Disease [Idea]

[Patine]

Frankengames

This would be a good name for a computer game design company.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

You have to be limiting in game design. Again, the alternative is Frankengames that are a hodgepodge of unrelated, disconnected mechanisms. A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when he has nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away, etc.

Or, to put it another way, when it comes to making something an active part of gameplay, go big or go home. Either make it a big, developed core feature that much of the game revolve around, or don't bother making it active at all - small active features only serve as distraction from the core features and lead to a kudzu game. If you can't go big, just mske it a passive part of other existing game elements.

And honestly, I don't see pandemics or health alone as having the scope to support an entire core game feature. You would need to expand the idea into a bigger scale to get a core feature; a more general crisis system *might* and even then I'm not so sure it's really worth it. Nor do I think this it's a wise choice of one.

Well, I see it similar to the natural disaster system that was prominent in GS. In fact, I wouldn't mind if this was even the replacement of natural disasters for Civ 7.

 

[Evie]

Natural disasters are VERY different from what you propose in that they are essentially an interaction-free mechanism: just pure random events that may or may not occur over the course of the game and that you, player, have almost no influence in or ways to prevent (off the top of my head: governors and dams?). For everything else, it works through the normal tile improvement system, pillaging, destroying and rebuilding tiles, the same as barbarian attacks and the rest.

There's no trying to prevent the disease from spreading or finding a cure or any of those sorts of things. You do not send Emergency Response teams to look for survivors, you do have workers building sandbag defenses on tiles, you do not have firefighter units to combat the forest fire.

Really, by most standard, I'd qualify natural disasters as much more of a passive system (as in: you the player have a passive role in regard to them) than an active one. Whereas what you propose is firmly on the active side, as in it requires constant actions by the players that are specific to this mechanism.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Natural disasters are VERY different from what you propose in that they are essentially an interaction-free mechanism: just pure random events that may or may not occur over the course of the game and that you, player, have almost no influence in or ways to prevent (off the top of my head: governors and dams?). For everything else, it works through the normal tile improvement system, pillaging, destroying and rebuilding tiles, the same as barbarian attacks and the rest.

There's no trying to prevent the disease from spreading or finding a cure or any of those sorts of things. You do not send Emergency Response teams to look for survivors, you do have workers building sandbag defenses on tiles, you do not have firefighter units to combat the forest fire.

Really, by most standard, I'd qualify natural disasters as much more of a passive system (as in: you the player have a passive role in regard to them) than an active one. Whereas what you propose is firmly on the active side, as in it requires constant actions by the players that are specific to this mechanism.

It would only become active when it becomes an emergency (researching a cure, sending aid, and producing medic units etc.). Otherwise, it would be like the current natural disaster system but with an easier way to mitigate them.

 

[Evie]

Which still makes it an active game system. A system that only becomes active sometime is still an active game system. (You could make the case that you're actually creating two systems here - a general passive system, and an occasional active one, but that's still adding an active system.

If anything, that makes it worse because you have units in the game that are completely useless unless a specific set of events happen then it becomes an active game system. As I said previously : active systems should go big or go bust. Halfway "mostly passive but sometimes active" is the worse of both worlds.

I don't think pandemics by themselves have enough "oomph" to build an entire "go big" active system. As part of a more general system of crisis or emergency, yes, but then they should rely on the same units and build options as the other crisises. Not their own dedicated units that are only useful for fighting them.