Are crises impactful enough?

[stealth_nsk]

In my last game I got a settlement during the happiness crisis in antiquity - on of AIs was unable to handle it.

 

[evonannoredars]

I'd much rather they introduce something similar to loyalty flipping in VI, where the flipped city becomes a hostile independent power.

Agreed, it'd also introduce another way to deal with the crisis - not caring about happiness and instead using military force to recapture cities that try to break off.

 

[Siptah]

Crises threat levels in my experience.

Antiquity
Barbarians - High (you will lose units, and if you don't prepare, also one or two settlements)
Centralization - Medium (if you prepare, nothing happens, if not, you will lose buildings and maybe even a city)
Plague - Low (you might lose one or two unit or a few turns of production, if at all)

Exploration
Plague - Medium (if you don't prepare, you will lose several turns of production and units. Preparation can cost a lot of gold)
Religion - Low (depends on your choices and how you set up your empire. There may be consequences if you choose unwisely, but why would you?)
Revolution - Very Low (you won't lose anything besides a bit of gold)

Some suggestions:
Antiquity plague affects commanders and units, which die slowly unless you put them on a specific tiles/buildings. Settlements without that certain infrastructure stop growing, trader routes spread the plague, and traders that don't stop at such a "protected" settlement die.
Religion gets events that destroy some of your relics, happiness buildings, and general yield penalties if your religious unity is low.
Revolutionary spawns troops in DL settlements and as long as these are alive, the respective settlements don't spawn treasure fleets.

I think it is important that you can do something to mitigate the crisis (as for Barbarians and the exploration plague), but if you don't, it should wreck your empire.

 

[evonannoredars]

Crises threat levels in my experience.

Antiquity
Barbarians - High (you will lose units, and if you don't prepare, also one or two settlements)
Centralization - Medium (if you prepare, nothing happens, if not, you will lose buildings and maybe even a city)
Plague - Low (you might lose one or two unit or a few turns of production, if at all)

Exploration
Plague - Medium (if you don't prepare, you will lose several turns of production and units. Preparation can cost a lot of gold)
Religion - Low (depends on your choices and how you set up your empire. There may be consequences if you choose unwisely, but why would you?)
Revolution - Very Low (you won't lose anything besides a bit of gold)

Some suggestions:
Antiquity plague affects commanders and units, which die slowly unless you put them on a specific tiles/buildings. Settlements without that certain infrastructure stop growing, trader routes spread the plague, and traders that don't stop at such a "protected" settlement die.
Religion gets events that destroy some of your relics, happiness buildings, and general yield penalties if your religious unity is low.
Revolutionary spawns troops in DL settlements and as long as these are alive, the respective settlements don't spawn treasure fleets.

I think it is important that you can do something to mitigate the crisis (as for Barbarians and the exploration plague), but if you don't, it should wreck your empire.

Haha I actually had a wip comment with thoughts how I'd alter the crises with a few similar ideas:

• Barbarians: No comment, still haven't experienced yet and now excited for!
• Religion: Have experienced, but once and I don't remember what it really did, so likewise no comment.
• Happiness: Make rioters into hostile units on the map which spawn on rural tiles and then move from tile to tile, destroying urban buildings. Killable, but permanent (for the age) happiness debuff in settlement for doing so. Spawn more frequently the lower happiness is, city flips once rioters destroy all buildings. This means there are more ways to deal with the crisis - keep the happiness up as before, use military force to suppress rebellion, or use gold to constantly repair everything. Celebrations also reduce combat strength of rioters, to incentivise picking happiness bonuses from narrative events.
• Plague: Plague reduces yields of infected tiles significantly. Infected tiles may also cause era-permanent population 'death' (tiles become inactive, can be repopulated on population growth, otherwise population restored in next era). Plague spread is more obvious, and works in three ways. Note a plague 'trigger' will cause a plague to break out in the next few turns.

