Luck/Misfortune Nerf.

HoneyBadger · #1 January 13th, 2007, 07:01 PM

Well, there you go. Next time we go to the Dominions 3 convention in Vegas, I'm hanging out with Meglobob.

Edi · #2 January 15th, 2007, 03:36 AM

Barbarian horde or Vampire Counts on the second, third or fourth turn is a game breaker. Bogus in the home province essentially anytime in the first 20 turns likewise. Those are the only ones I'd restrict for maybe the first five turns but no more.

Getting your lab or your temple burned down on the second turn is not a game breaker. It's an inconvenience and a setback, but not a game breaker. If you got your lab burned down on turn 2 and hadn't recruited a mage on the first turn: boo-hoo cry me a river, you screwed up, you live with it. Or restart as it may be.

I like the luck/misfortune mechanics as they are right now.

It seems to me that a fairly large number of complaints about the luck/misfortune issue, much as with the old age issue, come from people who want to use Death 3 and Misfortune 3 scales without actually suffering from the consequences of that decision.

Edi

Twan · #3 January 15th, 2007, 07:57 AM

High misfortune is no longer a condition for the worst events. The dom3 system favors misfortune 3 more than misfortune 0 as no matter your misfortune you may be screwed by an extreme random thing in the very first turns.

If you want to discourage players to use misfortune, plagues, ancient presence, Bogus, etc... should have misfortune x as a condition.

Edi · #4 January 15th, 2007, 08:15 AM

Ahh, that makes a lot of the arguments more sensible then. They should be tied to misfortune + other scale the way they were in Dom2.

Edi

Olive · #5 January 15th, 2007, 08:15 AM

Quote:

High misfortune is no longer a condition for the worst events. The dom3 system favors misfortune 3 more than misfortune 0 as no matter your misfortune you may be screwed by an extreme random thing in the very first turns.

Yes, but it happens more often. I remember my tests with order3 / misf2, at a certain point of the game, i had indie attacks most of the turns, even with the highest order.

But you're right, yesterday, I made a test with luck3 - OK, and turmoil3 - , I had a plague in my capitol in the first 5 turns.

When It happens on SP, you can just restart, but on a multiplayer game, when it happens on first turn, the game is screwed just when it begins. Got it on our game "CyberGlory", and I had no terrible scales - order 1, growth1, misf 1.

alexti · #6 January 15th, 2007, 10:25 PM

Quote:

Edi said:
Barbarian horde or Vampire Counts on the second, third or fourth turn is a game breaker. Bogus in the home province essentially anytime in the first 20 turns likewise.

I'm not sure that it's that catastrophic. In SP game it's not a big deal. In MP game it's tough, but I've recently got 4 bad events in a row (turns 3 to 6) that brought unrest in my capital above 100 (and destroyed my income as well, of course). Then I got involved into war with 2 nations at the same time. To top it I've started with a wrong plan and wrong pretender. The key point of the game was my mistake in scripting when sieging one opponents castle. Not sure what would happen if I didn't make mistakes myself, but I wasn't clearly out of the game after the bad start. So I don't think that any kind of bad events necessarily mean that you're out of the game.

Micah · #7 January 16th, 2007, 05:46 AM

Given that scenario I have to question either the quality of your opponents or the quality of the respective nations...I don't care how good you are, no one should be able to take 2 opponents on at once after cripplingly bad events, especially with a self-inflicted poor strategy.

HoneyBadger · #8 January 16th, 2007, 01:55 PM

I just started playing a game with Abyssia, and I was going to start with 0 Luck, and I realized that I couldn't safely start the game with less than 1 luck without risking a major disaster-the last game I played my Prophet was cursed in turn 7 AS I was in the process of Prophetizing him, and no misfortune, but I still don't think the witch's curse is a catastrophic event, unless she nails your SC Pretender, which would be rare.

Anyway, any time a relatively experienced, didn't-just-buy-the-game-yesterday, player can't validly decide to choose a given scale of 0 as part of a strategy, it means something is unbalanced. At this point, I would never, ever take any level of misfortune.

Scales, by their very definition, are tools of balance.

HoneyBadger · #9 January 16th, 2007, 02:04 PM

Ok, luck 1, turn 2, Abyssia: plague strikes, cutting my pop by 1/5 and costing me 200 gold.

PDF · #10 January 16th, 2007, 02:22 PM

Quote:

HoneyBadger said:
Ok, luck 1, turn 2, Abyssia: plague strikes, cutting my pop by 1/5 and costing me 200 gold.

What's broken is that now Luck doesn't seem to prevent major disastrous events - you just have less chance of getting them...
I don't think Curse event has much importance anyway (even on a Prophet or Pretender), but plagues, earthquakes and so on have.