Disasters and what can be done about them

[Hoek]

I was wondering what people's experiences have been

For me, the Human Genome Project has contained all viral outbreaks...what kinda stuff have other people run into?

[death_head]

Depends on the disaster...biological facilities help in the disease area...but some things like meteors and volcanoes there's no stopping...

[Kirnwaffen]

My "favorite" is when the volcano goes off right next to or right under your big sea base and knocks out a bunch of kelp farms, causing half the population to starve. The best way out (before orbitals) is to rush a couple of formers, and even that can only do so much.

[death_head]

Fun stuff...the meteor is worse; it annihilates the base.

[Hoek]

Question: if you try to lower a coastal square of land with a former, the land turns into sea, correct? Well, does the former go with it? Similarly, what happens when a sea former tries to raise sea shelf into dry land?

[death_head]

I've tried to do that before, and I never could. I think it was because it simply won't let you. You have to go next to it and lower or raise from there.

[Avenoct]

Deathhead's correct. It's kind of too bad that you can't sink your own formers..it would be amusing. You can sink bases, or raise land adjacent to sea-units. That tends to make 'em go poof.
I've seen the Volcano, but never the meteor! I'll have to start playing some eco-unfriendly games.

[death_head]

I only saw the meteor once, I think. It's probably really rare, since it could be devastating, and I think it probably happens on higher difficulty levels, but I could be wrong about this.

[DilithiumDad]

The worst and porbably most common disaster is crop failure (-1 nutrient per square for 10 turns). By trial and error, I have found that the best cure is to rush-build colony pods in the base and send in crawlers from adjacent bases to haul in +1 nutrient.

[Ken Hinds]

The worst that I've run into was mostly my own fault for not watching my troop support closely enough. I had a large city, 12 or so which for me is large, with lots of + 4 mining and it was pumping out various units that I should have been rehoming, but wasn't. I was running under one of the low free support SE settings and got a industrial disaster message about -1 mineral in every square for the next 10 or 20 years which I totally ignored, didn't even look to see which base it was. About 4 or 5 turns latter poof there goes about 1/2 of my supported units in the field. And of course one of them would have to be a fully loaded cruiser transport with units that were fully supported. However they didn't swim all that well in Silk-steel Armor.

Ken

[death_head]

I feel no sympathy for you O Ignorer of Messages.

[22turbo]

Meteors are devastating

I'm playing a game right now as Deidre on Librarian level (4th diff) where I kicked Miriam off my small island (huge map) with a Battle Ogre I picked up on my first pod within 10 turns of starting the game. She got reset to an even smaller island 3/4 a screen away from me and started sending troops over by the buttload shortly thereafter. I had to put up with that treatment because I didn't have ship tech yet but I did have the entire island populated with 8 perfectly spaced fully loaded bases. As soon as I got the tech I sent waves of Worms over and took her out right at the same time I discovered that bastage Yang who immediately demanded 550 credits to not wipe me out... of course I told him to pack it and he declared vendetta on our initial contact. He was giving me trouble with his skimships until I got up a line of sentried skimships along my coast until I could divert my offensive attention to him.

Anyway... to get to the point.... no sooner did I take out Mariam and start to plan an offensive against the Hive what happens? A meteor hits my little island on the whole HUGE map and wiped out 3 of my 8 fully stocked Colonies (including a couple Wonders). It left a big crater over almost half of my island called the "Garland Crater". Talk about putting a damper on your playing spirits.... sheesh.

[death_head]

Yeah...when I got hit with the meteor, it only took out one base....apparantly, it acts like a Planet Buster.