Health and Plague

[FramedArchitect]

This mod adds a new Health yield that can boost city growth, and Plagues that can spread through the world, devastating cities and units in their wake. Cities with positive Health convert it into food, while cities with negative Health are more likely to spawn and spread Plagues.

Download

• Health & Plague for BNW (v.19)
• Health & Plague for GnK (v.10)

Mod Mechanics

• City Health is based on access to fresh water, local resources and features, population, and buildings.
• Overall Empire Health magnifies local City Health, and is based on acquired Technologies and Policies, Happiness, and Difficulty.
• Plagues always begin in cities with the lowest Health, and can quickly spread to nearby cities.
• Plagues can spread faster along roads and sea routes, but slower across international borders.
• Plagued cities are very likely to lose citizens to the disease, and heal much more slowly if attacked.
• Units near plagued cities will take damage each turn, and may get the Diseased Promotion.
• World size, game speed, difficulty, and era all effect how fast and how far plagues will spread.
• Plagues tend to peak in the Medieval Era and get less severe in modern eras.

In-Game Help CIVILOPEDIA … CONCEPTS … CITIES

Compatibility

• Will conflict with mods that change: CityBannerManager, CityView, PlotMouseOverInclude, or TopPanel.

 

[Hulfgar]

great idea FramedArchitect!

to make it compatible with a mod changing TopPanel is it enough to merge both TopPanel files or is there something else to change?

 

[FramedArchitect]

to make it compatible with a mod changing TopPanel is it enough to merge both TopPanel files or is there something else to change?

Hi Hulfgar,
I think merging two modded versions would be easy enough. I noted all my additions in the TP.lua file. This mod also changes the TP.xml file but my one addition is easy enough to find. Let me know if you run into issues.

 

[FramedArchitect]

v.3 update for pedia screens, and bug fix for advanced starts.

 

[FramedArchitect]

v.4 city plots with adjacent forests: +1 health; adjacent floodplains -1 health

 

[JFD]

I appreciate the effort you put into making a mod like this. I haven't had a good chance to play with it, but I have tested it and it adds a welcome extra level of depth to the game.

 

[mitsho]

Great Idea, though I dislike the plague mechanic. Apparently I can do nothing against it but wait til it's over? I'd rather lower health would just give a and/or malus (since you can make health go up with science and culture as well). Or devastate the landscape ("pillaged" improvements), those are not so severe and it gives your workers something to do and creates interesting new decisions (which improvement to rebuild first) instead of the annoyance of losing a hard earned pop point in a low food city (which will be the ones with fewer bonus ressources = lower health).

Imho, Health should hit larger cities more (more pop = more disease), but so far, it seems the opposite? That would also be a good gameplay point (i.e. take the frontrunner down). Any plans on that?

Any plans on a health building line? (Public Bath -> Apothecary -> Hospital -> Medical Lab while the later food ones get changed to Supermarkets -> Skyscrapers (more room to live = more pop))

That said, I haven't played it yet, so hard to make a judgement. Hope the above thoughts are not too harsh LAst question though: How does the AI fare with this system?

 

[Gilgamesch]

Wow great mod. Maybe i get time to play with it before BNW comes out.
I hope this will alos show up for BNW

 

[FramedArchitect]

Great Idea, though I dislike the plague mechanic. Apparently I can do nothing against it but wait til it's over? I'd rather lower health would just give a and/or malus (since you can make health go up with science and culture as well). Or devastate the landscape ("pillaged" improvements), those are not so severe and it gives your workers something to do and creates interesting new decisions (which improvement to rebuild first) instead of the annoyance of losing a hard earned pop point in a low food city (which will be the ones with fewer bonus ressources = lower health).

