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**Lord God Jinnai** · January 6, 2000, 18:23

Alright I really think I NEED to post here since several of these are referring to the tech model. But first for somethings you forgot.

Floods also deposit soil so farming after a floods will be better.

Volcanoes can cause earthquakes and landslides (also it shouldn't be too hard to add avalaches for snowy regions like Alps.

You should also have cyclical fires like yellowstone.

So i guess we're not using greenhouse effects?

One water hazard I just remembered that is quite important are icebergs.
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Now for the tech stuff.

Meteorology could be a basic tech.

I think Tsunami will be the only name for well Tsunamis because Tidal Wave isn't very accuract and many people over in the west call them Tsunamis also.

**alms66** · January 6, 2000, 19:26

LGJ,
You and I will need to work together because as you've already noticed, both disease and natural disasters rely heavily upon the tech model.

As to your comments, yes some stuff is missing but I just wanted people to check out the basic system I'm using here. Cyclical fires, icebergs, earthquake linked volcanoes and volcano linked earthquakes and other things are gonna come soon. As for the Greenhouse stuff, I dunno. Should we really include that? Like you said yourself, there is now evidence to suggest it is just a climatic cycle of the Earth not the end result of CO2.
Avalanches, I believe are too localized, like tornados which I had origionally said I would do. They do cause damage and are a hazard in some areas but I just don't feel it's worth modelling. Just my $.02 on the subject, what do others think?

**Paul Crocker** · January 6, 2000, 19:37

Looks pretty good so far...we might want to separate the strategic (large scale flooding) from the tactical (icebergs and smaller fires), however to keep things from getting too complicated. The programmers can probably best address whether this model will chew up too many clock cycles or not. Enrichment of the soils by flooding should already be accounted for if the cells/tiles that contain rivers are given higher "food" bonuses (as in Civ).

Regarding climate change: there actually is GROWING evidence that CO2 IS changing it. There have been climate cycles throughout the past (we've known this for decades), but what's different now is that RATE of climate change. Increasingly, scientists are theorizing finding evidence that it has never changed at this high rate...which points to man as the cause (check out some of the forest ecology journals for some of this evidence...pretty eye opening stuff!) As far as the game goes, we could probably include it fairly easy (civ's solution, while simplistic, is probably a good model to elaborate on).

**Mark_Everson** · January 6, 2000, 22:48

T. K.:

I don't know why he said it was sketchy, it looks fairly complete to me! I'm a little on the side that it is perhaps too complete, that is it may include a few too many things. My take on that, is that we probably should just pick the top five disasters to model, put them in their as described above, and then see what the playtesters think. Things like volcanoes IMO aren't generally a big deal, unless your capital, or a major city happens to sit right on top of them. Ask the Minoans!

LGJ's point about floods actually helping the soil is a very good one! I'm sure Paul can give us a good hint as to how we should model that. How about it Paul? Or is that getting too picky?

On global warming, if we do it I hope we can do a better job than civ. a realistic map where we know the height of things, and have a crude climate model, will help immensely.

**roquijad** · January 7, 2000, 00:41

I think the model is very good. My comments:
1) Regarding cyclical fires and floods, I believe we shouldn't model them within this model since the cycle makes them a stable event in a game like Clash played through thousands years. Instead, I propose you take each major river when the world is just created and compute a probability of it having cyclical major floods. If the roll tells you so, then you change the properties of nerby land making it better for agriculture (even more than a major river with no cyclical floods) and worse for other activities.
2) On the greenhouse effect, IMO we're still too close in a historic level to be sure about the effect of CO2 on the climate. In that sense I guess civ2 approach of local pollution is much better since what we really do know is pollution can cause local environment effects such as poison rain.

**Lord God Jinnai** · January 7, 2000, 01:19

I felt I had to point this out about the warming of the planet currently. Many people say that its mainly do to man, but heres the problems:

In man's entire history we've put out as much CO2 and other similar elements into the air as 1 volcanic reruption, and not a big one like Mt. St. Helens. Second, there had been for the past 200 years, esp 50 years growing sesmic activity within the earth, and it is still continuing to increase.

