Illicit Resources (i.e. opium)

[maxpublic]

i don't stoop to pick up turds..

But apparently outright lying about the 'great many' positivie health effects of alcohol consumption isn't beyond you. Good to see you have some standards, bizarre as they may be.

you may find that if you actually read the inforamation (that dose by the way insist on moderation) you may well change your mind about what you said or at least add some moderation too your way of thinking on the subject.

I do, actually. I've read the actual empirical studies published in accredited, peer-reviewed journals. Not the crap published in popular newspapers or magazines, or the urban legend absurdities passed around as fact by the clueless and gullible.

Every drink kills a large chunk of brain cells. That is a fact; no serious scientist anywhere would dispute this. Even moderate drinking over time will lower IQ scores. This, too, is a fact that isn't questioned. To put it in laymans terms, moderate drinking over the course of time will make you stupider. It's that simple. You are not, have never been, and will never be, immune to this effect.

Last year Harvard researchers discovered a genetic link to the French paradox.

Well, no they didn't. They say there MAY be a link between moderate wine consumption and certain health benefits, but not a single researcher at Harvard will confirm that this is indisputable. Hell, there own website is careful not to make any irrational claims since the link is so tenuous and open to outside influences.

And lo! It appears those outside influences were found just last year! As published in Archives of Internal Medicine, sponsored by the National Institute of Health and the Danish Institute of Preventative Medicine, it turns out that the correlation isn't actually causation. Why are wine drinkers healthier than non-wine-drinkers? Because wine drinkers tend to be more affluent; and because they're more affluent they eat better, have better medical care, tend to have more free time, and are more likely to engage in regular exercise programs! Who woulda thunk it? Essentially, wine was mistakenly linked to better cardiovascular health because a) people didn't think to wonder if wine drinkers might be healthier for other reasons than the fact that they drink wine, and b) just about every study up to that point claiming that wine was oh-so-good for you was sponsored by grant money from a consortium of French wine makers.

So no, drinking wine doesn't appear to be better for you than not drinking wine. You'd be far better off eating fresh fish twice a week than drinking any amount of wine, since the fatty oils in fish are PROVEN to effectively combat heart disease. And unlike wine, fish doesn't kill brain cells and gradually turn you into a moron.

Even if someone were to come along and say that the good folks at the NIH and the Danish Institute of Preventative Medicine were wrong and that wine does, indeed, help somewhat with heart disease you cannot dispute that every glass puts you that much closer to terminal stupidity. As I said, you are not and never will be immune to the brain-cell-killing effect of alcohol. Every drink makes you that much dumber than you were before. You can't escape that, ever.

Perhaps you can live with the slow creep of stupidity in order to get yourself pissed on a regular basis. I'll pass.

Max

 

[LadyTetsu]

Hey Max and all you other folks out there arguing over wether or not drugs are a good thing.

Wine will kill you. Right. And so will breathing oxygen, which is a poisonous highly corrosive gas that we've adapted to mostly, but still eats at our DNA and mitochondria. . . we all gonna die, that's not the point.

The point here isn't whether or not you or science or whoever believe drugs are good/bad or slavery was or whatever. That's the fabulousness of Civ. Did the concept exist? YES. Did it make money? YES. As to health benefits or lack thereof? Pick and choose. Well, modern opinion sways back and forth, but I seem to recall tincture of laudanum being, er. . . lauded, before it was declared a poison. Likewise with wormwood. And now wine (which, by the way, mankind has been drinking for millennia across the bleedin' planet when water would kill you quite nastily - flux, anyone? Better to be slightly dumber and alive than dying of oogy diarrhea, methinks) and Omega-3 and the Atkins diet - it's all gonna kill us eventually. Or so they say this week. Medical science changes too fast to make ANY cut-and-dried statements about ANYTHING. Maybe it's not wise to drink coal tar, and if you think the risks outweigh the sometimes real psychological benefits, don't smoke a joint, or whatever. But you can't make anyone else believe what you want, even if it's screamingly obvious to you.

So perhaps, leave off the health effects. Increase maintenace costs to simulate corruption, up trade routes under certain civics to simulate a drug pipeline. Same thing with slaves, although I tend to think the civic should be beefed, rather than having a new resource. Maybe a slavery-civic-specific slave market, +1 trade route, +50% prod, -4 happy? Goes obsolete/removed with discovery of emancipation, even if you keep Slavery as a civic?

Point is, you folks arguing the yeas and nays of drugs and their healthiness are being as silly as panzooka and the others arguing about offending ethnic groups. Drugs is, drugs was, and drugs ever shall be. If you don't like them, don't play them. Request a mod (or make it yourself) without the effects you dislike. Heck, I'm a teetotaller, don't even take tylenol. But opium happened, so did coca, and hemp, and now the synthetics and who-knows-what-else. It's historical, it IS, and if you don't want it, get outta da boat. Some people vehemently believe that some drugs can be good in some ways. Some are just as adamantly opposed. It's all just plain silly.

