Re: Suggestion for an improved plague model.
Contagion is certainly a good idea. It's rather odd that the presence of plague on a planet does affect morale (happiness) in the entire system but it doesn't have any real chance to spread to other planets.
The percentages thing is certainly better than the flat levels we currently have but there are some other features you have not considered. Different plagues would have different rates of infection, that is, different degrees of contagion. And, why does a plague have to kill everyone outright to be damaging? What about a plague that makes everyone very sick, killing some but weakening the rest of the population and reducing production? So, 'contagion' and 'virulence' could be two completely seperate factors on a given plague. Add these two very different factors to the much finer 'scale' of effect you have proposed and things get interesting.
But there is one more thing that no one ever seems to consider. Why is it that the SAME biological weapons (or 'natural' plagues) can affect all of these 'alien' races equally??? Lizards and humans and birds and crystals all affected by the same biological agent? Is this bizarre or what? It really should be necessary to research a bio-weapon specific to the race you want to use it against. The simplest way to do this would be to have a 'named' bio-weapon for each race. But that's not the best way to do it. The best way to do it is to build some sort of 'code' system into the AI that has identifiers for the biological characteristics of the races. You could then have various degrees of 'relationship' (as in 'genetic similarity') between some races and varying degrees of effectiveness according to the closeness of the match for the bio-weapon being used.
Now THIS would get interesting if plagues could be long-standing events that infect entire systems and hang around for a while. You might see a system swept clean of one race by a plague and another race move in. Does the other race want to reclaim the planets yet? What if the plague is still there? They may be killed by it even if they successfully retake the planets by military force.
[ August 29, 2002, 20:27: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]
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