Natural Disasters

[barbeerhj]

What about hills?

[Dis]

hills too

I'm still not sure of the details. But you can have hills at lower elevation, and you can have hills at higher elevetion. Same with mountains (though this may be less noticible). having negative elevation deserts would be cool (like death valley).

where I come from we have something called high deserts. They are a bit different from lower elevation deserts. They get slightly more rainfall. Although in civ terms the difference isn't that significant.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by barbeerhj
What about hills?

That too.

[Xorbon]

I don't know why so many people have such a problem with random events. Good events could be added to balance the bad events. And the bad events don't all have to be city annihilating events.

I look at Civ as a complex board game. Think of random events as equivalent to "Chance" or "Community Chest" cards (from Monopoly).

[Kuciwalker]

Random events are bad because they punish the player for something outside of his or her control. Besides which "disasters" don't have any effect on a civ scale.

[Commy]

I think they should add hurricanes...

...and tornadoes...

...and ice ages...

...and meteors...

...and nuclear winters...

...and the abdominal snowman...

...and of course, my personal favorite, alien invasions...

[Xorbon]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Random events are bad because they punish the player for something outside of his or her control. Besides which "disasters" don't have any effect on a civ scale.

Like I said, random events don't all have to be bad. Good events could be thrown in as well.

And while disasters such as floods and tornadoes don't have any "civ-scale" effect, ones such as plagues, volcanoes, and decades-long droughts do.

To give the player some control over these events, city improvements and civ-wide 'ordinances' could act to reduce or eliminate their effects.

[Xorbon]

Originally posted by Commy
...and the abdominal snowman...

Of course, it would have to shave its belly to show off those great abs.

[Dis]

and they shouldn't only affect the player. so you can't say it punishes the player. In SMAC they hit the AI as well.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Xorbon
Like I said, random events don't all have to be bad. Good events could be thrown in as well.

And I meant bad, not as in detrimental to the player, but bad for gameplay.

[MrWhereItsAt]

Originally posted by vmxa1

No events or disasters please or at least they must be optional. I do not care for things that are serendipitously inserted.

Of course... but it will be on by default, thus upsetting many posters who just can't bring themselves to play the game with anything 'changed from how it was packaged' (read: options easily disabled).

[bob rulz]

I've been working on a natural disaster list that's not too unfair for a while now. First off, you could set your world to be a "calm" world, a "moderate" world (more like Earth), and a "severe" world. The worst natural disasters would never happen on a calm world, and still wouldn't happen very often on a severe world (maybe like three times per game at the most). I haven't worked out a perfect list yet, but I'm getting there...

[Dis]

don't forget to submit it to the civ 4 list

[PGM]

I'm not crazy about volcanoes. In fact, I'd like an option to turn them off.
I've never seen a volcano destroy an enemy city. On one of my last games, the same volcano erupted for 3 times within a short number of turns and the Dutch city adjacent to it was not destroyed. And I've seen this by the dozen.

[Aramis]

Volcanoes were a pointless addition. Just a petty annoyance, really. Still, there they are, and if there in CivIV, so be it. But no new natural disasters!
(barring the abominable abdominal snowman, of course).