Civ VI Natural Disasters ideas

Hello There

I think Civ 6 should have Natural disasters. If we check in history, natural disasters have big importance (vulvano in pompei in rome; eartquake in 1755 lisbon etc)

What do you think

Vulcano - a vulcano (mountain) appear in a square on a map. the fields around the vulcano produce more food, but if a city is near can be hurt or destroy city (reduce population and destroy buildings). The event should be random

Earthquake- an area on the map became destroyed but if a city is near can be hurt or destroy city (reduce population and destroy buildings). The event should be random

Tsunami -- an coastal area on the map became destroyed but if a city is near can be hurt or destroy city (reduce population and destroy buildings). The event should be random. can be caused by an eartquake in sea.

Tsunami/huracan - an area on the map became destroyed but if a city is near can be hurt or destroy city (reduce population and destroy buildings). The event should be random. thsi event should be not as strong as earthquake

desease (black plague, ebola etc) - city affected by this loose population and the units inside city loose health and can die. only affects bigger city (6+ population) and can spread by roads and comercial connections.

ground erosion - if a civ destroy many forest / jungles have a decrease on the food of the fields.

Other civs can send help to the civ that suffers this natural disaster to improve relation between them


Please give more ideas

Thank you

"There is no Knowledge that is not Power"

I sure hope it doesn't.

Purely negative RNG isn't fun.

Monado said:

I sure hope it doesn't.

Purely negative RNG isn't fun.

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I agreed that can be less fun (specially if it hapens to us) but it is more realistc. Also should have an option on the configuration menu to disable/enable this feature


"I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."

Keep the random outta my Civ, m'kay? (Or at least make it optional -- although I'd prefer that development time is spent on more useful features.)

Also, please be honest: if you built your capital next to a volcano and it got randomly destroyed(!!!), would you not go egg Ed Beach's house directly after hitting the reload button so hard that it'd break your keyboard?

stiiknafuulia said:

Keep the random outta my Civ, m'kay? (Or at least make it optional -- although I'd prefer that development time is spent on more useful features.)

Also, please be honest: if you built your capital next to a volcano and it got randomly destroyed(!!!), would you not go egg Ed Beach's house directly after hitting the reload button so hard that it'd break your keyboard?

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Just don't build next to volcanoes. I did just fine with volcanoes in older civ games. Civ3 I think had them.

Callonia said:

Just don't build next to volcanoes. I did just fine with volcanoes in older civ games. Civ3 I think had them.

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Iirc, in Civ III the volcano feature only affected the tile it was on, and only destroyed a city that was built right next to it (and then only with a 25 % chance). I guess this could work; and with a city other than your capital, you might sometimes make the call to settle next to the volcano if the potential loss of the city could be reconciled with the associated bonuses (a military city, producing almost no buildings and mostly units comes to mind). Perhaps I was too harsh in my initial assessment; I just don't want to be subjected to highly impactful randomness unless it's by choice.

Onun said:

I agreed that can be less fun (specially if it hapens to us) but it is more realistc.

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Thankfully Civ isn't a series about realism, and even games that care for realism usually try to avoid mechanics that are based on randomness and have a negative impact. It's just not fun for most player groups.

So even as an optional feature I think it's not worth the effort it would take to be implemented. It's content for a good mod though.

I love this idea. There is a mod called global warming that does some of these things. If you build too many factoried it causes random tiles to change to lower value...I would like to see fog that would allow units to hide from long range attacks and air attacks..mudslides that bog down tanks or blocks roads and fire that burns forests and can damage cities and nesrby units.....but your idea of a volcano that causes destruction but then becomes a farming boom after erupting is really good..I didnt think to make the natural disasters a benefit after they cause initial destruction like the earthquake could expose gold and coal after it destoys the area..great idea.

I think some rng is fine.

Just that the amount of rng or risk should be appropriate to the reward.
If the player has zero control over the event, then either its effect will have to be small, and kinda not worth it gameplay wise, or it's too large and not very fun.

I don't like your tsumani one, because all cities/harbor districts will be near the sea and the coast is too large of an area that could be afflicted.
The volcano one on the other hand I love. It's easy to avoid (assuming it affects in a one tile radius max): don't build next to volcano! But you can choose to do so if you want a higher food production.
For the earthquake one, again I don't like if one has zero control. Perhaps show a tile with a fault line? maybe bonus production? idk

The disease one I can see it being tied with the new amenity system and lack of aqueducts.. basically another penalty for not enough "happiness" besides slower food growth.

And while we're talking about tsunami's and earthquakes why not combine this with the religion system? Great prophet call down some destruction (though thats not "natural" i guess)

ground erosion removing trees? yeah... nope I mean if you plan for a lumbermill and the tree is gone that's really annoying. At least with all of the above ones you can repair/repopulate. But, we can't grow forests back after cutting them. So having the game unilaterally removing them would be infuriating. I mean maybe a temporary production decrease for the forests in a region?

