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.
