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Disaster and Emergency Situations Pack

PCGamer.com's Mod of the Week, 3rd December 2013.

Even playing through a few different games, I haven't seen most of [the disasters] yet, and don't want to spoil the additional ones I have seen: some of them are surprising and quite creative, yet they're all completely believable and appropriate. If you're looking to add more crises, more disasters, and more difficult choices to your presidency, this mod is a great way to do it.
- Chris Livingston - PCGamer.com

(I recommend reading the rest of the column too! It gives a really good sense of what the mod contains, and is also generally super nice!)

The Disaster and Emergency Situations Pack is a balance and content mod containing 4 new policies, 4 new dilemmas, 12 new situations and 26 new events. All of these are about what happens to your country when things go horribly wrong on a national scale!

The mod is intended to both add more variety and more challenge to the game, by adding a number of new national level disasters such as major flooding and wildfires. It acts as a balance mod to stop you getting complacent and stop you ever quite reaching too much of a comfortable plateau.

While I don't want to spoil all of the surprises, the pack now means that almost everything in the UK National Risk Register for Civil Emergencies[www.gov.uk] is implemented in one form or another in the game. The things that aren't included are things that are less likely to apply to all countries, like severe snowfall.

However, with all of this doom and destruction, there is a little hope. Four new national agencies can be put in place to help mitigate the effects of these disasters and other national level problems. While these will do little to help with your everyday problems like crime or poor health, they help build up resilience to major disasters. And, when things do go wrong, they step in to help coordinate a national response, further reducing effects. However, they take a long time to get established, so you may find yourself spending a lot of money on them for something that may never actually happen.

It is worth highlighting three things about the pack in particular:

• The pack includes a new kind of event that triggers situations. These events will show up in your quarterly report (such as 'A new disease is spreading!') and may have some initial effect, but will be followed by a situation that appears as a red icon on your main view. This keeps the serious disasters in your vision, and allows for their effects to be mitigated (or worsened...) through policies and other simulation values.
  
• Terrorism has received a major upgrade, both in dangerousness and complexity. Assassination is no longer the most serious terrorist threat. The new terrorist attacks are now managed behind the scenes, and you find that they will tend to come in waves and have the potential to get more dangerous if left uncontrolled. The threat can be managed through the application of force through security policies, such as wiretapping or police drones. This makes liberalism is now a little more risky as an option unless you manage threats to your nation other ways, such as managing your racial tension and foreign relations.
  
• Events can now trigger ongoing situations which can lead to further events and to dilemmas. After some tourists are kidnapped abroad, will you send your troops to attempt a rescue? And the choices of your dilemmas may have multiple outcomes. The rescue might succeed, bringing the hostages home, or it might fail, leading to them being killed in a firefight.

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Change log:
v1.1

• Added a Known Terrorism simulation value that gives the approximate level of terrorism in your country. It's accuracy depends on how good your intelligence services are.

v1.0

• Terrorism balance changes have occured to stop the patriot population getting quite so out of control.
  
• Which disasters will occur now depends more on the situation in your country. For instance, large CO2 emissions increase the chance of wildfires and flooding over time!
  
• 4 new terrorist attacks added for greater variety.
  
• 2 new disasters added for a little more variety and completeness.
  
• 2 new events that increase and decrease the chance of terrorist attacks added. Thanks to DancingEngie for your suggestion and input on these!

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You can also find non-Steam versions of this mod and further discssions on the official forums[positech.co.uk].

I also welcome ideas and suggestions for other things that could be added or changed! But please bear in mind that this mod is intended to deal with realistic situations as much as is possible, so zombie apocolapses and similar are off the cards for the moment.

Thanks!

-El