Hi and thanks for the ideas. Once a city is plagued, yes you just have to wait it out, though plagues don't last as long in healthy cities. Very healthy cities cannot get the plague at all. (Note that Policies and Techs magnify city health, so they can also have a negative impact). I considered terrain changes for this mod's effects, but they are very easy to overcome and don't balance well against the health growth mod. If you wouldn't like to deal with pop loss, this probably isn't the mod for you! I suppose you could turn off plagues and just have the health bonus.

Imho, Health should hit larger cities more (more pop = more disease), but so far, it seems the opposite? That would also be a good gameplay point (i.e. take the frontrunner down). Any plans on that?

In early stages I had linear relationships between city health and pop, but this was difficult to balance. Eventually I settled on a much milder natural log relationship. Also, in thinking about this I realized that city size doesn't affect health as much as infrastructure. Isn't Seoul healthier than Addis? I think disease is more prevalent when people come to live together in any sizable group. But I do like the idea that city size would affect the rate of pop loss for plagued cities....

Any plans on a health building line? (Public Bath -> Apothecary -> Hospital -> Medical Lab while the later food ones get changed to Supermarkets -> Skyscrapers (more room to live = more pop))

None at all, as I wanted this mod to have as small a footprint on the database as possible. I think it would be awesome if somebody developed a content type mod for this, which might include buildings, medical units that could end plagues, and biological weapons that could start them.

LAst question though: How does the AI fare with this system?

The AI fares as well as human; this is egalitarian mod! I have seen civs take advantage of neighbor plague by invading.

 

[Tomatekh]

I saw this on steam. It's an absolutely fantastic mod, well done! I've been wanting someone to mod in a health system and I'm glad it was someone as capable as you. I'll be using this regularly with my games from now on.

 

[FramedArchitect]

...I'll be using this regularly with my games from now on.

Hi Tomatekh,
I'm glad you like this mod; I know your civ mods (and others') sometimes include a small mod to the CityView screen that enables hidden buildings. I have included support for that feature in this mod, so it does work with hidden building mod as long as this one is loaded last.

 

[Tomatekh]

Hi Tomatekh,
I'm glad you like this mod; I know your civ mods (and others') sometimes include a small mod to the CityView screen that enables hidden buildings. I have included support for that feature in this mod, so it does work with hidden building mod as long as this one is loaded last.

Thanks! Saves me the trouble of having to merge the files. I know I sometimes overuse the hidden building trick for my civs. It's something I'm really trying to move away from, especially as I get better with lua. Recently, I've been helping Leugi with some city-state lua abilities.

I usually lump all the files required for the hidden building thing in a single folder and just tell people to delete it if another mod uses the files, as at most, I don't use it for game-play purposes but just an aesthetic effect. It's really great of you to include support for hidden buildings built in.

 

[Rob (R8XFT)]

Looks great!! (Something else to steal )

 

[mitsho]

Hi and thanks for the ideas. Once a city is plagued, yes you just have to wait it out, though plagues don't last as long in healthy cities. Very healthy cities cannot get the plague at all. (Note that Policies and Techs magnify city health, so they can also have a negative impact). I considered terrain changes for this mod's effects, but they are very easy to overcome and don't balance well against the health growth mod. If you wouldn't like to deal with pop loss, this probably isn't the mod for you! I suppose you could turn off plagues and just have the health bonus.

Sure I'm mainly looking for system though that are in line with the design of the whole game which explicitly avoids any negative modifiers for the sake of it. Vanilla Civ5 is a build-up, not a setback-and-recover type of game. In essence, I'd say your plague just introduces a random element into gameplay that makes certain civs rise and other fall per chance.

Also, I don't like anything that messes with the combat system, it's hard for the AI to understand it already.

In early stages I had linear relationships between city health and pop, but this was difficult to balance. Eventually I settled on a much milder natural log relationship. Also, in thinking about this I realized that city size doesn't affect health as much as infrastructure. Isn't Seoul healthier than Addis? I think disease is more prevalent when people come to live together in any sizable group. But I do like the idea that city size would affect the rate of pop loss for plagued cities....

