Blight

[Emptiness]

When blight hits, you, as a Sheim player, should be using sacrifice of the weak and therefore off setting the worst of the effects.

By increasing the unhealthiness of my cities by a further 3?

...and halving the food each point of population requires.

Consider a size 20 city making (and consuming) 40 . If Blight hits and you adopt Sacrifice the Weak then you add 4 and reduce consumption to 20. You've effectively increased the of the city by +16, since the from Blight cuts into food supply. The city will stop starving sooner because stasis will occur when - reaches [pop * 1], instead of [pop * 2] when not using Sacrifice the Weak. In addition, the city will regrow to pre-Blight size faster.

 

[BadukBoy]

I think that it would be good if blight scaled with game speed. I play on marathon game speed and blight did not last long enough. It felt alot harder to deal with blight during normal game speed game, but I am not very experienced with this game so I am not sure.

Anyways, Thanks for blight!

 

[Xanrag]

As I was playing Kuriotates with Agrarian civic I got hit... quite hard.. by the blight.

My capital (size 42 or so) got +67 sickness from the blight and dropped down to 1.. I fail to see how you can survive the blight as Kuriotates?

 

[Emptiness]

A size 42 city is doomed. If you know you plan to grow your cities that large (and the Kuriotates need to do so) I would actually suggest doing everything you can to raise the Armageddon Counter to 30 as quickly as possible, so that Blight hits in the early game (ie before your cities are huge). After that passes you can work on lowering it back down and will be able to grow without concern.

 

[Sarisin]

Thanks for referring me to this thread as I had originally posted in the Bugs Thread about my observation on Blight in my game.

I think enough has been said about the harshness of Blight. Some think it is harsh, some don't.

However, I agree with Broken Hawk on another important point. It definitely appears that Blight does NOT affect all cities/civs equally. As I said, in my game as Decius/Calabim I noticed that my score dropped like a rock while other civs' scores increased. I went back to the turn Blight hit and opened the World Builder. None of the other civs had any starvation going on like I did in all my cities. A few had the green unhealthy icon, but no starving and eventual loss of population.

I had plenty of that, though. I prefer a small civ with a few megacities. Well, Blight just murdered them as each was brought from the 20-30 range down to 1.

I watched as other civs killed me in production, research, building wonders, popping GPs, etc. as it took me nearly 100 turns (Epic speed game) to come close to recovering.

If Blight is to be harsh, fine. Let's have our strategies and plan for it. However, it is clearly a game balance issue if it is selective in who it affects - with a seeming preference for hammering the human player. I only base this on what I saw in one game, however.

Level the field and let Blight hit everyone equally rather than throwing some random variable into the mix. I would think that would make more sense with Armageddon events anyway.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Blight also doesn't always work like this right now. Sometimes, it functions like it should: 1-15 + pop in all cities for all civs. What you're noticing is clearly the recurring bug I mentioned, not a design choice.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

The strength of blight depends on the population and health in the city before it hits. As such, it can vary widely, and I don't thik what you are noticing is a bug.


I usually switch to Slavery fairly early, so that whenever the AC gets near 30 I can whip rush a bunch of things (health granting buildings, if possible) to keep my population down and thus limit the amount of unhealthiness I'll suffer from blight. I typically abandon slavery after I've recovered from Blight, while other civs are still suffering from it.

 

[AntaranDream]

I would like blight better if it was preventable aka not letting the counter get to x number. Having it at thirty makes it basically impossible to stop and limits the strategies players can employ. The issue here for me isn't so much balance as fun factor. Unless I'm playing as sheim, this mechanic just makes the game annoying. Maybe it could be made more fun if players could build some kind of wonder when the blight hits that gives them a resource that stops the blight from affecting their cities and make it tradeable so whoever builds it can help their allies as well?

 

[avalonnn]

Anyone remember FFH2 early blight? At least we're not losing all our farms + resources!

 

[Sarisin]

The strength of blight depends on the population and health in the city before it hits. As such, it can vary widely, and I don't thik what you are noticing is a bug.


I usually switch to Slavery fairly early, so that whenever the AC gets near 30 I can whip rush a bunch of things (health granting buildings, if possible) to keep my population down and thus limit the amount of unhealthiness I'll suffer from blight. I typically abandon slavery after I've recovered from Blight, while other civs are still suffering from it.

Please explain the formula for how it is computed. I cannot figure it out. Back to my example. Prespur has a pop. of 19 and gets hit with Blight of 58. That is a little better than 3 Blight per pop. I don't understand that. I have every possible health building and the wonder that gives health. IMO Blight should not exceed ONE per pop no matter what the size of your civ or your health improvements.

