LowtherCastle
Deity
- Joined
- May 18, 2005
- Messages
- 23,631
Slavery is optional and the event doesn't activate until you've had plenty of time to accumulate 10g. Furthermore, if you're running Slavery, why aren't you poprushing below pop4 more frequently? (We're talking early game here, since that was your point of emphasis.)Two equal teams, one gets hit repeatedly by slave revolts (-1 pop even if you have the cash), the other gets the free golden age quest. I know who my money is on.
Quests require a ton of resources, typically diverted from your strategy.
My question was not looking for umpteen hypothetical scenarios that can be avoided by smart play. I'm looking for specific events, like maybe tornados, that we, as a group, could agree to exclude.
You're mixing two different types of time, game turns and human time. Human time (2-4 months) has nothing to do with averaging out. By time, I mean games that require a greater number of turns.It's not over the course of a single game that events balance out, because late game events have propertionaly less impact than early game events. It's over the course of many many games that the balancing out occurs (comes out as a net positive), but since succession games typically take 2-4 months each, you're not going to see that averaging out occur in a reasonable timeframe.
Deciding to bee-line alpha and then finding out there is only one other player within reach is also an ireversible decision. So I'm arguing that the best teams are the ones that develop a flexible strategy that accounts for as many possibilities as possible and takes calculated risks to maximize their chances of getting the gold.Events aren't going to prevent a good team from beating a bad team, but they certainly can impact which good team wins. For a typical HoF/Gauntlet challenge, events are fine because if a string of uncontrollable bad luck happens, you can just try again, but for something like this or a GoTM there's only one shot.
When crossing plains, do you move your scout 1 tile per turn or 2? How do you move your scout through a jungle? Do you bypass it when possible? How doyou plan your initial scout movements, when there is no animal? Do you go somewhere les safe foryour scout? Losing a scout to an animal can make a huge difference in the game. Maybe we should eliminate animals, barbs, everyone start with Satellites, in short, remove all random factors? I'm not being sarcastic. I'm pointing out how many random factors there already are that have a significant impact on the game, especially at the highest levels.
Btw, eliminating nearby huts became imperative after CFR popped mining in SG2, then got an early religion and had such an outrageous advantage over other teams that there was no longer any competition after about T30.