Poll - How frequent do disasters occurr in your campaigns

[Teleklos Archelaou]

That's the question. How often have they occurred in **EB** while you are playing it? You can click as many different options as apply.

[Pharnakes]

Is it just me that can't see the poll?

[Teleklos Archelaou]

The board is weird like that. When you post a poll, the thread appears first, then while you make the poll, it isn't visible yet until you totally finish it (but the thread post is sitting there, visible.). Odd, but the way it works.

[Maeran]

While I'm waiting for the poll, I shall ask.

Do you mean disasters like the Seleukids breaking our alliance to wipe out my Roman army that was in fact campaigning against Carthage in Africa?


Or CTDs?

Edit- Ah, you mean natural disasters.

I've seen several plagues. No storms or floods though. If you're considering tweaking this, is there any way to make them more likely in winter?

[Dumbass]

I have had volcanoes in Southern Italy, but no message popped up, and no lava spewed forth, all I noticed was the sound of destruction, smoke coming out and a drained population.

[Pharnakes]

Yeah same here, though I never noticed the loss of population, though I didn't really look for it, but I've definatley had the screams and roaring nosises.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

The thing is, it seems we can make plagues and volcanic eruptions occur on specific years ("historical disasters"), but storms, random plagues, random volcanic eruptions, floods, and earthquakes are all very very very very rare to nonexistant, and we can't find a way to change that.

It seems like the file that controls that stuff does absolutely nothing - you can totally delete it and it does nothing.

Anyone interested in solving the problems can take a look at the discussion here: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=77756

I'm going to submit a new disasters.tga file with the next build, then post this poll again a couple of months after the release, and see if it has changed at all from what we currently see in the results.

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edit: Yeah, the volcanoes will be fixed - I see that all that takes is repositioning etna's coordinates, and I tried it and it works now. That is a historical volcanic eruption though - one that we set the date for. I wish we could do it for storms and floods and earthquakes too though, but it only works for plagues and volcanoes that way.

[Warmaster Horus]

Yep, I had Dumbass' problem too.
Thing is, it also took away my great general Scipio Asina...
He had just come back from a great conquest of Sicily.
But, oh well.

[Centurio Nixalsverdrus]

Oops - I voted for Earthquake never, but now I recall I once had one. I got a message, and dead soldiers and citizens, but no animation.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Yeah, we can't put coordinates in for that pontic earthquake or the gallic one or iberian one either. But the messages still pop up.

[The Celt]

None, zippo, nada. I think in one of my Arverni campaigns I had a plague but that was about two or three versions ago. So I've never seen any disasters in any of my 8.1v2 games. Its kinda boring really.....

[Redmeth]

I got plagues-a-plenty (5-6) in my Sauromatae campaign and once or twice in my Casse campaign. I've never seen floods or earthquakes though.

[d'Arthez]

I have had floods, and I have had even three different occurances of a plague in a single campaign (non-spy induced). In order to prevent being slaughtered by the Seleukids, I sent out an army of pest-ridden rats .... spies.


But I have not had a single instance of the plague or floods when playing with the Romans.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Well, believe us, we'd love to have more of them or some of them at all. We haven't changed anything we are aware would make a difference, and from talking with other modders it just seems like this is all out of our hands.

[MarcusAureliusAntoninus]

I've seen earthquakes (once maybe twice), plagues (I once used a spy to kill 20,000 people in Antioch with a plague), floods (sometimes cause a bug that prevents you from ever building a tower/fort in the territory it happen, ever again); but I have never seen volcanos or storms.

[Sakkura]

I have had earthquakes a few times, never any message about it though.
I haven't seen any of the others, although it is possible I could have missed a flood if it's "secret" like the earthquakes.

[Underhand]

I've never seen any disasters in EB, although that may be because I've only played beyond 240 with Bactria. I do wonder though why you would want to script historical storms, floods or plagues, given your attitude towards historical determinism in the rest of the mod (e.g. not wanting to script the emergence of Hannibal). I can understand scripting volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, given that they build up over such a long period that I'd expect they'd probably happen again if the period covered by EB was run again, but weather is chaotic and unpredictable even in the short term, and plagues are directly affected by the movements of carriers, among other things. It seems highly doubtful that a historical storm, flood or plague would always happen at a specific time and place.

[abou]

Weather is not really affected by what man does at this point in history (well, not then anyway since man didn't send thousands of ton of CO2 into the air). Pyrrhos conquering Makedonia isn't suddenly going to prevent rain.

