Diseases

OCD = Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsessive–compulsive_disorder

By the way, the idea that you can completely ban out disease by training more healers is historically questionable as well. In fact, up to the last century or so, medical science was so inadequate and full of wrong ideas that charlatans selling fake medicine were more successful than "real" doctors due to the placebo effect. "real" doctors often used methods (like bloodletting (*), or drilling a hole in somebodies skull to let the "bad spirits" out) that were more likely to make the patient worse than better.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting

 

The others explained it better but in short: You want to have more than , just because (and disease) is a negative thing and you want to get rid of it completely, not because it is acutally a bad thing.. Actually, that's less OCD, it's more human nature.

There, you haven't even tried it. You are just assuming. That's the problem. I only said without disease. Crime is actually pretty serious, but try to ignore disease. try it. for real. Look, I played lots of deity games and you basically couldn't get your city to for most part of the PH era, because those buildings / unit that would've helped with that were just too expensive. So I KNOW that you can ignore it, up to the renaissance, and still outtech the AI, even on deity.

 

What disease does mostly is slow down pop growth. But higher pop is not always very valuable. The best tiles usually get worked first, so working additional tiles tends to become less valuable, and higher pop also increases crime and lowers education, unless that is compensated for (which requires investment). In C2C, your economy depends more on having buildings than working tiles.

Having higher pop is necessary to unlock some buildings (esp. pop 6 tends to be important for that) but after that higher pop is of limited value. If you really want to powerboost pop to 6, build a bunch of food merchants and keep a positive food surplus afterwards.

Really the negative effects of a high level of disease are manageable. You can compensate for it with extra +health and +happiness and the rest of the effects are not that damaging to your game.

 

You made an assumption and then called me out. How do you know I'm not playing a game right now while ignoring Disease with my Modmod in place. You don't, but yet you accuse me of assuming.

This is being blunt but truthful: All Deity players No Matter How Well Intentioned, Always end up ruining good mods for the Avg player, Always. Seen this happen for over 10 years of visiting and 8 years of active participation on these CFC forums. (7+ years at the AtMoo forums before this) But a Deity player will never admit this because theirs is the superior way. That's just plain everyday fact in your (Deity player) eyes. You are superior because ergo, you play the Deity level so you must be always right. To je pravda.

Make the mod Fun for all levels, just not yours alone, is the true key to a mods success. But heck what do I know since I choose to play/test at less than Deity. Right!?

JosEPh

 

I think I'm going to take a neutral stance since I'm not sure if I'm a 'deity' player or not. But I do want to ask... do you feel that a player should be able to master all problems that face his cities or do you feel that, as it has proven to be in the real world, should be a true impossibility and all you can hope to do is your best at trying to mitigate problems?


The way crime and disease both work is to force a balancing out of bad decisions to find the best harmony between them all. If you let them run rampant, you're in serious trouble. If you completely counter them, you've probably overextended yourself financially and in terms of production investment to do so. This is what makes them brilliant imo.

I also strongly disagree that crime and disease are the greatest concern for players. Ultimately those are just catalysts... unhappiness and unhealth (and rev index in some games) are still the greatest concern... it's just that crime and disease can add to them. Going back to this root, the damage caused by unhappiness is tremendously greater than that from unhealth, even in vanilla and especially here where slowing your growth can actually be useful (yes... therefore unhealth CAN be useful at a point!) primarily thanks to education level management needs and the danger to that side of things by letting your city overpopulate.

Therefore, disease, though not crime, can be quite beneficial to let increase until you are on top of other things and have a city on top of its needs to manage and handle more growth effectively. Few diseases create unhappiness. They're almost all unhealth.

Crime, on the other hand, is very important to stay on top of. But even crime can be something you don't want to overspend to control too much. If you can stay ahead of your unhappiness (which without crime is quite easily done with all the happiness buildings) and balance your turn by turn investment into controlling crime with the amount crime would otherwise be costing you, then you've struck the right balance. Strong negative crime levels is a good indicator of massive economic drain from the things you've done to control them. It negatively impacts the player to overwhelm the property with control. Too bad the AI limitations won't enable us to make it even more painful by making negative crime be 'Oppression'.