My argument was also mostly a gameplay one, large cities can stomach losing a few more while it may be devastating for smaller ones. As population is everything in civ5 (due to the science link mostly), if you punish smaller cities more than large ones (which you do if they pop loss is 1 pop/static across the board), you make it harder to catch up. I'd want the opposite, hence the proposal.

(You might also find other relations if you don't look at Seoul 2013 vs. Addis 2013, but to say Paris 1300 vs. Avignon 1300. I have no idea if that's true, just saying that the modern comparison might not be the best when your plagues are mostly medieval )

None at all, as I wanted this mod to have as small a footprint on the database as possible. I think it would be awesome if somebody developed a content type mod for this, which might include buildings, medical units that could end plagues, and biological weapons that could start them.

Fair point.

The AI fares as well as human; this is egalitarian mod! I have seen civs take advantage of neighbor plague by invading.

Which is probably due to the unit (=combat strength) loss. I wonder if that'd work with one of the balance mod that makes the AI keep gold for investment/buying units. Did you let a few auto-games run to see the effects?

As for me, I'm going to try the mod, but I'd probably want one that is more directed at making health the "local happiness" (while keeping happiness as the global restriction).

 

[turingmachine]

but I'd probably want one that is more directed at making health the "local happiness" (while keeping happiness as the global restriction).

Honestly, I always saw when they added the distinction between local and global happiness to the game shortly after release as them missing their chance to add a logical health system into the game. Instead, they added a confusing, poorly documented, distinction within the same yield.

 

[FramedArchitect]

Which is probably due to the unit (=combat strength) loss. I wonder if that'd work with one of the balance mod that makes the AI keep gold for investment/buying units. Did you let a few auto-games run to see the effects?

For this mod I ran probably 50-75 autoplays. Plagues have very variable effects, and the map type has a large impact on propagation. Plague tends to sweep across continents in the early eras; in later eras plagues tend to jump to the sickest cities. It's not uncommon for plagues to get stuck in remote areas, especially in early eras.

 

[kaspergm]

This is definitely an interesting mod concept! I do have a couple of thoughts on it, though ... I don't like the huge emphasis there seems to be for placing cities on rivers. That seems very bad for balance, because it unjustly hurts civs with a non-river start. Rivers should have some importance, but should probably be minor compared to factors that can be regulated by the player.

Also, I am curious, is the AI in any way capable of handling this game mechanic - i.e. will they know that they should build certain buildings when their health is going into negative values?

 

[FramedArchitect]

... Rivers should have some importance, but should probably be minor compared to factors that can be regulated by the player.

Also, I am curious, is the AI in any way capable of handling this game mechanic ...

Freshwater (includes oases and lakes, too) is pretty important for city health, but I decided for v.5 to calibrate the health from freshwater to a difficulty scale, so this will be more balanced. I also upped the health yields from ocean resources (2 for fish and crab, added whale and pearls) so settling arid coastal lands will be more viable.

There's no ai programming here, and it would of course be leagues better if there were a health flavor and civs knew how to settle for best effect. I'm still pretty new to lua and I just haven't learned how to do this yet. That said, the normal way AI settlers value plots tends toward healthy cities.

 

[FramedArchitect]

v.5 Changes the way Freshwater works. Now Aqueducts will provide fresh water for cities not built on rivers or lakes, but the bonus is smaller and calibrated to game difficulty. In addition, the malus for no fresh water is based on city size, so as cities grow they become less and less healthy until an aqueduct is built. v.5 also balances the way plagues spread in early eras, but the medieval remains the era in which plagues are most likely to have devastating consequences.

 

[turingmachine]

v.5 Changes the way Freshwater works. Now Aqueducts will provide fresh water for cities not built on rivers or lakes, but the bonus is smaller and calibrated to game difficulty.

Do you mean just in terms of the health system or, that they actually provide fresh water (i.e. allow you to build Gardens in every city)? I would rather it only affect the health system.