Natural Disasters.

[Lab Monkey]

Let's face it, even Sim City had them! I used to love the sight of godzilla crashing over the land, or the challenge of dealing with earthquakes and floods. Okay, so maybe giand lizards are not really civ material, but a volcano destroyed pompeii, and earthquake and disaster relief would add further dimensions to diplomacy. It would also fit in with the idea of a civ being influenced to change it's attributes. What if, in ancient times, 3 Roman cities were destroyed by a natural disaster, would they attribute it to god's punishment, and promptly change from commercial to religious?

Just a thought.

 

[plomeros]

...and a great thought as well. Should be used the same way as barbarians, you have a choice of living in Paradise or Volcano Hell and be awarded points therafter...

 

[Park Ranger]

Yes, a great idea.

Could bring new meaning to the FLOOD PLAIN terrain.

 

[Lt.Col. Kilgore]

Maybe theres a VERY small chance that a mountain/volcano can erupt at any given time. In order to figure whether a mountain acts as a volcano is to say 1 in every 15 (is this realistic?) mountains have the potential to erupt and it will only be known until they do in fact erupt. I guess the effects would be similar to a nuke except in all adjecent square: Cities' populations are halved and most improvements destroyed or (rarely) the city is completely laid to waste, all units are destroyed as well as terrain improvements. Also pollution would add to it.

Earthquakes would simply kill aprox. 2 population points as well as destroying some city improvements.

I don't know what a flood would do.

I think disease should be a lot more heavily implemented. Like if one population point gets diseased from flood plains or jungles, it should have a chance to spread to others in the city and to other cities and military units in your civ all the while greatening the chance it turns into a pandemic that effects other civs that share your boarders until it completes it's course. The effects of this could be lessened with use of hospitals, aqueducts, etc.

 

[Dralix]

Civ 1 had "random events" or something like that. If memory serves, a city near mountains could suffer from volcanoes, until you built a temple, coastal cities without barracks could be attacked by pirates, and cities on rivers without aqueducts could suffer floods. I think they were removed from Civ 2 because people didn't like losing people and/or improvements to random chance.

 

[Lab Monkey]

Earthquakes could result from faultlines generated at the beginning, volcanoes and flooding would also be random, but in fixed areas due to weather fronts and fragility of the earth's crust in those places. Also all disasters can happen in non- settled areas, therefore acting as a warning. A civ would have to decide on whether to settle in a danger zone.

Random chance seems a small problem in comparrison to culture flipping and inherited unhappyness.

 

[Park Ranger]

Suppose floods can randomly hit a city on flood plains, or a city at the mouth of a river.

Effects might be:
1. civil disorder (no produciton) for 1 turn.
2. slight chance (like a catapult's bombardment) of damage to city improvements, maybe to a max of 3 improvements.
3. chance of pop decrease
4. damage to terrain improvements.

Lots of civ-style board games use random events to incorporate disasters into gaming. The effects should be noticeable but not crippling, and in any case there should be some preventative measure available to the player. (e.g. building dikes, or for earthquakes, an advanced tech that allows quake-resistant structures).

 

[sealman]

I agree that these sound good but then you are going to have to listen to some people complain about them. After all, there are people that are already upset over disappearing resources.

 

[Mavfin]

Some people will complain about anything difficult in the game. If they can't bring the game home, load it, and immediately win easily on the hardest diff level, they'll complain that the game is unfair...

 

[klazlo]

Hi guys,
Just two thoughts:

1.) what if someone could choose in the beginning of the game whether wants to play with disasters or not (just like eliminating some victory types),

2.) to get some balance, what if some good things could happen with you also by random (like population boom).

 

[sealman]

The more random events, the better. I like the idea of a Nuclear Meltdown with your reactor although it has never happended to me and I hope it does not. I do think that the chance should increase based on the corruption in the city.

 

[sealman]

Originally posted by Mavfin
Some people will complain about anything difficult in the game. If they can't bring the game home, load it, and immediately win easily on the hardest diff level, they'll complain that the game is unfair...

Well isn't it?

 

[wohmongarinf00l]

yeah, chance of a nuclear meltdown is very high when u have nuke plants....
i NEVER built them

 

[Caranamrta]

Lab Monkey's idea is very good! Earthquakes and volcanoes had a great influence - IRL they could destroy an entire civilization (for example, Crete was destroyed by the Santorin) or at least a whole city, and today's civs suffer also great damages in economics and population. They could endanger the nuclear power plants too.

