A mine in elemental.exe finds the other triggers SpellResearched.TechnologyResearched....ImprovementBuilt....UnitLevel...TotalPopulation.CityPopulation.. but who knows which ones are hooked up.

The only thing preventing us from making the quests you listed is the ability to put durations on modifiers (and quests).

And, of course, the current idea that events should be ignorable at the click of a button.

I'm working on a profile for a quest and it does the following: spawns a dragon that roams the countryside. The monster has a huge radius to wander around and will destroy cities. It also spawns a small goodiehut, but that has no real significance (the player can visit it for some gildar). Until the monster is destroyed, the player will suffer -50% prestige in all his cities. Once the beast falls, the player permanentally gains 10% prestige, and some to-be-named item reward. All that is possible at the moment, and much more.

Edit: Manipulating the effects of a fire shrine would not be possible at the moment, also.

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=A10rAqxZ (the only bug I can detect, besides the shitty texts, is that if a non-champion unit kills the dragon THEY get the reward and those units can no longer trade. I'll have to think of a work-around, maybe create another goodiehut with the actual reward.

Actually, what I'm thinking is to create a "mod" that simply removes the "no thank you" button from the UI. Unless SD heeds our begging, of course. At least that is within my reach. I would probably include an XML in such a mod to disable all the core quests, as many would be annoying if you can't deny them.

Edit: "Global" events that affect everyone? Not afaik, quests really only happen for the human player.

Changing of terrain, changing of environment, goodiehuts, world resources, finding items and returning them places, heroes joining you like damsel in distress quests, non-heroes as well. Check out https://forums.elementalgame.com/396539 for more, I'm really new at this stuff, I only looked at the quest system for the first time when 1.2b was released.

I would like to differentiate between events and quests, so that they are different. I don't want to make events that are just quests or goodie huts. Your Dragon  is a great example of an event, it's something that happens to a player and they have deal with it.

The random events such as those tied to natural disasters were one of the elements that most engaged me in civ4.  It breated a little more life and variety into the world.  I also support the idea that implementing them should be treated as non-skippable (but perhaps have a toggle to disable them in the menu if implemented in the unmodded game or frequency/impact slider) things that are happening in the world that you can respond to.  Even the one that would have a random forest be burned down due to a wildfire/storm, or pop up in a forest adjacent tile were immersive for me. 

Its also a good opportunity to introduce lore and other aspects of the world not tied dirrectly into the player's actions into the 'history'.  It could be chronicled or handled in popup simillar to the book intro thing that comes up when starting a new game- a record of a historical event that occured (though you are writing the history in the present).  This and word of the progress/ achievments of other countries could be as tales heard from traders/bards or any of a number of other sources (perhaps as is relevant to the source- such as what the common man, military officeer and a merchant find noteworthy would differ).  Diplomatic capitol could be used as a resource for this, especially as in regards to news from foreign powers.

I like the falling star idea- not sure about the time out on it (though i suppose it could represent the amount of time before it becomes to difficult to pinpoint its location due to the crash site becoming less notable over time due to erosion and the press of nature) but it could work as a first come first serve basis too.  Could provide a lump sum of whaterver materials you wanted from gold to mana, or perhaps X amount over Y number of turns (or even the choice between the two on how to harness it).

Having some decision opportunity events for cities or even tile/structure types within your zone of control would be nice as well.  I really liked the planet event things from galciv2.  Though admitedly I usually dont care for good vs. evil decisions- as long as the results of the decision are mostly clear (the good evil thing worked for galciv since it related to the perception other races had of your policies).  It could work well with say a different tech directed focus or ruling style on decisions to give you a few different options for response.  The little things like this pull you into the feeling of running an empire -as there is more to ruling policy than guiding construction and war.