Soren Johnson has published a new blog post, this time about “events”, have a read here.
Soren this time writes about how the random events in Civ4 were a necessesity to allow scripted actions happen, and that they were missed from Civ2, since they allowed great story mods there. He didn’t want to repeat them in Old World, since they were basically not diverse enough. In Old World he rather went for a system, which would make your leader and the foreign relations more personal, allowing you to better relate to other leaders and their actions.
An excerpt:
“Thus, I had the basic blueprint for an event system – it would be a virtual deck of event cards which each had a potential trigger (such as meeting a new nation), a set of requirements (a childless leader), and possible effects (a foreign spouse). When a trigger occurs, the game finds all events in the deck valid for the current game state and then chooses one randomly based on the weight, probability, and priority values of each event. The backbone of the event system are the subjects, which are a set of game objects randomly chosen for each potential event. Subjects can be anything from a character to a city to a family and even to a law or technology. Each subject can have multiple tests to find the perfect one – an adult child of the leader who is NOT the heir but IS a bloodthirsty schemer is a good example of a very specific subject that might mean bad things for the current heir. Further, the system can test for relationships between subjects, such as two nations that are at war with each other, the religion of your spouse, or a character who is vengeful against another. The event options can affect any of the subjects and can also be unlocked based on the current ratings or traits of the leader.”
Discuss this blog post in our forum here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/soren-johnson-on-events.673515/