From: mytelka@codon9.berkeley.edu ()
Newsgroups: rec.games.empire
Subject: Making research meaningful
Date: 7 Oct 1992 18:38:36 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Distribution: world
Reply-To: mytelka@codon9.berkeley.edu ()
NNTP-Posting-Host: codon9.berkeley.edu

Recently, people have been looking for ways to make research more meaningful
in empire (for example, requiring it for nukes, as in Chainsaw). This seems
to me a rather wrong-headed approach; one could just as easily say that
research should also be required for planes, boats, etc.

The most reasonable way seems to be just fixing the empire code such that
research, as it is presently defined, becomes a necessary commodity. The
obvious way to do this is to make plague a lot more than a minor nuissance.
I believe that the following modifications would accomplish this.

  (1) Fix it so that all contact with afflicted sectors spread plague. The
      fact that distribution doesn't do so must be a bug. I would want even
      people/commodities that move through a plague sector without actually
      stopping in it to spread plague. This is a lot more realistic; plague
      was one of the most devastating diseases in history, killing over 2/3
      of Europe in the 6th and 14th centuries, for example. And a country with
      no research should be in a similar danger.

  (2) None of this plague will be gone in a few updates crap. Once plague
      starts, it will be endemic in local wildlife and will last unless some
      expensive, high-tech eradication scheme is used. Plague killed
      20,000,000 people as late as the beginning of this century, and is
      still endemic in a number of areas (including California ground 
      squirrels, for example, which started a much hushed up plague in
      San Francisco in around 1905).

  (3) Plague stricken sectors should do no work. Planes cannot fly out of them,
      things cannot be made or mined in them, even banks won't produce interest.      People have other things on their mind. In fact, to make it easier to
      keep track of, since it's rediculous that there's no way to find out
      now, plague sectors should have there own designation: perhaps q
      for quarantined. This would work particularly well with the TAMU mod
      that allows you to see what sector type you're moving through: you can
      stop when you enter a q by mistake instead of spreading plague further.
      This will also make the new and improved plague not lead to deadly
      sneak counterattacks, where you infect sectors that an enemy is attacking.

  (4) Even if you're completely careful, there should be some chance of plague
      spreading to adjacent sectors each update. As rats run away, or people
      flee, they will spread the plague.

  (5) Finally, if plauge is to be so deadly, there should be some way to get
      rid of it. This should be quite expensive, though perhaps there should
      be a sliding scale based on research level. Perhaps a neutron bomb
      equivalent would do the trick, killing everything living in the sector.
      However, I would like the solution to (at least usually) be based on
      research, allowing the bomb only as a very expensive rapid solution
      in extremity (ie your airport has been affected; if you "cure" it, it
      will take an update and then you'll have to build the sector back up
      from a q, but if you nuke it, you can explore back into it and reuse
      it immediately).

Dan Mytelka, aka as Langerhans the mad bio-scientist (mytelka@mendel.berkeley.edu)

PS For anyone interested in a good history of the plague, try Fleas, Rats and Man: (rest of title forgotten). There's a lot of great stuff in there, like how
the Black Death started in Europe in 1347 or so when Mongols bombarded a
beseiged town in the Crimea with the bodies of people who had died of the
plague.

Newsgroups: rec.games.empire