Natural disasters spoil this game

[LLCoolJD]

I don't remember the natural disasters being such a problem when I played this game years ago, but tonight I had disaster after disaster strike my planets. Not only do they destroy structures, but they permanently reduce the resources and building capacity of a planet. It seems absurd that these disasters can't be disabled or at least softened so that you could at least rebuild...

[GrimReaper1789]

It's RNG. It comes from a time where strategy games were indeed harsh. You just don't remember it because you've been softened by today's easy "Everyone is a winner and deserves a trophy" mentality

[Combat Gorge]

LLCoolJD, ignoring the first reply to your comment which isn’t helpful and an exercise in writing to see their own words. Yes, planetary disasters could occur frequently in the game before the steam re-release. It's completely random on how many will occur, sometimes you will go an entire game with only a single planetary disaster sometimes you will have tons of planetary disasters. Yes I will admit it was kind of a developer oversight to not allow you to turn off disasters, or at the very least not have it destroy the manufacturing capability of a planet. I don’t remember if there ever was a mod developed for the game that would circumvent this issue, I do remember there being a trainer ReBed that allowed you to modify a bunch of different states, so maybe you should check an see if you can just modify the planet after this occurs (if you can find the trainer).

Additionally there was two theories I read about to avoid natural disasters. First if you didn’t fill up all the energy and mining slots on a planet you wouldn’t incur a natural disaster on said planet. Second theory was planetary assaults increased the likely hood of there being a natural disaster on said planet. That means you have to make sure to fight your battles from space.

Personally the natural disasters though aggravating at times never really bothered me terribly enough to bother with them.

[Russian Orthodox Revolution]

Natural disasters are very rare in this game. They pretty much have no impact on your game. I've never had a multiplayer game where the outcome was affected by a natural disaster. I get one that kind of hurts once every 100 games or so.

[chsalpha]

Natural disasters are supposed to happen once during 400 turns, but unfortunately they occur much more often. It was already a problem in the original release version. Everyone hated them and you can't turn them off. Most of the time it seems they strike planets where you have shipyards or factories.

[LLCoolJD]

Thanks for the replies. I think this latest round of disasters hit hard because it wiped out some great planets designated as specialized construction yard and orbital shipyard centers. I wouldn't mind if I could at least still have the slots to rebuild my facilities. After a few years of game time the whole galaxy is going to be a smoldering ruin, which is silly.

Originally posted by GrimReaper1789:

It's RNG. It comes from a time where strategy games were indeed harsh. You just don't remember it because you've been softened by today's easy "Everyone is a winner and deserves a trophy" mentality

I haven't played Rebellion since the late 90s, but I recall the game being criticized even at release for some questionable design decisions. Tough-but-fair is fine, and randomness is fine. Random, unrecoverable, and unavoidable disasters don't strike me as a good mechanic in 2016 or (if you wish) by the standards of the 1990s. I do agree that games were more unforgiving back then, but there was also less polish.

[Spock]

Natural Dissasters always ruined this game for me. They occur much often, destroying key planets. As human player you can deal with it, but the IA is uncapable of recover from a big planet dissaster. I remember Coruscan being deleted in each game I played 15 years ago.
Sadly, Rebed doesnt fix it. Its a hardcoded issue.

I hope somebody fix it, turning planet slot loss for only building loss or removing dissasters complety.

[Imperial Fist]

I had a planetary disaster on Coruscant of all places...

[saxxon]

Can't turn them off... Arggh...

Praetor you likely don't encounter them often because you are good enough to not have to go for a marathon length game. I can assure you at turn 1000 I have 3 smoking ruins of prime industrial planets. It was around 400-500 they started in this last one.

