No good strategy goes unpunished

[piratefish]

I have noticed that over the course of many games played, it seems as though the human player is handicapped or punished for managing well.

Whenever I am employing a sound strategy to build up my nation, I am constantly plagued by detrimental events. It is not uncommon to have 3 or 4 events a year like Major Worker Strike, Parliamentary Scandal, Tech Team Loses Skill, or Great Peace Demonstration.

All of this is well and good, but beneficial events hardly ever occur. The ratio of deleterious events to beneficial/benign events seems to be somewhere on the order of 20:1.

What gives? It is very frustrating to have my efforts negated by a single event to make up for the lack of good AI.

Sorry to complain, but am I the only one who has experienced/noticed this phenomenon?

 

[okyriosy]

I think you are just unlucky. Don't worry, your luck may come back...
(Reminds me of a CK game where my ruler lost everything in two months because a string of six-seven really nasty events happened at once)

 

[froglegs]

It is my observation after 5 years of playing HOI 2/AOD that the random number generator is not quite random. Too often in a game I seem to get these "random" events in a series, both all good and all bad being repeated over several years in the game.

 

[unmerged(38985)]

This sounds the same than "online poker is rigged".

I've never noticed anything.

 

[unmerged(189717)]

AFAIK, AoD uses some stuff from the computer it is installed on to generate random events. Some computers seem to have a much higher change of offering those events than others.

 

[unmerged(38985)]

There is also proof that random number generators might have been cracked by the Soviet AI. Did you guys play against SU in particular?

 

[DesertSnow]

All of this is well and good, but beneficial events hardly ever occur. The ratio of deleterious events to beneficial/benign events seems to be somewhere on the order of 20:1.

What gives? It is very frustrating to have my efforts negated by a single event to make up for the lack of good AI.

AFAIK, these events fire independently of whether or not the nation follows a good or bad strategy. IMO, democracies in the HoI series are overly handicapped.

 

[quaazi]

Democracies have the option of going full free market. They are in no way handicapped.

 

[piratefish]

Say what you will, but after 7 years of playing HOI and many dozens of games, I have definitely noticed an unusually high proportion of deleterious events to beneficial or benign events. Easily on the order 8:1 (or worse).

Is it because there are more 'negative' event possibilities than 'positive' ones? Or is it another way that designers have tried to even the playing field regarding human vs. artificial intelligence?

There is no way anyone can convince me that events truly are random with respect to their overall effect (bad vs good). Over the long run, there have been far too many 'bad' events in my games with respect to 'good' events. This means that there is either a built in bias for the negative events, or there are quite a bit more possible negative events than positive ones.

I may not be a statistician or actuary, but I do have a pretty decent grasp on finite mathematics, and the evidence is overwhelming.

 

[piratefish]

There is also proof that random number generators might have been cracked by the Soviet AI. Did you guys play against SU in particular?

Wow, sarcasm. How rare and refreshing.

But to play along, sadly it can't be the Soviet AI. I have experienced the same phenomenon playing as the SU.

 

[Blecky]

As for the random events that are not triggered by any conditions I´ve noticed that it usually takes three months of game time before they start to occur. If you save and reload then it takes another three months. Besides I don´t think there are more negative events than positive ones but you rather remember those pesky ones better than the positive events. Even playing as the SU I suffered from a major worker strike in AoD :wacko:

 

[piratefish]

I am aware of the tendancy to remember the "negative" random events more readily than the "positive" ones, but ever since I started to become curious about the frequency of occurrence around a year ago, I have actually kept track.

I have not entered the data into a spreadsheet and crunched it, as a matter of fact I have not even saved all of the data. I only recorded it for each game to see the proportions. What I noted is that EVERY single game I have played since last April (2009) had more negative random events than positive (HOI2 Armageddon and AoD).

In my most recent game playing as US 1936 normal/normal I had 2 tech team skill increases, 2 major worker strikes, 2 great peace demonstrations, 2 parliamentary scandals, and 4 policy reforms that required me to sustain 2 - 5% dissent to avoid sliding back into isolationism or dove lobby. I had no miraculous breakthroughs in technology, and no leading scientists defecting to my country, nor did I have any private initiatives boosting my production.

This is pretty typical of what I have observed over the last 14 months.

 

[jose1357]

as democracies I tend to agree that there's more negative things than positive. But then again once when I was playing as Germany one time the SU AI actually offered me the unholy alliance, and Japan decided not to invade China so you can always increase the random modifier if needed