My vote? Leave in the health effects, even the positive ones. You may get a massive city, but even a cancer-free pothead is STILL not gonna go mining most days.

 

[Quinzy]

here here. i think everyone should sut up about what they think and what is eccentric-PC, not even normal PC. im am NO fan of cencoring history. this happened. if you dont want to belive it, done use it.
sorry for just basicly repearing what LadyTetsu said but i wanted to get the point across.

 

[LittleRedPoint]

I like the idea what Rome Total War has. If you capture city you can do next things:

1. Kill 3/4 of population and get money
2. enslave 1/2 of population

If you choose slavery then you can enslave enemys population. It should didvided between your settlements as cheap worker. using 1 food instead of 2. But causes unrest. one slave +1

But this can made only by phyton. So phyton experts is it possible?

 

[4_HoTA]

Nice post tetsu..max.. you really are a moron are'nt you.

 

[kaoruchan]

I think that people here are unaware that there is in fact a difference between 'marijuana' and 'hemp'. In order to be used as a drug, cannabis must be cultivated in a special way, removing the male flower parts in order to maximize the production of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive chemical in marijuana that causes its distinctive high. Left uncultivated, the plant will not be able to attain a high enough THC concentration (around 7%) to cause any noticeable high. The name hemp refers primarily to the industrial use of plants of the genus Cannabis, such as fiber or oil. If you want to be accurate about this, I would recommend using marijuana, or at least cannabis, as the name of the "illicit" resource.

 

[BaneBlade]

Nice and interesting disscuccion here. Less for the gameaspect, i'm simply interested in disscussions about drugs. 2 things are burning on my tongue, though, and dammit Lady Tetsu beat me to one of it:
1) Wine should provide health, not happiness, the reason it was the most usual drink(water aside) for thousands of years in different cultures wasn't they were all alcoholics, but i was the only source of nonpolluted(antiseptic) water.
2) I wouldn't depict slaves as a ressource on a specified tile, it makes no sense, imho. Talking about EU2 for example, there are some specific "tiles" in Africa, where the player can "harvest", where it has been done historically. But EU2 spans a timeline of some hundred years, even much lesser time where u can actually "harvest" the slaveressource, and that was-historically- the time were the "primitives" there were abused by the globalplayers, cause all of them estimated themselves superior and entitled to do what they want with the blacks. Now explain me why there should be something similar on a specific tile, maybe for thousands of years gamehistory? They don't develop, don't merge with ur people? Your people and all other Civs will never consider them human-like-myself? Nearly impossible, imho.

 

[Dom Pedro II]

Nice and interesting disscuccion here. Less for the gameaspect, i'm simply interested in disscussions about drugs. 2 things are burning on my tongue, though, and dammit Lady Tetsu beat me to one of it:
1) Wine should provide health, not happiness, the reason it was the most usual drink(water aside) for thousands of years in different cultures wasn't they were all alcoholics, but i was the only source of nonpolluted(antiseptic) water.

Now that IS a good point... Although I was aware of this, I hadn't considered it for this purpose.

2) I wouldn't depict slaves as a ressource on a specified tile, it makes no sense, imho. Talking about EU2 for example, there are some specific "tiles" in Africa, where the player can "harvest", where it has been done historically. But EU2 spans a timeline of some hundred years, even much lesser time where u can actually "harvest" the slaveressource, and that was-historically- the time were the "primitives" there were abused by the globalplayers, cause all of them estimated themselves superior and entitled to do what they want with the blacks. Now explain me why there should be something similar on a specific tile, maybe for thousands of years gamehistory? They don't develop, don't merge with ur people? Your people and all other Civs will never consider them human-like-myself? Nearly impossible, imho.

Well, slaves typically come from defeated warriors and conquered regions... perhaps that should be how they're generated. In Civ3, it was possible to have units that could enslave defeated foes. That seems pretty reasonable.

Also, slaves come from within ones own society... slavery is one of those tricky things because do you A) just give a civlization-wide bonus, B) create slave units, C) make them a specialist? D) make it a tradeable commodity... a combination of them? And if so, how to balance it?

 

[BaneBlade]

Dom Pedro 2, i think all ur suggestions are doable/reasonable and i would like to see someone making a Mod around these ideas. And i was aware of the Civ3 feature, in fact, as soon as i tried the new Jaguarwarriors in Civ4, i wished a really big wodden-club and some of the gamedesigners with me in a closed room, they killed my pet-unit!

 

[panzooka]

u can slave other civ's worker, and it becomes your slaves, ye for the rest of the game, many centuries.
in civ3, i believe it says somewhere slave unit or similar.
in civ4, there is nothing relate to slaves when u capturing other's worker.
heck, if u capture an indian fast worker, it becomes normal worker, apparance changed, stats changed, etc