Recycling doesn't stop global warming: Shocking evidence!

I modded the forge to give 99 and for recycling centres to be free for new cities. Then I crammed 18 civs into a duel sized map with all grasslands and no forest or jungles and start in the future era. I build my first city which has about 5 from population and everything else cancelled out by the recycling centre. I hit next turn, everyone else builds their first city and BAM! Six deserts. What madness is this! What demon clawed his way through the illusionary veil of a good an just world to abide such a scourge.
I was originally looking into how environmentalism indirectly increases global warming. It gives more which then allows you to have more buildings which would increase global warming. I was going to change the civic to give health to buildings to even it out. I tested it with the 99 forge and all economy civics giving 99 to the forge to see if the GW calculation uses the total health factor of a building or just what unhealthiness it gives. I was just the unhealthiness. I then went to test the recycling centres and... this happened. Recycling and environmentalism serve to increase global warming! Somewhere Al Gore vomits with rage. At best one would vomit with rage at such a revelation. :suicide:

See for yourself. Download the CIV4BuildingInfos file and place it in D:\My Documents\My Games\Beyond the Sword\CustomAssets\xml\buildings
Then set up the game like I did and watch the earth BURN!!! The horror! The HORROR!! Aaaaaaaarrrrgggghhhhh!!!
</scene>

Seriously though, what's to be done?

Minor Annoyance said:

Seriously though, what's to be done?

Click to expand...

Remove Global Warming from the game. Maybe in Civ5, the global warming mechanic will add something to the game. In this version of civilization, it just shows the eventual apocalyps. Not a lot of fun to see your nicely crafted empire inevitably fall into dust.

(Note that you can of course avoid the worst of the global warming by finishing the game early enough, but that doesn't mean that the global warming mechanic is a contribution to the game.)

As I recall global warming is.. well global. Other nations can cause it no matter how well you attempt to prevent it. This is a real life issue as well.

Be generous with the techs that help counter global warming is one way to do it. Even as a gift you are doing yourself a favour.

The issue is not that.... 3.17 GW mechanics make that there are no real ways of stopping it: you can't plant trees ,Enviromentalism has no effect , making improvements will not make anything at all to stop it ( as Minor Annoyance showed and I already suspected ) and you can't destroy/disband buildings ( and that notion of power = of BtS does not help too ). Basically you're doomed to have GW in your games if you live enough and there is nothing you can do about it ( AI have lumberjack genes .... ). This coming from a company that brags about wanting to take the unfun parts of the game ( yeah , I read Soren text in the Vanilla manual ) ......

Gives an incentive for conquest. Wipe out the other civs so the forests and jungles can grow.

^^

Given the warmonger tendencies of some of the Firaxians ( i.e. Blake ), that would not be so surprising .... "Hey, let's make the late game even more unfunny... it looks that , in spite of the low scores , there are still people that tries to win by space or UN... That has to be stopped."

More seriously, before 3.17 , GW was badly screwed but atleast you could do something about it. If they had putted GW depending on the modified health ( + ) or if you could plant trees, you could do something about it in 3.17.... but you simply can't do nothing except waiting for the tiles to turn desert.....

Other thing is that GW can generate a positive feedback cycle: GW removes forest if it strike a tile with one......

About not being able to plant trees: Forest preserves increase the change of new forest tiles appearing around the preserve, right? But besides that, there should be some replanting mechanism.

Perhaps there should be a type of special worker for tasks like building bridges over water, tunnels through mountains and replanting forests. If you allow only 2 or 3 of such workers to be in play (like the limit on missionaries) then that would prevent excessive plant/chop abuse, simply because you can't replant very fast with only a few of those special workers. Or, how about a Great Engineer doubling as special worker? Perhaps that wouldn't make much sense for replanting, but it would for building bridges and tunnels.

Minor Annoyance said:

I was originally looking into how environmentalism indirectly increases global warming. It gives more which then allows you to have more buildings which would increase global warming. I was going to change the civic to give health to buildings to even it out. I tested it with the 99 forge and all economy civics giving 99 to the forge to see if the GW calculation uses the total health factor of a building or just what unhealthiness it gives. I was just the unhealthiness.

Click to expand...

That's bad.

Minor Annoyance said:

Seriously though, what's to be done?

Click to expand...

This might be an issue for Solver's unofficial patch. The mechanics of Global Warming can be changed in the DLL, there's a function called CvGame::doGlobalWarming() that does the calculations for GW (and, as you already found out, it does only assess the bad health of each building and ignores positive health effects).

I've fiddled around with that and modified it so that Recycling Centres halve a city's contribution to GW due to its unhealthy buildings and a player's contribution is halved if he is in Environmentalism. So one can quarter the total amount.
Tested it with Minor Annoyance's MadMax-Scenario and it worked quite well.

r_rolo1 said:

( AI have lumberjack genes .... )

Click to expand...

.. and so they should. If the AI deliberately left n% of their jungle/forest unchopped then that's extra short term benefit they are missing out on. The race to develop your land is too important to even consider the eventual desertification of the earth.

But in general I think that an inevitable world of sand isn't a fun thing to include in a game. I've yet to see how global warming actually plays out in 3.17 but chances are I'll end up modding it again.

^^I agree with not blocking lumberjacking to AI , but I was not complaining on that, but on the fact that AI lumberjacking + the impossibility of replanting forests ( not mentioning the almost negligible effect of preserves ) makes impossible to counter 3.17 GW or even to stop it from starting. It looks that a lot of ppl in Firaxis likes Mad Max

build a city at the beginning,do noting but waiting for AI's conquest,you will never touch the GW

Yeah well, the planet is going to hell anyways so why wouldn't they model it in the game?
Read this: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-north-pole-is-melting

Modding DLL is difficult, building and compiling it alone. I guess the best you can easily do is changing GLOBAL_WARMING_TERRAIN in XML/GlobalDefines from TERRAIN_DESERT to TERRAIN_GRASS. GW will still destroy forests and improvements, but replacing them with grass is less devastating.

It's a stupid mechanic broken in concept and in practice.

Kind of funny that a FORGE can cause global warming.

And RANDOM tiles turning into desert? No logic at all. Pure annoyance, not that I encounter it much since I don't even like space victories which usually means any GW of significance I see comes from nukes, which is even stupider (they don't cause warming...they'd cause winter if they caused anything, and you'd have to use more nukes than have ever existed for something like that to happen).

Judging from real-world reports, the first effects of global warming are felt in the polar regions, not the temperate or tropical zones. So what ought to happen in the game is either melting of some sea ice, which might open new sea lanes and (rather disatrously) flood some coastal tiles, or tundra tiles becoming plains. Only later should lower latitudes be affected. If anybody could provide a mod that works in that way, I for one would be deeply grateful, as in my current game I am being hit by the desertification of highly-valuable tiles with horrendous frequency although I have lots of recycling centres, get all my power from the 3G Dam, and nobody has Fission. Nor is there a Coal Plant anywhere in the world.
Also, can anybody tell me exactly what triggers global warming ? Is there a key date before which it cannot occur (I'm in the early 1800s) ?

Nestorius said:

Gives an incentive for conquest. Wipe out the other civs so the Barbarians can grow.

Click to expand...

Nestorius,

I fixed that for you!


Sereiously, if what Minor Annoyance, is saying is true, then someone messed up big time. If Global Warming is affected by totan unthealthiness (not the difference of unhealthiness minus healthiness) then it really makes for a horrible horrible disgusting and broken game mechanic.