Disease improvement ideas - spreadability and severity

[Sasza22]

The current disease system works but is easy to handle and doesn`t cause serious harm to your colony. But if it did it might be too hard for new players. I think the issue is that the stronger the disease the easier it is for dupes to spread it.

Food poisoning doesn`t do much and it`s hard to spread from one dupe to another. It probably should be like that so it can work as a tutorial disease. Slimelung can spread easily and hits slightly harder with debuffs. Meanwhile zombie spores if you accidentally spread them around are a nighmare to get rid of and do a really large debuff.

I think it should work a bit differently. Diseases that spread easily shouldn`t be too severe. With how weak simleung is atm it should be easier for dupes to catch, and to spread to one another. Zombie spores with how hard they hit should be harder to spread (but probably should spawn in a biome you don`t always enter in atmo suits).

I think there should also be diseases more severe and maybe even deadly but really hard to catch. Like germs that are only connected to a specific resource or a critter and don`t survive without it. I also think the minor dieases (sunburn, hypothermia) should lower dupe`s immune systems so it`s easier for them to catch other stuff.

[M4ndatory]

In my opinion higher tier diseases should kill again. A good way to make it happen without beeing too hard could be the time it takes to kill a dupe and the wasy it spread. For example: -slimelung is a respiratory disease, should spread very quickly but also since is a mid-tier disease should take a lot of cycles to kill a dupe, with severity increasing slightly at start and ramp up only at the later stages. Zombie spore instead could use a moderate spread rade but should kill quickly with simptoms escalating very quickly (for exmple after 2 cycle the dupe stop do errands and start walk randomly in the base).

regarding food poisoning it come so quickly it should not be too terrible. i think the way it spread now it's fine but could be a little bit more severe, maybe an athletic and strenght debuff

EDIT: terrible english, sorry

[Meltdown]

I think that the balance between being new player friendly and being an actual threat could be achieved by making repeating infection cases growing worse. 

For example, each dupe could have a hidden counter for each disease. The counter would increase while the dupe is ill and decrease while they are not. If dupe gets ill often, their counter would grow faster than it resets; if they catch illness rarely it would likely reset to zero between sinkness periods. Once counter for the disease reaches the certain threshold, the effects of that disease would become worse for the dupe. There may be a number of such thresholds, representing diseases progression from being almost harmless to actually dangerous/life threatening. The balance between counter increments and decrements for each disease would be individual and would represent it's overall severity. Those numbers could be additionally affected by separate difficulty slider (or could be tied to an existing one). That system would give players some time to react to the problem and would punish them for ignoring it for too long. 
 

[Sasza22]

3 hours ago, M4ndatory said:

Zombie spore instead could use a moderate spread rade but should kill quickly with simptoms escalating very quickly (for exmple after 2 cycle the dupe stop do errands and start walk randomly in the base).

I think it would work but zombie spore germs need to be easier to get rid of. As of currenlty if they leave the oil biome it`s super hard to contain them. I think they should work similar to floral scent and be limited to the sporechid but have increased severity.

2 hours ago, Meltdown said:

I think that the balance between being new player friendly and being an actual threat could be achieved by making repeating infection cases growing worse. 

This is also a good idea. After 4 or 5 repeated infections the symptoms could go back to the earlier versions or cause a dupe to get incapacitated.