Epidemic system i beg you

[WeissRaben]

Okay sure, but I recon it would be pretty hard to go to war on your neighbors when your entire city/country is walled in. You probably don't want to in the first place if you're risking bringing the disease in.

Oh, for sure. During the Plague itself no one should be in condition to wage war.

 

[alexkowal123]

No, please. I am incredibly in favor of historical processes over railroaded "flavor", but the train for immunity to Old World diseases had departed a few millennia before the starting date. Best you can do is not have the epidemics coincide with the European invasions, and that will probably give the natives a greater fighting chance, but the seeds for the Columbian Exchange had been planted long, long before the game starts.

Ahistorical does mean departing a bit from facts, and in this instance it would be the seeds for the Columbian exchange that would be altered. I know this feature doesn't sit well with lots of people. and to be clear, I don't think this should be a base/normal game feature

 

[pheonicia]

There are at least three ways you could change up how the new world received disease from the old world without changing anything prior to the start date.

1. The Greenland colony (which we know will be present and playable) is more successful than it was historically, introducing smallpox and other disease much earlier than in our timeline and giving the natives time to recover before more widespread European colonization

2. Chicken pox was introduced before small pox and became a widespread pandemic in the new world, giving the natives some resistance to small pox and reducing the overall mortality rate. Even dropping it from 90 to 60% would have a huge impact.

3. In the 150 years between game start and colonization, a disease in the Americas develops that when shipped back to Europe results in a destructive epidemic on the scale of the Black death, forcing european nations to withdraw from the new world for an extended period of time.


I'm sure that other possibilities exist as well.

 

[Eruth]

There are at least three ways you could change up how the new world received disease from the old world without changing anything prior to the start date.

1. The Greenland colony (which we know will be present and playable) is more successful than it was historically, introducing smallpox and other disease much earlier than in our timeline and giving the natives time to recover before more widespread European colonization

2. Chicken pox was introduced before small pox and became a widespread pandemic in the new world, giving the natives some resistance to small pox and reducing the overall mortality rate. Even dropping it from 90 to 60% would have a huge impact.

3. In the 150 years between game start and colonization, a disease in the Americas develops that when shipped back to Europe results in a destructive epidemic on the scale of the Black death, forcing european nations to withdraw from the new world for an extended period of time.


I'm sure that other possibilities exist as well.

Those would all be interesting scenarios, but I wouldn’t want any of them to divert dev time from more plausible content. I always want to be clear that they would need to be locked behind game rule as rather than, as OP suggested, a small RNG chance of happening every game.

 

[pheonicia]

Those would all be interesting scenarios, but I wouldn’t want any of them to divert dev time from more plausible content. I always want to be clear that they would need to be locked behind game rule as rather than, as OP suggested, a small RNG chance of happening every game.

Personally I think there should be dev time dedicated to alt history after ~100 years from game start, otherwise what's the point of say playing Greenland and being successful if the game doesn't respond to what you do? Having actual content for changes the player makes results in an overall more interesting experience.

 

[Eruth]

Personally I think there should be dev time dedicated to alt history after ~100 years from game start, otherwise what's the point of say playing Greenland and being successful if the game doesn't respond to what you do? Having actual content for changes the player makes results in an overall more interesting experience.

I did not say I oppose alt history, I said I don’t prioritize this particular alt history. This would be a massive balance change to the game that would only happen if the player does extremely well as a very small and niche start.

 

[pheonicia]

I did not say I oppose alt history, I said I don’t prioritize this particular alt history. This would be a massive balance change to the game that would only happen if the player does extremely well as a very small and niche start.

Fair enough, anyways I made a different thread extending the idea to a more general form.

 

[Prince Ire]

Not necessarily. Milan went full Madagascar in response to news of the Plague: the city was locked down completely, all trade was shut down, and if someone was found to be sick their entire family was walled inside their own home. Methods beyond brutal, for sure: but as the 1360's rolled through, while most of the larger Italian cities had lost up to almost three quarters of their population, Milan still sat at around 120k inhabitants, and it would go on to do absolutely whatever it wanted in Northern Italy for the following half century.

The initial Black Death also just sort of went around Poland, nobody is really sure why.

 

[Abnormalmind]

The initial Black Death also just sort of went around Poland, nobody is really sure why.

Northern Poland was significantly affected by the Black Plague, while the rest of the nation remained relatively sparsely populated?

 

[WeissRaben]

Ahistorical does mean departing a bit from facts, and in this instance it would be the seeds for the Columbian exchange that would be altered. I know this feature doesn't sit well with lots of people. and to be clear, I don't think this should be a base/normal game feature

The issue is that anything ahistorical works through relatively well-defined points of divergence, with anything coming before that following history closely (or, well, as closely as possible). For any Paradox game, divergence starts when the game clock starts ticking, but not before.

 

[alexkowal123]

The issue is that anything ahistorical works through relatively well-defined points of divergence, with anything coming before that following history closely (or, well, as closely as possible). For any Paradox game, divergence starts when the game clock starts ticking, but not before.

Yeah agreed, it defo shouldn't be a normal feature but personally I think it'd be a lot of fun as an optional one, and could be fun for the devs to get creative on

 

[Ariphaos]

that is going to be such a fun dev diary to write

I am curious how you will handle resistance/immunity.

And stories like Eyam.

It's going to be interesting to see if they can get a system to work that makes you enjoy getting the country destroyed that you just spend hours to build.

We've never really got an internal politics update, because and they never really got antiblobbing mechanics to work because "losing half your country isn't fun". EU IV disasters have a giant "do these things to just skip them!" notification, so that you can avoid them or they bribe you with bonuses when you can't.

I don't think I've ever seen Paradox make a mechanic that doesn't follow the "the line must go up!" principle, without having to change it after the outrage, so I hope this one will be the one

One of the things Imperator did well was its rebellion system. Ignoring that it was rather trivial to homogenize your empire (a mistake I hope Johan has learned from), it made a great show of making massive empires a lot weaker than they would be in EU/CK, and you could never just doomstack your way into a giant empire because you needed to spread forces everywhere.

Ignoring some issues with multiple wars and the ability to homogenize the risk away, I think it was pretty close to what everyone wanted.