I thought it would be interesting to discuss something that has become quickly apparent: how localized the plagues are, and how that affects (or doesn't affect) the balance of power, so to speak, of the game.
The Mediterranean is the focus of most plagues. Spain, Italy, the Levant and, especially, the ERE is where you'll see most of them at any given time. It doesn't mean that they don't happen in other places, but certainly they're much more likely to appear there. This seems reasonable and intuitive; I'm by no means an expert on the history of medicine, but those are the areas where the trade flows and where the European population is more concentrated, at least in the earliest startdate. So I guess that this is very much WAD.
Still, the change is very dramatic. I have gone a century as Scandinavia without a plague, while on the ERE, you have a plague somewhere 2 out of 3 times, and you spend several years locked up in your castle every other decade. I wonder if that's intended too, or if the algorithm got a bit out of hand and led to an outcome that is more extreme than intended.
And other than that, do you think that this has a noticiable effect on the global balance of power? Byzantine Emperors have short lives and so do their vassals; nonetheless, I have seen it expand moderately and it doesn't seem to have too much trouble in the long term (other than being in a quasi-perpetual civil war and changing Emperors in a whim, but this is the ERE, so that's basically how it should work). Still, I haven't played enough, so I couldn't say if the depopulation of characters and the lack of Prosperity bonuses eventually harms them.
So... Any thoughts about any of that? What's your experience with it?
The Mediterranean is the focus of most plagues. Spain, Italy, the Levant and, especially, the ERE is where you'll see most of them at any given time. It doesn't mean that they don't happen in other places, but certainly they're much more likely to appear there. This seems reasonable and intuitive; I'm by no means an expert on the history of medicine, but those are the areas where the trade flows and where the European population is more concentrated, at least in the earliest startdate. So I guess that this is very much WAD.
Still, the change is very dramatic. I have gone a century as Scandinavia without a plague, while on the ERE, you have a plague somewhere 2 out of 3 times, and you spend several years locked up in your castle every other decade. I wonder if that's intended too, or if the algorithm got a bit out of hand and led to an outcome that is more extreme than intended.
And other than that, do you think that this has a noticiable effect on the global balance of power? Byzantine Emperors have short lives and so do their vassals; nonetheless, I have seen it expand moderately and it doesn't seem to have too much trouble in the long term (other than being in a quasi-perpetual civil war and changing Emperors in a whim, but this is the ERE, so that's basically how it should work). Still, I haven't played enough, so I couldn't say if the depopulation of characters and the lack of Prosperity bonuses eventually harms them.
So... Any thoughts about any of that? What's your experience with it?
