Dynamic diseases, natural disasters

[VI Imre]

The question is will we see any of these?

Eathquakes, tzunamies, vulcanic eruptions, smallpox, plague, malaria (and dynamic diseases that spread fast through the continent or you country) and so on...

I'd love to see provinces with swift shrinking population as an effect.

 

[VI Imre]

And an event for a meteorite impact ala Tunguska, which would obliterate an area of the map completely changing the course of history. This should be very rare of course.

I don't know, natural disasters should rather be fixed, humans didn't influence nature so much as they do nowadays. There were no nuclear weapons and other stuff that could manipulate the weather and there were no huge industrial comlexes during the timeline that could cause global warming.

On the other hand diseases should be more random since the migration of people is not predetermined. And you should also be able to quarantine a province or entire regions to decrease the chance of infecting other provinces (which would still happen half of the times).

 

[DrLulz]

This is one of the areas, where gameplay should imho trumph historicality.

A natural disaster of any relevant size will screw the player over, while being dependent on factors completely outside the players control. I'm sure it is a recipe for a thousand rage-quits and save/reloads. Of course flavour events are always nice for the uhm.. flavor.

But imagine playing the Aztecs and having 90 % (I think that was the historical figure?) of your population wiped out by smallpox. You really upped your game, perhaps you got a bit lucky, you made sure you had tribal alliances in place, so Spain found no eager allies, when they landed in meso-america, and consequently the whole story ended with you mounting Cortéz head on a spike outside the gates of Tenochtitlan. But what is this? The Europeans brought smallpox with them, and there's nothing you can do to fight it, and nothing you could have done to prevent it. 90% of your population is now dead. YOU LOSE.

This would litteraly make the game unplayable for such a nation, and become and "auto-loss" outside of player control, almost as bad as the event-annexations of earlier version of Vicky2 (Hawaii and Madagascar). I know it's historical, and small events (like a temporary drop in support limits or something) is all fine, but implementing real nation-shattering epidemics would simply be a bad experience.

You could of course answer that you don't support deterministic epidemics and natural disaster, but would have them happen at random. But this just encourages save/reload-cheating and rage-quitting.

You can take a look at the plague in CKII as far as I know it is seriously watered down. Precisely because a plague that left a third of Europe dead would have ruined the gameplay experience.

I'm sorry, other than flavor events I think this is a bad idea.

EDIT: Okay, so in all fairness I noticed you wrote this:

And you should also be able to quarantine a province or entire regions to decrease the chance of infecting other provinces (which would still happen half of the times).

This is player influence on the event, making the idea more viable BUT:
1) Was a real epidemic ever succesfully contained in this period? And even if quarantine measures were put up they should "fail half the time" (and surely a higher succesrate would be unrealistic)
2) Would quarantining diseased provinces be a no-brainer? - if so this is a choice, where in reality you have no reason to choose option 2: Do nothing, and therefore not adding any depth to the game. Of course you could make the cost of quarantining so prohibitive that it represented a real choice, but then an epidemic would remain a nation-shattering event (either economically if you quarantine or because of population decline if you don't) which is esentially out of the players control, which is bad.

 

[VI Imre]

Without real disasters the game is guaranteed to be sandboxy. These factors should really be considered to be added since they could couse the destruction of whole nations. I understand that it can ruin the game of one (especially true for the beginners), on the other hand it is great to write an AAR of nation surviving several of these disesters and still be able to flourish. Not everyone uses the save-reload cheat, it makes the game boring without anithing unfortunate to happen. The success of quaranteening a province should increase with the technology, early in the game it is very hard to stop a plague whilst later you will have higher chances. And perhaps epidemics should have an incubation period inwhich they can infect other provinces unnoticed. Once the news of the epidemic reach the ear of the king they will be revealed on the map and the king can act. Of course quaranteening a province would stop it to trade (especially bad for trade centers like Venice, but if you don't act it has high chances that you infect every province that you are the center of trade of), cause serious slowdown in production and would cut the taxation as well.

 

[Jos de trol]

Without real disasters the game is guaranteed to be sandboxy. These factors should really be considered to be added since they could couse the destruction of whole nations. I understand that it can ruin the game of one (especially true for the beginners), on the other hand it is great to write an AAR of nation surviving several of these disesters and still be able to flourish. Not everyone uses the save-reload cheat, it makes the game boring without anithing unfortunate to happen. The success of quaranteening a province should increase with the technology, early in the game it is very hard to stop a plague whilst later you will have higher chances. And perhaps epidemics should have an incubation period inwhich they can infect other provinces unnoticed. Once the news of the epidemic reach the ear of the king they will be revealed on the map and the king can act. Of course quaranteening a province would stop it to trade (especially bad for trade centers like Venice, but if you don't act it has high chances that you infect every province that you are the center of trade of), cause serious slowdown in production and would cut the taxation as well.

I find this suggestion to be a bit absurd really.

quarantines were not the self evident measures to defeat diseases we now consider them to be. And of course, how the hell are you going to quarantine an entire province with medieval/rennaisance technology

 

[LouiST]

Natural disasters and diseases should be added. And some should be fixed like earthquakes, while some should not like diseases, famine and floods as the size of casualties may depend on government's efficiency.

If a country fails to manage them, rebellions could easily occur, like in the late Ming Dynasty.

 

[unmerged(463662)]

The cordone sanitaire is rather famous:

Some of the most effective measures taken against plague were the quarantines first used in 15th-century Italy. By the 16th century, quarantines were common throughout Europe. It was in response to plague that urban governments, first in Italy and then in other parts of Europe, developed systems of public health services to deal with epidemics. Towns began by simply investigating any suspicious illnesses or deaths; some created special plague hospitals to hold the ill; and almost all restricted movements of people during times of plague. Travelers were expected to carry certificates of health indicating that they had not been exposed to epidemic disease. By the 16th century it was virtually impossible to move out of areas under quarantine.

Beginning in the late 17th century, governments created a medical boundary, or cordon sanitaire, between Europe and the areas to the east from which epidemics came. Ships traveling west from the Ottoman Empire were forced to wait in quarantine before passengers and cargo could be unloaded. The Holy Roman Empire created a similarly effective medical border along the Danube River and elsewhere on its border with the Ottoman Empire to the east. Those who attempted to evade medical quarantine were shot. The cordon sanitaire seems to have been effective. While bubonic plague continued to affect the areas of the eastern Mediterranean, it disappeared in the West.

Something should be done to rebalance population growth. City size gets a bit silly later on, with no conferred advantage to the player.

A Black Death thing would unbalance game play. England would know each game it has 15 years of easy looting in the east before it got hit

But some kind of nationwide disease thing might be fun, because sometimes bad stuff just happens, like the period of religious strife, which is modeled.

 

[Jos de trol]

The cordone sanitaire is rather famous:



Something should be done to rebalance population growth. City size gets a bit silly later on, with no conferred advantage to the player.

A Black Death thing would unbalance game play. England would know each game it has 15 years of easy looting in the east before it got hit

But some kind of nationwide disease thing might be fun, because sometimes bad stuff just happens, like the period of religious strife, which is modeled.

There's a difference between:
-a naval quarantine for ships wanting to enter a city;
-a quarantine of the already infected/their relatives;
-a mandatory health check before entering city gates;

all of which were used to control plague outbreaks in Europe

... and a preventive quarantine of entire provinces like one would do with a zombie outbreak.

There was a big plague in the 17th century, and while there certainly was a lot of the measures I enumerated, I don't know of any areas being totally blockaded.