Winning the lottery is OP?

[-- scippie --]

Every 10 week game where I win the lottery once becomes super easy. You can spend that money on so much useful stuff so your stats go way up. Winning it twice in a game is totally unfair for the AI. I just won a 10 week game with three of the four stats maxed out which is otherwise impossible (at least for me).
So maybe the lottery price is too high? I remember it being semi-random in Jones so that it was very seldom to have a real high amount.

[Xalerion0]

I just played my first game against the AI (a short game) and it soundly beat me. It won the lottery 3 times. There was no way for me to even get close to it. It had almost 3 stats maxed and the 4th stat was 3/4s of the way full. I had no chance and it was extremely unbalanced. Was looking through the discussion to see if anyone else had the same issue and whether it was common or consistent. Beating the AI is one of the last achievements I have to get and, based on my recent experience, I don't think it will be possible in the current version. Hopefully AI difficulty settings and AI "luck" will be balanced at some point, but it has been out so long that I kind of doubt it.

Edit: Just went through the other threads and there are multiple posts from others regarding the same thing I experienced, so it doesn't seem uncommon.

[-- scippie --]

I started playing again a couple of days ago, and I never encountered this. I also have been winning against the AI with bells and whistles, getting twice his score and things like that.

So I guess you need to work on your tactics more because I no longer experience those issues I mentioned a couple of years ago.

It is certainly still so that winning the lottery gives you a big advantage (you can most likely buy the fridge and that is a big boost). Winning it 3 times is a bomb, so if the AI had that, that was really bad luck for you.

[Xalerion0]

Originally posted by -- scippie --:

I started playing again a couple of days ago, and I never encountered this. I also have been winning against the AI with bells and whistles, getting twice his score and things like that.

So I guess you need to work on your tactics more because I no longer experience those issues I mentioned a couple of years ago.

It is certainly still so that winning the lottery gives you a big advantage (you can most likely buy the fridge and that is a big boost). Winning it 3 times is a bomb, so if the AI had that, that was really bad luck for you.

After my post, I played again (one game each of short, medium, long, and marathon) and soundly beat the AI without any change in my tactics and 0 more losses. Somehow, that first game I had posted about above, the AI only bought tickets on 3 days and it won each day (Not to mention that jobs were never available for me on days where I would normally progress while the AI never had that issue and the fridge and washer being on sale when it won the lottery where it could grab them very early). It also went for the bonus objectives without ever having bought a newspaper. It seems odd that the "luck" was so heavily favored towards the AI in that game while the gameplay was significantly different in the following games. A post from the developer in response to someone else remarking on experiencing the same thing said that the skill level of the AI is randomized (and I believe their "luck" is too. Don't remember exactly, but don't think it's worth searching through the forums again.) and so the difficulty is completely RNG. Another user complained that the AI they played against in a marathon game was extremely bad and kept making significant and repeated mistakes, including not eating, and that such caused that game to not be fun or competitive, which received the same response from the developer as the one similar to what I had experienced. I guess I just got a really bad roll my first game with the AI settings. It was truly insane.