Another important catastrophe - the epidemic. I know that there are diseases in jungles and flood plains, but that isn't the real epidemic. The great epidemics expand, reach distant cities and can kill 40-50 percent of the population. In Europe there was the great pest. It beginned in a city called Kaffa, in the today's Ukraine. Some Genovan (Genovite? Genovian?) traders brought the disease in Genova because contaminated rats were in the boats. And the plague spread everywhere in Europe, and killed every third man.
Another example - when the Spanish overran the Aztec and Mayan territories, they brougt the pox in. The pox spread very fast, and reached the Incas before the Spanish. The epidemic killed the Inca king and caused a civil war which trembled the whole Inca empire - the Spanish had easy work to overrun it.
These epidemics - i think - are easily inbuildable in the civ3. This would be rare, but there would be things which could greaten the chance of an epidemic - a war, the poverty, the starvation, the swamps and jungles, and meet with an other civ which was unknown before; The bacteria with the one are unknown for the immune system of the other, and vice versa. The epidemics could cause civil wars. And the advancement of the medicine could lessen the chance of an epidemic.

P. S. Excuse for my wrong English.

 

[Lab Monkey]

As for another epidemic, in the case of the military STDs are the most common! We Europeans spread a little culture, and a lot of Syphillis!

As for 'unfairness', I think people would apperciate the random events if they were handled in a realistic way. So far the only grumbles that I have taken notice of are legitimate faults of Firaxis' programming.

 

[Park Ranger]

Caranamrta, your post reminds me of Avalon Hill's board game, CIVILIZATION. It was chock full of "calamities" that would come up frequently. Some were natural disasters (Earthquake, flood, epidemic) and some were social calamities (civil war, iconoclasm & heresy, slave revolt), and because they were randomly shuffled into a commodities deck, at least one of seven players would draw at least one every round.

The main thing in this game with the calamities is that the effects were seldom limited to the player who drew them. A player who lost pop to a famine could also order any of the other players to lose pop too - unless that player had "pottery" (a tech advance like in CIV) and grain (a tradeable commodity). So though the calamities had sometimes devastating effects, they also spilled over to other players, and so eventually everyone would suffer, and you just had to rebuild...

I know, different game, and possibly hard to implement here, but it made that game a lot of fun...

Anyway, the basic idea of disasters/calamities is a good one, would add a lot of realism and if implemented correctly would not unbalance the game. The Romans endured after the eruption of Vesuvius and the loss of Pompeii, so why can't the civ3 player?

 

[Selous]

Originally posted by klazlo
Hi guys,
Just two thoughts:

1.) what if someone could choose in the beginning of the game whether wants to play with disasters or not (just like eliminating some victory types),

2.) to get some balance, what if some good things could happen with you also by random (like population boom).

i LIKE this post!! ... top post about implementation of disasters in the game of civilization ..... it is easy to think of plenty of disasters ... typhoons, hurricanes and cyclones ... earthquakes ... floods ... tital waves, sunami (SP?) .. i think the different names for the same disasters would be cool also ... perhaps even culturally based? (as in europeon, asian and so on) .. and these disasters should justy be the 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 type events ... the REAL big suckers ... not the big storms that hit every year

i think epedemics could work a bit like in CTP?? ... where a city had the little sign on top of the city ... and it could spread to other citys by trade and trade networks

now for good things ... population boom ... sure ... but what about any other things?? any ideas here?

 

[ChrisWade]

If these disasters are incorporated, (which gets my vote. Sod the moaning gits, they can suffer) I think there should be some useful events as well. Something along the lines of mountains collapsing into the sea, generating new grassland or tundra melting to reveal grassland. Or possibly extra rivers or natural springs appearing in arid areas, making irrigation easier in the early days.

 

[dikwhit]

guys...... excellent..... natural disasters... what a novel concept count me way in, ones not so natural could be included also such as
1) terroisim (WTC/ oklahoma city)
2) industrial accidents (bhopal/chernobyl/exxon valdez)
3)military coups

other possible natural disasters could include famine(6000 years w/ good harvests?) / great fires (chicago) / etc.etc.etc.


unfortunately, given the history of things being implemented that make sense, this idea would probably add 10 dollars to the cost of the XP

 

[klazlo]

Originally posted by dikwhit
unfortunately, given the history of things being implemented that make sense, this idea would probably add 10 dollars to the cost of the XP

I got an idea from this for another disaster: in the modern era a multinational software company gets control for most of the computers you use by having the same software on them - it collapses and you suffer some break for the research process...

But to have some good layer in it: ... then the leader of the company who is quite rich donates some money to your government as compensation.

This second event should have a random chance like 1:100000