Plauge is a different manner. We might try to make it so that if plauge shows up in a certain province it will spread realistically. We might also see if we would want to track outbreaks that start in China, which would be mostly unaffected by events in game, and then spread to Europe. It turns out most terrible diseases in recent times and history originate from China so I think this could work nicely.

[Matic]

I've never had ANY of the natural disasters (storm, earthquake, volcano) but I've had more plagues than you can shake a stick at.

[Thaatu]

I too have had enough plagues for my share, usually two per campaign. I remember seeing a storm as Carthage, and the time when my siege of Messana was lifted by Mount Etna I cannot forget. But floods I haven't seen once in EB, and I had no idea there were earthquakes in RTW...

[Underhand]

Weather is not really affected by what man does at this point in history (well, not then anyway since man didn't send thousands of ton of CO2 into the air). Pyrrhos conquering Makedonia isn't suddenly going to prevent rain.

True, but that's not what I meant. My point is that what we understand about the weather is that it's extremely hard to predict accurately and can change very quickly and unexpectedly. On the other hand, the movement of tectonic plates occurs over decades and isn't really affected by what goes on on the surface of the planet. This means that, the way I see it, running a segment of history over again from a specific moment would probably see earthquakes and volcanic eruptions at similar times and places, but very different weather, just as it would see different people born.

All that said, the activities of man could affect the weather. What if in EB Rome conquers its empire really quickly (which is likely what happens most of the time someone plays as the Romani) and sticks up advanced blacksmiths everywhere and has a population explosion? What if a tribe clears this forest rather than that forest?

Small things in a great enough number (and there definitely are many millions of them happening all the time) could presumably affect the weather somewhat too. Perhaps if I fart in your general direction I might avert the rainstorm we'll be having in six weeks

[blank]

no disasters for me...

too bad, really

[Moros]

The butterfly effect, huh? I think weather could be made random, but eruptions and earthquakes really should be in specific years. Tough in one way it's stupid if you're already knowing a vulcano is going to errupt so that you can move your army temporarly,... Somewhere that would be dull. So at least keep some disasters like the plagues and floods random or something. Tough some could remain to happen on a fixed date, like a large epidemia or soemthing.

[Fondor_Yards]

No quakes, 1-2 storms, a half a dozen or so floods, and more plaques then I can count.

[d'Arthez]

I'd rather have a volcano erupting once over a period of 100 turns, than twice in specific turns. The human player will make plans when he knows when the volcanoes will erupt. The same with earthquakes.

An integral part of historical disasters is that they were not expected. Would the people of Pompeii decide to the same course of inaction if they knew what was going to happen?

I am no expert on floods, but how likely is it that a province on the Iranian plateau (I think it was Gabiene in my game) gets hit by a flood? I would think though, that it would be relatively common for crops to fail, especially when unadvanced farming techniques are used (weather being equal).

[abou]

That's a pretty fair argument, Underhand. Not that I completely agree with it, but a good point made. We'll just have to make them a bit more randomized. And actually, since you mentioned deforestation, that could actually increase the chance of floods without plants to absorb water. I wonder if we can check for settlement size against chances of flooding.

[Centurio Nixalsverdrus]

Weather is not really affected by what man does at this point in history (well, not then anyway since man didn't send thousands of ton of CO2 into the air). Pyrrhos conquering Makedonia isn't suddenly going to prevent rain.

Uh, the Romans for example built mines in basically all of Spain. The pollution (sulphur) resulting from the processing of the ore was so high, that the impact on the climate could be proven by examination of ice cores extracted from the Greenland ice cap. And the same goes with every volcanic outburst in history (last few thousand years).

I am no expert on floods, but how likely is it that a province on the Iranian plateau (I think it was Gabiene in my game) gets hit by a flood?

Hehe - my only flood so far occured in the middle of Mauretania...

Although volcanic eruptions seem quite determined and uneffected by what is happening on the surface, I doubt it could be foreseen exactly. It would be perfect to code it like "... volcanic eruption in Campania somehow between 82BC and 76BC..."

[CountArach]

None of them.

[Captian Cornelius]

I feel sad, I've had RTW for a whole year now I've played a bout an hour a day and I've never seen a storm or earth quake.

[Teleklos Archelaou]

Thanks to the Border Reiver, looks like we will be having random earthquakes in appropriate hotspots in a future build. Probably some more small volcanoes too that randomly have flareups. He posted his work a little while ago on the disasters file and random floods in certain places are possible too.