Random Event 'Features'

[Morbio]

I'm a long way into my 5th game and am getting somewhat frustrated by some seemingly random events which are taking the pleasure out of a most challenging game.

To set the scene: A Long way means well past the point when I officially lost to Rome. I find it almost impossible to stop their conquering or the north half of Europe in all my games so far, except when I was Carthage on a relatively easy setting. Currently I'm Selucid and trying to beat Rome, which is at war with the rest of the world. I have the southern half of Asia minor and the western quarter so I control the straights between Asia and Europe. I have conquered all the eastern Mediterranean lands and all northern Africa to Cyrenica. I'm at peace with everyone (Carthage holding East Africa, Sparta holding Crete, Pontus holding North West Asia minor and Bosporus holding the corner that it never seems to get out of) bar Rome... this is our common enemy, Rome's army is probably twice as big as all the rest together and there is no hope to beat them in a straight fight. For the last 30 years or so I have managed to occupy a couple of squares in Europe at the north edge of the Europe Asia straits. These have 6 hoplites/Phalagites all fortified supported by galleys and triremes in the strait and patrol towers providing ranged attack support. As the units in Europe get worn down these are rotated back home and fresh units replace these. Rome constantly attacks and the solid fortified and highly trained hoplites generally take out 10 or more Roman units for each loss I occasionally suffer. I'm working on the principle that if I bleed enough of Rome's units, the populace reduces and revolution will occur to give me a chance to advance.

The issues that are hugely frustrating are;
Plague
It's now 50BC and I've had 3 plagues and 2 of the 3 were major plagues that cost me 2 or 3 cities each, lots of population and a small fortune to try to repair. I seem to have 1 or 2 plagues every game and when playing a smaller country that is often struggling against multiple enemies these can be almost crippling.

Revolution
The sequence of events here makes it impossible to make a good judgement regarding what to do. The first time I'm aware of a new (reinstated) country coming into existence is when I get an envoy asking for peace from a country I didn't know I was at war with! I've generally just accepted this as a quirk of the game, but this time it is crippling and completely ruined days of hard work I've invested over the last several days. Athens had just been defeated by Rome, it had been holding out on the small island (Delos?) east of it's homeland. Rome was just finishing its turn and was slaughtering my ships in the straits and hoplites on my home territory... which was odd because it had no way to attack any of them, and then comes the message ... 'Athens would like to make peace with you'. Great I think, I'm getting an ally back and Rome will have to divert forces. I accept peace then look at the map to see how Rome had managed to somehow attack me when it never could before. To my joy I see that Athens now has all of Greece, but to my horror it has a fair chunk of west Asia minor and a good chunk of central Africa! See minimap in attachment:

22_10_17_31_15.jpg (251.18 KiB) Viewed 2709 times

My gripe here is in two parts;
1) The scale of the uprising... is there any logic to why a country could resurface in a completely different area and why occupy large swathes of a country that has been supportive of it before it was wiped out.
2) The bigger issue: When the peace message is presented there is no way to see where the country is that you have to make a decision about. This is fine for an existing country, but when a new country pops into existence it would be REALLY HELPFUL to know where it is. Of course, I made peace thinking I have another ally, just assuming it is somewhere in Greece, but now most of my land is gone and I need to retake it and I will be a pariah if I attack a country I've just made peace with. To be honest, this has just killed the game.

Your in frustration,
Morbio.

[dejvid2]

It's best new countries as completely new. If a country has been eliminated then a new state will be created when discontent rises to a certain level. It then just takes over the label the eliminated faction had.

I agree 100% with your second point. The game needs show the extent of a new faction before you are asked to make a decision.
(In a situation like this I would feel justified in falling back on the autosave as a workaround)

[pavelk]

Hi Morbio,
I am sorry to hear that you got frustrated about it.

Let me answer it one by one:

Rome constantly attacks and the solid fortified and highly trained hoplites generally take out 10 or more Roman units for each loss I occasionally suffer. I'm working on the principle that if I bleed enough of Rome's units, the populace reduces and revolution will occur to give me a chance to advance.

This is basically one of the impacts of difficulty. I see that you are fighting at least on hard? Maybe even or higher difficulty? They are just using available resource to max extent.

Plague
It's now 50BC and I've had 3 plagues and 2 of the 3 were major plagues that cost me 2 or 3 cities each, lots of population and a small fortune to try to repair. I seem to have 1 or 2 plagues every game and when playing a smaller country that is often struggling against multiple enemies these can be almost crippling.