Anyhow, there's a wide margin of acceptable property levels and if you're clever enough you might be able to use what seems to be 'bad' to your advantage. True that you can't let it just go - that WILL kill your nation and quick. But they aren't the only things like that already in the game. Try ignoring the need for workers. Since you can't, does that mean that the need for workers dominate the game? I think saying crime dominates the mod or was even designed to is an extreme exaggeration. To say that about disease is completely off track since many players find you can run a successful game ignoring disease for the most part. (I wager those players do at least tend to build buildings that would keep disease from running too rampant though.)

 

Correction TB; Every disease creates at least 1 Unhappiness, I repeat Every disease. And in this mod mod there is at least 1 that creates 2.

And Crime, since it's inception, has dominated the Mod. Whether you all think that is a gross exaggeration or not.

And I really don't like labeling as was done with the OCD comments. Thanks Noriad for the explanation.

JosEPh

 

That's not true for crime IMO. Even the low level crimes costs a lot , so countering it is almost always beneficial. If the early crime buildings were less expensive and the later more.... that would be interesting IMO.

Because you said so Here:

How would "we" ruin mods? I think you completely ignore what I've said. My only statement was that you can ignore disease for the most part of the game and still have a fine game. Period. I didn't asked to make it stronger, nor to lower the thresholds and which the diseases kick in. Nothing about that. Just an observation. I liked your attempt to spread out dieseases more, I think this was more than necessary and should be in the SVN asap. Even if it gets a little bit watered down; I for myself don't care about that.

That's the thing. For ALL levels. That includes deity as well. From all your posts I get that you try to convince everybody that the game should suit your settings regarding gamespeed, difficulty and others. You have to accept - just me or everybody else - that there are hunderts of different combinations of options and playstyles and that it's only a great mod if it serves a wide variaty of them. Not just deity players. And not just Monarch or Epic players.

 

The problem is that people who play at the harder levels complain and their suggestions get worked on making it harder for those of us who play at Noble. All the changes to the hunter line come to mind. Most were made because people were complaining that their hunters could attack cities and were the strongest units out there, so hunters were nerfed with all their promotions getting negatives against non-animal units. Now even the hunter buildings have been reduced with a lot more changes being suggested. At least most of those are in a modmod.

 

Checked the current SVN version by loading and looking at the disease buildings in the pedia just now. 5 diseases have unhappiness. They would, all combined, bring only 8 unhappiness.

Unhealth, on the other hand, IS present on all diseases.

It's important but its not everything. Could you succeed in the game if you ignored research and focused entirely on crime? No? Then given how there are a great many things I could say the same thing about outside of research, how does crime 'dominate' the game? By saying this are you saying crime should be something a player CAN completely ignore?

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is no worse than Attention Deficit Disorder. It ranges from extremely mild and simply a factor in a person's personality to something extremely incapacitating. I use it for the whole spectrum and don't consider it an innately 'bad' thing. I feel success usually requires a little OCD (attention to detail). All I was saying is that it's excessive to try to get your cities to always be perfectly healthy to the detriment of more important objectives.

I suspect most Civ Players are to some minor extent OCD. It's what makes us enjoy micromanagement at all.

 

I stand corrected on Unhappiness from disease. I was mixing up Pests with Disease.

How can you take a simple fact that Crime has dominated the mod into the extrapolation you just presented? Where does dominate translate into everything? That's just being obtuse. Crime, Disease, pests, etc are all parts of the mod that need attention. And not Once have I ever said that any of them should be completely ignored unlike others who have.

Does not matter if OCD is no worse than ADD, it's still labeling when it's presented as it was in this thread.

