Suggestion: diseases - more transparency, more options

[Limdood]

A little preparation for my suggestion:

In A15:
disease was treatable by medicine.  Medicine was easily obtained, plentiful, cheap, and stockpilable.  Disease was not a threat, it was an annoyance.

In A16:
Disease is usually treatable by modern meds, always by glittermeds, but a serious threat with herbal.  Herbal meds are very easy to get, modern meds aren't too hard to get, are cheap, and plentiful, and glittermeds are rare and expensive.  Disease is expensive for glittermeds, risky for regular meds, and deadly to herbal meds.  Penoxycyline is introduced as a tradeoff-style way to deal with diseases (treat no one, treat your doctor all the time cheaply, or treat everyone at GREAT expense) - but because disease actually hits days before the "disease event," penoxycyline is misunderstood, as well as the fact that complete avoidance of an event leaves you never sure if you prevented the event or just luck made the disease not hit.

I think that the new state of diseases in A16 is better than A15:
1) disease is a threat now, where it almost never was in A15
2) Disease now has several levels of distinct treatment quality, finally separating tribal from survivor starts (sorry folks, if something is a threat to survivor, it needs to be deadly to tribal, and if its a threat to tribal, its likely only a minor annoyance to survivor)
3) there is a preventative measure with a cost/availability vs. reward

That being said, there could be a few things that would further improve disease - making them more manageable without necessarily making them easier or harder.  Here are my proposals :

1) make disease mechanics and medicine more transparent in the game. 
           Rate of disease progression and immunity gain would be really helpful for players to know if they're on track or if the patient is doomed.  This helps make informed decisions both in the current game and in future playthroughs.  Informed decisions with measurable, predictable effects help to make a game more fulfilling.  The risk is still there.  A player can still think "well, he's looking ok, maybe i can try a regular med instead of my last glittermed" and then realize the treatment quality just didn't cut it, and you'll fall short.  At least you made an informed choice and learned the results of your choice in a timely manner.

2) More clarity in penoxycyline effects.
        This involves letting the player know when disease WOULD have hit a pawn, but was prevented by penoxycyline.  Players LOVE knowing that their choices made a difference.  By leaving it ambiguous whether disease was prevented by immunity or just didn't hit, the players never know if their actions mattered.  It also involves letting the player know if their taking penoxycyline was too late.  If penoxycyline was taken AFTER the disease was contracted (hidden) but BEFORE the notification of disease, then the penoxycyline would not grant immunity (though it might boost immunity).  Players need to know this or it leads to a fundamentally unintuitive system of disease prevention.  Possible methods are a notification of WHEN the disease was actually contracted (date/time) on the notification or health tab and/or the disease notification saying that while the pawn is under penoxycyline effects, it wasn't taken in time.  None of this changes how penoxycyline works, it just makes it clearer to the players.

3) Add a low-cost, high risk, high success option disease treatment (not prevention)
        Add or modify a drug that boosts blood filtration or some other immunity gain metric (in a clear, easily understood way), but is highly addictive, and could cause overdoses or permanent damage, just like the current risks of Yayo and Flake.  This gives players the choice of saving their pawns, but at risk of addiction and maybe eventually long-term problems like carcinoma or asthma or something.  This could even be an easily obtainable tribal remedy, allowing tribes to survive disease, but at SERIOUSLY more risk than survivor-type colonies.

None of these options fundamentally change the deadliness of disease (except possibly the last one, indirectly), they just give players the knowledge or informed options to deal with disease without blundering around, guessing at game mechanics, or misunderstanding less intuitive aspects.


Would love community thoughts on these proposals.  Agree or disagree as you see fit.  For the purposes of a clear and concise suggestion thread, please keep discussion limited to these points.  I'm NOT discussing a complete overhaul of the random "event based" diseases.  Needed or not, if that's what you want, make a different suggestion thread about that.  This is just for the 3 minor changes suggested above.

[TheMeInTeam]

"Deadly" is fine.

Having no realistic option you can possibly take if you get x instance in the game is not fine.

At minimum, the grace time needs to be longer.  The reason is the same as the reason for the existence of the passive cooler.

[Limdood]

"Deadly" is fine.

Having no realistic option you can possibly take if you get x instance in the game is not fine.

At minimum, the grace time needs to be longer.  The reason is the same as the reason for the existence of the passive cooler.

thats a totally different suggestion.  I'll gladly weigh in with my thoughts on that issue, but in its own suggestion thread, not changing the direction of this one.

[cultist]

I don't think introducing a bunch of new items, mechanics and stats that revolve around disease is the way to go. Like I've mentioned earlier, the game is not about overcoming disesase but because it's by far the deadliest event in A16 (especially early and especially with tribals) you have to plan everything around it, which is dumb. Minor adjustments to either medicine or disesase progression is all that's needed really.

[TheMeInTeam]

"Deadly" is fine.

Having no realistic option you can possibly take if you get x instance in the game is not fine.

At minimum, the grace time needs to be longer.  The reason is the same as the reason for the existence of the passive cooler.

thats a totally different suggestion.  I'll gladly weigh in with my thoughts on that issue, but in its own suggestion thread, not changing the direction of this one.

If you're going to pull a line like:

(sorry folks, if something is a threat to survivor, it needs to be deadly to tribal, and if its a threat to tribal, its likely only a minor annoyance to survivor)
3) there is a preventative measure with a cost/availability vs. reward

Then either that part of your OP is off topic or my response is not off topic.  It can't be only one of those.  Using false statements as the basis of a suggestion weakens the case for the suggestion as it influences the present mechanic, and slipping that in if it isn't relevant isn't useful either.

Your current assertion there is false.  In A16, there is a condition under which there is no consistently viable preventative measure and no cost/availability vs reward tradeoff evaluation the player can make.  That condition is relatively common (early disease) and devastating to one of the standard starting scenarios (lost tribe) without counterplay. 

"Don't pick this start or you will die at random no matter what you choose" is not a valid gameplay choice.  It is not strategy of cost/availability.  I agree that the game effects of disease being more transparent would be useful, especially a more simple presentation of information so the player can evaluate what he could have done better.

But that still shouldn't have an answer of "nothing".

[Limdood]

you're picking the "hard" option (tribal) and blaming it on the RNG instead of taking the steps to prevent it.  Day 2 or 3 send a pair of pawns to the nearest outlander town with your 200 silver, jade knife, and any pemmican and leather you've managed to scrape up in that time.  within 15 hexes and you're back by day 5-7 - with a few modern medicine, penoxycyline, and possibly some modern bullet weaponry.

since you need normal meds or better, you HAVE to trade to get it eventually. 
Having meds on day 5-7, combined with adjacent food/med stockpiles and wood or concrete floored rooms and doctors drafted and ready to treat and in a good mood and you've got a good fighting chance to survive.  Yes, your doctors could all get diseased at once, but 6 penoxycyline on day 7 means you can keep your best doctor plague free from day 10 to 40

Could the timetable use an overhaul?  Probably.  I haven't gotten an early tribal disease before day 10 yet, which was survivable. 

On the other hand, I see a potential reason WHY medicine was adjusted, and it makes sense to me and I agree with it.  Whether diseases stay in the state they are now OR NOT, my suggestions in this thread are meant to improve transparency in mechanics and options for the player, without trivializing the event or changing difficulty at all.  A quality of life change, NOT a balance change suggestion.  If you want to suggest a balance change to diseases, suggest away.