National Disasters

National disasters like floods, fires, plague, volcano eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, sea storms, avalanche and others, according to history of the nations as well as regional geography of the map you are playing on.
When playing as the Japanese you could face a Godzilla awakening and it's path of destruction.

probably old news and no takers.

I don't know if those would qualify as "national" so much as regional. And, I'd be fine with something akin to that. There were a couple of mods in Civ IV that had this.

There are similar 'random events' in some other games; most people do not like them as they are an unnecessary random element added. However, I like the idea of these, so long as they're within reason (only eruption when next to volcano etc.) as I like a bit of an unknown element to stop it feeling gamey (i.e. my wonder finished this turn, my GS pops on this turn, and then I trade lux X to maintain happiness etc.).

I'm down with natural disasters and other random events. Random factors would add a lot more variability to the game as well as replay value.

I think the way to make 'natural disasters' acceptable in game terms is to give you some way to avoid them, or give them a positive as well as a negative aspect.

For instance, if a volcano occasionally erupts and wipes out 20 - 33% of the population of any city within its radius, why would anyone build a city there? Because the tiles around the volcano are extra-productive in food (volcanic ash as fertilizer) AND the volcano gives you access to obsidian (volcanic glass) which can be used to make extra-sharp blades, and is therefore a potential replacement for bronze (copper resource) for tools and weapons.

If Plague can occasionally ravage your population, then there should be anti-plague properties to researching Medicine, or building Hospitals, or even a Wonder like the Mayo Clinic or CDC that lessens the effects dramatically.

And, finally, one of the Advanced Starting Options should be 'Turn Off Natural Disasters' for them that don't want to play that game.

Adding random elements to the game is problematic. It nullifies strategic skill, which isn't what you want in a strategy game. So there would need to be some way of minimising or maximising your chances of falling victim to a disaster. But even then there'd be an element of RNG unless there was complete flexibility and predictability, in which case it wouldn't be very realistic to make these disasters floods or earthquakes or eruptions.

The other alternative is to make it so that the effects are quite minimal, but then it would also hardly be a good in-game representation of a disaster.

Camikaze said:

Adding random elements to the game is problematic. It nullifies strategic skill, which isn't what you want in a strategy game. So there would need to be some way of minimising or maximising your chances of falling victim to a disaster.

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Isn't being able to react and recover from 'random events' part of Strategic Skill? And having some way to minimize the effects is exactly what I argued would be a requirement for including them.

Leaving them out completely makes a mockery of what is supposed to be, at least vaguely, a historically based game. Including them in all their effects (losing entire cities like Pompeii to volcano, or 1/3 of your total population to Plague) would indeed largely nullify Strategic Skill. The trick is to find a middle ground that includes them without making them Game Changing. I think that can be done, and I think it should be done. I also think that, as mentioned, for those who believe it nullifies strategic skill, there should be an option to turn them off in the Set-up for your particular game.

Adapting to natural disasters would add to strategic skill in a truly single player game perhaps, but not in a game in which you're competing against others not burdened by the same setbacks. It's like if you were playing a first person shooter and your gun jammed. Wouldn't matter whether you were more skilled than your opponent or not; they'd have an unfair advantage. Gameplay always trumps realism.

There are random elements in the game, though, most notably starting positions. Civ5 has generally been better at this than Civ4, where you could get stuck with ice and tundra, a predicament which would make most people simply re-roll. But the problem is that the more interesting the random elements are, the more unbalancing they are. If you want them to not potentially screw you over, then they can't have massive effects, and so they can't be all that interesting.

Something Civ4 also attempted to do, which most people hated, was global warming - if you used too many nukes, you'd be hit with desertification of random tiles. The main problem with this sort of thing was, though, that if you wanted it to be remotely realistic, the tiles that would be turned into desert had to be distributed across all civilizations, no matter who was at fault.

My favourite idea was to have natural disasters as you'd expect, and people could die if you weren't prepared - however, you got rewards if you reacted well or had infrastructure in place to protect. This added some strategy into it, so it could be quite effective. It may even be modded, though I cannot find anything about it, mainly because I haven't tried searching.

I wouldn't have "random" disasters, rather I'd have disasters according to their geological location on the map.

Should be some other benefit to being there, unlike with the volcanic eruption event in Civ4. Punishing the player or AI just for bad luck... not a good idea. Dark Ages were one of the Civ3 ideas... and they weren't in the game. For a good reason.

Camikaze said:

Something Civ4 also attempted to do, which most people hated, was global warming - if you used too many nukes, you'd be hit with desertification of random tiles. The main problem with this sort of thing was, though, that if you wanted it to be remotely realistic, the tiles that would be turned into desert had to be distributed across all civilizations, no matter who was at fault.

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This hate was wrong because it affected all civs if i'm right. Having tiles transforming into deserts was reducing pop/pop growth, gold income and science, but as it was the same for everybody it didn't change anything. It's rather an example of badly understood mechanic than a bad mechanic by itself.

