[Suggestion] More factors to events

Many events are currently not influenced by policies and stats that you would expect them to be. In particular, events taken from Democracy 2 are not affected by new features in Democracy 3. Here are a few I think need updating:

• Disease Cured!: This event is not affected by private healthcare at all, only state healthcare funding.
• Church Attacked!: Not influenced by ethnic tension, just crime rate.
• Embassy Attacked!: Not influenced by foreign relations.
• Bird Flu Outbreak: Not influenced by any factor. Should probably be influenced by population health, private healthcare or the public health service.
• Pension Fund Scandal: This event should be positively influenced by private pensions. With mostly state-run pensions, a scandal like this isn’t as big of a deal.
• School Shooting: Perhaps this event should be influenced by the population’s health as well, rather than only crime and police-related factors. Proper provision of mental health care is likely to reduce school shootings.

All good ideas, but I’d add that Bird Flu should be negatively influenced specifically by State Health Services, and positively influenced by air travel (and possibly tourism).

The air travel thing should be obvious–it’s the main way the real-world bird flu spread.

My reasoning for limiting the negative influence to the State Health Service is that dealing with an epidemic is one of the things a state health service is uniquely suited for over a privatised health system: the government is massively incentivised to stop a pandemic outbreak, so they’ll provide the vaccine for free, while the private health care system is incentivised to charge for their vaccine. The important thing for stopping a pandemic, though, is getting the vaccine to the large numbers of poor and low-income people, who might not be able or willing to spend money on it.

Upside, it provides a noteworthy distinction between state and private health care, which D3 largely lacks. (Except that state health care costs money, of course.)

I’m not sure the general health of the population would matter for this event; it’s not like cancer, where you benefit from regular screenings and preventative care. It’s a pandemic that pops up out of nowhere without warning, and can’t be treated until it appears, at which point a specific vaccine has to be created to cover it.

On a whim, I decided to check what National Service does, and it turns out it does almost nothing. The only event it contributes to is the Military Whistleblower event. Presumably, it should also contribute to all the other events that Military Spending contribute to:

• Embassy Attacked
• Fishing Boat Sunk
• Island Invaded
• Pirates Capture Oil Tanker
• Terrorists Captured

Notably, it also doesn’t reduce terrorism or improve security, or affect Cyber Warfare. The Cyber Warfare and security ones are probably reasonable, but surely having a larger number of well-trained reservists would be useful against terrorism.

Conscripts typically don’t serve in foreign countries, though. It might be helpful for National Service to reduce terrorism, but maybe not some of the other events.

Thankyou for these posts they are incredibly helpful, and I find it hard to argue with any of them, and will look at implementing all of these changes for 1.10. I especially like the idea of bird flu and air travel. For some reason I have 12 monkeys in my head now
Patch 1.09 was basically a simple technical patch to introduce steam workshop, version 1.10 is likely to be heavily focused on balancing and tweaking stuff exactly as this thread suggests.

True, but I was thinking that having conscripts available for domestic defense might free up more of the proper armed forces for foreign conflicts. As in, you don’t need to keep as many of your troops in your own country for national defense if you know there’s a few million reasonably-trained conscripts you can call up in the unlikely event of a domestic attack.

No problem. I was thinking, rather than just not having an event like Bird Flu appear if you’ve got a strong public health service, it would be more interesting if it did appear but the effect was reduced or mitigated by your health service, and the text of the event dialog mentioned this. It’s a feedback thing, it tells you WHY the Bird Flu pandemic did or didn’t happen, and which of your policies were responsible. As it stands, I’m keeping (e.g.) my military funded because I vaguely know there are some negative events that can occur if it isn’t, but there’s nothing reinforcing this decision. It never pops up and says, “hey, some jerks tried to invade your island, but it turns out that’s where you were keeping the supersoldiers and mecha suits (which are presumably what you’re buying with all these billions of defense dollars).” And if I don’t fund it, it never pops up to ominously tell me there’s rumours of an impending attack for which we are woefully ill-prepared.

This would require a small re-engineering of your events system, though; not just “these factors affect the probability of an event occuring,” but also “these factors affect the severity of the consequence.” If severity < 0.05f the event doesn’t happen, if severity > 0.75f the event happens full-force, otherwise it has a reduced effect (which could be implemented just by pre-applying a few turns worth of decay using the existing formula), and each of these three possibilities could have separate event text.

In this system, Bird Flu’s probability would be affected mainly by air travel and tourism (and maybe the global economy, representing poor countries cutting their own public health services during a recession), and only slightly by very high public health (assuming the “Health” simulation object also represents “public health education,” so your citizens know not to lick railings in airports), but its severity would be affected mainly by the public health service. So, loads of government-funded medical research facilities and a vast infrastructure for manufacturing and distributing vaccines doesn’t stop the bird flu from happening, but it does limit the impact it has to a couple photogenic poor kids for the TV news to fawn over, rather than 60% of my adult workforce.

I’m, uhh, sure redesigning the remaining 70 events for this new system in this level of detail would be a… trivial task… Ahem.

Although, to be honest, if you ever decide to commit to deepening the complexity of the event system like this, I’d personally rather see the events become something we actively deal with, like what they’re suggesting in this thread. I’m of the opinion that random events that are just “something terrible happened!” with no ability to interact are kinda boring. Makes me feel like the game’s just kicking me in the shins and giggling. I’d at least like to be asked in which shin I’d like to be kicked.

(Incidentally, the best random events system I’ve seen is in Endless Space. It’s brilliant. Each event has a “greedy,” “selfless,” and “aggressive” response. And some of them are galaxy-wide, so every player gets to pick a response, which sets up an amazing prisoner’s dilemma situation where if everyone picks the selfless response, everyone benefits, and if most players pick the aggressive response, everyone suffers, but if only one or two players picked the aggressive response, they benefit enormously while weakening their selfless or greedy opponents. I actually applauded when I first saw the Galactic Plague event.)