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heardie
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I have already finished a prelimanry Disease Model.
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Disease Model
One of the most important aspects, I believe, is to have a disease system, that is realistic enough for a great game, yet simply enough for everyone to be able to understand it. The system should not rule over the entire game, IMHO, as there are more important things to concentrate on, but even with this said….
Why have diseases:
The problem with earlier civilization games is that they all fail to realize actual events, which cause actual problems. In Civ and Civ2 both by Microprose, there aren't any plagues. In real life, however, the Bubonic Plague swept through Europe killing over 50 million people. Smallpox swept through the Americans after being introduced by Cortez's men leaving only 10% of the
population alive. Even as recently as WWI over a quarter of the world's people were infected by a pandemic of influenza. Malaria, AIDS, and a whole plethora of others both new and ancient have been a boon of civilizations throughout history. This absolutely MUST be a factor in game design, especially in that it provides a totally new and different enemy for players to deal with. This would provide an ultimate solution to a host of problems. First, ICS would become
suicide (by facilitating the rapid spread of infection). Also, military oriented civs would be caught offguard with an inability to deal with the new terrors.
Diseases affect different people in different ways. Each disease needs to have the following characteristics:
Infectiousness: 1-10 with 1 being E-coli which doesn't spread on it's own and 10 being Influenza which is airborne. This is the rate at which the disease is spread and generally modifies the quarantine variable.
Incubation: 1-10 1 being several years and 10 being just a few days. 1 diseases would spread throughout the whole population before any notice is given to the player and would take a while before the effects take shape while 10 diseases can wipe out whole squares before getting a chance to spread.
Mortality: 1-10 with 1 meaning only a few physically weak people might die and 10 meaning a 100% mortality rate, no survivors. (not necessarily everyone gets sick, of course)
Cureability: 1-10 with 1 being a simple parasite that can be washed off, 2 is a parasite that requires some special treatment, 3 is a bacteria that can be treated with herbs, 10 is a retro-virus for which there is no cure at present. Certain advances can adjust this number- the discovery of penicillin etc. With new strains, the higher number here indicates resistance to earlier treatments.
Of course these numbers can change, after x number of turns treating "disease c5" with penicillin, it's curability number would be raised by 1 in a new strain and renamed "disease c6" NOTE: Except for some, i.e. HIV, these are all based, on when the disease first appeared, i.e. Smallpox is very preventable now, but in the early years, it was much deadlier.
HIV:
Infectiousness = 3
Incubation = 1
Mortality = 10
Cureability = 10
Influenza:
Infectiousness = 10
Incubation = 6
Mortality = 1-4(var)
Cureability = 9
Smallpox:
Infectiousness = 7
Incubation = 5
Mortality = 9
Curability = 6
Pneumonia:
Infectiousness = 0
Incubation = 6
Mortality = 8
Curability = 6
Cholera:
Infectiousness = 5 (This number may need to be higher. The disease is spread
by water contamination.)
Incubation = 7
Mortality = 9
Curability = 3
These are only a few possibilities. Based on a civilizations medical knowledge index the chance of detecting increases, mortality rate decreases and the number you get for being able to cure a disease increases. The perfect example of this is Smallpox, which is these days 99.9% eradicated. In fact the only known storage of Smallpox is being kept, in case the disease ever surfaces again. This was meant to be destroyed last year, which would have got rid of it forever, but they decided to hold onto it for a year or two longer.
Each square will have a negative value by default, which means that there are no diseases in that square. If it does have a disease than it is a disease like AI, or B3.
TileA: Dis,-
TileB: Dis,-
TileC: Dis,A3
TileD: Dis,A3,B2,F1
TileE: Dis,-whereas in gameplay "Disease A" might be named "Smallpox", and three is the particular strain of that disease. Any undected diseases would have an X% chance of spreading to an adjacent square depending on infrastructure, that chance would be reduced by half if that square is quarantined the same turn it is detected and reduced by half again each turn after (after it's already too late, of course =). Cities connected with active trade’s routes would have a 99% chance of spreading the disease.
Aqueducts will reduce the chance of an outbreak occurring on that square by 50%, but will facilitate a spread by doubling the chance if an outbreak does occur.