[Kalshion]

There USED to be a way to turn them off, but it required ya to muck around with the files. =(

[Badhabit]

Consider how easy this game is, this isn't that much of problem after 300-turn.After 300 turn, you should have alot of planet which 1 or 2 of disaster don't really matters.
Only problem it would be if you have very bad luck, at beginning of the game, you get disaster more then 2 within 100turn. and/or top off that is when enemy is attacking/blocking one or two you planet at same time.
Been play this when it launch, in my member there is only twich, which I had that much of bad luck.
just Restart a new game, I doubt you will run in to that same problem again that soon :D Unless you are THAT unluck

[Erwin_Von_Braun]

They are a pain in the balls for sure.
I am no software engineer by any stretch of the imagination, but surely there must be a way to at least reduce the chances of them happening with a little code tinkering?

[PeeWrinkle]

Natural disasters are rare. I usually only have one or two of them per game, some games none occur. At least none on my side. It seems like one out of ten games I get extra resources found, which I guess is the opposite of a natural disaster.

I will say that the best way to combat a natural disaster is to have a primary and secondary construction yard. I technically try and do this for training facilities and shipyards too and I try to have primary and secondary facilities in each sector I control.

While that is difficult to pull off all three, if you can insure you have a primary construction yard of 8-10 yards and a secondary of around 5-6 you can recover reletively quickly from a natural disaster even if it hits one of your constrution yards.

Also if your construction yards are building anything but construction yards the first 100-140 days of the game you are probably asking for trouble if a natural disaster does occur.

In short keys to recovery if you are hit are:
1. For the first 100-140 days construction yards build more construction yards, preferatly on the same planet.
2. Always have at least one secondary, preferably more, construction yard with at least 5 yards.

I appologize fore being repatative in this post.

[Kowloon Goreksson]

Even before I remember and noticed natural disasters were horrible to deal with, I always made sure to make 2 planets on each "system", or w.e its called, be massive construction yard hubs. It's still annoying,but you can recover more easily. If you only have 1 planet for everything... not very smart and definitely will hurt if rng says hi.

My experience is entirely for single player though. I can't imagine playing multiplayer as my micro blows and honestly, a lot of games I watch seem to be a sabotage battle of ~200 days... which I respect, but not my idea of fun.

[Rogue_Two]

To whom this still concerns:

After having played the game for almost 20 years, original version and steam version my two cents on the natural disasters:

1. They happen a lot more often when you have a huge amount of controlled planets, fully industrialized and lot's of free maintenance capabilities that go into the 1000s. It seems the game punishes you for playing so defensive or being so mighty. What I do is always invest my resources and keep my available maintenance rather low. In a small galaxy game maybe in the 100s. This does not stop the disasters completely but they appear much less often in my experience. Keeping a reserve in maintenance prevents the loss of ships in that case.

2. If you can't live with the disasters, a couple of save games help. Maybe keep 3 save games and save one after another so you always have 3 different states. When a disaster happens and you load a save game that is maybe a few dozen days away from it, it might not happen again. However if your savegame is too close to the disaster event, it will happen anyway because it was already scheduled by the program. Hence keep save games at different points in time.

[extank]

I've found a couple of strategies to help keep Natural Disasters down (not gone, sadly, but much less frequent):

Keep your mines and refineries pretty well balanced. Especially on a planet; if you have three mines on a planet, then put three refineries on it along with them.

Try to stay around 50% or less of a planet's natural resources with your mine allocation; if a planet has 12 "slots" worth of natural resources, put no more than six mines in.

Leave three to four open System Energy slots on each planet. Two, at a minimum.

Try not to build too much, too fast. Building a fleet all at one across multiple Ship Yard factory worlds, even as your Construction Yard worlds are cranking out Mines and Refineries, and your Training Facilities are building Units by the dozens, sucks down a LOT of Refined Materials very quickly; it seems to me Natural Disasters follow soon after (or even during!) such construction blitzes.

I tend to play "long games" just to indulge my World Building/O.C.D., and following the above guidelines, I've gone into the 1,000-1,200 day range without a Natural Disaster striking my worlds; and when they do, they tend to NOT be total disasters. That doesn't mean they're not happening in the mean time; they're just not happening to me.