Using real-world data

[rasqual]

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqs...day-M1_src.kml

My suggestion would be to let earthquakes of a given magnitude knock down troop strength -- but only slightly -- wherever such a quake fell within an extrusion zone indicating occupation or home base.

Ironically, Mr. Realism is suggesting something unrealistic for the sake of at least getting your feet wet with real-world data. Fact is, there aren't enough serious quakes that kill people to make the demise of troops near such earthquakes likely. Most of the quakes (this is live data) are tiny. Therefore, it'd be unrealisic to take out troops when such quakes hit -- but I'm recommending it anyway.

Here's a list of recent quakes above 5.0:

M 5.0, Greenland Sea 8/13/2005 23:23
M 5.0, southeast of the Loyalty Islands 8/11/2005 8:46
M 5.0, Yunnan, China 8/13/2005 4:58
M 5.1, Banda Sea 8/13/2005 9:07
M 5.2, southeast of the Loyalty Islands 8/11/2005 7:02
M 5.3, Sumbawa region, Indonesia 8/13/2005 3:10
M 5.4, Molucca Sea 8/16/2005 10:39
M 5.4, north of Ascension Island 8/15/2005 7:53
M 5.4, Pacific-Antarctic Ridge 8/11/2005 11:36
M 5.5, Oaxaca, Mexico 8/14/2005 2:51
M 5.6, Papua, Indonesia 8/15/2005 3:15
M 5.7, southeast of the Loyalty Islands 8/11/2005 11:50
M 5.9, Tarapaca, Chile 8/14/2005 2:39
M 6.0, Maug Islands region, Northern Mariana Islands 8/13/2005 7:36
M 6.2, southeast of the Loyalty Islands 8/11/2005 9:08
M 7.2, near the east coast of Honshu, Japan 8/16/2005 2:46

The remaining 643 were all below magnitude 5. If you wanted to get earthquakes a bit more involved in your architecture, you could take it down to magnitude 4 -- which would implicate another 36 locations. Down to 3? Another 42. You could probably go down to 3, because incidents of concurence with game-populated areas would still be fairly low -- and I'm not recommending heavy casualties at all. Just something to introduce a bit of mother nature's random misfortunes in a REAL WORLD way -- if a bit unrealistically. ;-)