Aurora, aurora, aurora brings out that little Stalin. It got me wondering, what do you guys think of bio-chem warfare weapons possibly missiles so you can dust your opponents ideal world with area denial weapons? I imagine plague simulation with reverse population growth and infrastructure forming the bedrock past which declines cannot happen because civilian populations will be protected. Can this be used to tip missiles as a warhead whose effectiveness can be upgraded through research in chem-bio warfare so that the hotter the agent the less you need to waste planet and the harder the clean up .
I have considered this in the past but I don't want to make it a weapon that could easily wipe out a population so you can just move in and take over. To create biological and chemical weapons you would need knowledge of the biology of the targeted species. This could be gained through the study of conquered populations or POWS. I guess you would get a research project for each alien race for which you have prisoners, along the lines of those in the UFO series of games. You would also need other tech lines to provide general bio weapon knowledge in the first place and eventually you would create a bio weapon in the same way as developing a new missile design. Researching the bio weapon would require the use of research facilities and there would be a small chance of contamination so somewhere out of the way would be a good idea. If you dust a planet with a bio agent that did eventually kill the population, then it would likely hang around for a long time and possibly mutate to affect other species, including your own
Bio agents would have a contagion rating, which would determine how quickly they spread, an incubation period, which would determine how long before the disease presented symptoms and a lethality. Ships movings between affected populations would have a chance to spread the disease. This would eventually appear on the ship itself based on the incubation period but perhaps not before it infected a second world. I guess there would also have to be medical facilities to fight any plagues and develop an antidote or vaccine. Plagues could also mutate in terms of their lethality, incubation and contagion rating, as well as which species they may affect. Perhaps plagues could also be present at the sites of ancient ruins. It is a fascinating area and I would like to add soemthing along these lines at some point. It wouldn't be in version 4.0 though.
Steve