Luck/Turmoil versus Nothing.

[RadicalTurnip]

If I'm going to kill my scales to make a good bless/a good pretender, I usually take luck (and sometimes growth) and then just lower everything else.

[DonCorazon]

I hate Luck. Psychologically, if something good happens, you feel like you paid for it, and if something bad happens, it pisses you off since you spent the points to get those positive scales.

Misfortune is the opposite - if something bad happens, you feel okay since at least you got the design points, and when good things happen, you feel like you cheated the devil his due.

[Cammorak]

I tend to favor luck as it eliminates some province dependence and, contrary to the name, can actually be fairly reliable, though not always what you need at the time. I think it's also useful for nations that will look to diversify their magic earlier as it makes bootstrapping much less painful.

Also, it depends upon PD to a lesser extent. Granted, no PD is good, but given the choice between garbage PD and PD That Might Actually Kill Something, most players will attack the nation with garbage PD early. Less reliance upon provincial income/gems makes this less painful.

[Verjigorm]

I've played around with Luck/Turmoil several times. You don't need fortune tellers. You will generally get fewer bad events than a player with Order/Misfortune. However, the nation you select has to be able to absorb the loss of revenue caused by the turmoil scale.

Frequently, when taking Turmoil/Luck, I found it's extremely unwise to go heavy on Turmoil because there's no way to repair the loss of tax revenue.

Keep in mind that a lot of this is just strategizing and hasn't been put into practice.

You lose 7% income per shift toward Turmoil so sticking in the 1-2 Turmoil range will allow you to balance (up to 12%) the revenue loss with increases in Production/Growth.

I messed with T'ien Chi with this pretender (Keep in mind I'm not crazy about him overall right now, he was a test candidate):

Lord of Plenty (Body 1339, 150 hits)
Magic: Earth 8 Astral 4
Dominion 5
Scales: Turmoil 1 Productivity 2 Cold 1 Growth 2 Fortune 3 Magic 1
Imprisoned

Why I like MA-TC for Luck/Turmoil:

TC has incredible magical versatility and some relatively cheap basic mages and regular units. They have a need for extra production to build archers well since their archers are kind of resource intensive, so they are naturally predisposed toward Production scales, and they have old mages (not withstanding their national age reversal spell), so growth works too.. Taking magic scales allows for special events to occur. I'm not sure which events take which levels, but I'm sure there's a table somewhere (in fact I know there is). I think Luck-3, Magic-3 has a special event associated with it.

Ignore the magic picks and focus on the scales. That was an interesting but not very useful experiment.

The experiment showed that you can sustain very good mage and unit production with a flat income bonus (0% total). The money drop specials are the bomb, but it's the gem drops you're looking for. The gems are random but occur frequently enough to be useful and will put you ahead of the curve especially since TC can site search everything except blood and death naturally and they can use virtually any gem type.

TC Also has excellent Immortal national heroes.

Now, TC is recommended to take order because of free PD, but I still get PD bonus events. After all, I'm lucky!

So after my rambling.... What I'm essentially looking for in the Turmoil/Luck combo is:

1. A nation that can use a wide variety of gems.
2. A nation that deals well with good scales and slightly decreased money supply (e.g. no bonus money). Cheaper common troops, with higher production requirements otherwise we're wasting the Production scale bonus.
3. A nation that can tough it out with a Dormant/Imprisoned pretender.
4. A nation that can select the Lady of Fortune pretender since she causes good events, not just prevents bad events.
5. A nation that benefits in some other way from Turmoil like Pangaea that gets extra Maenads.
6. A nation that has patrol units that can be used effectively to increase provincial income with growth scales (say 120% tax rate) to supplement the revenue loss from the turmoil scale.

Methodology:

1. Don't overdo the Turmoil. It only gives you a boost to event frequency, but you lose a lot in exchange. Leave the scale flat (0%) or take 1 tick, and 2 ticks cautiously and only if you're taking a patrolling nation.

2. Balance the income loss from the Turmoil with Production/Growth.

....

Now we'll get back to the magic path weirdness:

What I was looking into was the possibility of taking a Bless strategy (which doesn't necessarily work well with TC b/c their Sacreds are cap-only), in conjunction with the luck scale. Certain nations may be able to pull off such an oddity and it could prove to be an extremely useful strategy since:

1. The bless strategy makes for an excellent early to mid game with no need for significant magic use, and therefore, no significant gem expenditures which...

2. Will leave you with a massive and diverse gem horde in mid to late game which is INVISIBLE to your opponents since luck gems don't show up on the graphs which can also let you fly under the radar a little but not too much since a good player will see your scales and anticipate magical diversity, but will give you a head-start when magic starts to take over.

Just some thoughts. I usually like to play with the Lady of Fortune when I take Luck, but with Pangaea, pretender choice doesn't matter as much. The Luck/Blood combination provides for an excellent benefit with Crossbreeding which is my favorite spell in Pangaea (I use Crossbreed fodder in all armies). The "lucky" breeds are formidable and common especially for what you're paying to get them.

---

Oh! As for the Fortune tellers, I always look at fortune tellers as a license to take Misfortune scales. The very first fortune tellers were the Fortune Tellers of Black Forest Ulm in Dominions 2 which forced you to take Misfortune scales. Anyone who has frequently hired cap-only fortune tellers or hire-anywhere fortune tellers can easily take Misfortune scales because you will mitigate bad events simply by research process. Fortune telling is also a cumulative percent chance to avert a bad event per province rather than each individual having a certain chance to avert an event. For example, if you have 20 Sibyls in your capitol each having Fortune-teller (5), you cannot have a bad event in your capitol, ever, regardless of your misfortune scales.