**alms66** · January 8, 2000, 05:11

First of all, I'd like to address the concerns of people who think the models are getting too complicated. Computers are evolving so fast that I think when Clash is finally released, Comps will laugh at what we are doing now. Yes the models are complicated, but I remember a time when programmers where held back by the limitations of computers, I'm sure we all do. Nowadays it is the software that is lagging behind. We are creating a revolutionary game here, and to do that we must also break software standards. The most "advanced" game of this sort currently is Call to Power which recommends 200mhz and 64 RAM. If we exceed those requirements, I say GREAT! We have then trully succeded in creating what we set out to create. But enough ranting...

Mark, how could you possibly say that volcanoes are not "a big deal"? They are one of the most influencial forces upon the earth. They can drop the average temp. of the earth by 2 degrees, which is nothing to sneeze at. A 5-10 degree decrease would cause an Ice Age. The same amount of increase would kill every human on earth. And as for the Minoans, I could write hundreds of pages on that (Classical history is one of my favorites), but suffice it to say the most prevelant theory now suggests that the volcano that destroyed Thera also created the Mediterranian Sea.

As for the cyclical fires and floods, I'll drop them because I agree with Roquijad that most cultures simply adapt to such things.

And as for the Greenhouse effect, I can agree with and counter agrue every point brought up so far. But to LGJ in particular I'd like to say, yes there is increased sesmic activity but who's to say it isn't because the "blanket" that covers the earth (the atmosphere) is warming that the interior earth is warming? And to Paul in particular, there is also evidence that the rate of climate change is not relevant. Before the last Ice Age there were incredible changes in average temperature (up to 20 degrees each way, which is drastic)for 50 years before it occured. So again I agree with Roquijad that it is maybe too early in a historical level to include this. There is simply too much evidence for both arguments to make a decision.

**Mark_Everson** · January 8, 2000, 11:08

T. K.:

You can make the model arbitrarily complicated, with relatively little use of clock time. But the player Won't Care. As a matter of fact, IMO the player will get irritated being notified by zillions of little "disasters" that have only a marginal effect on the civ. For that reason I think the model needs to be concentrating on Really Big things that Dramatically affect the civilization in question. Because I can just about guarantee you that every player will check the little check box that says "Show Major Disasters Only" after their civ gets bigger than about ten squares. The game is called "Clash of Civilizations", not "Disaster Relief". So my point is why put a lot of effort into making a detailed model that virtually nobody is going to care about IMO. I think the effort should be put into making the big things have engaging game play, and feel as correct as possible.

On volcanoes. Sure, the temperature effect of a major eruption can be a big thing. I didn't see that in your model. I assumed you were just talking about local damage. So your plan is to connect volcanic activity to temperature, and thus to changes in weather patterns and general cooling which will also affect famines? (That should lead to some interesting stuff if that is the way you want to do it! I'm still not sure the player will get a lot of fun out of it though...)

[This message has been edited by Mark_Everson (edited January 08, 2000).]

**Lord God Jinnai** · January 8, 2000, 15:11

Well if we're not using cyclicle floods/fires then we could have an arbitratry amount of "lost" resources every turn. This would vary, of course. That should eliviate your prob Mark since those would be the most common distasters TKs modeling.

**alms66** · January 18, 2000, 18:01

I know what you're saying about the player's point of view, Mark, but that wasn't the point of that. It was to, hopefully, quiet the concerns of those who see any model, not just this one, being too much for a computer to handle.

But back to the model... There are really only 6 disasters in the model (Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, volcano and pollution). Tsunami and land/mudslides occur along with earthquakes or volcanoes, so don't count because they would be listed as the "same" disaster. Drought and Famine will need to be dropped unless someone can come up with a really good reason for a province of 30+ sqares to all be starving at the same time. One major flaw with modelling famine is that later in the game the provinces are simply too big to deal with such a localized disaster.

However I would like to suggest we keep the following for the economic model:

Much of the food a civ can produce will be lost to insects, rodents, spoilage and fungus, not to mention natural disasters like floods. New technology and infrastructure improvements will eliminate some of the loss.
The following will simulate this:

x% is lost to insects, rodents and spoilage in the field
x% is lost to insects and rodents in storage
x% is lost to spoilage in storage

Crops from the field (those gained that turn, before any is eaten by the populace) are reduced by the % above. Then the populace eats what is left, if there is extra it goes to storage, if there is not they eat from the storage, but not before the storage is reduced by the 2 percentages above.

