Since differing opinions have emerged at the playtesting thread on how strong/weak the plagues are, this is the place to solve the debate ;)

Voted Okay, although it may be less than needed or rather, there's a certain need for a pre-1300ish plague. It's very historical I believe but as someone else said, until the first plague there's a lot of units around and the game is very slow.

Plague, when it hits needs to be bigger, because as it is now, it kinda sucks(for the plague, not human or AI).

This is going to become a nice bell curve.

BTW, would be nice if there were some easily-accessed config option to turn off the plague and/or mercs.

Actually it is very easy to turn plagues off. Just open Plague.py and make a '#' before 'self.setGenericPlagueDates..', save and thats it.

Thanks. Still, it's not what I'd call “easily configurable.” I was thinking more along the lines of a separate Config.py (or at least a section in Consts.py) where you can toggle features which are governed solely by Python code (i.e. not in the DLL).

In my beta 3 game as Austria, plague never wore out, the whole Europe was doomed... It didn't spread to Sicily and my Atlantic Islands cities nor Russia & Sweden, but in cities it spread in, it kept killing people forever...

I think it should be adjusted a bit, It often comes very heavy handedly killing off all workers and soldiers if you don't act quickly, but doesnt come that often.

An ideal plague: would completely spread around europe in under 5 turns (often times it gets to every country in 5 but takes longer to spread around) but then only takes about 3-6 turns based on health, but kills about half of units. And probably have 5 or 6 times starting later than it does currently (a plague almost at the start of the game is a little brutal)

also if you have time, go check out the feedback forum, we need more people there