It’s been a long while since I’ve played Civ 4, so I don’t remember exact examples of random events. But I thought they sort of went like this:
Most are not. Most are like this:
1. Your forge burned down. You can spend money to keep it or lose it.
2. Forest fire! Spend money (you won't have any) or get
for a while.
3. Barbarians spawn in busted areas and lemming script your city.
4. All of your naval units on a given tile disappear. Even if there were 200 units there.
5. Free golden age!
6. Congratulations, have 8
from nothing.
7. We are going to penalize you for using the best early civic available, but not enough to make it worth avoiding, and not evenly with other civilizations.
8. Build 7 castles and we'll give you a likely diplomatic victory.
9. You have declared war on three civilizations! One of them gets a bunch of tanks.
10. Your science rate is increased or decreased for one turn.
11. Your theater burned down. If you have money you can replace it instantly.
12. Let's just remove all these tile improvements nearby, no matter how long they take...
Junk.
Your example is one of the better examples of events, but in virtually every case you would take the
bonus at the expense of 50
.
are far more valuable than
in civ IV, and that
gets multiplied by any infrastructure you've built. If nothing else, it's a more efficient
--->
conversion than any other means you've available even at the baseline +1.
As a result, you'd always take the
if available (and using binary research sliders and brokering tech for
, it generally will be), and otherwise the
(no reason to avoid that option based on your description). So, after seeing such an event a single time, any rational player who is even a little competent would pattern-recognize it, pick
, and continue play. That's not a lot of game depth, but it's a lot better than the events I listed at least.
Civ 5 is already very random. As the most obvious example -- your starting spot. I don't think adding random events makes it substantially more random than it already is.
Fun logic! Let's apply it:
- You have been stabbed in the leg with a knife. Because you are already experiencing a lot of pain and have a life threatening wound, why not let someone also slash your arms and chest with a knife? The wounds won't be nearly as deep and not life threatening, so it does not substantially increase your risk of death! That means that slashes would be fun! Let's slash!
...
. Let's not use that logic then.
Besides, Civ V has taken pains to mitigate the imbalance of spawns BIGTIME since civ IV. Spawns are much less ridiculous now, for a number of reasons:
1. Tall > Wide, so land distributions are less painful (one civ getting 20% of land or more on standard maps without a war was a painfully ridiculous advantage).
2. Starting bias further lowers the odds of a screw job with a lot of civilizations.
3. Scenarios and custom maps bypass spawn limitations entirely, if desired.
They're still a problem (though less so) but why add more problems? How many Civ V games are "spawn losses"?
For that matter, I'm having trouble thinking of anything I miss from BtS in BNW, but it has been a long time since I played IV.
Good BTS features that should be in BNW:
1. Waypoints and efficient UI queue.
2. Permanent Alliance option (off by default)
BNW is pretty feature rich, and in other cases 1UPT or other basic design choices (SP, tenets vs civics) alter what could realistically be brought into Civ V.
I WOULD say vassals, but Firaxis has never proven it could create a working vassal state mechanic right up through 3.19, so if they did that in Civ V it would be a first, not a IV port
.
...so you're ok with random events, if done properly ?
Yes, just as I wouldn't mind Apostolic Palace, "done properly". Events could be handled in a far more abstract fashion, or proc based on more reasonable conditions, or proc more frequently but be far less impactful than IV's and if they followed my rules above, could easily add to the Civ V experience rather than subtract from it (and events that penalized intelligent play in Civ IV were the worst of all).