JosEPh

 

Well are you or aren't you? You strongly implied you were playing a game ignoring disease, and that your modmod made that possible.

And if 'OCD' is 'labelling', what is it when you call people 'obtuse' (ironically a synonym of 'blunt', which is a word you regularly use of yourself...)?

 

I'm trying to figure out what YOU mean when you say Crime dominates the mod. So you don't mean that its the only thing you need to worry about but you also don't mean that you don't want to have to not concern yourself with it at all and that's what we have is something directly between those two points so at WHAT point do you feel it 'dominates' the mod?

I realize there's a blurry grey line between those two extremes and that they are extremes. I'm trying to get a concept of where the term 'dominate' lies in that wide grey line. To me, Dominate, is a pretty extreme term that generally means it's what the whole game has become about.

I don't find crime to be anything more than any other concern, production, research, growth, expansion, etc... It affects how you play but it doesn't guide every decision and for long periods of time can be ignored. But if you ignore it enough, it will burn you. Pretty much like all the other controls and assets to manage.

It's more valuable to monitor than disease because it has a greater impact on unhappiness and economy so can do pretty serious damage, even more if you're playing with Rev.

But how much does it change the game? Not all that much imo... just means that our Civil side of the game has another few layers to manage and ones that have purposefully been made difficult to manage with perfect precision which was something civ desperately needed so that it started feeling more like managing an empire than playing a game of chess. If that makes sense. Mind, some smoothing of crime's gradiation of increasing impact, and some of the other considerations DH brought up in the crime thread, does make sense. As with most mod elements, improvements can be made.

I just think its a dramatic overstatement to say it 'dominates' the mod.

To say you've shown an OCD set of behaviors is not an attempt to label or belittle. Please don't take it that way just because someone framed it that way for you when you asked what it was. In everyday speak it just means you're organized and that you may be organized at times to a fault. I'm OCD in this way myself and proud of it. I wish more people were because although there can be fault in it, there's far too often a lack of pride among people for what they do and OCD is quite the opposite of that.

Label or no, it's as much a compliment as an insult and is merely an observation to be taken unoffensively. I wouldn't say anything of the sort if I didn't think we were friends by assumption first, companions trying to improve things with our expressions of opinion second, and although we don't always agree, I always respect your point of view and would ask the same in return, simply because I know I don't always see everything with 100% accuracy myself - no one does. THAT should be the base assumption we should all share. Doesn't mean I can't stand on a strength of opinion and back myself in what I say with expressions of rationale. So don't take it personally please... it's not meant that way.

In fact, the only reason I would say that being overly concerned about unhealth is somewhat an OCD trait is because I myself had to learn to stop worrying too much about it. The original Civ IV designers made it seem like one of those horrible things to avoid at all costs by making the city graphic look so alarming if you were running at higher unhealth than health and that made the whole thing a psychological trap for newer players. I believe some never see it for the psychological trap it is no matter how much they play because its counter-intuitive to think of such an obvious alarm being displayed as something that can and maybe should be ignored for more important things.

It probably was more necessary to stay on top of unhealth in vanilla. In C2C it CAN be a useful thing on occasion.

 

Huh? Where did you get that I said my Modmod did that?

But yes I started a game just recently trying to ignore Disease/ but I quickly found that I used some of the early ones for their + so ....... meh. It takes me weeks to play a game and I have 3 going on now. And I'm also trying to decipher the Crime xml files. So that "challenge" is on hold. Faustmouse wins by default! Yeah for Faustmouse! Actually I don't think I'll even try to finish that one as it has about as much chance of me finishing it as would a game with Rev turned On.

plllllbbbbbtttttttt! And why are you being TB's defender? Did he appoint you as his attorney? He can speak for himself, he's a Big Boy.
EDIT: And he just did before I posted.


And why is this thread being clogged up with this junk? Is it National jump on JosEPh Month?

