Serbia, with its one starting province, only has 55,000 people left. These events are absolutely devastating for small nations and frankly shouldn't hit them so often.
Famine and disease events fire way too often
- Thread starter anomanderus
- Start date
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I can absolutely understand you and maybe there's a mod to fix this. But in reality it wasn't really different.
It adds a very big challenge to playing these nations good. Organic chemistry and the poor getting their life needs, and also catching it from your neighbours. Serbia is not in a particularly prosperous neighbourhood.
That isn't a challenge, that literally makes the game impossible to play with unrealistic levels of population decline. Even the Irish famine only killed 1 million, and that was because of bureaucratic incompetence causing the parliament to assume it wasn't a great problem. The spanish flu only killed 50 million worldwide, it didn't wipe out entire nations.
In fact it was, given the largest famines of the era- such as the great indian famine- were caused by the British government foolishly selling off necessary crops for the population's survival.
Some nations in the game, frankly, are unplayable without resorting to heavy modding or console commands.
So I don't play them without heavy modding or console commands...
So I don't play them without heavy modding or console commands...
I decided to play an uncivilized country with a large population and in 10 years I've already lost 200k pops to these events. Who thought this was a good idea or historically accurate?
For uncivs its worse because they are eligible only for those kind of events so they will naturally fire more often. Anyways, you can just savescum them. When the event pops up, dont accept it, save, and quit. When you reload, the event wont be there anymore.
If your nation with a large pop is China, no biggie.
Even GP nations can have population dips at the start, just westernize, research medicine and chemistry techs, those plagues will go away.
Between the famines, plagues, and the revolts killing off population by the thousands or hundreds of thousands, it's a bit too much of a "random event" kind of game at times. Either you need to save-scum to avoid the major disasters, or else you're at the mercy of the Random Number Generator as to whether your country grows or shrinks. A bit of randomness makes the game much more re-playable, but when the RNG is the most important factor, it becomes a game of chance, not a strategy game. In my opinion, there should be a bit of randomness in ALL game calculations, but not as the most important factor. It should be able to tip the balance if things are close, but not force things which are not "prone" to happen. If you play a smaller country, the effects should probably be scaled down a bit, because losing 30% of the population of one out of 20 provinces is an annoyance, losing 30% of the population of your only province is a full-scale disaster, and you might as well just reload because you've just been set back half a century or more.
I had one game as Prussia where I got hit early with several local plagues and outbreaks (one of which spread from a neighboring country) within about a year of each other, they spread repeatedly, and my population declined by over a million over about a decade. I lost a NF point as a result, and most of my military brigades were significantly understrength, ruling out major military operations until they recovered at least somewhat. A few years after the plagues ran their course, I got the medical tech and inventions to deal with the problem and boost my population, but it had already put me 30-40 years behind in population growth, industry, and lost military opportunity. Basically, it can change your entire game in an instant, and all the skill and planning in the world won't make up for the fact that the RNG just decided to switch your game to a harder mode.
Basically, events can either be deterministic or random. In a deterministic situation, pressure builds up over time (or decays) until it reaches a certain threshold point, and then the event happens. HOI3 used that for events such as the German occupation of the Saarland, where German pressure to increase their own political party's organization or popularity in CZE will lead to Czechoslovakia getting a choice of handing over the territory or going to war with Germany. You don't know exactly WHEN it will pass the threshold, since other factors will influence the rate (or possibly reverse it, if enough espionage is pumped into it by CZE and not enough by GER), but it WILL happen within a certain approximate timeframe under normal in-game circumstances. I believe the game gives the German player (or the German AI) an "I Win" button if they can't manage it by roughly the historical date, which I consider to be blatantly unreasonable if the diplomatic and political circumstances don't allow it to happen "naturally".
In a random situation, factors may influence the odds of an event happening, but there is a regularly made calculation to compare a (possibly modified) random number against the threshold value, and a chance that the event can occur at any time, or never happen. Factors my increase the odds for each calculation, but there is no possible way to predict WHEN it will occur. Given a Mean Time to Happen (MTTH) of 30 years, it could very well occur on the first day, or never happen in 100 years or more. If a plague has a MTTH of 200 years, it's possible that you'll get hit three times in a decade, or never see it, but the player will see it ON AVERAGE about once in a game at most. The MTTH can also be weighted (by adding a factor, either increasing or decreasing linearly). Increasing the MTTH over time means that the event becomes increasingly less likely as time goes on (the circumstances are no longer fresh, and people lose interest, until the event becomes ridiculously inappropriate), or it can decrease, indicating that pressure for that event is steadily building up. A plague can have a falling MTTH (increasing chance) over time since the last occurrence, indicating that an immediate recurrence is unlikely, but people can lose their immunity to the disease over time.
The trick for imitating real-world factors is using the right function for the situation, or creating hybrid functions which begin a variable MTTH check once the conditions exceed the threshold (or ending the checks once the conditions are no longer valid). If you don't meet the conditions, it won't happen, and the more you exceed those minimum conditions, the more likely it is to happen, which is generally the most realistic situation.
