Viperswhip

Join Date 03/2006

Luck, does it work in TA?

I am not feeling lucky!

Well, I have played a few sandbox games on the newest patch and I haven't had much luck with the luck attribute.

I almost always take luck as a starting ability, it's not quite the one point wonder creativity is but it provides a fair amount of fun in DA.

I have deliberately played the game through the colony rush stage 4 times today, with 60% luck from Universalist, with the 25% starting and 10% mysticism. In the latest game, only one out of 14 planets had a special situation. In the previous game it was 2 for 19.

In DA with only the initial 25% I normally had specials pop up on at least 1 in 5. Is this working like it should or have I just have bad luck? Is there some internal rollover or something? 60% should be producing a fair number of specials, certainly more than 1 in 10 I would think.

Has anybody else run into this issue?

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Luck only works for your minimum damage. So your problem that specials weren't appearing as often is just YOUR bad luck.

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Yeah, luck just increases the minimum amount of damage your ships do with each "hit" during combat. It has nothing to do with ethical choice situations... although it would be nice if there were an attribute to regulate such a thing.

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Here is the quote from the gal civ 2 wiki

Luck is a player ability that determines what the odds are of a random event (finding ships, planets being terraformed, etc.) going the player's way.

In Dark Avatar Luck also determines the floor roll for attacks with weapons. A race with 25% luck will roll from 25%_weapon_power to max_weapon_power, and not from 0 to max_weapon_power. This effectively increases damage done by 12.5%

That's why I brought it up. If this is not the case then the wiki should be changed.

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I don't know about anyone else, but when I first played with a lucky race in TA (an attribute I don't normally use) I noticed that the planet quality of planets that I was the first to scout were significantly better than in most of my games (before and since). I didn't notice any extra special tiles on the planets, but the number of tiles available was definately above normal.

I could tell once I got to an area that other races had scouted before I got there, because the average planet quality was more like I would expect to find.

It may just be a co-incidence, but I doubt it

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Here is the quote from the gal civ 2 wiki

The Wiki is wrong on some points. Somewhere here on the board, the devs have stated that it only affects damage rolls.

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It does effect damage rolls (though it really, really shouldn't), but it had a bearing on random events in GC2, and to my knowledge it's never changed in DA.

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I was under the impression that it does affect some random events. On DA games where I select Lucky, I'm the only one to find a Ranger ship (unless there's another Lucky empire). I thought it also decreased the likelihood of special events having a bad effect (fewer worlds taken by the Jagged Knife, Pirates less likely to target you, etc), as well as likelihood of successful spying.

NO???

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Well hell, I'm all confused now. These all sound like viable outcomes of a Lucky race. I pick it for the minimum damage during combat. Anything else is a bonus.

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Hi!
About the only two confirmed workings of the Luck are the change to weapons roll and significantly increased chance of obtaining Lucky Rangers. It sounds logically that the Luck should be involved in any event where dices are cast to get the outcome, but "sounding logically" doesn't mean much in this game.

I'm pretty sure the Luck doesn't increase the chance of planetary events at colonizing, and the amount of bonus tiles on HW. The rest is just a guess. One shouldn't expect much from 1 point the Luck costs.

BR, Iztok

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Following applies to TA, and based largely on my memory of one game.

There may be some other aspects. I noticed the Lucky Ranger thing as well, but it is not just Lucky races that get them - they do however seem to get more of them and especially when in most dire need - it is for that reason in fact maybe a bad omen when you start getting a lot of them(!) (at some point they become not very good ships, albeit worth every penny you paid, unless you upgrade them).

Try upgrading lucky rangers. They keep the 'lucky' deignation, and I believe they may actually have their own inherent luck bonus as well as some kind of first round bonus. I know because when I used some lucky rangers which I had upgraded to monster battleships or dreadnoughts the combat screen said something about my lucky ships' (but not my 'normal' BBs and DNs) first round bonus attacks expiring, and that was in a game where I was not a Super Warrior race.

Would like to know what the "first round bonus" is.

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I've also found luck to be invaluable for getting nice cash bonuses during surveying. Honestly, though, that's the only kind of stuff it should be effecting... the minimum damage bonus just doesn't make sense! It's a 12.5% average damage increase plus all sorts of huge cash bonuses at game start, and it only costs a single ability point! Needless to say, I've never played a game without the ability.

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Hi!

I've also found luck to be invaluable for getting nice cash bonuses during surveying.

I did a test in this area too (game version DA 1.8), but found out that Luck doesn't play a big role there. Only a small portion (can't confirm, but in my test it was about 1 in 5) of anomalies gave me random bonus (each reload a different one), the rest was fixed. When I tried that random bonus I haven't noticed there was a preference to 1000 BC cash outcome (I simply never got it in ~20 reloads), and my race did had Luck. Even 750 BC and 500 BC cash happened only once.

Well, the "test sample" was too small to draw some hard conclusion, but IMO the Luck doesn't play any significant role here. It's just a random roll at the galaxy setup - if you're lucky, you can get 3000+ BC from 20 anomalies (my recent league game). If not, then 1700 BC from 100.

Just an anecdotical evidence: what I've noticed is reappearing anomalies tend to give you the money when you need it the least. In end-game when I've been literarily flowing in cash, my survey ships kept finding money-rich anomalies.

BR, Iztok

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econundrum1

Join Date 04/2007

+36

I'm inclined to believe it does affect the roll to determine how good an Anomaly is, I do seem to notice a marked increase in good out comes with it. Also I have to say I think it helps the roll to see if you discover something with the Creative ability too.

I had no idea about the weapons damage thing, though it does explain the affectiveness of some of my ships.

I wonder if we could get official clarification?

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