Why do my commanders keep dying of disease?

[Kristoffer O]

Most diseases would be over in a month. Either your'e dead or your'e alive. The diseases of dominons are more like leprosy or other wasting diseases. Your body festers and bodyparts fall off. Sometimes you loose an eye, sometimes you loose your mind and sometimes you loose your chest

Nooooooooooooo ...

It's VD.

She was a burner ...

[Edi]

NTJedi, I know very well what diseases are. Most you either recover from or don't. I'm assuming that the diseases in Dominions would be, like Kristoffer said, of the invariably fatal variety (such as leprosy) or tuberculosis or syphilis which the victim will not recover from without medicines/magic and which will be fatal over the course of time.

As for smallpox and plague (bubonic, lung and blood), while those were not always fatal (not sure about the blood variety, which was worst, they're all caused by the same germ), they were so deadly that they might as well have been, and it's just an added layer of complexity to model some minuscule recovery chance and attendant later immunity to disease for such recovered units into the game. The Black Death basically depopulated Europe in the Middle Ages, so I don't think it is an unrealistic simplification, or even a particularly far-fetched one, to have units that catch disease die eventually.

Edi

[NTJedi]

EDI...

You are failing to understand that diseases do not have a 100% Kill Rate.... with or without medicine/magic.

With diseases the chances of survival vary from only 0.1% dying to as high as 93% dying WITHOUT medicine/magic. NOW... with diseases on dominions_II it means 100% ALWAYS Death without medicine/magic.

Also being that this game has so so many different races, creatures, and monsters of all different powers/sizes it's truly amazing/wrong to see a diseased unit 'ALWAYS' die.

[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

[NTJedi]

Edi
Some diseases do have a 100% kill rate untreated. Syphilis, leprosy, tuberculosis for example.

That's WRONG... do some studying.
Ebola if a far greater danger then what you have listed above.

60% of sufferers die within three years from the more dangerous types of tuberculosis.

The researchers studied tissue samples from 240 patients with diffuse large-B-cell lymphoma. Based on their analysis of about 10,000 genes, they found at least three distinct diseases, with varying chances of survival.
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/071...710020019.html


THERE IS NO REPORTED DISEASE TO HAVE A 100% Kill Rate... especially for different creatures, animals and so on. And we see all different types of living things within this game.

[ November 21, 2003, 12:13: Message edited by: NTJedi ]

[Edi]

Ebola has a roughly 90% to 95% kill rate. Untreated syphilis hasa 100% kill rate, but it takes years or decades even. It will kill you, though. Tuberculosis, 60% death rate in 3 years for the more virulent strains, how about 10 years or 15 years? You don't get to cut off at some arbitrary point if we're talking about untreated diseases.

Leprosy doesn't kill in and of itself, but kills the nerves so you lose all feeling and won't notice minor injuries that get infected and will leave you a wreck. Read up on it (if nothing else, than the Covenant books, the descriptions are pretty graphic). It cannot be cured, as far as I know.

AIDS will kill you 100% certainly if untreated, and even treatment just postpones that fate. It's not the AIDS virus itself, but the other stuff that it allows to run rampant in your system, so in effect it's the cause.

Besides, that lymphoma article of yours is utterly irrelevant, because it predicts survival chances with treatment, while the whole goddamn setup in Dom2 is that present-day medical technology is not available, hence no available treatments! What part of this are you too stupid to understand?

But if you really want, I can easily get the opinions of qualified MDs to settle this, so wait over the weekend. We could use professional input here.

Edi