[Edi]

I understand your point well enough, you just don't see mine.

Some diseases do have a 100% kill rate untreated. Syphilis, leprosy, tuberculosis for example. These were common once upon a time. The means to treat them are very recent inventions when you consider human history. The biggest advances in medical science since the Roman times were for the most part achieved in during the late 19th century and the 20th century, and the cures for a lot of previously untreatable diseases only after 1930, with the discovery of antibiotics.

I'm actually not sure if leprosy can even be cured instead of just arrested (I'd have to check, but assuming Donaldson did his research when he wrote the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, then it is indeed incurable).

Cancers, especially melanoma and lymphoma, but most others as well, will 100% guaranteed kill you if untreated, and melanoma for example will do it real quick-like, just a few months if not detected and excised in the very early stages.

If we want to talk about diseases like Black Death and smallpox, yes, some people survive those untreated (afaik there is no treatment, just vaccine for smallpox, as it's caused by a virus), but they are very few.

Problem is, most people on these forums, like you and I, are used to late 20th century medicine that's available on demand, and we'd probably have been dead several times over just a couple of hundred years ago. If we assume the Dominions world to have a general medical knowledge of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance period, anybody getting one of the serious diseases (e.g. leprosy, syphilis, cancer) is screwed up the *** hard and then some. Hell, basic wound infection would kill them more often than the wound itself.

Even if you allowed for Roman level medical knowledge (the period of Marcus Aurelieus's reign till the Fall), it changes little. Wound infection deaths would be the only thing that goes down, as their knowledge was on the surgery front (they could perform cataract surgeris, for example) and treating injuries, not diseases (but they understood the effect of cleanliness and principles of isolation and a lot of other stuff). People were also generally less well nourished than now, thus had overall weaker immune systems and succumbed more easily.

If you programmed a 1% or 5% or 0.1% chance of recovery, whoo-hoo, who's going to give a damn? Because it's going to be an added layer of complexity that has no value at all. Yeah, you might get lucky with that favorite commander who had gotten diseased, but the likelihood is that he will just die anyway. Besides, if you want to have an accurate modeling, next people would be *****ing that units that got cured of disease should have immunity afterward, which is not realistic given how there are more than one type of very deadly diseases, some survivable (if you're lucky), some always 100% fatal even if they take a little bit more time.

Given all of the above, why not have the disease be always fatal? Leprosy/syphilis/cancer and it's goodbye without magic (leprosy) or appropriate medical knowledge and procedures (syphilis & cancer), which require the kind of technology that the Dominions world simply does not have.

Magical healing powers (Arco, fairy queen, some heroes) can counter disease, which is good for them. Pangaean type units are able to cure afflictions some of the time, including disease, which means they're hardy. Other creatures and things are either immune (undead/inanimate things) or **** out of luck, and them's the breaks, and I see no reason to protest that on the ridiculous assumption that because we know how to cure most of these, the same knowledge and technology would be available in the Dom2 world.

It can be assumed that when you get the starvation/disease Messages ("...diseases are afflicting the troops") or when you have armies in a province with Chillsick Swamp, Leper Fens or Inkpot End that those who got the disease markers and death sentence that goes along with them were the weak ones who don't have what it takes to survive, and the ones who didn't either never got disease or got it but fought it off. All of this is completely plausible with suspension of disbelief firmly in place and with the additional benefit of not needing to add unnecessary complexity to the game.

In other words, I want some stronger arguments than an overgeneralised and flat out wrong claim that all diseases are survivable without treatment (especially given some underlying assumptions about the technology and medical knowledge base in the Dom2 world, namely that it's at Middle Age and not Roman level) and an unjustified demand that there must be a chance for units to be cured of the disease affliction.

The devs aren't very predisposed to providing a cure mechanism, and I find that perfectly okay in light of historical facts and as you can see, there are perfectly good arguments for their position. Feel free to try and discredit them, but I don't think your case is strong enough.

Edi