Again, just open the World Builder when it hits and have a look at the other civs. It is true maybe that the AI will not have cities as large as you, but there were cities in the 15-20 range totally unaffected by Blight. Compare that to Prespur.

Then, look at how the game's score goes. Driving a city all the way down to a pop of 1 while AI cities are unaffected is either a bug or a balance issue. Either way, it should be fixed IMO.

Interesting strategy with Slavery. I'd like to see you use that in a FF or FF+ game where you can get 2, 3 or more Blights in a game.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Where did you get the "3 per pop" idea?

This is the code

CvRandonEventInterface.py:

def doArmageddonBlight(argsList):
	kTriggeredData = argsList[0]
	iPlayer = argsList[1]
#	iPlayer = kTriggeredData.ePlayer
	pPlayer = gc.getPlayer(iPlayer)
	if pPlayer.getCivilizationType() != gc.getInfoTypeForString('CIVILIZATION_INFERNAL'):
		for pyCity in PyPlayer(iPlayer).getCityList() :
			pCity = pyCity.GetCy()
			i = CyGame().getSorenRandNum(15, "Blight")
			i += pCity.getPopulation()
			i -= pCity.totalGoodBuildingHealth()
			pCity.changeEspionageHealthCounter(i)
	py = PyPlayer(iPlayer)
	for pUnit in py.getUnitList():
		if pUnit.isAlive():
			pUnit.doDamageNoCaster(25, 100, gc.getInfoTypeForString('DAMAGE_DEATH'), false)

The health penalty should equal the population, plus the unhealthiness from buildings (I assume the city had at least a Breeding Pit causing unhealthiness, and possibly also a Public Bath, Forge, the Soul Forge, and/or Mines of Guldur. For now I'll neglect the fact that your health buildings should more than compensate for these), plus a random number between 0 and 15. A single hit of Blight should not have caused a size 19 city more than (19+15+8) = 42 unhealthiness. Are you saying that Blight alone added 58 unhealthiness, or that the total unhealthiness after Blight was 58?The former seems wrong, but the later is quite reasonable.


I believe that unhealthiness caused by Pestilence may still be marked as if it was caused by Blight. This event is basically a weaker version of Blight that can reoccur over and over again so long as the AC is over 30.

def doArmageddonPestilence(argsList):
	kTriggeredData = argsList[0]
	iPlayer = kTriggeredData.ePlayer
	pPlayer = gc.getPlayer(iPlayer)
	if pPlayer.getCivilizationType() != gc.getInfoTypeForString('CIVILIZATION_INFERNAL'):
		for pyCity in PyPlayer(iPlayer).getCityList() :
			pCity = pyCity.GetCy()
			i = CyGame().getSorenRandNum(9, "Pestilence")
			i += (pCity.getPopulation() / 4)
			i -= pCity.totalGoodBuildingHealth()
			pCity.changeEspionageHealthCounter(i)
	py = PyPlayer(iPlayer)
	for pUnit in py.getUnitList():
		if pUnit.isAlive():
			pUnit.doDamageNoCaster(25, 100, gc.getInfoTypeForString('DAMAGE_DEATH'), false)

Pestilence could have stuck just after blight, adding up to an additional 19 unhealthiness to the possible 42 from Blight.

 

[Emptiness]

I believe that unhealthiness caused by Pestilence may still be marked as if it was caused by Blight. This event is basically a weaker version of Blight that can reoccur over and over again so long as the AC is over 30.

I'm tempted to think that the instances of massive Blight unhealthiness are actually caused by Blight and Pestilence triggering on the same turn. Maybe Pestilence shouldn't be able to occur until AC 35, so that they will only overlap in cases of rapid AC inflation. A popup notification when Pestilence triggers would also be nice.

 

[fish_sticks]

I decided to get a little bit of empirical data about the numbers that are being thrown around. One interesting thing from running this a few times is that the human player seems to be hit worse. I do not know why, but that is what my number indicate.

Setup: I started a dual map with three players and cleared it out. All players were non-expansive. I setup the map so that each player had the exact same setup with four cities and enough food for all of them. Other settings: Last days, epic game speed.

Trigger: Three Hyborems in world builder...

