cradle barbs and plagues

Boney · April 8, 2003, 18:04

Okay okay I am back to my old fave, cradle, but a couple of things have me a little mystified.

Barbs: Have barb levels been set that as soon as I have the upper hand massive stacks will come and take my cities? In the early game I like to build up armies of warriors and slingers and then attack my orange neighbor (always seems to be the oranges that find me first). The current game I have just taken babylon and the next turn a stack of 12 (yes 12) barbs takes my capitol. Luckily I had saved a couple of turns be4, so I went back and turned on cheat mode to see if the barb army really existed. There were no barbs of a threatening level nearby, so what happened? Does the game have some sort of trigger that will set up barbs if it thinks the human is getting too powerful?

Plagues: I think that something is amiss, unless there is knocking down of a human too powerful in the early game programmed in. I managed to retake my capitol of the game spoken about above and also took nearly all of the enemies cities. This seemed to trigger another anomaly, Plagues. I realise that plagues are part of the cradle game, but my 8 cities are having plagues every 10 to 15 turns. Man enough is enough, I realise that this is to hold back the human player, but it a real pisser that my cities get hit so often. I thought that it happened less often than this. So where can I adjust the frequency of these plagues? I remember that previously I could limit the plagues to only my oldest cities, but I can't seem to do that now, as disasters is a slic file and I can't get into that.

Game above. Very hard. UGmap. Barbs top settting.

child of Thor · April 8, 2003, 18:23

Alot has to do with your game settings i think. Hexagonain or someone close to the files will give you more detail.
As to the plagues, i've noticed it too and i'm wondering if it was one of the things that changed with the later releases. I think it is very much tied into you population size and unhapiness levels due to pollution, i got around it by making sure i had built all the city improvements to deal with overcrowding.
Maybe take the barb setting down one level and see how it plays?

Immortal Wombat · April 9, 2003, 04:43

Everyone hates the plagues... Hex did tone them down in later releases, so they only take out 1/8 the population, but I think there may be an error in the code which makes every city affected, rather than a random sample of them as it should have been.
I think Peter Triggs did a new version of that function which played a whole lot better. Can't find it at the moment...

Anyway in either version, the following buildings help prevent plagues: Apothecary, Physician, Drug Store, Hospital.

Zaphod Beeblebrox · April 10, 2003, 05:54

what me did disable plagues in cradle was not the constant loss of pop which can be lived with, but the fact, that if you are playing with cityexpansion (as i always do) and plagues you will soon end up with a ring of dead citytiles around your towns which makes you almost incapable of building or researching anything or even just feeding your people.

Boney · April 12, 2003, 09:53

round about 500bc the barbs pretty much disappeared and the plague frequency died down.

So I am wondering if the massive increase at first was 'cos I was getting too close to the AI civs, and needed to be knocked down?

Is that right?

Immortal Wombat · April 14, 2003, 16:53

That won't affect the plague frequency. I think the only variable that affects them is the game level you play.