Natural Disaster Model

[alms66]

Henrique Duarte,
If you want to do the equations, go ahead, but I'd check with the map generator guys first because I think that MCA said he would do it, but I'm not sure.

[Richard Bruns]

This might seem off topic, but I don't think it is. As I was discussing this game with a classmate, he brought up a good point: hackers and computer sabotage/warfare. I searched old threads and didn't find any provision for this. It is something that I think we should definitely include. Random hackers can cause problems for a civilization, and organized, government supported, computer attack would be far more damaging. As economies get more and more computerized, the danger of this will only increase.

This kind of thing could easily be included in the natural disaster model. I know that it is really stretching the definition of natural disaster, but if you think about it, the two are very similar. They both cause widespread problems, having impacts all over your civilization.

Private hackers would appear more or less at random, but the frequency would be influenced by the social model. A computer attack would be organized by a hostile country and would be far more damaging.

The effects of such disasters would range from a small loss in trade and cash flow to a disruption of the entire infrastructure.

Some attacks would be directed toward a specific province. In that case, the damage would be localized. The effects of this kind of local hacker attack might be better served by the guerilla warfare model, however. We would have to see the final versions of both models to decide this.

All of this would of course be heavily influenced by the levels of technology your civ has.

Obviously this is something for the future, but I think we should think about it and prepare for its inclusion. I will probably go ahead and put "Computer Security" somewhere in the tech tree.

By the way, talking to friends about the game is very helpful. You get good ideas and feedback that way. It is pretty easy to get insular when there are only about a half-dozen regular posters; talking with friends is a good way to prevent yourself from becoming too single-minded. And with any luck they might start to help with the project.
[This message has been edited by Richard Bruns (edited March 01, 2000).]

[alms66]

Richard,
That probably should go with the guerilla warfare, it really isn't a disaster, IMO.

I've been trying to trim the number of disasters to the top 5, but I still can't see trimming beyond these:
Flood, Hurricane, pollution, earthquake, volcano, drought, famine, and fires.

That I believe is the minimum we can go with. On pollution, I'd also still like to do real world pollution, like oil spills, nuclear radiation and such, rather than those stupid little skulls like civ.

Another point I'd like to bring up is that some of these disasters will hardly be seen by a player. For example let's look at floods. On Earth there is (using my equation) approximately a 9% chance per turn of a flash flood occuring. This isn't 9% per civ but 9% per turn that somewhere in the world there will be a flood. So if we average it out there will be something like 45 or so floods over a 500 turn game. Now with the number of civs/cultures in the game it is very unlikely that a player will have to deal with a flood more that twice in any one game (which falls very short of their real world equivilants). The same can be said for droughts. While hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes will happen in the same spots over and over, but that's just the way they work. Fire, famine and pollution, on the other hand, can be easily controlled if you manage your civ well, if not they then become a problem.

[Richard Bruns]

I know it wouldn't be called a natural disaster, but I think that it would use some of the same code. Guerilla war is limited to one province, but hacker attacks will affect everything, like a drought does.

My point is that we should make flexible code so we can fit things like that in.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Moved to new page.
[This message has been edited by Lord God Jinnai (edited March 29, 2000).]

[alms66]

Hi LGJ,
could you move this over to the new thread?

I was hoping no one would notice the model was up until I could get the new thread going.

I'll get back to you on those questions and comments later today, right now I gotta go.

-thanks