What happened to the AI?

[Edratman]

I suspect that the AI nation got an invasion on the first or second turn. I've seen it two or three times to the AI and had it happen to me once. When it happened to me I had bad settings. From that occurance, I guess that the same thing happened to the AI. I remember one time when the AI was stuck at one province they were under the knight siege when I got to the province.

Both the knight and barbarian events are too strong for starting armies to relieve the siege.

I like the chance that bad things can happen on the first turn. Unpredictability is one of the charms of the game. Pretty much everyone has learned to recruit a mage the first turn with bad scales because of the lab destroyed event.

[VedalkenBear]

I'll note that I quite often take Luck-3. I also play with CBM routinely, which IIRC increases the probability of events being 'good' with Luck-3 to 95% (from 90%). And I _still_ have gotten labs burned down or temples hit by earthquakes in the first 3 turns.

However, since I play SP, I can simply start a new game with the same parameters if I don't feel like suffering from that handicap.

I also play nations with fortunetellers a lot to more or less guarantee good events in those provinces.

Yeah, I don't like bad events. However, barring an option to out-and-out remove all random events from the game (with the attendant nulling of the Luck scale), I have no issue with the current system.

[Loren]

Edratman said:
I suspect that the AI nation got an invasion on the first or second turn. I've seen it two or three times to the AI and had it happen to me once. When it happened to me I had bad settings. From that occurance, I guess that the same thing happened to the AI. I remember one time when the AI was stuck at one province they were under the knight siege when I got to the province.

Both the knight and barbarian events are too strong for starting armies to relieve the siege.

I like the chance that bad things can happen on the first turn. Unpredictability is one of the charms of the game. Pretty much everyone has learned to recruit a mage the first turn with bad scales because of the lab destroyed event.

But that would have shown as the loss of the province early on. That's not what happened, though.

[PvK]

Yep if the AI gets besieged by strong independents before it expands, it can get stopped.

[PvK]

Ok, so I ran a test game as LA C'tis with Turmoil-3, Unluck-3, Growth-2, Heat-3, Prod-3, Magic-3, just staying in my home capital, and here's what happened.

All went well enough until brigands started hiding out in the province, which turned up the unrest, and then lots of events started wiping out or driving away my population, cursing my pretender and troops, causing my income to vanish, etc. Two barbarian hordes tried to take my province but were defeated by my provincial defense force. I tried lowering taxes and patrolling, but my economy collapsed and my population plummeted.

Finally, in the last month of year 2, an earthquake hit and trogs swarmed out and seiged my castle.

The provinces graph DOES go down when a province is seiged.

However, I had no income and no lab and no way to pay to rebuild it, or to recruit troops, for many months before that happened, due to having only one province and unluck/turmoil/unrest/brigands in my capital. I have 4910 population left in my capital, no temple, no lab. Unrest is 94, gold income is 2 with tax at 50%. I do happen to have a large undead army which I could use to break out with, but not every nation would have any such thing.

[Aezeal]

Endo: I have nothing against bad luck and it's events in most of the game, but I do think the impact it can have on the first turns is too much so I think it should not happen the first turns or at least not happen to the starting prov the first 3-5 turns.. after that luck will still be worth it's points without the option of getting your game ruined by misfortune (or even with luck as mentioned) and in MP some events would ruin your game in most cases

[PvK]

My example also showed that you can become impotent due to bad luck + turmoil + unrest via hiding independent brigands, if you don't attack and your lab is destroyed. No income plus the AI being unwilling to attack with a weak army could have him stuck with no income.