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[Kagus]

Just what are people's opinions regarding turmoil/luck scales? I find I have a tendency to go all-out on the luck end if I don't have the spare scales to do a safe order dominion, rather than going for 0/0 neutral scales.

It's also something I feel is rather drastically affected by how the game is set up... Unless I'm missing something, in games with rare special events the misfortune nations will have an advantage, while games with common events will favor the lucky. Unless there's something so that the "rare" events are counterbalanced by being a bit more severe in either one way or the other, but I somehow doubt that's the case.


It is of course dependent on what nation you're bringing in, as some nations pretty much just demand turmoil scales with all sorts of special goodies... But what about nations that don't have a particular swing one way or the other? Would you rather take turmoil/luck for the extra chance and strength of events, or go for neutral scales to get that 15% extra income?

[Shadowlord]

In round 21 we had a Mictlan with quad bless and a ton of Ozelotl. They had:

flying, strenght near 20 (blood bless), Blood Vengance, like 17 Attack, Flaming Weapons, Death Weapons and a Nature Bless (which with the death bless gave them near 50 effective hp + regeneration)
and most importantly 3 different attacks (Bite, Claw, Claw) that could all apply the magic weapon effects - additionally "need not eat", Forest surival and a moral of 30.

Thankfully they never really left there capital.

Death bless does good work keeping them alive, but they probably would have been much more effective with a water bless instead; it also helps with defense, which they're kind of lacking in (unlike D, it does nothing against (most) evocations, but Blood Vengeance and the nature bless have that pretty well covered) and a water bless would bring them up to 4.5 attacks per round, each one benefiting from that strength and the fire bless. Those additional attacks are gonna be worth more than the death weapon effect in pretty much every case.

What prevented them from leaving their capital area after getting the ozelotls? It seems about right for a mid-game rush, and if the player got to Ozelotls I would think they're pretty competent. Or did they only get that far due to being ignored?

it was your triple-blessed boars that kept me in check.

How does this even happen?

I did leave my capital, and what happened was that I was surrounded by the boars, Agartha, and vans iirc. I invaded the vans and got backstabbed by the boars, so had to shelve expansion plans to defend my lands.

[E. Albright]

If I can afford it, Luck+Order is what I'd want. Turmoil is obnoxious for most nations, and the extra 6-12% events doesn't feel like it balances out a lack of Order. Turmoil also opens up some really annoying events (although yes, it also opens some nice ones with high Luck, and especially high Luck + high Magic).

This only applies if you're leaning scales over bless, ofc. If points are at a premium, you take what you can afford, though I still don't like taking Turmoil.

[Frumple]

Never turmoil 3. There's basically nothing those points can give you that's worth the events it enables/makes more likely. That's the major thing. After that is conditional, but unless you're ermor or lemuria (or something with chaos power, I guess, but I've never noticed the power effects be very impactful) order is better (though it doesn't exactly hurt for those two, either) and misfortune is a pain in the rear for everyone (marginally less for those two or three that use a lot of fortunetellers, maybe), soooo...

Turmoil is generally the last scale I'll dump, and I take misfortune precisely never. Not even for a multibless. Everything is permissible except bloody misfortune. I'll take luck 0 but that's as far down as it goes. Far as I'm concerned that scale only has four options and none of them give you extra points.

[E. Albright]

Oh, yeah, never Misfortune 1+. I did that once in a competitive game, and even with hordes of mages with oracle to blunt its effects, it was enough to convince me it was a very bad idea. And it gets disproportionately worse when any of your other scales are negative. You're reckless to take Misfortune as a negative scale, but you're crazy to take it along with any other negatives.

I rarely if ever play with rare events, so I suppose that could change things, but it's hard to imagine it would do enough.

[Kagus]

Looking through the mod manager, the Turmoil 3 bad events are either relatively tame or countered by having anything approaching a positive luck scale. Most of the bad turmoil events are unlocked by just one or two points.  Order, on the other hand, has lots of nastiness unlocked by both 1 and 2 levels and nothing new in level 3.

As far as strengths are concerned, don't underestimate chaos strength... It can make a pretty damn big difference, all depending on what's being affected. At max turmoil that's +3 strength, attack and defense for most folks, and levels of order will of course reduce those stats by a similar amount.

It's PARTICULARLY noteworthy with units like the ko-oni, since they're comparitively cheap and having a square full of size-1 units with +3 to everything is pretty gnarly.


EDIT: Nevermind the comment about order vs. turmoil, apparently the game uses the most arcane system of tags and values because apparently magic, turmoil and whatnot can have values from -2 to +3, but their opposing scale is a completely different string altogether. Hurr.

[Micro102]

Why can't you just take 3 luck alongside 3 turmoil and get a bunch of good events?

[Cheeetar]

You can do that. Taking turmoil scales does unlock some bad events, which dilutes the pool of random events you want to aim for by getting lots of random events, but it's not incredibly terrible in my experience.

[chaoticag]

Why can't you just take 3 luck alongside 3 turmoil and get a bunch of good events?

