What are some Plague strategies you have that work?

[jpcerutti]

Besides a mod, an edit, or changing the starting setting - I have an existing game that I am trying to play that got "updated" in the midst of playing it. Near as I can tell building a sick house/hospital does next to nothing and my vassals are completely clueless for dealing with, pathfinding, AND holding events in the midst of smallpox.

I have had some limited success by relocating my capitol far from rivers and the sea, better yet with impenetrable mountains blocking access from some sides (I like Iberia and Toledo is working as a physical limiter... kinda...).

Another thing that 'helps' is keeping a war justification in my back pocket and promptly declaring it when a 'NOW mandatory knight' vassal decides to hold an event in his plague ridden lands to immediately cancel his idiocy.

Lastly, by scraping up every last warm body I can find and packing them into my holdings, I can have somebody, ANYBODY, survive a plague but I have an insane amount (like 400 people!) packed into my capitol and I pause the game once a year to marry EVERYBODY in my realm. If you're over 16 and not married to somebody it's only because they died and I haven't seen you lately. I no longer care about compatibility or what traits they have. Can you reproduce? Will you join my court? those are the only two questions I have. They are going to die from Typhus or something long before they become rivals and try to murder each other anyway. Got the wandering exclamation mark? Time for you to marry into a city holding.

Worst part is none of these work well. What are some other strategies I may try?

[Half-lidded Bruiser]

Install a mod, or start a new game with a weaker epidemic setting.
"Nooooo, I said those are not options!"
k

[jpcerutti]

Originally posted by Half-lidded Bruiser:

Install a mod, or start a new game with a weaker epidemic setting.
"Nooooo, I said those are not options!"
k

If'n I'm gonna cheese, another option would be to regularly save and simply restart/reload from before the plague I don't want happens (they are random) - but I AM more looking for coping strategies than eliminating them from the game. :)

[TiberiusGaben]

why do i keep seeing posts like this . ive lost one guy to a plague . just isolate capital and yourself do this till its gone . who cares if your vassals/peasants die

[wei270]

Originally posted by TiberiusGaben:

why do i keep seeing posts like this . ive lost one guy to a plague . just isolate capital and yourself do this till its gone . who cares if your vassals/peasants die

i think it is too frequent, and it resets all your country development.

[jpcerutti]

Originally posted by TiberiusGaben:

why do i keep seeing posts like this . ive lost one guy to a plague . just isolate capital and yourself do this till its gone . who cares if your vassals/peasants die

Well, I care. They're family and friends. Not always your favorite uncle or the smartest family member, and sure, sometimes they murder each other AND sleep with their children but they're MY bunch of incestuous cannibal murderers that start wars they can't possibly win.

I'd like a big enough piece of land to hold the title of Emperor, *I* can survive (well, not always *me* but somebody in my house will). Just like we developed strategies and workarounds for inheritance issues we will develop workarounds and strategies for plagues. Just locking the door and going full survivalist sounds boring to me.

[Tragopan]

I know you don't want to mod the game or alter the game settings to find a solution but the unfortunate truth is that PDX needs to fix plagues before you can play comfortably that way.

Right now they're way over-tuned. On normal settings the world will remain undeveloped and you will have endless plagues. To get a more realistic experience I recommend setting plague frequency to Very Rare and deadliness to Apocolyptic. In this way you'll get the experience of Plagues and be wary of them but not be spammed by new plagues and deaths and constant de-development every few months.

I don't know if the issue is with PDX overweighing the modifiers for plague, a bug with how they're generated or if plague resistance isn't actually doing anything but it's clear that Plagues are not working as intended.

[Karsh]

Originally posted by wei270:

Originally posted by TiberiusGaben:

why do i keep seeing posts like this . ive lost one guy to a plague . just isolate capital and yourself do this till its gone . who cares if your vassals/peasants die

i think it is too frequent, and it resets all your country development.

then set them on almost never , you can set up the amount of how dealy and how many times they come and spread

[jpcerutti]

Originally posted by Tragopan:

I know you don't want to mod the game or alter the game settings to find a solution but the unfortunate truth is that PDX needs to fix plagues before you can play comfortably that way.

Right now they're way over-tuned. On normal settings the world will remain undeveloped and you will have endless plagues. To get a more realistic experience I recommend setting plague frequency to Very Rare and deadliness to Apocolyptic. In this way you'll get the experience of Plagues and be wary of them but not be spammed by new plagues and deaths and constant de-development every few months.

