Request: Miasma Everywhere

[ihateusernames]

Miasma is a vastly underwhelming mechanic with great potential. As the game stands now, there are only a few times when miasma is even a consideration: “I’ll have to heal after that expedition”, “I’ll have to heal after that tile improvement”, “My trade route is slightly longer”. But ultimately these slight annoyances only occur on one out of twenty hexes and are very easy to mitigate.

I’ve seen a few discussions about buffing miasma, but I believe that even the current 10 damage can have a significant impact if the map starts with miasma on every hex. Units will be forced to stay near cities, trade routes will be more precious, expansions will be very deliberate, and miasmic repulsers will actually be useful.

Most importantly, this will make the planet truly mysterious and alien, and your civ’s sphere of influence will grow at a much slower pace. It seems odd that the atmosphere is going to start perfectly suited to humanity. We should have to fight for our place. I personally want to combine this with the aggressive wildlife mod to create a truly terrifying experience. I hate mashing Next Turn, and anything I can do to create more tactical gameplay is going to improve my experience.

I know I can add miasma with the IGE, but that's one hex at a time. I'd try to mod it myself but I'm on OSX.

It's a small adjustment but big thanks if you decide to take care of it.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

This might be done through the individual map scripts.
This might be interesting, but I doubt the AI could handle it. You couldn't even have more than two units since that's how many can fit in a city. And you'd have to get a miasma clearing tech before you built any more.

 

[ihateusernames]

Doing it through individual map scripts makes the most sense, but how can I go about doing that? I thought the world builder hasn't been released yet?

You could manage more than two units, if you danced in and out of cities. Miasma damage is 10, city heal is 30 (IIRC), so you can heal quicker than you get damaged out in the field. You couldn't go very far, and there would be a soft cap on units, but that's kind of the point. I would like to see miasma clearing to become an essential tech in the way that covert ops is.

If that is too extreme, we could try a one- or two-hex ring automatically cleared around cities to give us some breathing room. Or, instead of 100% miasma, we could try 90%, which would give us small safe zones that we would need to reach to heal. This would open up the map, but still force significant tactical forethought. As some have suggested, we might have this related to terrain (e.g. heavier near xenomass).

Your lack of faith in the AI is well founded. I recently tried the aggressive wildlife 'Heart of the Swarm' difficulty, and all the AI lost their capitals by turn 50. Miasma is a bit different though, since it doesn't actually come after you.

 

[whoward69]

The AI units will move until they are crippled and then stagnate as healing in non-friendly lands is +10, miasma damage is -10, so the AI unit will get to a certain level of HPs and then fortify until healed, which will never occur. Ever watched a fortified AI scout being slowly ground down by a barb archer - quite funny the first few times, by depressing after that.

 

[Sir Betti]

Iteresting idea. a mod with options of 50% up to 100% miasma. Just how taxing that would be on really big maps remains to be considered.

 

[CaptMikeP]

The only thing is that if people are lazy they'll just go Harmony and take over the world in a heartbeat.