Have you ever advanced Life Expectancy beyond 79 years here?

[egaonogenki]

I haven't played Civ IV in a while and IIRC, life expectancy was still only 79 years. I kept trying to research future tech but no matter how many times I did, the LE wouldn't budge past 79.

How many Future Techs would I need to do so?

Also, would there be extra techs in the expansion packs that'll budge the life expectancy a little more too? (I have one or two of them, but they haven't been opened, and won't be until I feel satisfied about how "finished" my game is on Vanilla.

 

[kossin]

From War Academy:

Life Expectancy - Works on the same principle as the approval rate except it deals with health and sickness. The formula is health / health + sickness. At the beginning of the game the default is 30 years. You can see the total for health and sickness of each city in the F1 screen.

The formula is then x / (x+a) which converges to 1 (i.e. 100%) when x -> infinity.

The problem is that growing population adds unhealthiness, unless you have the National Park (I think this is a National Wonder in Warlords/BTS) - so the best way to increase healthiness is actually to kill people

Adding health isn't bad either though.

 

[Jerrymander]

the best way to increase healthiness is actually to kill people

wat

The formula also might have a range of 30 to 80, meaning that 80 is only achievable when you have no unhealthiness... which would be possible in a OCC.

 

[kossin]

The range is 0-100, with both extremes hard to reach, especially 0 as it's hard to generate enough population while having all the unhealthiness.

100 is easily reached in OCC with National Park+Recycling Center.
0 is probably impossible to do other than turn 0 when you haven't settled.

 

[coanda]

As soon as you have any health in any city, you couldn't get a life expectancy of 0... just very close.

The best I could think of would be a OCC (complete with national park! I was trying to pick a reasonable situation which a player might actually get into in the run of play) which had only seafood health resources in it's cultural borders and had significant unhealth (I used 4) from floodplains, had traded for other health resources, built every increasing building, and suddenly got blockaded and lost all it's resources. 16 unhealth, 2 health. Demographics (when I quickly WB'd that to check) gave it a life expectancy of 11. And to make it worse, this need not change as the city shrinks in size due to lack of food - because you have national park, so city size has no effect on health!

Of course, if some crazy OCC player had 4 unhealth from floodplains, limited access to health resources of their own, and built every building which increased unhealth, but decided not to run Environmentalism or build National Park then ran into that situation, they might manage to reach a size-12 city, for 35 unhealth to 2 health... which would give them a life expectancy of 5. If they'd also gotten Sid's Sushi or Cereal Mills, and been trading like crazy to get extra food that way, they might manage size 20... for a life expectancy of 4.

 

[Jarlaxe Baenre]

EDIT: Didn't see it was talking about Vanilla.

 

[egaonogenki]

As soon as you have any health in any city, you couldn't get a life expectancy of 0... just very close.

The best I could think of would be a OCC (complete with national park! I was trying to pick a reasonable situation which a player might actually get into in the run of play) which had only seafood health resources in it's cultural borders and had significant unhealth (I used 4) from floodplains, had traded for other health resources, built every increasing building, and suddenly got blockaded and lost all it's resources. 16 unhealth, 2 health. Demographics (when I quickly WB'd that to check) gave it a life expectancy of 11. And to make it worse, this need not change as the city shrinks in size due to lack of food - because you have national park, so city size has no effect on health!

Of course, if some crazy OCC player had 4 unhealth from floodplains, limited access to health resources of their own, and built every building which increased unhealth, but decided not to run Environmentalism or build National Park then ran into that situation, they might manage to reach a size-12 city, for 35 unhealth to 2 health... which would give them a life expectancy of 5. If they'd also gotten Sid's Sushi or Cereal Mills, and been trading like crazy to get extra food that way, they might manage size 20... for a life expectancy of 4.

Coanda, it's high time for a stat reprogramming (hopefully to come in Civ V) because how on earth could anyone reproduce at 4 & 5? Maybe robotic servant droids do the needed work for them?

PS: "Unhealth" is an antonym that doesn't exist. See: http://thesaurus.com/browse/health (I think "disease" or "sickness" is what you're looking for.)

If there are servant droids who take care of the repopulating, then why aren't they programmed to keep their masters healthy? Sad...

 

[Rosiel]

a bit off-topic but I was always wondering...

Do Life Expectancy and Approval Rate affect the score or the game in any way ?

Or are there any useful hints you can get from knowing your rivals' ratings in those two ?

 

[r_rolo1]

a bit off-topic but I was always wondering...

Do Life Expectancy and Approval Rate affect the score or the game in any way ?

Or are there any useful hints you can get from knowing your rivals' ratings in those two ?

No , they don't add for score and they were designed basically as fluff. The only way of using them to your profit is to look at them at t1, to scout for the number of Charismatic and Expansive leaders in map.