[Verjigorm]

As for Bogarus and the Kalendologists:

Kalendologists are pretty good fortune tellers and cheap, but this does not in anyway indicate that they should be massed as researchers since the Master of Names is far better. The way I see them is to say that they can create a formidable Soul Slay or Enslave Mind communion given their incredible cheapness (90 gold) and the fact that they have 2S basic. Throw POTS with a Kalendologist Communion Master and have someone along with a Banner of the Northern Star (or just cast the spell), and you have a (with just POTS): Soul Slay communion, or with POTS+LOTNS, an Enslave Mind communion. Snazzy.

Unfortunately for the Kalendologist, they have a disadvantage to their blue-robed cousin the Astrapelagist who can:

Summon Simargl Patrols
Cloud Trapeze
Commune to Thunderstrike OR Soul Slay

Astrapelagists also have a better buff array in their communion especially if you have a nice 2/8 which gives you twice as many scripted buffs twice as fast and Thunder strikes for up to 50/4 with +1 (POTS to cast TS), and then +3 bonus for communion size, and +1 again for storm power for 12.5 fatigue Thunderstrikes notwithstanding the fact that you also get 2 masters with 6A5S. You can still POTS/LOTNS to get Soul Slay for 20/3 (7 fatigue), but no Enslave mind.

[Squirrelloid]

Some notes:
Gandalf is wrong: Misfortune is not a weapon against your enemies. Your luck scales act as misfortune scales for your opponents (ie, so long as its in your dominion).

Presumably, your misfortune scales act as luck scales for your opponents.

O/L is a perfectly playable combination in CBM - I happen to like it a lot with some nations. Sure, you get fewer events, but that just means you need more provinces to routinely max out your events...

T/L works for nations who don't need a lot of cash. Not only do the Mictlans generally want to get into blood in a big way, they also don't need much cash to pop out an expansion party every turn. So Turmoil synergizes with the blood, it also isn't that painful.

Many nations that require high resources can afford turmoil because the gold:resource ratio for their troops reduces their gold needs substantially.

(Obviously (almost) all nations would *like* order scales since infrastructure is still costly, but you can make up the difference in faster expansion with a lot of nations since those turmoil scales are usually translating into a better blessing or more-uber awake SC).

[Gandalf Parker]

Well Ive seen plenty of complaints about taking a nation with misfortune and immediately losing it to things like barbarian attacks. Not sure what the timing is for that

[Verjigorm]

It's not the barbarian attacks. PD of 15+ will generally defeat any barbarian attack that you get at Misfortune-2.

The problem is taking Misfortune-3 which gives you Knight parties (like the ones that quest for the Chalice) that appear in a province at random and then expand to adjacent provinces if you don't go kill them. These generally cannot be defeated by any sane PD level.

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

It's not the barbarian attacks. PD of 15+ will generally defeat any barbarian attack that you get at Misfortune-2.

The problem is taking Misfortune-3 which gives you Knight parties (like the ones that quest for the Chalice) that appear in a province at random and then expand to adjacent provinces if you don't go kill them. These generally cannot be defeated by any sane PD level.

Um.. are you playing the same game as the rest of us? Or are you just trolling the thread?

There are no knights who go questing for the chalice. There's no code connected to the chalice to cause such a thing (confirmed by lch). This is nothing but flavor text on the Chalice description - there is no substance.

Small numbers of barbs require Mf1 to trigger.

Knight attack requires Mf2 to trigger. Its ~30 militia and knights. They do not go invading other provinces - they work exactly like all other independents.

large numbers of barbs (~100) require Mf3 to trigger.

When i said your opponents luck acts like misfortune for you, i meant it has the scale effects thereby. (Ie, increases % negative events instead of positive). I don't know if your opponent's luck acts like misfortune for threshhold effects (required to trigger event X), but then, I don't know your opponent's misfortune works like misfortune for threshhold effects either. It would not surprise me if the checks for threshhold effects are entirely separate from the % good/bad effect check in the code, and so it may treat it differently in either case, or may even ignore the scale for threshhold effects if its outside your dominion. I simply don't know, but I wasn't trying to make a claim about threshhold effects.

In terms of the turn you capture a province, events are generated before army movement, so if you get attacked by barbs after invading your opponent's province, that event was generated for your opponent.

[Verjigorm]

Bleh... I appear to have lost all reading comprehension and completely misread your (squirrel's) post... significant editing...

I'll generate a turn file for you...

Turn file ready. Look at T'ien Chi this turn and then step it forward and watch the location of the future knight attacks--they always seem to occur in provinces adjacent to the original attack.

The knight attacks do appear move from the original province to adjacent ones or at least they appear to do so by some extremely unlikely coincidence in multiple games. Though it appears to take several turns. This may mean that if you have a Knight attack in a given province and then get a bad event in a province adjacent to it that there is a surety or at least increased likelihood that that province will also be invaded by knights.


As for the Chalice attack, I had always wondered why I was never actually attacked while using it, but I thought that it might be because I was careful to put the chalice back in the lab when not in use. ^_^