@TB,
Since we only see the words typed, we All (my self very much included) inject our feelings, at the time of reading, into it. And as you well know my posts come across demonstratively (in part because I'm a poor typer and sometimes capitalize when I don't mean to). Because I keep forgetting that that is a Special posting thingy. For me when you are forced to pay attention to a part of the game constantly it is dominating the game play. Crime should rear it's ugly head from time to time but you should be able to Not have to check it every turn to see if you have it under control. That is dominating. And when you completely run out of crime counter measures (buildings) to the point you've eaten up all your +/turn on TWs to keep it from escalating wildly (and that Is something it does regularly) is that not dominating the play? For me it is.

JosEPh

 

Well it's made in 2 of the 3 so far............ oh wait with faust and noriad, both Euro, that Is all 3! \

JosEPh

 

At least this Western Illinois cornfield dweller made International headlines by ticking off ppl in 4 different countries in 3 different hemispheres and multiple timezones.

JosEPh

 

Why not: - lets jump on JosEPh . Oops another from Europe.

 

Good post.

I can understand what you mean by emotionally injecting into the conversation and much of what I've replied to do was to try to eliminate the emotion and try to get down to the reality. (I suppose I'm considered cold by some because I consider emotions to be a source of illogical expression and conclusions in most cases.) But I get it. And I admit I'm not always above it as much as I try to be.

I don't find crime to be escalating as wildly as it once did ever since trade was taken out of the equation. It can fluctuate but it seems much more sane now.

You made a good point about how trying to control it completely will eat you alive financially. That's what I meant earlier about that being where it should be.

My point is this, crime is not something any civilization has ever come close to having perfected eliminating. C2C gives players a wide margin of happiness before unhappiness starts choking off cities in most cases (especially if you've done what you have with pests.) There are at least a lot of ways to address happiness crises. Crime is only one source of those.

Crime also impacts the economy. But... as you pointed out, so does trying hard to control it. It is very easy to try too hard to control crime and end up losing more in your economy than the losses you're trying to stave off.

So it asks us to take a much more clever route between fully solving crime in a city and allowing it. Is that easy? No... hell no! And that's what makes it cool! Finally something isn't a perfect science and really can't be unless you're a mathematical genius or beyond that.

On easy game settings such as Noble, crime isn't that hard to manage because the population doesn't create much. The harder the setting, the more impossible it is to consider the 'perfect balance' of enforced crime control to be the point at which there is no crime. It becomes more and more necessary to allow some crime but only to the extent that all of your margins of impact are taken to as tolerable a degree as possible.

In other words, if you allow some crime that creates unhappiness, as long as you have enough sources of happiness to handle it, it's not really hurting you. If you allow enough economic impact from crime that wouldn't be worth addressing further because it would cost more to control it further than what you would prevent in losses, there's no reason not to stop trying to command crime any further. So it's to the truly clever player to try to find this perfect balance where some crime is acceptable. Then keeping the crime to that level becomes a trick.

I find it easier to simply try to control it but not worry so much about it that I'm checking it every round. I check all the properties on occasion and in our PVP games much more often because I mull over everything more often than I normally would. lol.

If I'm getting an unhappiness issue, it's time to worry about it. If I'm hemmoraging gold, it's time to worry about it. Outside of that I build the buildings that control it with some moderate priority (pretty low actually) and ensure that my cities are invested at least a little with law enforcement, usually one for a new city and then I react as I feel is necessary to. This can 'dominate' the game somewhat in that it means that its VERY hard to find time to build an army and woe be to the player that does and ignores their crime in the process - mid war they can suffer tremendously. But not much different to the penalty for ignoring research and instead building for war. You may win against your neighbor or enemy but in the process you lose the game because another civ has shot ahead in tech while you were mitigating your economic losses to the war. Always been that way. With crime it's more exaggerated, yes.

But then... I just think that's so cool that it's made the game that much more tricky. I've always felt CivIV was pretty basic once you figured it out. This is a mechanic that makes it tough even when you HAVE figured it out - or can depending on your difficulty setting.