Calling all disasters

Two galaxies coliding is FAR FAR too much for any amount of computers. I dont think all computers humans have today would be able to simulate that in any reasonable amount of time. So thats off the table.

I would personally put occurence of disasters in independent sliders, not the difficulty slider controling every aspect of the game.

That way, i can have a game where i fiercly try to evolve over other species that are nearly cheating with their evolving points, and activelly try to make me go extint even going extint themselves if it makes me go extint, without having to worry about disasters.

Or i can have a game with very easy AI that is slow evolving, but with disasters every 5 minutes.

Or i can have both at the same time.

So just to help recap what has been suggested so far:

Natural Disasters

Volcano
Fire
Avalanche
Earthquake
Meteor
Drought
Flood
Sandstorm
Tornado
Hurricane
Landslide

Perhaps also landslide?

All right. The chances of a volcano erupting are pretty high: it's just a matter of time before they blow.

Forest or grassfires appear to be approximately once every year or two: they'd probably be one of our most common disasters.

Earthquakes can have their own timer with a random-number roll to see how strong they are.

Floods, droughts, hurricanes/typhoons/twisters... can be tied to weather? I'll look at it. Sandstorms are also very common and tied to the weather.

Landslides/Avalanches can be triggered by earthquakes, increasing local area damage, but should probably rely on whether or not the area you are in is stable.

Meteor: if we're not going to model the whole solar system continuously, this can be handled by a random number generator, that will roll and see whether the rock evaporates in the atmosphere or whether it's big enough to carry through and strike like the end of the age of the dinosaurs. (Rocks the size of refrigerators are not going to do any more than local damage.)

That looks nice, Calli. I would say fires are much less frequent, as most of the fires have a human cause. Volcanoes are guaranteed to erupt eventually, but you must have a volcano alredy in-place. Finally, new volcanoes can be generated by earthquakes (or earthquakes be generated by mew-forming volcanoes).

Actually, rocks the size of a refrigerator are not even going to go through the atmosphere. If you mean the size of a refrigerator when they hit, yes, that will probably be mostly local damage.

What about a biological disaster? Like a deadly illness that just spreads and spreads and can wipe out entire ecosystems and bring a civilization to its knees?

@ Dinoman: Biological disaster goes under "disease" for now. Populations will not boom or crash without either a lack or an addition of resources. We do have a discussion of disease, but it's not here, it's under auto-evo for reasons of "that's when we thought about it."

@Daniferrito: Yes... refrigerator sized on impact is what I meant. We can just randomize the numbers: x% possibility of burning on entry, y% that it causes only local damage (random coordinates,) and z% that it is big enough to dust-cloud and or go end-of-the-mezozoic. Obviously those are listed from greatest to least chance.

dinoman9877 wrote:

What about a biological disaster? Like a deadly illness that just spreads and spreads and can wipe out entire ecosystems and bring a civilization to its knees?

 Here we're discussing natural terrain or climatic disasters. Diseases, nuclear fallout, and other ideas will be for other discussions.