There are two ways how to prevent that - you can either not play with random events entirely (when new game is started you can decide to turn it off in game options) or prevent it from happening. If you build sewerage systems in your cities it will prevent plagues from happening.

RevolutionThe sequence of events here makes it impossible to make a good judgement regarding what to do.

There are two types of revolutions. The first one is semi-random and can be turned off (again by turning off random events), second is purely based on happiness. To see which parts of your country are potentially in danger or rebellions or revolution, click on "happiness" resource to investigate your local happiness map.

The first time I'm aware of a new (reinstated) country coming into existence is when I get an envoy asking for peace from a country I didn't know I was at war with!

It is true that there should be first message about civil war and later the diplomacy window. It is already in our tracking system but right now there are some more important items.

The scale of the uprising... is there any logic to why a country could resurface in a completely different area and why occupy large swathes of a country that has been supportive of it before it was wiped out.

The revolution (civil war) always starts in a city owned in history by the faction which is revolting. You can prevent it by building Civil Service and also by keeping local happiness high.

When the peace message is presented there is no way to see where the country is that you have to make a decision about.

Before you accept any diplomatic offer, you can review the whole political map. Please read this (part about Political overview).

Does it make a bit more sense?
Pavel

[Morbio]

Pavel,

As always your responsiveness is excellent! Thanks again for a prompt reply. Here's my comments on your replies

Rome constantly attacks and the solid fortified and highly trained hoplites generally take out 10 or more Roman units for each loss I occasionally suffer. I'm working on the principle that if I bleed enough of Rome's units, the populace reduces and revolution will occur to give me a chance to advance.

This is basically one of the impacts of difficulty. I see that you are fighting at least on hard? Maybe even or higher difficulty? They are just using available resource to max extent.

No, I'm fighting on medium and realistic. By the time Seleucid is strong enough, and has either subdued aggressive neighbours, or has formed peace with them, then Rome is too strong to fight in any way barring a war of attrition. I'm not complaining about this, as I feel this is probably realistic in an historic context, it's more a general observation.

Plague
It's now 50BC and I've had 3 plagues and 2 of the 3 were major plagues that cost me 2 or 3 cities each, lots of population and a small fortune to try to repair. I seem to have 1 or 2 plagues every game and when playing a smaller country that is often struggling against multiple enemies these can be almost crippling.

There are two ways how to prevent that - you can either not play with random events entirely (when new game is started you can decide to turn it off in game options) or prevent it from happening. If you build sewerage systems in your cities it will prevent plagues from happening.

I prefer to play with the random events and I feel they give some realism and they add a different dimension due to unpredictability. However I feel the frequency and/or scale may be a little excessive. Although I accept I'm making this judgement on 5 or 6 games, so it may be statistically unsound to do so. All the plagues occurred before I achieved the sewers option, so maybe I was particularly unlucky.

RevolutionThe sequence of events here makes it impossible to make a good judgement regarding what to do.

There are two types of revolutions. The first one is semi-random and can be turned off (again by turning off random events), second is purely based on happiness. To see which parts of your country are potentially in danger or rebellions or revolution, click on "happiness" resource to investigate your local happiness map.

I like the random factor for the same reason as stated earlier. My happiness has never dropped below about 115% and I've just checked the preceding turn and my happiness was 165% (see screenshot)

The attachment 22_10_20_58_31.jpg is no longer available

and the whole of the happiness map was dark blue (see screenshot).

22_10_20_58_31.jpg (277.9 KiB) Viewed 2686 times

It was the scale of the uprising that was surprising, it covers about 1/7 of the map, and the fact that my country was engulfed when I had been on very good terms with the old Athens and I am fighting their oppressors. Even that I can rationalise, and find some logic to accept this, but why would complete chunks of Africa also rebel when they have never been associated with Athens and have been well looked after. The rebellion in Greece and even the spreading to the suppressed Balkan people makes some sense, Pergamon maybe at a stretch... It just seems as if the random event needs some rational constraints.

The first time I'm aware of a new (reinstated) country coming into existence is when I get an envoy asking for peace from a country I didn't know I was at war with!

It is true that there should be first message about civil war and later the diplomacy window. It is already in our tracking system but right now there are some more important items.

OK, understood.

The scale of the uprising... is there any logic to why a country could resurface in a completely different area and why occupy large swathes of a country that has been supportive of it before it was wiped out.