I don't know if the issue is with PDX overweighing the modifiers for plague, a bug with how they're generated or if plague resistance isn't actually doing anything but it's clear that Plagues are not working as intended.

I think their intention was to limit the number of character portraits/people and the levels of development from getting too high too fast (and control midgame crashing, framerate loss, and easy dominance by players) - and in that form they do sort of work in a backhanded way. Kinda like the AI never marrying anyone beyond location holders/nobility and not building much works for limiting both of the mechanic issues after a fashion. That way AI doesn't have to get tweaked or get a programmed advantage to keep it competitive... and players can continue to marry everybody in their realm and build tall if they want to.

What I'm experimenting with now is trying to flip it and use plagues to advantage. IF they're going to exist you should theoretically be able to spread plagues yourself.

Have limited success with marrying people into households of frenemies that have various diseases. Just like great pox sometimes presents as lover's pox before it goes full blown I think the rest of the plagues should have a brief incubation period where you could send those people out as biological warfare. Dismissing infected people is too random to be an effective targeting method - sort of like the event where your rival catapults the pox victim over your walls.

I also think you should be able to spread plagues with an army. Your army can get infected and take losses - you should be able to both spread that plague directly by moving that army to an uninfected location and siegeing AND by siegeing lands around the edges of plague lands stressing them. That would be an actual use for large armies of levies.

What seems to be working best is plague as a siege defense. If my castles are defensible for a fair amount of time, and I form my army somewhere free from plague and steer clear of those lands, the AI isn't smart enough to steer clear of the plague and will defeat itself more often than not by disease attrition. By careful pathing and willingness to lose a sacrificial smaller army of levies I can bait a much larger foe AI into doing stupid things to lose. They definitely need to tweak the AI when it comes to plagues.

[Germaine's Bra]

If you want to cut plagues,

Do not build High development (this sucks for gold)

Build Hospices

Go Learning tree Medicine focus.

As you get rolling into Empire, while they do come up alot in the empire they are insignificant most of the time. Throw money at them to not take the penalities, build the initial hospice in duchies and the AI tends to upgrade them as they have money.

[Germaine's Bra]

Originally posted by jpcerutti:

Originally posted by Tragopan:

I know you don't want to mod the game or alter the game settings to find a solution but the unfortunate truth is that PDX needs to fix plagues before you can play comfortably that way.

Right now they're way over-tuned. On normal settings the world will remain undeveloped and you will have endless plagues. To get a more realistic experience I recommend setting plague frequency to Very Rare and deadliness to Apocolyptic. In this way you'll get the experience of Plagues and be wary of them but not be spammed by new plagues and deaths and constant de-development every few months.

I don't know if the issue is with PDX overweighing the modifiers for plague, a bug with how they're generated or if plague resistance isn't actually doing anything but it's clear that Plagues are not working as intended.

I think their intention was to limit the number of character portraits/people and the levels of development from getting too high too fast (and control midgame crashing, framerate loss, and easy dominance by players) - and in that form they do sort of work in a backhanded way. Kinda like the AI never marrying anyone beyond location holders/nobility and not building much works for limiting both of the mechanic issues after a fashion. That way AI doesn't have to get tweaked or get a programmed advantage to keep it competitive... and players can continue to marry everybody in their realm and build tall if they want to.

What I'm experimenting with now is trying to flip it and use plagues to advantage. IF they're going to exist you should theoretically be able to spread plagues yourself.

Have limited success with marrying people into households of frenemies that have various diseases. Just like great pox sometimes presents as lover's pox before it goes full blown I think the rest of the plagues should have a brief incubation period where you could send those people out as biological warfare. Dismissing infected people is too random to be an effective targeting method - sort of like the event where your rival catapults the pox victim over your walls.

I also think you should be able to spread plagues with an army. Your army can get infected and take losses - you should be able to both spread that plague directly by moving that army to an uninfected location and siegeing AND by siegeing lands around the edges of plague lands stressing them. That would be an actual use for large armies of levies.

What seems to be working best is plague as a siege defense. If my castles are defensible for a fair amount of time, and I form my army somewhere free from plague and steer clear of those lands, the AI isn't smart enough to steer clear of the plague and will defeat itself more often than not by disease attrition. By careful pathing and willingness to lose a sacrificial smaller army of levies I can bait a much larger foe AI into doing stupid things to lose. They definitely need to tweak the AI when it comes to plagues.

That works, had an war get decimated as they tried to take my capital and I was away while a plague was at home. (Got that achievement) by the time my soldiers got there they were weak enough for easy roll over.