Disaster Model v1.1

[Mark_Everson]

TKs most recent Disaster model, v 1.3 , has been posted by Dom. I don't think TK is going to be active anymore, but others can discuss the model as it was posted. If nothing else you should check out the model for the great picture Dom came up with for it!

[Simon Loverix]

If there are no objections, I merge it with the ecology model. It already has detailed stuff on pollution, climate and terrain matters, so it's not much extra work. Natural disasters obviously belong there, and man-made disasters are often caused by disrupting the ecosphere.

In early and ancient societies famine occurred when 2 harvests in a row were bad, i.e. Very Often. Can that effect be considered part of the tech level, or is it still uncommon enough to consider it a disaster? I think players would be disappointed when such an important fenomenon as famine would be excluded, so I'll try to do it with minimal calculations.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Simon:

Merging them is ok by me, it makes sense. On the famine issue, I think the common normal famines are much too frequent to be explicitly handled as disasters. To pass the threshold to be a 'disaster' I think an event needs to hit the economy or military of the civ by 1% or so. Otherwise we will be Continuously annoying the player by announcing many small local disasters. By this definition only a widespread regional famine would make it to the player as an 'official' disaster. Local famines should just be something that the player's general strategy (food storage, transport capacity to move food around, etc.) automatically handles (or leaves as is, as often happened in the middle ages).

[Simon Loverix]

It's mainly because most of the disasters already described are natural disasters. Probably there will be other disasters also like the krach of 1929, but I suppose such things are best handled in the appropriate model, for as far as that doesn't already happen.