Cities (All and is AFTER population in what is listed in the overview tab, F1):

City 1:  5 population, 13 :health:,  17 :food:
City 2: 10 population,  8 :health:,  12 :food:
City 3: 15 population,  3 :health:,   4 :food:
City 4: 20 population, -2 :health:, -10 :food:

Each of these are for successive runs (reloading the game) for what is given for "blight" in city view:

City Size |  5  |  10  |  15  |  20 
----------+-----+------+------+------
Human     | 26  |  34  |  55  |  64
Human     | 17  |  31  |  43  |  40
Human     | 25  |  26  |  52  |  44
Human     | 18  |  29  |  46  |  50
----------+-----+------+------+------
AI1       | 10  |  17  |  20  |  29
AI1       | 11  |  24  |  25  |  27
AI1       | 14  |  22  |  15  |  25
AI1       |  5  |  22  |  26  |  18
----------+-----+------+------+------
AI2       | 15  |  23  |  20  |  29
AI2       | 18  |  15  |  25  |  22
AI2       |  5  |  15  |  24  |  27
AI2       |  8  |  13  |  16  |  32

As I said before I have no idea why the human gets hit so much harder but it really seem to always be that way in my games and I do not think that I am just remember the negative moments here.

If you consider the size 15 city:
4 * (overflow ) + (15 population)*2* = 34

In each of the runs it would have ended up with at a minimum of -43 hit. Running the numbers in my head it will be around 15 or so turns before the city could possibly break even at which point it would be around 5 population. I would not consider that such an issue if it looked like the other players were being hit anywhere near as much, as everyone would just be screwed for a little while.

Also consider for a size 20 city and a 60 penalty it would require 100 or 5 per citizen. With plains/farms/sanitation/agrarianism and only 20 plots in the city radius to work that is just equal. If one considers that it is common to get cities into the 30s it becomes a little silly.

On a more sinister note, if a city has negative with 1 citizen should it auto-raze?

 

[Sarisin]

Where did you get the "3 per pop" idea?


The health penalty should equal the population, plus the unhealthiness from buildings (I assume the city had at least a Breeding Pit causing unhealthiness, and possibly also a Public Bath, Forge, the Soul Forge, and/or Mines of Guldur. For now I'll neglect the fact that your health buildings should more than compensate for these), plus a random number between 0 and 15. A single hit of Blight should not have caused a size 19 city more than (19+15+8) = 42 unhealthiness. Are you saying that Blight alone added 58 unhealthiness, or that the total unhealthiness after Blight was 58?The former seems wrong, but the later is quite reasonable.

I believe that unhealthiness caused by Pestilence may still be marked as if it was caused by Blight. This event is basically a weaker version of Blight that can reoccur over and over again so long as the AC is over 30.

Pestilence could have stuck just after blight, adding up to an additional 19 unhealthiness to the possible 42 from Blight.

I got the 3 per population idea from dividing the Blight by the population (58/19)

I had NONE of those buildings, etc. you mentioned, but I did have 'healthy' buildings such as Herbalist, Granary, Smokehouse, Aqueduct, and the Aqua Wonder.

I am saying that the Blight listed for Prespur when the AC hit 30 was 58 - not total Unhealthiness. I had an additional 19 unhealthiness (population) and 1 (Features) for a total of 78. I wish I could upload the save, but I keep getting a bizarre error every time I try.

Of course, you could get nailed with Pestilence the exact same turn as Blight (no notification, though), but what are the odds? Also, this excessive Blight seems to happen to the human play a lot. Is getting Pestilence the same turn as Blight on AC 30 a new game feature for the human player?

Again, the two issues:

1. Excessive Blight caused by some sort of error in the calculation

2. Blight not affecting all cities/civs equally.

PS. Interesting tests, fish_sticks.

 

[Breez]

For some reason I remember reading in a bug thread a while back that Blight was twice as strong for Humans as It was supposed to be.

Also... Anyone else getting blight 3-4 times per game? I seem to get it at roughly AC of 30, 50, 70, and 90

 

[Emptiness]

Blight only occurs once per game, the first time the AC increase to 30 or more. Pestilence, which is very similar but weaker, can occur multiple times and when it occurs is determined randomly (once the AC is above 30).

 

[Breez]

That is probably what I am seeing then.

 

[Ariminio]

...and halving the food each point of population requires.

Consider a size 20 city making (and consuming) 40 . If Blight hits and you adopt Sacrifice the Weak then you add 4 and reduce consumption to 20. You've effectively increased the of the city by +16, since the from Blight cuts into food supply. The city will stop starving sooner because stasis will occur when - reaches [pop * 1], instead of [pop * 2] when not using Sacrifice the Weak. In addition, the city will regrow to pre-Blight size faster.

Thats what I thought, I planned the whole game around this and delayed adopting sacrifice the weak till blight, but my fine ashen veil capital went from 35 down the crapper anyway. The penalty was so high that even with half the food req the city wasnt even close to break even.

Blight is ok in small and medium sized cities, but anything above 20 gets a way too high health penalty.

 

[muxec]

Doesn't AI get a modifier for all unhealthiness depending on difficulty level?

 

[Monkeyfinger]

I doubt it, at least for blight, because whenever blight doesn't glitch out the AI's cities die just as fast as mine.