Random Event of Doom

[binhthuy71]

...but in the case of the tsunami, its certainly so so no one would break their computer. It's by far the most brutal event almost put into the game.

There was also the fact that the accompanying sound was a toilet flushing.

 

[Bruin.Bound]

Thanks for the link Bin. Reading up through it, most seem reasonable, but that tsunami event is horribly brutal. Destroying small coastal cities and ravaging the rest would have been pretty crazy.

 

[6K Man]

I love getting extra tanks, and the free DOW, but I wouldn't call that game breaking.

I've been on the receiving end of that event as well.

 

[mechaerik]

It's even worse that Lincoln's barely researching Printing Press (so no Rifles) and Navarre just got some tanks. Lincoln's a dead man.

 

[RedFury]

For the record, I don't dislike most events. It's the 5% of ridiculous ones that can really give the whole system a bad name.

I think a player's attitude to events largely stems from your motivations for playing a game like civ in the first place. If you like it for the fun and empire-building, you probably like the realism of events. If you play it for pure strategic thinking, you possibly don't like them so much. Yes I know, pure strategic thinking involves a degree of risk management, but lets be honest you can't prepare for all events. Moreso, preparation for some of the big nasty events would take so much deviation from the normal map-fitting strategy that in the 99% of cases when the event doesn't occur, you're now 8 techs and 4 cities behind where you'd otherwise be.

or sending spies across (as we just saw).

I thought we established that this event does not require the target to be doing any active spying on the recipient?

REx early, you take the risk of being weak defensively and not being able to handle a barbarian uprising. Lets face it, a lot of us, myself included, are very thin at early stages trying to get some blocking cities or resource cities up, and maybe we deserve to get swarmed by a barb uprising every once and a while.

This event is a good example of what I'm talking about above. It's chance of happening is so little, yet its effects so huge, and the deviation in normal strategy required to actually be prepared for it (can you?) so significant that if you try to prepare for it in all your games, then in the 99% of those games where the event doesn't eventuate, you're going to put yourself in a far worse position with far less chance of victory. Personally, I'd rather just play optimally in every game and take the loss in 1 out of 100 games than always drastically alter my game to prepare for a 1% chance and have my win rate plummit (immortal level.)

edit: I'm a pure strategist, so I play with events off. I like risk management in strategy, but many of the more unbalanced events simply do not represent sensible risk management.

 

[Bruin.Bound]

The screenshot I believe said a spy had been captured, or at least that was the empression I was under. If it wasn't the case, then I agree that its a dumb trigger to the event. I don't see an event putting you 8 techs and 4 cities behind, the only one I can think of that would have a drastic impact is preparing for the barb uprising. I agree, I refuse to change my strategy to be better defended, but I still think its shortchanging those who do. If they can play with slow expansion and great defense and scrape out wins at the same level as me, I would give them a lot of respect and credit.

 

[Kanzera]

I like random events. Except when I'm on the receiving end of a bad one. >.<

 

[binhthuy71]

The screenshot I believe said a spy had been captured, or at least that was the empression I was under. If it wasn't the case, then I agree that its a dumb trigger to the event. I don't see an event putting you 8 techs and 4 cities behind, the only one I can think of that would have a drastic impact is preparing for the barb uprising. I agree, I refuse to change my strategy to be better defended, but I still think its shortchanging those who do. If they can play with slow expansion and great defense and scrape out wins at the same level as me, I would give them a lot of respect and credit.

The problem is that you're not just on the wrong end of a barb uprising - that I can take. The problem is that you can be fogbusting and doing all of the right things and the Vedic Aryans will still pop right out of thin air. It makes about as much sense as "A giant asteroid has destroyed your city," or "Keanu Reeves' latest movie has put your entire population to sleep: no for 5 turns."

 

[Bruin.Bound]

But fogbusting is to stop normal barbarians, not barbarian uprisings. So there is no right thing you can do, apart from defend your cities well.

 

[binhthuy71]

But fogbusting is to stop normal barbarians, not barbarian uprisings. So there is no right thing you can do, apart from defend your cities well.

