feels the same way.

but hey!!

on heat/cold, like Endo said, it causes encumbrance. I think the upside to taking cold3 is worth it. you have a harder time with cold resist nations, but they would be using Murdering Winter anyway, and you have an easier time with cold-blood nations, and I do not think there is a heat version of MurdWinter.

In addition, you can build a strat around the temp scales. If you have a nation with chaff-type units and/or light armor/encumbrance units available, the encumbrance aint such a drawback. And you would benefit in battle against players who are depending on fewer, but heavier armored and robust, units. It affects everyone on the battlefield, and provides just one more way to stack the deck in your favor by designing around it.

[Endoperez]

kasnavada said:
I couldn't have said it myself any better... Now, I wish that 9 provinces times 30 turns meant the same amount of events that 270 provinces in a single turn does. For some reason, many people seem to believe there is a cap number of events... and that it doesn't scale because of this. Probably because there is a cap.

Just removing that cap would make turmoil / luck and order about equal.

I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about.

Think of it like this: Growth gives a static precentage bonus to population, every turn. To test Growth scale, you can run a test with 9 provinces for 30 turns, or a test with 270 provinces for 1 turn. The results will be different.

Growth/Death affect late game more than early game. Production's main effect, more resources, is static but importance of resources goes down as more magic is researched. Order is good, but Production or at least non--Sloth, non-Misfortune may be better in early game for some nations.

Why, then, should Luck's bonus be static? Luck is random, but it CAN give huge bonus in the early game, much bigger than Order, and the rare events where everything goes right that are game-changing (getting a single path-booster may enable you to forge more of them, especially for Air or Death, and sometimes you get Staff of Elemental Mastery or a Ring of Sorcery)... But Luck can also give militia, or a lab in an unimportant province or as many gems as you get from your capital every turn, and these are useless in early, middle AND late game.


If more events happened, you would get more actually good events, and more actually pretty useless events. It would be BORING to read through them, every turn. IMO, a better solution would be to directly increase the quality of events in middle/late game, not their quantity.


Giving all nations some national troops and restricting labs to provinces with recruitable mages would help. Adding in events that are too good for early game would help a lot. Whether they are limited by the number of provinces you own, amount of research you have done, or the availability of a spesific unit (an ancient mage's soul being bound in one of your mechanical men, giving you air/fire/nature mage), it doesn't matter.

[Twan]

The problem for me isn't the cap itself but bad events "stealing" event slots when your scales aren't maxed everywhere, so you need a very strong dominion or to be turtling to have reliable effects.

It's very rare to have luck 3 everywhere when you are expanding, you often have provinces with luck 0-2, or even worse with your turmoil scale but not luck (or with the misfortune of a neighbour). Then you may get an half of bad events, replacing same number of good ones, and these events can nullify the positive effect of the scale.

Order of course only give bonus where the scale has been developped, but provinces without order don't steal the income bonus of provinces having it.

Tests don't represent that well, as they are usually based on strong dominion + temples everywhere + no expansion.

I think the best way to reevaluate luck scale would be to check provinces by decreasing order of local luck (so you'd get events in provinces with low/negative luck scale only if the total number of events of your lucky provinces didn't have reached the event cap).

[Endoperez]

johan osterman said:
Number of luck events are determnined by homeprovince scales and number of provinces, IIRC. The events are categorised as either bad luck or good luck events, the ratio of which are dependent on your home province luck scale. Once the general nature and number of events are determined the will be randomly assigned to provinces. There they will be randomly generated if the province does not have the requirements for an event the event will be rerolled. For the purposes of what events might occur enemy dominion luck scale in a province will be coniderewd unluck, unluck scales will still be unluck. So in order to get the 3000 gold event you will have the event occur in a province where you have your dominion and a plus 3 luck scale.

edit: source http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...&Number=612131

[Twan]

I should be really unlucky if it's the real mechanic.

[kasnavada]

Think of it like this: Growth gives a static precentage bonus to population, every turn. To test Growth scale, you can run a test with 9 provinces for 30 turns, or a test with 270 provinces for 1 turn. The results will be different.

You don't know what you're talking about. What you just did was a perfect example of a strawman argument : the events you get from luck or misfortune from turn n do not affect turn n+1. Growth from turn n affects turn n + 1, therefore as you justly said, you can't compare growth that way. But you can compare luck effects since they are independant from one turn to the next. Same with order and production (and negative counterpart).

That's the reason why the only difference between testing luck for 30 turns on 9 provinces and testing luck in 270 province is the cap limitation for events... which should be gone.

Your ideas are interesting though, but a better solution would be to group the events :
Example : your followers found some water gem in provinceA, fire gem in provinceB instead of 2 messages. Even more since it doesn't matter where the gems are found.

Same for gold : it could be summed. For the loss of gold, it should also be. I always found strange that losing 200 gold in a province that gives 14 gold result in a loss of 14 gold...

Luck should scale with territory since more territory means more chances for luck to happen.

And, as far as militia events being useless, they've been mostly replaced by national troops events AFAIK... so your wish has been heard.

[Sombre]

kasnavada said:
Luck should scale with territory since more territory means more chances for luck to happen.

And, as far as militia events being useless, they've been mostly replaced by national troops events AFAIK... so your wish has been heard.

Luck does scale with territory, but only until you reach the event cap.

Militia events are still pretty common and in some cases the national troop events are just as bad anyway.

[Chris_Byler]

kasnavada said:
You don't know what you're talking about. What you just did was a perfect example of a strawman argument : the events you get from luck or misfortune from turn n do not affect turn n+1. Growth from turn n affects turn n + 1, therefore as you justly said, you can't compare growth that way. But you can compare luck effects since they are independant from one turn to the next. Same with order and production (and negative counterpart).

That's not true at all. Indy attacks on turn n affect turn n+1 very obviously: you still don't have the province, unless you send an army to retake it. Buildings destroyed by an event remain destroyed until you rebuild them. Population killing events have a persistent effect just like death scale's (only more dramatic). Free buildings, extra mines, and many other luck events have persistent good effects. Unrest events on turn n will affect your tax revenue - if you use autotax, it will automatically cut taxes to reduce the unrest, and if you don't, you will have to manually reduce taxes, patrol, or reduce unrest some other way in order to get your tax revenue back.

[JimMorrison]

Kasnavada, I hope you don't have a career as a scientist.....


Your 9 prov * 30 turns = 270 provinces for 1 turn is fatally flawed. You have been told repeatedly that events cap out. It's hard to say definitively if it's 4 or 5 or even 6 - that's not the point. The point is that even if it's 6, and even if you only reliably got 2 per turn with 9 provinces, your test would result in 60 events with the 9 province test, and 6 events in the 270 province test. So to clarify, you are theoretically (though not in any way -accurately-) extrapolating the effects of Order, you are getting 10x the Luck effect on the empire that is 1/30 the size.


Just.. stop.. arguing.. please. <3