As to volcanoes, having a city hit by them like in Civ3 is a major flaw, because cities don't represent just cities, but a lot of them. In reality only Pompeï got hit by the Vesuve, not a whole region.

Camikaze said:

Something Civ4 also attempted to do, which most people hated, was global warming - if you used too many nukes, you'd be hit with desertification of random tiles. The main problem with this sort of thing was, though, that if you wanted it to be remotely realistic, the tiles that would be turned into desert had to be distributed across all civilizations, no matter who was at fault.

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Don't forget unhealthiness. And it wouldn't be nukes causing it IRL but high energy use and a lot of cows.

Naokaukodem said:

This hate was wrong because it affected all civs if i'm right. Having tiles transforming into deserts was reducing pop/pop growth, gold income and science, but as it was the same for everybody it didn't change anything. It's rather an example of badly understood mechanic than a bad mechanic by itself.

As to volcanoes, having a city hit by them like in Civ3 is a major flaw, because cities don't represent just cities, but a lot of them. In reality only Pompeï got hit by the Vesuve, not a whole region.

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Actually Pompei wasn't the only city ruined by Vesuvious. Another city Herculaneum was destroyed as well. The volcano was a threat to a small region, not just a single city.

civfanchambers said:

Actually Pompei wasn't the only city ruined by Vesuvious. Another city Herculaneum was destroyed as well. The volcano was a threat to a small region, not just a single city.

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- And don't forget the eruption of Thera/Santorini in the Aegean earlier, which devastated the entire northern shore of the island of Crete, or the eruption in 1816 which resulted in the 'Year Without Summer' over much of the globe.

These, however, are examples of the kinds of Natural Disasters we probably DON'T want in the game: too big, too hard to recover from, totally disruptive to whatever strategy you were trying to pursue. Instead, a volcanic event that removes X % of the one city's population BUT there are also positive effects to being near a volcano, that to me is about the level of 'disaster' we should aim for.

Camikaze said:

Adding random elements to the game is problematic. It nullifies strategic skill, which isn't what you want in a strategy game.

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Camikaze said:

Gameplay always trumps realism.

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That's an interesting position considering the fact that both Sid Maier and Brian Reynolds had a clear single player focus for Civ I and Civ II and (sometimes severe) random elements have always been part and kind of DNA source material of the Civ series. Civ was created with the idea of bringing human history and empire building into video game format - where it clearly makes a lot of sense to have disasters and unexpected events to deal with (Sim City with its Tornados and Godzillas or Railroad Tycoon with its train wrecks were main inspiration for the creation of original Civ!). The multiplayer focus - with the desperate need to make everything balanced and fair - and also all the tall vs. wide nonsense that was added to V diminished the realism aspect (in earlier incarnations of Civ and in real world clearly size matters - that's why Rome, the British Empire or Russa and USA are considered Superpowers, not Swiss, Liechtenstein or Monaco). And sorry to say, but there are people who's focus in Civ is not the balanced multiplayer strategy game approach but rather the history construction kit approach the designers of the frist incarnations actually intended.

gps said:

That's an interesting position considering the fact that both Sid Maier and Brian Reynolds had a clear single player focus for Civ I and Civ II and (sometimes severe) random elements have always been part and kind of DNA source material of the Civ series. Civ was created with the idea of bringing human history and empire building into video game format - where it clearly makes a lot of sense to have disasters and unexpected events to deal with (Sim City with its Tornados and Godzillas or Railroad Tycoon with its train wrecks were main inspiration for the creation of original Civ!). The multiplayer focus - with the desperate need to make everything balanced and fair - and also all the tall vs. wide nonsense that was added to V diminished the realism aspect (in earlier incarnations of Civ and in real world clearly size matters - that's why Rome, the British Empire or Russa and USA are considered Superpowers, not Swiss, Liechtenstein or Monaco). And sorry to say, but there are people who's focus in Civ is not the balanced multiplayer strategy game approach but rather the history construction kit approach the designers of the frist incarnations actually intended.

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Go go go ! I'm with you ! This post is the most interesting post I saw in I&S so far, with far more ins and outs than any one else. And, it goes against the boring weight of opinions !

Gameplay in Civ series has always been a result, not an intention. It has always been an historical experimental game with fun things inside. The purpose is to be cool, not to be a puzzle. I guess that's what happening when people play too much.

i take it your country electing a party who change leader to a terrible prime minister, who loses the next election and is replaced by a coalition nobody elected - since none of them got enough votes to form a government alone- doesnt count as a natural disaster? pity...

i miss the random events from civ 4. for example, the city-state quests feel like kind of a letdown after the quests of the former game.

andreafin said:

i take it your country electing a party who change leader to a terrible prime minister, who loses the next election and is replaced by a coalition nobody elected - since none of them got enough votes to form a government alone- doesnt count as a natural disaster? pity...

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No, that would be a Political Disaster, and as everyone knows, Politics is not Natural - that's why it makes Strange Bedfellows.