It depends on how you define "defend your cities well". In the early game I don't usually have axes or chariots and if I don't have a warrior-based UU then the best I can do is barracks-built Combat I warriors. It would really stifle expansion at a critical point to spend a lot of turns (and hammers) building enough of them to defend each new city against random events. It's a lose-lose scenario: either you lose because the barb uprising destroys your fledgling cities or you lose because you didn't expand while the other civs did.

 

[duckduckswan]

"Keanu Reeves' latest movie has put your entire population to sleep: no for 5 turns."

 

[0range]

Woah, that sucks for America.

 

[Kanzera]

The problem is that you're not just on the wrong end of a barb uprising - that I can take. The problem is that you can be fogbusting and doing all of the right things and the Vedic Aryans will still pop right out of thin air.

Isn't that what kinda happened to the Romans? And the Persians? And the Byzantines?

 

[binhthuy71]

Isn't that what kinda happened to the Romans? And the Persians? And the Byzantines?

Briefly, no. In chronological order, the Persians were conquered by Alexander relatively quickly. This was only after a series of Greco-Persian conflicts that began in 547 BCE with Cyrus the Great's conquest of Ionia and ended in early 330 BCE in with the surrenders of Persepolis and Susa to Alexander after his final defeat of the Persian army at Gaugamela the previous year. The fall of the Western Roman empire has been mulled over by generations of historians beginning with Zosimus in the 5th century and most famously by Edward Gibbon (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, pub 1776). There is rough consensus that it took approximately 320 years to be completed and many agree that the fall was complete on September 4, 476, when the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustus, was deposed by the German chieftain, Odoacer. The Eastern, or Byzantine Empire, continued to wax and wane until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
I read the history of the period known as Classical Antiquity (The Greco-Roman world centered on the Mediterranean) for years before becoming even more interested in how the end of Mediterranean-centered civilization set the stage for the Middle Ages and the eventual rise of Western Europe. This has not made me any better at playing Civ.

 

[Tatran]

And can you be on the receiving end, with you declaring war on somebody without having a choice ? Did that happen to anybody here ?

It's less funny when it happens the other way around.
I had one game where the biggest AI (Pericles) did let me declare on them.

 

[Graceheart the Leopard]

so the civ that is on the receiving end doesn't even need to be spying on the civ which triggers the event? That is madness.

Madness? THIS! IS! SPARTA!

Anyhow, that is an overpowered event!

 

[r_rolo1]

Isn't that what kinda happened to the Romans? And the Persians? And the Byzantines?

Unless you call the Germanic, the Greeks or the Crusaders ( yes, because it was the Fourth Crusade that killed the Bizantine Empire, to be never reunited after that and not the Ottoman Turks , that simply picked the various states that got out of the Fourth Crusade aftermath one by one after the Nicean dinasty that retook Constantinople from the Latin Emperors had the terrible idea of introducing some Turks in Europe as mercenaries.... ) barbarians in Civ IV terms ( that is guys with no territory and no cities simply organizing and coming to attack ), no way

For the record, I don't dislike most events. It's the 5% of ridiculous ones that can really give the whole system a bad name.

I think a player's attitude to events largely stems from your motivations for playing a game like civ in the first place. If you like it for the fun and empire-building, you probably like the realism of events. If you play it for pure strategic thinking, you possibly don't like them so much. Yes I know, pure strategic thinking involves a degree of risk management, but lets be honest you can't prepare for all events. Moreso, preparation for some of the big nasty events would take so much deviation from the normal map-fitting strategy that in the 99% of cases when the event doesn't occur, you're now 8 techs and 4 cities behind where you'd otherwise be.

This event is a good example of what I'm talking about above. It's chance of happening is so little, yet its effects so huge, and the deviation in normal strategy required to actually be prepared for it (can you?) so significant that if you try to prepare for it in all your games, then in the 99% of those games where the event doesn't eventuate, you're going to put yourself in a far worse position with far less chance of victory. Personally, I'd rather just play optimally in every game and take the loss in 1 out of 100 games than always drastically alter my game to prepare for a 1% chance and have my win rate plummit (immortal level.)

edit: I'm a pure strategist, so I play with events off. I like risk management in strategy, but many of the more unbalanced events simply do not represent sensible risk management.