1. Traders (the automatic ones you don't control) that leave infected settlements will be visibly infected. If they arrive in another settlement, it causes a plague trigger. Trade routes can be cancelled to prevent this. This may result in additional pressure through the loss of resources.
2. Civilian units, especially missionaries and treasure fleets, will be visibly infected if they spawn in settlements with the plague. Have a medical isolation option, which requires them to stand still on an unclaimed tile for a number of turns, after which they become healed. Activating them in a settlement will cause a plague trigger however - so you could use missionaries to infect other civ's settlements in the Exploration age, true to the spirit of the real colonisation of the americas. Plague doctors can speed up decontamination of adjacent units, and can instantly deconaminate foreign missionaries.
3. An infected city/town may, after a number of turns, cause a plague trigger in a connected town/city. Settlements can be quarantined, which will stop all food/gold exports in towns and stop all food imports and adjacencies in cities, but prevent outbreaks in walled tiles if the settlement was locked down before the trigger (so you can quarantine a settlement too late and have an outbreak anyway). This would provide a way to keep units safe inside walled tiles, and usually by the end of an era all there is to build is walls anyway. If an already-infected settlement is quarantined, it has a reduced chance to cause further spread.

• Gold/revolution: Instead of applying deductions to gold income, it should target the sources of gold. As crisis progresses, narrative events describe how different gold buildings are siezed by guilds/minor nobles/etc, preventing them from providing any gold for you. The policy cards remain more or less the same - you now need to juggle rising costs while your raw gold income is slowly cut off!

 

[stealth_nsk]

The effect of crises totally depends on luck. I had barbarian crisis in my previous game and I lost a single explorer, which I was too lazy to delete myself (the continent was already explored and explorers don't survive age transition anyway). The thing here is what I didn't have any borders with open pieces of land by the end of antiquity, so all the barbarian wrath was against opponents.

 

[Siptah]

Those are great ideas @evonannoredars
I especially like having the mob on the map as units that you can but should not kill.

I think population dying/non-worked tiles would be good for a different type of crisis: famine. The population growth bucket works in two ways: growth and decline, while food yields in cities (but less in towns) are dramatically decreased.

I also wish for an independence crisis in exploration: each settlement in distant lands can ask for support (5 turns worth of gold or culture for example) or flips to city state.

 

[StargazingDog]

I just finished antiquity on sovereign difficulty and had the rebellion crisis. It was rough. I just barely held on until the end. Several of my towns had many buildings burned and population lost.

I think the difference between this and prior games is that I never had an abundance of resources as I did on lower difficulties. In easier games, I'd have a bank of coin to buy my way out, or just a better economy overall. This time, every drop of influence and gold was being spent on trying to keep up with the AI. I'm curious to see what my empire will look like after I click end turn and start the exploration age.

 

[evonannoredars]

Those are great ideas @evonannoredars
I especially like having the mob on the map as units that you can but should not kill.

I think population dying/non-worked tiles would be good for a different type of crisis: famine. The population growth bucket works in two ways: growth and decline, while food yields in cities (but less in towns) are dramatically decreased.

I also wish for an independence crisis in exploration: each settlement in distant lands can ask for support (5 turns worth of gold or culture for example) or flips to city state.

Thanks! True, a famine crisis would be interesting also and pretty simple to make work effectively I reckon. An independence crisis could also work the other way round - at crisis start, you choose which side of the division you want to be on. Is it a case of your distant lands colonies want independence from your glorious empire or is it that your old, cumbersome home continent settlements are holding you back from further expansion into the new world?

Hopefully they'll add more crises with time, six (but realistically five) isn't very many and will probably get repetitive eventually, especially considering how most have one way of dealing with the problem. I'd be keen to see a volcanic winter crisis (inspired by the volcanic winter of 536/late antique little ice age), which would be similar to a famine crisis wrt reduced yields, but could also have effects to do with increased fog of war, snow across the whole map (not sure what snow even does normally tho), and other strange phenomena.

 

[vorlon_mi]

Geography and map type have an effect as well. My first game was "Continents Plus", which includes more small islands. My current game is "Continents" with fewer islands. That meant that the other land mass was further away; I had to research Shipbuilding to get my ships over there without redlining from rough seas. That left fewer turns to bring home Treasure Fleets as well as later access to Distant Lands luxury resources. In both games, the AI have not done *any* treasure fleets. They've not done as well planting settlements in Distant Lands.
They may be less prepared to deal with the crisis as it comes.