Now you’ve mastered the basics of Scenario Creator,
The next two labs we haven’t looked at yet will open up a world of possibilities - the World Lab and the Government Actions Lab. Changing details in here will allow you to create advanced scenarios with almost limitless depth.
The World Lab
In the World Lab, you can alter details of any country in the world, as well as editing air and sea routes. Using the World lab on its own can make effective scenarios – this is how we created “Where is Everyone” and “Flight Club”!
The world lab.
Editing a country’s data allows you to rename a country, alter their population and medical budget (great for a fantasy or post-apocalyptic setting), as well as determine how much other countries care about this country’s health. This can be altered by setting the country importance variable between 0.5 and 1.5.
You can also alter how the country is categorised for environmental plague characteristics. If a plague has high rural country effectiveness, but you don’t want it to cross Russia easily, you can edit Russia to not count as a rural country. Edit the country description, and allow for “extended description” if you need more details. The population density can also be edited. This determines how crowded the country is and therefore how quickly a plague will spread through it. For example, India’s population density is 1.25, while Russia’s is 0.75 as India has many more people living in a much more condensed space.
Editing air and sea routes is a great way to challenge players to use a different strategy than one they may normally rely on. In the present version of Scenario Creator, you can add new air routes or remove existing ones, and you can also remove sea routes. It’s not currently possible to add in new sea routes. Once you’ve selected air or sea routes, clicking on different countries will show you how many of those routes stop there. The USA, for instance, has 9 air routes. Clicking ‘edit’ will show you a list of the different routes. Here you can see that on average, once every 33 days, a plane will leave the US and head to a random country. Clicking on the country in any existing route will allow you to change which country that plane heads to. You can also change the frequency of planes or boats going on that route. Experimenting with these parts of the lab could massively alter how difficult your scenario is!
The Government Actions Lab
The Government Actions Lab allows you to alter what actions different countries will take as the plague takes hold. For example, it would be possible to create an “All Greenland” challenge where all ports are closed as soon as anyone in the country is infected.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Editing population numbers, air and sea routes can have knock-on effects in how the game functions, so proceed with caution, test thoroughly and be careful when changing these! If you're concerned, skip this and read the Events tutorial.
The government actions lab
Opening up the Government Actions lab shows you the full list of actions a country can potentially take. Here you can edit an existing action or create a new one. Each action has a set of “Conditions” they require and “Outcomes” that result from them. Most conditions are straightforward, but there are some which are a bit more complex and require additional explanation.
Action Taken: An existing government action must happen before this action can occur.
Action Not Taken: An existing government action must not have happened before this action happens.
Probability: The likelihood of the action occurring after conditions are met. Here, 0.1 represents 100%, and 0.01 represents 10%. The event may happen at this probability rate each turn after the player meets the conditions.
Increase Probability: If switched on, the likelihood of the action occurring will increase every day.
Change to Local Danger: Increases the possibility of humans dying due to public order disturbances, e.g. riots or executions.
Ignore ‘Disease Noticed’ Condition: Determine if the action requires the disease to be noticed before it can occur.
Remember, the more conditions you set here, the more unlikely it might be that players will meet them. 50% probability if one action is taken will happen half the time that action is taken, but 100% probability if three actions are taken will require players making all 3 of those actions and therefore can’t be guaranteed. Once you have set conditions for your event, you can determine the outcome of it. This can be a change to the plague’s strength, country statuses, or medical research. You can also create a news headline to let the player know your government action has happened.
Congrats, you’ve mastered the Government and World labs! Now for the tricky stuff: The Events Lab in the next tutorial.