I'll be working on a new version of this and the Disease model for the next few days. So expect it soon.

Also I'd like to say we should wait to impliment disease and disasters until all the other models are working good. Simply because of the randomness of such things, I just thought it would be best to save them for last.

**Krenske** · January 18, 2000, 19:44

Could I suggest the following, through history there have been many natural disasters and until the last 500 years most occurred in low population or wild areas. I therefore like the idea of a disaster targetting a random square rather than definitely hitting a city (Floods are different they should obviously be limited to river systems.

But (you knew it was coming) I would like to see some consideration given to scale of events. 90 percent of events should fall in the "normal" range, 9 percent in the "abnormal" range and 1 percent in the "truly horrible" range. My idea with these is that the "normal" range works pretty well as described in posts above. "Abnormal" level are a magnitude greater and so I would suggest having double effects in the original area and another area with normal effects like a bullseye with two levels. The truly "horrible" would see three tiers of damage over three areas.

My reasoning for this is that some civilisations have been badly effected by some bad disasters. The "horrible" detonation of Thera wiping out most of the minoans is a good example. Even when they haven't seriously damaged a civilisation they have been recorded and if they occurred now in a more densely populated world then the effects would be much worse.

My prime example is earthquakes most disasters would be considered magnitude 7, occasionally something would sneak up to the 8 level and then once every 100 years we get the "grand madrid"(?) event with 3-4 mag 9's in a month. If that event happened today the American death toll could be in the millions and property damage would require a World war scale effort to recover from rapidly. (I believe the AEC refuses to build nuclear power plants in the region because of the danger of a repeat.)

Just an idea to add some added spice. By the way some horrible events should have the possibility of simply wiping out a city ( eg. Pompeii).
[This message has been edited by Krenske (edited January 18, 2000).]
[This message has been edited by Krenske (edited January 18, 2000).]

**Lord God Jinnai** · January 18, 2000, 19:56

TK:

Droughts and Famines:

Well there have been major droughts throughout history that have had their results felt civwide/worldwide. The most recent examples were when El Nino came couple years ago and causes either major droughts/flooding around the world and the great drought of 1988 across the entire continental US (only most of flordia was exulded), Southern Canada and Northern Mexico. Although this didn't have too much of an affect do to our ability to pool crops from other countries, if that weren't the case, it would have been.

Also if ur implimenting floods, its only natural to impliment the other extreme, droughts, otherwise u'd end up kinda unbalanced.

Krenske:
I like ur idea just not ness the levels and percentages.
[This message has been edited by Lord God Jinnai (edited January 18, 2000).]

**alms66** · January 19, 2000, 17:15

Krenske,
You must keep in mind the size of a square (3500 sq. miles), not many disasters can affect such a large area, except maybe earthquakes and volcanoes (which can have drastic global effects). The ranges on the chart should pretty much handle the ideas you are expressing here.

LGJ,
I agree it may seem unbalancing not to include droughts and famines, but such large scale droughts and famines are very rare. Imagine one province of your 6 is in famine. All the merchants would be running around gathering food and then, a player could simply "give back" excess food to the provine in question, from what I understood in the economic model, unless I simply misunderstood.

**Henrique Duarte** · January 19, 2000, 18:20

Hi there.
I´m a MSc geology student and maybe I can give a hand on the flooding/earthquake/tsunami events.
I have seen the map generator model and it is based on plate tectonics so it will be quite easy to assign a disaster probability to each square according to the tectonic/geologic setting given by the map model.

The disaster magnitude (mainly for earthquakes) will follow a Guttenberg-Richter Law (something close to a inverted exp/fractal law) and the probability for an event in each square will be affected by the proximity and magnitude of other earthquakes (I suppose that on this gamescale replicas will not be considered because the big one will be the sum of all important quakes)
This way no region will have several big ones (unless its tectonic setting favors such occorrences)

I could continue on flooding, tsunami (simple consequence of underwater quakes) and vulcanic activity but I think it is better to wait for your opinion.

Anyway if you want to I will do some numeric modelling on this events or, at least give you references on the subject.

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