Introducing health mechanic into Civ V: A way to potenciate few yet powerful cities

[Ikael]

It seems that this game have two problems: the proliferation of ICS and the difficulty of making huge metropolis once you pass trough a certain size number.

In order to solve both problems at the same time and also making the food resources worth of crap, I think that it would be a good idea to introduce a health mechanic.

Concepts:

- Said parameter will be an empire - wide one like happiness, aiming to represent life expectancy and quality of life for your citizens.

- You will gain health points by funding cities next to freshwater, having acess to food resources and building certain buildings (aqueducts, hospitals, etc)

- However, the factors that will lower your empire health will not be total city population as it happens with happiness, but rather number of cities and certain buildings (factories, forges, etc), and it will grow exponentially. Say, your second city would generate -3 health while your tenth would generate -6. Yup, not realistic, but It wasn't me the guy who decided to homogenize cities in the name of "streamlining", so please bear with me

- Health supplus will help your most 3 populated cities grow at an increased rate directly proportional so said suplus. Say, if you have an excess of +10 health, they will grow at a 30% increased rate, while if the suplus amounts to +20 health they will grow at a +60% rate. Of course, there will be wonders / social policies / buildings that will affect not only the health bonus but also the number of cities affected by it (said, instead of your 3 biggest cities, it will affect your 5 biggest cities, or a wonder that will help a certain city to gain the health bonus regardless of its size).

- Health penalties ought to be severe so if you decide to go for a massive, sprawling empire you can focus into other things rather than health, but still you won't be able to ignore it completely. Health deficit will a cause a -30% city growth and production penalty on all your empire.

Thoughts?

 

[Camikaze]

I agree that there should be a health mechanic in the game, but I would think it much more realistic that it be done on a city basis, rather than an empire-wide one. Why would one city being founded next to fresh water positively or negatively impact on the health of another city? You do admit that it isn't realistic, but I don't see why it shouldn't be a concern in the system. It seems odd to implement an unrealistic feature when there is the option of introducing it in a much more realistic capacity.

I do like how you've outlined health effecting city growth (although if the system is empire-wide, why shouldn't this bonus also be empire-wide?).

 

[PhilBowles]

A very old thread to resurrect, but I just tried the Health & Plague mod in Steam Workshop, and it's an interesting approach. In its current form it's not particularly well-balanced (partly in its own right, partly because it favours things already favoured by the game - such as Tradition and Rationalism - and penalises already weak elements, like iron) and works badly with the AI (which turns into a permanent source of disease that will spread to you regardless of how well you manage health in your own cities).

It does however show how health could be used in a Civ V framework with a good template, and eliminates some of the problems with Civ IV's health mechanic (its irrelevance in the early game, the fact that it was merely a tedious management mechanic which gave you no advantages for managing health well beyond not suffering a penalty, and that having all bonus resources connected by your trade network reduced the importance of city placement beyond the presence of forests and floodplains). Resources, such as coal, with negative effects on health are a good addition as well. Presumably if updated for BNW, health (and plague) will be able to travel along trade routes.

Downsides:

- AI behaviour which doesn't prioritise buildings etc. tied to the new health mechanic make open borders very risky, since you'll be suffering from plague in short order.

- The 'empire health' component is an interesting idea (a global modifier to city health based on having particular techs and/or policies), but while these effects should probably be represented somehow, in its current form it's irrelevant with one exception: in a golden age you'll get a sufficient health boost to affect city growth. Some odd choices as well here, possibly from trying to tie things like scurvy to the techs that made long sea voyages possible, but it's not clear why that would affect city health, so negative health from Optics and Compass is bizarre. The sorts of policies that Commerce represents don't seem obvious disease sinks either.

- No meaningful negative effects from low health. Plague can be game-changing (poor Augustus kept getting hit and stayed at the bottom of the league table as a result), but as noted above healthy cities can contract plague. And once contracted, health doesn't affect the likelihood of suffering negative effects, or the duration of the plague. Supposedly low health (I never had negative health for any length of time, since as implemented negative health scales poorly with population growth) increases the likelihood of contracting plague, which is a nice idea but when certain civ behaviours and every CS makes them a plague carrier, you're going to get hit badly anyway. Poor health should have an intrinsic negative effect equal to the positive of good health (i.e. -1 food per negative health point), plus the reduced resistance to plague.

- Plague is implemented strangely. It emerges as a random event in low-health areas, and dissipates the same way. It can't be cured, and there's no mechanism for ameliorating the effects. Cities will recover individually, whether after a set time, a set loss of population, or a random number of turns (not sure), and early on I saw a pleasing pattern of plague gradually disappearing from cities and then vanishing altogether when the last city recovered. But there are also cases where lots of cities will still be plagued, but the random event generator will decide that the plague's gone, so they're all cured instantly.

- There's a bug in the mod that treats any source of water (i.e. including coasts and oceans) as freshwater, which contributed hugely to making health easy to manage on the island map I rolled. EDIT: Turns out aqueducts are implemented to act as a source of freshwater, and since I had Tradition all my cities therefore had freshwater by default.