Reworking the Flu Pandemic mechanics

[anbeck]

The flu pandemic adds late-game flavor and it could be an interesting late-game crisis. In its current form, however, it does not force the player to make meaningful choices, and the flat throughput penalty feels like a mana debuff rather than the result of a pandemic wreaking havoc in your country. The pandemic should have potentially devastating effects your your economy and society, but these should emerge organically by affecting the building blocks of your society (population, institutions, trade, economic chains, etc.).

Some ideas for a pandemic rework (originally posted here):

• instead of the flat throughput penalties to all buildings, it the pandemic should affect the pillars of your economy/society and thus indirectly affect your economy. The pandemic could increase mortality (depending on urbanization in the state and the level of health institutions) and radicals while reducing army morale and limiting the effects of the education institution (schools closed) and research progress (universities closed).
• Some places (like Australia) also had maritime quarantines, which could be a pandemic response decision. This could slow down or bring to a halt migration and give a penalty to trading (either in volume or reduce the profitability of trade routes due to the increased cost of trading). Potentially, you could mix and match various pandemic response decisions so a player can prioritize some measures, resulting in different combinations of debuffs (maybe you prefer to close educational institutions over limiting your trade, maybe it's the other way round).
• Institutions should matter. In addition to your educational institutions (and depending on whether you close them or keep them open), health care should matter more. It should also make a difference if you have censorship (maybe it reduces the negative effects on army morale at the cost of increased general mortality).
• Different sectors of the economy should be affected in different ways. A paper linked in the Spanish flu wikipedia entry mentions that "businesses that specialized in health care products experienced an increase in revenues" (this paper, p.21). While this will only work once the pharmaceutical industry has been added to the game (I hope this will come sooner rather than later), maybe a stop-gap implemantation could be a chemical plant PM that diverts opium from the military to the civilian sector to reduce mortality.

All these effects would without a doubt affect your economy, but not by applying a direct penalty to it but rather by affecting all the building blocks of your economy: your population, your institutions, your trade relations, and so on. Then you can make hard and interesting choices. And it could also reshape your country: maybe the pandemic resulted in a health care institution, which will now benefit your citizens even after the pandemic is over (and maybe they get angry if you try to decrease health care spending again).

 

[Fawr]

I'd also like to see the pandemic come to an end rather than travelling around the world continuously until 1936.