It's generally the only way that domkill nations make any money. The main thing about turmoil plus luck is it can make getting your hands on gems at least a smidge easier for thigns that your nation does not normally dabble in, in case you need a spell here or there. The sheer amount of things you can do with gold though is too much to pass up on, so most people opt for order.

[Frumple]

You can do that. Taking turmoil scales does unlock some bad events, which dilutes the pool of random events you want to aim for by getting lots of random events, but it's not incredibly terrible in my experience.

You can try that. It's a theory oft tested on the domkill nations (that aren't r'yleh). I've actually done it quite a lot both in Dom 3 and 4, which is why I've stopped :V

You can still play through it with usually (usually) not much trouble, but mostly it's just notably likely to be freakishly annoying. Invasions every other turn, all sorts of irritants popping up in your message log, etc., etc., etc. Particularly with the changes in Dom 4 to PD, I very much don't think it's worth it, especially for the non-r'yleh domkill nations -- tank everything but order, luck, and magic, basically (and/or growth, for asphodel), otherwise you're going to be spending half your time reconquering provinces in your backline with your freespawn (or just leaving chunks there, which is bad enough) instead of sending them to the front to do something useful. It's playable, but I don't really find it fun to play anymore.

Turmoil two (or maybe one, depending on how bad the T2 unlocked stuff is... I had remembered most of the major problems being T3, but it's definitely possibly I was misremembering) is about as low as I'd recommend, and even then... if you're doing it, you're doing it for gems and magic items, not gold. Luck 3 and Order 1+ will net you significantly more cash if you're going high luck primarily for that, even with the reduced events and playing a popkill nation. The order positive events can be hella' sexy -- free castles, gigantic lumps of dosh (iirc the largest single gold event is order locked, somewhere in the range of 3k in one go), that sort of junk.

[Kagus]

You can get magic treasure events (plus the plagued prince, if you have death) with Turmoil 3, and those are both worth a couple grand each. Order does unlock considerably more gold-lump events, but Turmoil does have its own cash injections.

Order also opens up a lot of weird stuff like the mass exodus events, noble claim invasions, Robin Hood etc., but all in all does have a lot more cash-boosting events. Turmoil is more magic gems, sites and random special allies.

Might have to rethink a lot of my pretender dominions because of this.  I still don't know what -2 order is or -2 turmoil, but I'm sure there's some reason for those values to exist...


Also I'm always s'damned points-greedy when making pretenders.

EDIT: Oh god... There's an "It Came From the Desert" reference.

[Cruxador]

The thing about Domkill nations is that you also don't care about a lot of the problems that turmoil events (and bad events in general) will do to you.

[Frumple]

Except the invasions, since you eventually have no PD unless you have forts everywhere (and you're almost certain to not have as many forts as you would without turmoil :V). Theoretically you can just use your freespawn in its place, but that means micromanaging the ruddy freespawn and having to leave mounds of them loitering around doing nothing save fending off the possibility of invasions. Or have a few wandering bands held back clearing up your core territories (i.e. more annoying micromanagement, more forces that could be spending time catching arrows for your important stuff instead). And the worst part is it doesn't become a particularly noticeable issue until later in the game, when you have a whole host of other things you'd much rather be spending attention on.*

Probably doesn't get under some folks' skin as much as it does mine, but I'd actually rather take turmoil as a nation without popkill than the ones that have it, these days. Much less trouble in the long run.

*E: Though with sudden retrospect, I can see how that might be an intentional bit of design, and a rather cunning one. A sort of subtle poke to domkill nations for unilaterally tanking their scales without considering anything except the pretender points, that's even sneakier by not coming into its full effect until a few dozen turns in, so that folks just dipping their toes in to test stuff won't notice. If illwinter actually meant to do that, I have to say I'm kinda impressed. Impressed and hateful :V

[E. Albright]

The massive increase in number and type of events definitely changed the design metagame, and I'd have to say it's for the best even if it's annoying at times. IW did make passing mention when event modding (which was accompanied by a huge influx of events) was being developed that one of their goals was to make certain sorts of scale combinations no-brainers no more...

[Kagus]

Again, looking at the mod inspector, Turmoil 3 unlocks precisely 0 new invasion events, while Order 3 has 3 invasion events. Order 2 also has a few invasions, including the rather nasty "lord with a lawful claim" events where they come charging in with a bunch of knights, heavy cav and a wizard. Order 1 unlocks almost entirely beneficial events though, especially for MA T'ien Ch'i, who get three custom-tailored events that give ceremonial masters/ministers of rituals a bunch of gold just for existing.

Most of Turmoil's invasion events are unlocked with Turm 1, so even just one tic on the scale will open up those chances, while Turmoil 2 actually unlocks a lot of rather beneficial events. Also remember that there are invasion events that don't care what your Order/Turmoil alignment is at all.


EDIT: Great, just great... Looking at all these different events and their conditions, now I gotta go through and re-do damn near all my pretender designs thanks to how this works out. Yippee.