Master of disaster...

[Venger]

I had thought that maybe disasters would make a comeback from Civ1 - I kinda miss the occassional fire, flood, hurricanes, theiving, etc. that occurred. I even thought there was some discussion about it being included prior to Civ3 being released. Anyone else think it's inclusion would add depth and flavor to the game?

If you didn't play Civ1, on occassion bad things may happen to cities that don't have improvements - a flood may wipe out a population point in a city if you don't have city walls, a plague may wipe out your foodstore in a city if you didn't have a granary in it, thieves could pilfer a little gold if you didn't have a barracks in a city, and so on. It didn't happen much, but I thought it made the game a little more tasty...and it encouraged you to bulid out your city...

Venger

[Grim Legacy]

Please NO!

These random events are boring and frustrating. It's bad enough with these jungle/floodplain diseases, random barbs and resource depletion. No more ad hoc setbacks please.

[jbird]

I'd *love* to see this as an option, a simple checkbox (on or off) right next to the barbarian level would be great.

Jbird

[Apolex]

Yeah I agree... disasters make things more fun (make it a check box option at the beginning). Occasional floods for cities near rivers, earthquakes for cities near mountains, etc. I want to see Godzilla come out and stomp all over cities when they produce too much pollution.

[derdede]

Maybe you could receive aid from friendly nations. Money or workers. You could also decide how much aid to send to a nation that is struck by a hurricane or a flood. During times of disasters nations might help each other, thus changing their relations.

[Altuar]

Yeah, I wholeheartedly sign this one. Different events for different eras and governments as well! Would be neat, and making it optional would aggravate no one.

[wal35]

This has no basis in fact just my opinion.

I think the disasters in Civ1 were really in there to appeal to the people who bought the game because they'd played the (excellent) Civilization board game which had just those sort of "random" disasters but by the time Civ2 came along they didn't need to worry about the board game.

As I said maybe its just me and how I got hooked on Civ all those years ago

Anyway by the sounds of Civ3 is plenty hard enough without any random disasters.

[Asharak]

Those disasters were quite neat -- annoying, infuriating at times, but neat nonetheless. I'm not sure how much they NEED them back, though. Civ has diversified itself enough since a decade ago, that there is plenty of chaos in the game without such disasters.
I'm not saying they COULDN'T be brought back, and I'd probably turn them on if they did come back, but I can't say it's high on my list of features Firaxis needs to add/fix.
Some of the options expressed in this thread about the impact on diplomacy and international relations (derdede, Altuar) sound great, but right now I think I'd rather see Firaxis devote their time and manpower to dealing with the trespassing issue, among other things. Still, if they get those things patched up and still aren't sick of working on CivIII, it'd be nice to see the return of the disasters accompanying the return of multiplayer.