🌪️ Crises & Natural Disasters
Two different systems damage your empire, and they are easy to confuse. Crises are scheduled, empire-wide, and unavoidable – they arrive on the Age clock and you prepare for them. Natural Disasters are random, local, and permanent features of your terrain – you choose whether to live with them when you decide where to settle. One is a test you can study for; the other is a standing risk you accepted at founding.
The Crisis system
As Age Progress approaches its end, a Crisis triggers – a game-wide challenge that tests your empire's resilience. It begins around 70% Age Progress and intensifies twice before the Age ends.
Crises introduce Crisis Policies: negative Social Policies that you are required to slot as the crisis deepens, with more slots forced open at each escalation. You do not choose whether to take a penalty – you choose which penalty, and that choice is the entire game here. A Crisis Policy that shifts damage onto Towns is devastating for a Town-heavy empire and nearly free for a City-heavy one.
A Crisis fires at the end of the Antiquity and Exploration Ages. There is no Modern Age Crisis – the Modern Age ends in a Victory, not a transition, so there is nothing to test you before. That means every Crisis you will ever face happens while you still have an Age transition ahead of you, and preparing for the transition and preparing for the Crisis are the same work. See The Three Ages.
One Crisis is selected at random per Age. You can also disable Crises entirely in Advanced Setup if you would rather play without them.
🏺 Antiquity Age crises
| Crisis | Theme | Effects | How to survive it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plague | Disease spreads between Settlements | Unrest, damaged tiles, and population loss in infected Settlements. Spread cannot be fully prevented | Move units away from infected tiles; bank Happiness ahead of time to absorb the Unrest; write off the worst-hit Settlements and protect the healthy ones |
| Revolt | Popular unrest | Large Happiness losses across all Settlements, risking riots and secession | Build the largest Happiness buffer you can before it starts; use Crisis Policies to steer the damage toward the settlement type you can most afford to lose |
| Invasion | Hostile incursion | Hostile camps spawn widely, military maintenance rises, and each phase sends stronger waves | Keep a standing army; treat the waves as free Commander experience; garrison and fortify border settlements |
Most Crisis Policies let you choose where the pain lands – Towns or Cities, your Capital or your other settlements, places you founded or places you conquered. Before the Crisis starts, decide which half of your empire is expendable for ten turns. A Carthage player with one City or a Joseon player with a tightly limited City core makes the opposite choice from a wide Town empire, and getting it backwards doubles the damage.
⛵ Exploration Age crises
| Crisis | Theme | Effects | How to survive it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plague (advanced) | The Black Death | Spreads along Trade Routes; escalates through phases; Major Outbreaks damage buildings. Religious Settlements are infected less often, and recovered Settlements gain permanent immunity | Produce Physicians to Treat the Sick; take Crisis Policies that convert the suffering into yield (Humoralism for Science, Plague Cults for Culture); station Commanders for Cordon Sanitaire; Lazarettos protect coastal cities |
| Wars of Religion | Religious conflict | Bonuses and penalties keyed to which Settlements follow which religion; factions clash | Spread your religion widely before the Crisis window; convert strategically valuable cities; lean on religious buildings for the bonus side of the ledger |
The Antiquity Plague is the hardest Crisis to play against because, unlike Revolt or Invasion, it offers no real counterplay – only mitigation. Pre-build Happiness infrastructure and accept temporary losses. The Exploration Plague does more raw damage but is more manageable: Physicians work, and its trade-route spread lets you see it coming. See The trade system.
Scoring off a Crisis
A Crisis is never purely a tax. Crisis Triumphs appear dynamically in the Triumphs Screen whenever one is running, rewarding you for surviving, mitigating, or outright exploiting it – and they appear in every game regardless of Triumph Set, including when Triumphs are turned off entirely. Whatever else the Crisis is doing to your empire, it is also handing you objectives nobody can opt out of. Full mechanics in Triumphs and Dedications.
🌋 Natural Disasters
Natural Disasters are unrelated to Crises. They fire at random throughout the game, driven entirely by the terrain features near your settlements – which means they are a consequence of where you chose to settle, not of what Age you are in.
What a disaster does. Every affected tile takes damage: Buildings and Improvements must be repaired, and any Units standing there take damage. Wonders are immune – nothing destroys a Wonder except a nuclear weapon.
Why you gain yields. This is the part that reads as counter-intuitive, and it is deliberate. Rural tiles struck by a disaster are usually fertilized, raising their Food and Production until the end of the Age. Volcanic eruptions can add Science on top. A disaster is a short, sharp repair bill followed by a stretch of better land – which is why settling next to a volcano is a genuine strategic choice rather than a mistake.
Urban tiles replace a tile's natural yields with the building's output, so fertility does nothing for them. The fertilizer bonus only shows up on rural tiles – Farms, Mines, Pastures. A settlement that keeps a healthy rural belt converts disasters into a net gain; a fully urbanized one just pays the repair bill.
The three kinds
| Type | Where it happens | What is distinctive |
|---|---|---|
| 🌊 Flood | Coastal tiles, navigable rivers, and floodplains | Affects rural tile yields only; frequently damages Fishing Boats. There is no dam or equivalent to prevent it |
| 🌋 Volcanic Eruption | Tiles adjacent to an active Volcano | Damages and fertilizes adjacent tiles with bonus Production, Food, and often Science. Most volcanoes erupt once per active phase, then go dormant |
| 🌪️ Storm | Varies by terrain (see below) | The only disaster that persists across multiple turns – it forms, travels the map on an unpredictable path, and damages whatever it passes over. Comes in two severity levels |
Storms take the form of the terrain they form in:
| Storm | Terrain |
|---|---|
| Hurricane | Coastal waters |
| Tornado | Plains and Grassland |
| Blizzard | Tundra and Snow |
| Dust Storm | Desert |
| Squall Line | Mountainous plains – sets buildings on fire |
Playing around them
- Read the map before you found. Tiles carry flood warnings, and an active volcano is visible. You are agreeing to the risk when you settle.
- Watch the turn of warning. Storms are visible forming a turn or so before they land – enough time to move Units out from under them, which is the damage you can actually avoid.
- Repair promptly. Damaged Buildings and Improvements produce nothing until repaired.
- Tune it at setup. The Disaster Intensity setting in Advanced Setup controls how often disasters fire. Setting it to Light reduces the frequency without removing them. See Setting up a game.
Volcanic tiles are among the best land in the game, and eruptions make them better still by fertilizing everything adjacent. If you can keep your Wonders and highest-value buildings just outside the blast radius while keeping Farms and Mines inside it, you collect the fertility and skip most of the repair bill. Settling near a volcano rather than on top of one is the whole trick.
A pre-crisis and during-crisis checklist for every Crisis type is in Appendix E.