The revolution (civil war) always starts in a city owned in history by the faction which is revolting. You can prevent it by building Civil Service and also by keeping local happiness high.

See previous comments. Yes, I should have had Civil Service, but money has been tight (an unending war tends to do that), but happiness couldn't be much better, so why would people rebel?

When the peace message is presented there is no way to see where the country is that you have to make a decision about.

Before you accept any diplomatic offer, you can review the whole political map. Please read this (part about Political overview).

OK, I missed that, that's my mistake

Thanks again for the feedback.

[pavelk]

Hi Morbio,

As always your responsiveness is excellent! Thanks again for a prompt reply. Here's my comments on your replies

Believe me that it is my pleasure. All the feedback is appreciated!

I prefer to play with the random events and I feel they give some realism and they add a different dimension due to unpredictability. However I feel the frequency and/or scale may be a little excessive. Although I accept I'm making this judgement on 5 or 6 games, so it may be statistically unsound to do so.

I definitely don't want to make light of your suggestion but this is probably very subjective. We dont want to hardcode something like "max one plague per game", both the number of plagues and extent of it is semi-random. It can happen few times in one game or not happen at all. The probability of this is pretty low but sometimes it simply happens. On normal difficulty the probabilty of plague in one particular turn is 0.5%. Statistically this should happen once in 200 turns.

I like the random factor for the same reason as stated earlier. My happiness has never dropped below about 115% and I've just checked the preceding turn and my happiness was 165%

In that case it was definitely the semi-random event. I say "semi-random" because it is not random entirely. If you have civil service in a city, the probabily of this city revolts is 5%; in combination with very low probability of revolution in general (for medium difficulty it is currently set to 2% per turn) it seems plausible? If you have Civil service in all the cities, the chance that one of them will revolt in one turn is 5%*2% = 0.1%. Even for this semi-random event other affectors play its role (other city improvements or units in city decrease the chance even more).

It was the scale of the uprising that was surprising, it covers about 1/7 of the map, and the fact that my country was engulfed when I had been on very good terms with the old Athens and I am fighting their oppressors. Even that I can rationalise, and find some logic to accept this, but why would complete chunks of Africa also rebel when they have never been associated with Athens and have been well looked after. The rebellion in Greece and even the spreading to the suppressed Balkan people makes some sense, Pergamon maybe at a stretch... It just seems as if the random event needs some rational constraints.

Here is our way of thinking - this semi-random event is different to the one purely based on numbers (on local happiness only). You can not only turn these events off entirely (if you want) but it is also deliberately a bit "shocking" event. Something unexpected happened, similar to plague. The extent of the revolution is similar to extent of plague - it varies. It is based on the central point of revolution and distance from it. One of your cities revolted in Greece and all parts of your country (which were not either occupied by your military units or refused to join the revolution - like cities) became part of the newly created country. I agree that even better would be to based it also on history (so only Greek tiles would rebell). It is a very good idea but I cannot promise to look into it anytime soon now.

My happiness has never dropped below about 115% and I've just checked the preceding turn and my happiness was 165%

I just want to point out that base happiness (165%) means nothing for revolutions. It is the local happiness what matters.

OK, I missed that, that's my mistake

Well this is our fault (design issue) that you didnt notice that. Unfortunately I am not sure how else to solve this. Maybe another button called "show me first political map" might be better...?

[Morbio]

I prefer to play with the random events and I feel they give some realism and they add a different dimension due to unpredictability. However I feel the frequency and/or scale may be a little excessive. Although I accept I'm making this judgement on 5 or 6 games, so it may be statistically unsound to do so.

I definitely don't want to make light of your suggestion but this is probably very subjective. We dont want to hardcode something like "max one plague per game", both the number of plagues and extent of it is semi-random. It can happen few times in one game or not happen at all. The probability of this is pretty low but sometimes it simply happens. On normal difficulty the probabilty of plague in one particular turn is 0.5%. Statistically this should happen once in 200 turns.

By my reckoning that's about once per game, I must be very unlucky to get 3 in this game, or the percentage calculation isn't quite working correctly.

I like the random factor for the same reason as stated earlier. My happiness has never dropped below about 115% and I've just checked the preceding turn and my happiness was 165%

In that case it was definitely the semi-random event. I say "semi-random" because it is not random entirely. If you have civil service in a city, the probabily of this city revolts is 5%; in combination with very low probability of revolution in general (for medium difficulty it is currently set to 2% per turn) it seems plausible? If you have Civil service in all the cities, the chance that one of them will revolt in one turn is 5%*2% = 0.1%. Even for this semi-random event other affectors play its role (other city improvements or units in city decrease the chance even more).

