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Adding Random Events

What simulation game would be complete without random events? Random events are handled somewhat similarly to synthesis methods, in that you set the value of the variable random-events to a list of the methods that you want run. Note that you must still ensure that the probabilities for the events on your list are nonzero!

Superficially, random events just introduce some unpredictability into a game. However, adding it just for its own sake is not a good idea; in the worst case, the game becomes the infamous "dice-rolling contest", where nothing matters except luck. Random events are more valuable when they introduce risk, and players have to balance that risk against their goals. As an example, random losses of cities in the standard game would be pointless, since players have to have them, and there would be a chance that all of a player's cities would disappear, causing the player to lose for no good reason at all. On the other hand, the chance of losing an expensive capital ship in shallow coastal waters is enough to motivate the player to keep them well out to sea.

In the past, bugs or unexpected behavior in random event routines have resulted in hard-to-reproduce problems. For the sake of debugging, you should test the game with random event probabilities set very high, perhaps as a variant so it can still be played normally.


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