Do epidemics and wars have any impact on the gameplay?
An epidemic might have an outbreak sporadically in any of the map provinces. Apart from direct damage (in citizens) the epidemic harms the prosperity level, and later on it causes the exodus of the population (a group of citizens exits the city and moves towards another settlement). The refugees from the infected cities bring the plague with them, hence providing the spread of the epidemic across the map. It reaches its peak, and then decreases (the cities get cured on their own, or the players can also apply special infection-blocking abilities to their cities), but the damage has been done and the population has decreased in many areas, hence the economic base went down. We had to go into such detail with this system in attempt to recreate the well-known epidemics of mid-14th century, which took the lives of thousands Europeans. A war (i.e. presence of seized objects and hostile military units in a province) like an epidemic entails the decrease in welfare and a special status of the