A worst-case example would be Pirate spawns in earlier expansions of EU3, where pirate ships had about a 50% chance PER DAY to respawn along your trade routes, after 30 days since the previous patrol, meaning that they were inevitable within only a few days past 30. A gradually increasing spawn chance, from 0.1% per day up to a limit of around 1% per day over the course of a year without a patrol might have been more than sufficient, NOT the absurdity of a 50% chance per day, instantly after 30 days.
I had one game as Prussia where I got hit early with several local plagues and outbreaks (one of which spread from a neighboring country) within about a year of each other, they spread repeatedly, and my population declined by over a million over about a decade. I lost a NF point as a result, and most of my military brigades were significantly understrength, ruling out major military operations until they recovered at least somewhat. A few years after the plagues ran their course, I got the medical tech and inventions to deal with the problem and boost my population, but it had already put me 30-40 years behind in population growth, industry, and lost military opportunity. Basically, it can change your entire game in an instant, and all the skill and planning in the world won't make up for the fact that the RNG just decided to switch your game to a harder mode.
Basically, events can either be deterministic or random. In a deterministic situation, pressure builds up over time (or decays) until it reaches a certain threshold point, and then the event happens. HOI3 used that for events such as the German occupation of the Saarland, where German pressure to increase their own political party's organization or popularity in CZE will lead to Czechoslovakia getting a choice of handing over the territory or going to war with Germany. You don't know exactly WHEN it will pass the threshold, since other factors will influence the rate (or possibly reverse it, if enough espionage is pumped into it by CZE and not enough by GER), but it WILL happen within a certain approximate timeframe under normal in-game circumstances. I believe the game gives the German player (or the German AI) an "I Win" button if they can't manage it by roughly the historical date, which I consider to be blatantly unreasonable if the diplomatic and political circumstances don't allow it to happen "naturally".
In a random situation, factors may influence the odds of an event happening, but there is a regularly made calculation to compare a (possibly modified) random number against the threshold value, and a chance that the event can occur at any time, or never happen. Factors my increase the odds for each calculation, but there is no possible way to predict WHEN it will occur. Given a Mean Time to Happen (MTTH) of 30 years, it could very well occur on the first day, or never happen in 100 years or more. If a plague has a MTTH of 200 years, it's possible that you'll get hit three times in a decade, or never see it, but the player will see it ON AVERAGE about once in a game at most. The MTTH can also be weighted (by adding a factor, either increasing or decreasing linearly). Increasing the MTTH over time means that the event becomes increasingly less likely as time goes on (the circumstances are no longer fresh, and people lose interest, until the event becomes ridiculously inappropriate), or it can decrease, indicating that pressure for that event is steadily building up. A plague can have a falling MTTH (increasing chance) over time since the last occurrence, indicating that an immediate recurrence is unlikely, but people can lose their immunity to the disease over time.
The trick for imitating real-world factors is using the right function for the situation, or creating hybrid functions which begin a variable MTTH check once the conditions exceed the threshold (or ending the checks once the conditions are no longer valid). If you don't meet the conditions, it won't happen, and the more you exceed those minimum conditions, the more likely it is to happen, which is generally the most realistic situation.
A worst-case example would be Pirate spawns in earlier expansions of EU3, where pirate ships had about a 50% chance PER DAY to respawn along your trade routes, after 30 days since the previous patrol, meaning that they were inevitable within only a few days past 30. A gradually increasing spawn chance, from 0.1% per day up to a limit of around 1% per day over the course of a year without a patrol might have been more than sufficient, NOT the absurdity of a 50% chance per day, instantly after 30 days.
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Oh lord, not EU3 pirates! I'll talk, I'll talk, just make them stop spawning!!! 
One thing I like to do is to copy over whatever mod I'm playing into a separate mod folder, and then rip out events I don't like or minimize their impact if I like them in concept if not in practice.
One thing I like to do is to copy over whatever mod I'm playing into a separate mod folder, and then rip out events I don't like or minimize their impact if I like them in concept if not in practice.
I think there's a bug in here. Or at least something not working as intended. Namely, event "Famine Strikes Province" has the following check:
Code:
trigger = {
NOT = { poor_strata_life_needs = 0.8 }
NOT = { government = democracy }
total_pops = 50000
}After this change, 54% of my poor strata had their life needs fullfilled, while 42% had their everyday needs fullfilled as well.
I fixed this by adding a condition about their everyday needs in the trigger.
Code:
trigger = {
NOT = { poor_strata_life_needs = 0.8 }
NOT = { poor_strata_everyday_needs = 0.20 }
NOT = { government = democracy }
total_pops = 50000
}
To sum up, by lowering your taxes you've been increasing your everyday needs fullfillment, while decreasing life needs, hence you got more these events.
That post was made nearly a year ago but it was AI-controlled Serbia, not player-controlled.