I kind of like the idea of natural disasters, but have to agree with the others that it would be terrible if something happened to destroy your strongest city. I think your idea of having a possible pandemic maybe every 25 to 100 random turns or so would be interesting if it was done the following way:

a) any civ that has a city in contact with a certain threshold number of disease-originating areas (jungles, marshes, farms) could potentially become ground zero for the next pandemic,

b) there would be, let's say, ten major diseases that could pop up randomly if the conditions were right: cholera, typhoid, influenza, tuberculosis, bubonic plague, small pox, malaria, yellow fever, diphtheria, polio, some of which are more lethal than others,

c) that city would get hit first and then the disease could possibly spread to that civ's other connected cities (depending on the disease's virulence),

d) and then each civ that conducts trade with any of these infected cities might get infected, and then possibly spread it to all of their connected cities,

e) the more lethal the disease, along with a lack of health or sanitation buildings or techs, then the higher chance that disease will decimate the population for one to five years (a population reduction), and if the city is small enough in size, it might be wiped out completely (becoming a ruin and a future archeological site),

The result of this is a slow but unstoppable spread of a killer disease that has a chance to affect all civs unless: a civ has no active trades or contacts with any of the infected civs, has a good healthcare system in place, or that civ was already affected by this disease within the last 50 turns (acquired immunity).

This could actually balance the game in the early stages, because the bigger the civ is (in terms of population), the harder they'll be hit if they get hit. Diseases that strike a city hard could cause the remaining population to become really unhappy (demoralized) until either: a hospital or medical lab is built or, after a certain amount of time, they forget about how bad the disease was. If you pair this idea up with a rule that no cities under 10 pop can build a settler, then this would really help prevent city spamming by everyone until more advanced healthcare was researched allowing cities both big and small to survive the occasional sweeping pandemic.

I'd enjoy random natural disasters personally, but they should be optionable (one of game options: "disasters allowed/not allowed".

All random events should have both a positive and a negative aspect, or they will be turned off by most players.
Examples:

A Volcanic eruption can seriously damage infrastructure and population is a nearby city, BUT any volcano that has been erupting off and on for centuries not only has, generally, richer, naturally fertilized soil around it, but also gives access to 'extra' Raw Materials (Resources):
Obsidian - also called 'volcanic glass' which produces razor-sharp blades and can act as a substitute for Bronze in early tool and weapon-making - Aztec 'Eagle' and 'Jaquar' knights were equipped with wooden club/swords with obsidian blades embedded in them, as an example.
Tephra - Volcanic ash, which allows the early making of Cement, giving a boost to the construction of all sorts of things - like waterproof artificial stone piers and harbors. May also be required for some construction: the Pantheon's great dome was made of it, and it's hard to imagine building it with any other substance and the technology of the Classical Era.

So, the Trade-Off: occasional destruction versus Extra Food, substitute Strategic Resource and unique Building/Construction ability.

Earthquakes, by themselves, are pretty uniformly Bad. But, almost any region prone to earthquakes is also Volcanic, which also means there are Hot Springs in the area, which can produce "Baths" or 'Cures" - potential sources of Health, Happiness, and Tourism - early Tourism at that, the German tribe living around the hot spring at what is now Wiesbaden in Germany, right across the river from the big Roman legionary fort at Mainz, made a very good thing out of inviting Romans to cross the river and soak from about 0 to 400 AD.

So, the Trade Off: occasion destruction of infrastructure to varying degrees, versus a unique Early Happiness Building and early Tourism.

Given choices of positive and negative possibilities, 'natural disasters' can be another source of variation in Civ development and decision making, not a complete disaster at all.

Strategy games need strategy in them.

The scale on some of the suggestions is nonsense. More damage than getting sacked by 10turns of army investment? Yeah, no thanks.

You can do random events/disasters right by making investment sinks against them and force planning to optimize, but they don't fit the time scale civ likes to use very well. "Hurt or destroy the city" is such an absurd/nonsense proposition that it doesn't fit. In-game, a single city can represent around 1/10 or more of the entire population of a civilization (unlike real life for most time periods). Then we're supposed to buy that a single tsunami is going to do damage lasting CENTURIES? Cmon man. Let's not go throwing "real history" around while suggesting that . It's bad enough that building a granary can take decades without some random nonsense you can't even hedge against destroying it so it takes decades more. There's no realism there, so if you implement this you need gameplay.

Where is that gameplay?

I agree with TMIT mostly on the whole random event issue. Especially since it would be weird for a strategy game to spend a decent amount of resources building a system that really is not strategic. And it really is important that any RNG event should not be so powerful that it would delay or boost a large amount of turns for a city's development, or else the whole point of the strategic aspect of the game is pretty much contradicted.

Boris' post about risk/reward hexes is pretty interesting; you could settle a city with high yields that can occasionally produce less-than-normal yields. But then we're adding "luck" into a game that otherwise does not include it nor need it. From a designer standpoint, I also wouldn't want to develop a system that feels like a "nerf" to the player that's out of the player's hand to prevent.

Which is why I much prefer the way that natural wonders are developed. You get a boost if you find them and settle them, or you don't get penalized for not having one nearby. Now, if natural wonders randomly started to destroy my land after I settle next to them, that wouldn't be because I wasn't strategic, it would be because I didn't invest in the Luck stat.

As a strategy game luck should not impact too much, certainly negative luck just creates bad vibes
There is starting luck in goody huts and these are harder to get early with more aggressive barbs.
The trouble with too much good or bad fortune is it will sway the challenges of the game too much and things like the HOF have less impact.

Onun said:

"There is no Knowledge that is not Power"

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As Einstein said - "Any fool can know. The point is to understand"