[dogscoff]

Yeah, okay, forget all that other stuff I typed down in my original post. How about we start with this, and try to build some of the more advanced features into it:

Plague Severity:
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-All colonised planets have a plague severity value, measured as a percentage. 0% means no plague. 100% is the nastiest plague you can get.

-Every complete 5% of plague severity kills 2% of the planet's population per turn (rounded up). This means plagues of less than 5% have no effect. However, a 50% plague would kill 20 million population on a planet with 100m. The next turn it would kill 16m of the remaining 80m, then 13m...

-The severity should also affect the change in the population's anger. Low severity=slowly gets angry. High severity=instant rioting.

-Random plague events, plague bombs and plague intel would be implemented by simply adding a given value to a planet's plague severity.

-Every planet with more than 10% plague adds to the plague severity of each friendly planet in the system. Normal planets would be incremented by 1% per plagued planet per turn. Planets with a spaceport will go up by 2% per plagued planet per turn. Blockaded planets will not receive this increment.

-Ground combat on a planet increments its plague level slightly, due to homes and sanitation infrastructure being destroyed, medical staff diverted etc. The extent of the increment should depend on the duration of combat.

-Ditto for orbital bombarment, except that it's not duration but damage to population and facilities that governs the extent of the increment.

-The extent of ground/ orbital combat increments should be be subject to values in settings.txt.

-A random factor of a few percent is also introduced each turn which could be positive or negative. For planets with less than 5% severity, this random factor should lean heavily toward the negative. (ie minor plagues tend to cure themselves) It would be nice if this was moddable in settings.txt.

-It would be cool if plague could be carried by population in cargo as well, but it would probably be too hard to implement.

Medical ships & med levels:
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-All ships have a "med level" from 0 to 100. This med level takes a base value from an installed med bay component when the ship is built. Only one med component per ship is effective, but backups may be installed.

-When a medbay component is destroyed or retrofitted out, its med value is subtracted from the ship's med level.

-When a medbay component is repaired or retrofitted in, its med value is added to the ship's med level.

-Med levels are modified by experience as follows: On each planet, every 10% of severity reduction in a single turn grants 1% medical experience to every ship in orbit. Ships with a med level of 0% do not benefit from this bonus.

-A cheap "sick bay" component should be available from the start of the game with a med level of just 1 or 2.

-System and sector wide facilities could be available to temporarily modify the med levels of nearby ships.

Curing plagues
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-If the plague severity is higher than the med level of an orbitting ship, then that ship does not "qualify" to cure the plague and has no effect on it.

-Plague curing using medical ships is calculated as follows:
The med levels of all qualifying ships are totalled up. That total is then divided by 5 and deducted from the plague severity.

There. Much more simple, but pretty much exploit-proof and still an improvement on the existing system. Obviously the numbers could be tweaked (and modded). Opinions?

Anyone got any ideas for more advanced features tht could slot in there?

[ August 29, 2002, 16:34: Message edited by: dogscoff ]