My cities tend to have a lot of improvements, and only 4 cities rebelled, all in North Africa. The crazy thing is that I now have about half of my cities as islands in Athens' land... It just seems silly.

The attachment 22_10_22_52_39.jpg is no longer available

The attachment 22_10_22_53_30.jpg is no longer available

It was the scale of the uprising that was surprising, it covers about 1/7 of the map, and the fact that my country was engulfed when I had been on very good terms with the old Athens and I am fighting their oppressors. Even that I can rationalise, and find some logic to accept this, but why would complete chunks of Africa also rebel when they have never been associated with Athens and have been well looked after. The rebellion in Greece and even the spreading to the suppressed Balkan people makes some sense, Pergamon maybe at a stretch... It just seems as if the random event needs some rational constraints.

Here is our way of thinking - this semi-random event is different to the one purely based on numbers (on local happiness only). You can not only turn these events off entirely (if you want) but it is also deliberately a bit "shocking" event. Something unexpected happened, similar to plague. The extent of the revolution is similar to extent of plague - it varies. It is based on the central point of revolution and distance from it. One of your cities revolted in Greece and all parts of your country (which were not either occupied by your military units or refused to join the revolution - like cities) became part of the newly created country. I agree that even better would be to based it also on history (so only Greek tiles would rebell). It is a very good idea but I cannot promise to look into it anytime soon now.

That's the point, I had no cities in 'old Athens' lands, I had no cities in Greece, in fact I had no cities in Europe. This rebellion happened a long way away and yet about a third of my lands, all separated from the rebellion by sea, rebelled despite the fact that all happiness was extremely high. It really doesn't make sense.

My happiness has never dropped below about 115% and I've just checked the preceding turn and my happiness was 165%

I just want to point out that base happiness (165%) means nothing for revolutions. It is the local happiness what matters.

Local happiness was maximum dark blue everywhere, the people couldn't be more happy, so why rebel?

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OK, I missed that, that's my mistake

Well this is our fault (design issue) that you didnt notice that. Unfortunately I am not sure how else to solve this. Maybe another button called "show me first political map" might be better...?

I agree that the game design shouldn't rely on the user reading the manual, somehow the button needs to be more prominent, or maybe the political map could be shown on one side of below in the same screen as the offer of peace? Why make the user press another button when they will nearly always want to see the latest situation before agreeing to peace?

[Morbio]

Missing attachments from earlier post

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22_10_20_58_23.jpg (187.21 KiB) Viewed 2664 times

[pavelk]

By my reckoning that's about once per game, I must be very unlucky to get 3 in this game, or the percentage calculation isn't quite working correctly.

Yes I would say so. S**t happens.

My cities tend to have a lot of improvements, and only 4 cities rebelled, all in North Africa. The crazy thing is that I now have about half of my cities as islands in Athens' land... It just seems silly.

I absolutely agree, it is nonsense. I will increase the priority of this to major, it was minor before. Hopefully I will get to it soon.

That's the point, I had no cities in 'old Athens' lands, I had no cities in Greece, in fact I had no cities in Europe. This rebellion happened a long way away and yet about a third of my lands, all separated from the rebellion by sea, rebelled despite the fact that all happiness was extremely high. It really doesn't make sense.

Here I would disagree. Revolutions tend to spread behind borders. Just recent example - Arab spring.

Local happiness was maximum dark blue everywhere, the people couldn't be more happy, so why rebel?

I agree but that is what the semi-random event is about. As you can see almost none of your cities revolted because your happiness/morale/loyalty which is correct. The rest is related to the second answer, it is nonsense that the territory joined the revolution when the cities around didnt rebel. Agreed.

I agree that the game design shouldn't rely on the user reading the manual, somehow the button needs to be more prominent, or maybe the political map could be shown on one side of below in the same screen as the offer of peace? Why make the user press another button when they will nearly always want to see the latest situation before agreeing to peace?

Well the windows are pretty small and it would be difficult to create a fitting design. I think I can add the third button so it opens the same window like the button below the window. Something like "Political map" can work.

[pavelk]

Morbio,
if you have an End-turn save right before this happens, please send it to info@kubat-software.com. It would help me to make these changes easier. Thank you