Any infected units (unmarked during gameplay) automatically spread the disease to everything it touches. Imagine the terror in a player when he receives the message "You Legion has been eradicated by the Plague" when that player realizes that same legion has been through the heart of his empire. Consequently, there needs to be a time lapse between infection and detection.
In addition to this, there can be a section of your research, where if you have a certain disease, then there can be an option to research a cure/vaccine for the disease, i.e. what is happening with AIDS and Cancer at the moment. Then after a certain number of years, you will have discovered a cure. Now this leaves you with a few opportunities. You could use the disease
for biological warfare, knowing that if your enemies reciprocate with the same disease you will have a vaccine/cure to it. Alternatively, you could sell it to the rest of the world, which would be a handy benefit to your wallet! The price the rest of the world is willing to pay would depend on the mortality of the disease. A cure/vaccine, for something like AIDS, would sell for much
more than a cure for the common cold, although both would be handy! The final
option, the ‘gentleman’ option would be to give it away to the rest of the world, which should give you a bonus to your reputation. Just on reputation I believe it should be on a scale of 1-100, with 1 being you are the nicest person, and 100 being you are a sadistic bastard. If you give away the cure/vaccine than you will be a few points taken away from the scale. In fact, I might start
a whole reputation thread later!
Civ A’s immunity to certain diseases would be different to Civ B’s. Let’s set up a hypothetical:
Civ A = Romans
Civ B = Indians
The Indian Unit has a bad case of smallpox. He meets the Roman unit, who exchange words, but then return to their own civilizations. Let’s say the Roman goes back to Rome, which has around 1 million people.
Smallpox is a deadly disease with the following characteristics:
Infectiousness = 7
Incubation = 5
Mortality = 9
Curability = 6
As the Infectiousness is 7, than 700,000 people of Rome will get the disease. The amount of time it takes to get the disease will start with a figure, and then decrease the next turn, i.e.:
1st Turn back – 100,000
2nd Turn back – 300,000
3rd Turn back – 100,000
4th Turn back – 75,000
5th Turn back – 50,000
6th Turn back – 25,000 and etc.
Out of the 700,000 that contracted the disease than 40% of them will be cured, (100%-60%). This leaves us with 700,000 – 280,000, or 420,000. Then out of that 90% of them will die, or 378,000.
In a case like this, there is also the possibility of a unit of one Roman city, not knowing he had smallpox, entering another city, and setting off the disease in there.
There will be certain things that the player can do to curb this. As the Incubation is 5, then a certain period of time will pass, say for example two turns, before the player is aware of the epidemic. Then he has the option of doing something about it, i.e. quarantining all the un-effected people, which can help to stem the flow of this disease, or researching for a cure/vaccine,
or even buying one, if someone has discovered it. . This is just an extreme case that is an example of an epidemic. In some cases only a percentage of all this will happen. This could be determined by a random generator, and/or affected by sanitation levels in the city. It can also be affected by the player’s immunity to certain diseases. If the city had had smallpox before, than he would have say, for example, a 50% immunity to it, so then the effect would be lowered by 50% and by all the other modifiers.
Some Civ’s would be affected by disease different to other Civ’s would be affected by the same disease. Also at the beginning of the game, some Civ’s would have certain disease that other Civ’s wouldn’t have, like the tropical cities, would often get malaria, while one’s located not near rivers wouldn’t.
Here's another thing, Influenza always mutates. So every year even though there may be some immunities developed by earlier strains, each new strain makes prior immunities useless. To model this, diseases could be named "A1" or "A2" indicating two different strains of the same disease. While a prior infection would provide some help, maybe a 10% bonus, it would be of little use.
In the modern years, there can be research centers built in each city that would allow you to research for cures into diseases, without actually using it as your technology that you are pursing.
Another idea: Perhaps there can be funding. I don’t know what we are planning on doing on corporations, but maybe if you are discovering an cure for cancer, then a corporation can put in funding for it, and then if it is discovered they get some sort of recognition. Don’t know if this will work under a corporation system.
Most of this is not my ideas. Some of it is, but there are some credits to people that need to go out:
Guildmaster – he started the original thread and this, and some of the ideas are his, or have evoled from his ideas.
amjayee – another forum poster, and one of the main programmers for OC3.
Toubabo_Koomi – who is working on the Clash, disaster and disease models.
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that's it so far
How many diesease shoould we have? And what diseases?
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15-07-2000 05:25
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