The thing is, you tend to remember the bad events and forget the good ones. That is why people keep whining about losing at 99.5% odds. They forget about the other 1000 times that they didn't lose.
This does not address the merits of the theory of events on or off. People do selectively remember bad outcomes, but in the case of events in a competitive setting even good ones can spoil the game between otherwise even players (or close).
I played a few games with events one steroids. All events and quests are enabled for every game. Most events are also turned to recurring. And the chance of events happening is 10% per turn, which means, in a 18 civ game, an average of 1.8 events happen globally every turn.
It's always good to hear people having fun in casual settings, especially if unusual.
I have noticed that you tend to get more good events than bad. The weighting of events tends to hold quite well. In one game, I had over two dozen events that increased tile yield. I had also a number of forest fires and mines and forges blowing up. Thing is, I knew those were going to happen sooner or later, given the settings, so I stored gold to mitigate them and capitalise on the good events.
Most good players store gold anyway. Events that prompt payment or negative effect are only potentially devastating before writing, where binary research is an overtly poor choice. Therein lies the problem however. If I were to control 2 civs and try as hard as I could with each on a mirror map, a side that gets 3 forest fires in the capitol pre-writing and can't whip for a long time is going to fall behind. There's no strategy in that instance, just luck.
With proper strategies, you can make events work for you. It does require that you don't do things on autopilot because that would be disaster. It also requires that you don't run things so close to the edge that a slight bump will tip you over.
There's simply no strategy to prep for loss of buildings w/o gold option (missing key wonder), and not events "canceling". Take another MP game. Player A, B, and C all benefit from slavery so much that even multiple slave revolts > not running slavery. The intelligent thing to do is to run slavery, and all 3 do.
Player A gets 0 slave revolts, player B 3 slave revolts, and player C 1 slave revolt, before 1000 BC. Two of player B's happen before writing.
There's no reconciling that. Even if player A eventually gets 2 revolts 50 turns later, the damage has been done earlier and it had more impact by a lot. Little things like this give a side an advantage over time. Maybe player A and B both opted to go oracle, and player B played better by 3 turns with careful micro only to come out behind due to the revolts. Now player B is behind 500
worth early game. Nobody could assert such a game's outcome is dependent on skill or strategy any longer in cases like that.
Against the AI? No biggie. The AI is terrible and people win making mistakes on deity even if culture/space are left on (deity AI have virtually no chance w/o those VC, barring always war). A lot of players who plan micro still dislike them however because they simply force players into making lots of extra calculations.
Maybe it is just me. I like a bit of unpredictability in games. I am always the guy with the weird stuff. In Counterstrike, I am the sniper who runs around hunting instead of camping. In Age of Empires, I am the guy coming at you through forests or trying to pull off off-the-wall stunts like playing hit-and-run with trebuchets (the Japanese are very good for this) or running through your entire base with a few horse archers time and again for the laughs.
There's nothing wrong with this. Depending on the game it might even get you the mighty status of "cherry tapper", which I admire greatly
(I used the lancer exclusively back in gears of war 1, when it was considered a poor + noob weapon...of course nowadays in gears 3 we have actual weapon balance XD). I don't think you'd pick those options if you truly wanted to beat someone you thought was at your level or better, but that doesn't mean they can't be fun.
That's also why I've kept my arguments against events to being against competitive settings and against the implication that they employ strategy heavily. For the most part, events don't add a whole lot of strategic depth to the game, just a shift in micro tables, adjustment for after you spent the gold, etc. Simply picking the proper tile improvement has more depth...however that doesn't mean events can't be fun. They just shouldn't be in formats like Hall of Fame (No strategy, just keep playing new games until you get good events
), BOTM (one unlucky outcome and you lose to #1 guy), or MP. Unfortunately, those formats often employ them, although BOTM has been good lately and a lot of MP games are sensible enough to disable them. HoF, however, is the format that should absolutely LEAST use events, because allowing them there encourages #games > well played games, and goes directly against the purpose of allowing things like mapfinder, opponent selection, etc which were implemented to allow more skilled players to compete against players with more time.
I think the biggest problem is not with the concept of events but rather the implementation. Firaxis is notoriously bad with expansion features; the code for vassals is a joke (less power can make someone capitulate rather than more power sometimes for example), the AP has been broken in every patch iteration it has existed, etc.
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. Getting GG'ed by an archer stack would make me rage hard.
