[SPOILERS] DaveV: Seriously, Capria?

[DaveV]

The story of my game so far: great combat luck, poor event luck. That guy on the left edge of the picture is my C2 shock warrior, who killed a barb warrior at 96% odds and is now at 13/17 XP.



This is really my fault: I was skimping on my event fund to speed up Festivals. This is one of the many events that is basically some greasy mobster knocking on your door and saying, "That's a nice city you have there. It would be a shame if something *happened* to it."

In this case, the bad thing that results from not paying the 20 gold protection money is -2 population and a huge happiness hit, so yay for my second city being useless for a long time.

Another ongoing theme: good alignment is the worst alignment. I was hoping to switch to slavery later, but it's not available to good civs. For this event, an evil civ could recruit a crazed axeman with 10 XP, who might survive long enough to do some useful scouting. There are lots of other events where being evil lets you avoid bad consequences. I considered researching Message from the Deep just so I could change alignment to neutral, but that's a lot of beakers spent just for the alignment change. I think I'm better off going straight to Way of the Forests, to have access to some decent offensive units. Once I've started to build religious units, switching religion to change alignment would mean losing those units.

In more positive news, I finished my pagan temple in the capital, and will have a prophet in 23 turns (if I don't accidentally pollute the GP pool).

[DaveV]

Well, at least I got a couple good nights' sleep before this turn.

I didn't realize the psycho killer can move to a different city, and strike again in my capital:



So my carefully set up God King capital is now utter garbage:



Just       . That's effectively the harpy event, without the benefit of a great artist.

That is ... disheartening. This one event is probably enough to torpedo my plans, and I'll probably end up as zombie chow.

Because, to continue the bad news, here's Mr. Aggressive Pyre Zombie popping up as my neighbor:



I guess that means I owe my loyal readers a set of graphs.

[DaveV]

It looks like Cairo is trying to be a good neighbor and hasn't declared war to take a shortcut through my territory.



It's just painful to open the save. I don't see how I recover from this setback: I made a lot of sacrifices to get to God King, planning to make up the difference by spitting out a couple quick settlers. Now my capital is bleeding off another 21 turns of whip unhappiness.

My capital is crap, my settler production is crap, my GNP is crap, my score is crap, my motivation is crap; my whole game is just a big heap of stinking, steaming, crap.

[DaveV]

Now the game's just trolling me:



8 gold short of a great engineer. I could spend 50 gold for supplies, but meh.

[DaveV]

Yup. Definitely trolling.

[Mardoc]

Yup. Definitely trolling.

[DaveV]

The in-game consequences of my slow settler begin to be felt. Aurorarcher has beaten me to the Wine/Corn spot.



Gnashing of teeth. Now my settler has to be rerouted, and Aurorarcher has claimed a spot I really wanted.

I now know the map layout almost completely: the two people that I don't border are Bob and Mackoti. Mack has either Cairo and Bob for neighbors, or Bob and Aurorarcher.

Obligatory graph dump:

[DaveV]

Here's a back of the envelope calculation of what I've lost to the psycho killer (qu'est-ce que c'est):

A pair of citizens can collect four food and four hammers, for break-even food and six god-king hammers. So every missing citizen costs me three hammers and one commerce. For six turns, I'm down four citizens, for 6*4*3=72 hammers, and 6*4=24 commerce. Then, six turns of three missing citizens, for 6*3*3=54 hammers, and 6*3=18 commerce. After that, I can grow and only lose one citizen, so 6*3=18 hammers and 6 commerce. Total is 144 hammers, and 48 commerce. Additionally, as a consequence of the lost production, I lost the wine site to Aurorarcher.

As I said before, I don't see how I recover from this. Doomed again by the RNG to play out a certain loss.

[naufragar]

Random events are part of the soul of FFH, but maybe for a multiplayer balance mod, EITB will want to cut off the peaks and valleys and disable the best and worst? I feel for you.

[RefSteel]

For this event, an evil civ could recruit a crazed axeman with 10 XP, who might survive long enough to do some useful scouting.

I'm quite certain I've received the crazed axeman as a reward even as a good civ in the latest EitB! You have to pay to "step up patrols" to get that option of course, and there might be a small, temporary happiness penalty in the city where he's "captured." I think the evil-only option is to pay slightly less money to "take care of the problem." In any case, sorry to hear that you happened to be (in one case just) short of the necessary cash on two consecutive pretty-big events! EitB events can indeed be game-shaping, often with nothing that can be done about them. (Wasting illness, I'm looking at you....)