The Plague Mega-Event

I was playing DA yesterday and my game was going nowhere. I was on a tiny map with 6 opponets (Painful I think) and the writting was on the wall for me because I had the fewest colonies and I was grunting just to do things like researching laser II.

Anyways, Then this event happened, which said there was a plague. And that populations would slowely die until a cure was researched. That was real clever. Integrating the tech tree for events. Anyways, my population was crashing faster than you can say pets.com

So, knowing that it would take me 86 weeks to research the tech I tried anyways. Watching my population fall, fall, fall, fall. But, A mircle happend! I guess the plague deaths are are some kind of log function because the fewer people I had, the fewer died. And because research is not population dependant, I was able to brut my way to the cure. Needless to say, my next tech was planet invasion and I was taking planets that only had 14 Million (not billion, million) colonists on them. I was loading trasports with only 40 million and sending them off.

Three AI observations about the plague:


-Global economy suffers so much that unless you can get the cure soon you're a goner. You'll have less than 1 billion on each planet in less than 20 weeks. What saved me was that I was the Torians.

-None of the AI's researched the cure! The ai was on "bright." Would they if the AI setting was up more? They sure did want the cure! It had some real weight on the trading scale. I could have traded the cure for almost anything.

-The Torians and their 4X birth rate. I don't call it a cheat or an exploit because it is a race ability. But there is a period where the population gets so low for the torians that approval gets to be 100% and when approval is 100% they get that mighty 400% birth rate. They actually see a birth rate increase until they get enough people that approval becomes 99%. But this is planet specific, their colonies that didn't have moral buildings suffered like the rest of the universe.


I really liked this event. It definatly changed the status-qou in the universe, which is what, I guess, they are suppose to do.

110,062 views 9 replies
Reply #1 Top
The AI in the last public build still hadn't been fully updated to address mega-events properly. It should be better in the next one.
Reply #2 Top
Ok so I was playing another game this morning when the same plague event happend. All the same settings. And this time 3 of the 4 nations started researching "plague cure". It would have taken them a very long time. 114 weeks or something. So I just finished them off.

So I want to clarify that the ai did research plague cure this time. I took some screens, but I can't find them. Anybody know the default screen save spot?
Reply #3 Top
Anybody know the default screen save spot?


Pressing printscreen just copies a screenshot to the clipboard. Unless you use a third party screenshot utility such as fraps, you need to go and paste it into a graphics program manually.
Reply #4 Top
mega events suck especially wen ur tech research is very slow but the ai is retarded wen it come to researching mega event techs.
Reply #5 Top
I was going to post this topic myself today. I, too, encountered the plague, researced the cure and conquered the galaxy as all other populations dwindled. None of the other civ's researched the cure or offered to trade for it from me (not that I would have given it up).

Perhaps based on a civ's diplomacy or tech level, the AI could decide to research or trade for it, or both. And how does one steal technology in this version?
Reply #6 Top
I've just seen my first plague event & finished researching the cure.

Has anyone noticed whether your diplo status declines if you keep the cure to yourself? It seems like at least the "good" AIs should be more motivated to hate you the longer they suffer the plague while watching your people recover and move on.

p.s. I also wonder if the plague event could and should be tweaked to happen only well after the new-fangled colony rush is over. My current Huge map still has some prime real estate that I can see and a modest chunk is still in my FoW.
Reply #7 Top
In 1A, I didn't seem to see any (Tough) AI hostility when I kept the cure until shortly before someone else researched.

I spent *months* growing rapidly while the AIs actually fought amongst themselves, wasting precious population on troop ships, and I did indeed make out like a bandit b/c the AIs seemed to give up colonizing.

Has anyone gone through a Plague event yet in Beta 2?
Reply #8 Top
I just had the plague event and the ai was researching the cure    apparantly the event works well now
Reply #9 Top
It sure researches the Plague event, but it didn't research the Disease event (the one that lowers morale or something).

Not sure if that changed in 2a yet.