That is the point i've been defending ad nauseam . There is a lot of game-breaking events that would require HUGE preparations to counter and some are simply uncounterable. I, in other thread, used the example of the event that spreads a state religion of a civ to some foreign cities ( this event does not check if the target city would be eligible to recieve a natural spread of that religion , so even running Theo is useless vs it ) and the fact that you can lose the game because of that ( via AP vote ) ... and someone actually sugested that this event outcome was counterable by building the AP ourselfes . Think on it, the only way of avoiding a loss via event in certain circumstances involve teching theology and building a 400 wonder that has no helping resources.... On other example, I remember a post of a player that actually won via UN by the precious cooperation of the flight crash event .... +1 in diplo per interaction ( and he was having a lot of them due to the fact there was a lot of civs with flight in game ) If it happened in the other way around ( that is , AI banking diplo points for a diplo win in a way not possible if the event didn't kicked in ) ... how can you counter a flight crash? Attaching two airships to every plane? Or the bermuda event.... the only way to avoid it is not having ships in the sea

My point is simple: I'm not against events . I like to have something cutting the dullness ( in spite of not agreeing with the way Firaxis made that not all the events are active in any particular game ... ). But I definitely do not like events giving you or a AI a undeserved victory/loss ( by undeserved I mean a victory or loss that would not happen without the event, like the examples I posted above ) if there isn't a cost effective way of dealing with it. Events like a early barbarian uprise that can target a player that doesn't meet the prereqs, a bermuda triangle event that can eat all of your army, a spread religion event that can make you lose via AP if you don't actually control the AP yourself are good exaples of things that should be rewired IMHO

 

[Bruin.Bound]

How many times has a random event actually given a victory that would not have been achieved otherwise? Few times I assume, such a small percentage that I actually find it cool that everything fell into place like that in these rare instances. Its called a random event, some of them are based on how you play, and others are just purely... as it states... random. If you don't like randomness, then don't use them, but I like them. So far I have never seen a game-breaking event in my own games that actually decided a game, if they happened all the time then I would agree that it was taking something away from the game. But they don't. Again, I'm speaking mainly from my own experiences. The last time I had a barb-uprising it was four swordsmen on my borders, Shaka was a neighbor so I was more than capable of dealing with it.

About the barb uprising, there is a window to get an early resource like horses or copper that would be able to fight the event. Or, go straight for archery and get your cities defended. Yes, some settlers could be made while you are making extra units, so most of us don't do it, but its not unreasonable that someone may. And if I get a very early barb uprising and you manage to survive it, then later to go on to win the game, I'd feel pretty good about myself. I guess the barb archer uprising can go very early, if it does maybe it is just an instant loss. I don't know how early it goes, but I would hope that the human player would still be able to quell it by getting an early resource or archers. If not, then maybe it is slightly broken and should have been delayed.

 

[Iranon]

I like random events, even the harsh ones.

Barbarian uprisings often make me change my whole strategy. Build an army to finish off the victim/take over the barbarian lands? Turn expansion up to 11? Some really far-away blocking cities to prevent another AI from settling the free land?
If barbarians get out of hand (early victim -> lots of land for new barbarians to spawn in), the resulting game is very different from the usual fare, and I enjoy the variety.
Of course, being the victim isn't easy but I don't want any special treatment.

Slave revolts may be uninspired and annoying, but I really think Slavery needs this drawback given its sheer power.

*

What I dislike is the implementation of some, for both balance and flavour. r_rolo's example of religion spread is a good one. If I'm running theocracy to prevent religion spread, I expect it to affect this event as well.

The one in the original post qualifies as well. If I never used espionage maliciously, I don't want to hear any nonsense about a spy of mine inadvertedly causing war. On the other hand, I find it bizarre that supposedly friendly spies can be caught trying to poison entire cities without more severe diplomatic repercussions. We should be able to interpret that as an act of war, without triggering the defensive pacts of the perpetrator.

 

[HUSch]

Again all break downs in SP there is a good solution: play a next.
If you play a mp, There are events with possibilities; for example the barb rising, there is a chance that this will help you to win against your neighbour, I saw this in a mp.