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 here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=181793&d=1214986026
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!!!
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Seriously though, what's to be done?

You sure this is just a "Minor Annoyance" for you...?

Hm. Using net unhealth (ie. - ) would also have weird effects - you could offset the greenhouse gas emissions by catching more fish!

One possibility would be to, for each city, subtract a percentage of the count for the purposes of global warming for each "green" factor present (say, -25% for Recycling Center, -25% for Mass Transit, -25% for running Environmentalism - numbers just for illustration).

Or, just edit out the stupid global warming completely. End of problem.

There's way to much environmental crap in Civ 4. I noticed a "Earth Day" event the last game I played. Dreck.

The Last Conformist said:

Hm. Using net unhealth (ie. - ) would also have weird effects - you could offset the greenhouse gas emissions by catching more fish!

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My idea was for it just to use the net health of the unhealthy buildings. Then I'd mod environmentalism to give + to six unhealthy buildings instead of just the 6 overall. Then with the recycling centre you'd get the +6 it originally gave, although it would be odd seeing factories and forges giving positive , I'd still think of it as the recycling centre and the civic doing the even though it's attached to other things.

Solver, what's your take on global warming? Do you think it's something that the unofficial patch could/should deal with?

Personally, I think so, because the current game mechanics don't work as intended imho. I can't imagine Firaxis intending the effect that recycling centers and green economy help to *increase* global warming because they allow for more unhealthiness in the cities.

I don't think that Recycling Centers should have any impact on GW. Here's why.

Under 3.13 (and indeed in previous versions of Civ IV) there was almost no reason to EVER build anything other than coal plants. Build 'em, then allieviate the health problems with Recycling centers. No reason to wait and pay extra for Hydro Plants, no reason to wait and risk meltdowns with nuke plants.

Under the new 3.17 system, you can still use RC's to get rid of the unhealthiness impacts on population. But not the effects of global warming. So there is still a cost to building the coal plants (which remain cheap and have early availability). It isn't as cut-and-dried.

Now, there may be some tweaking that needs to be done with this...I think it's a bit daft to have unhealthiness from drydocks or laboratories or perhaps unpowered factories count toward global warming. But I don't think that players should be allowed to use recycling centers as a get-out-of-jail-free card for global warming.

But Coal Plants add just 2 unhealthies per city, if your idea should keep me away from Coal Plants to decrease GW, they would need an even higher unhealthiness penalty, like 3 or 4.
I think letting a RC halve a cities contribution to GW would be nice.

jkp1187 said:

I don't think that Recycling Centers should have any impact on GW. Here's why.

Under 3.13 (and indeed in previous versions of Civ IV) there was almost no reason to EVER build anything other than coal plants. Build 'em, then allieviate the health problems with Recycling centers. No reason to wait and pay extra for Hydro Plants, no reason to wait and risk meltdowns with nuke plants.

Under the new 3.17 system, you can still use RC's to get rid of the unhealthiness impacts on population. But not the effects of global warming. So there is still a cost to building the coal plants (which remain cheap and have early availability). It isn't as cut-and-dried.

Now, there may be some tweaking that needs to be done with this...I think it's a bit daft to have unhealthiness from drydocks or laboratories or perhaps unpowered factories count toward global warming. But I don't think that players should be allowed to use recycling centers as a get-out-of-jail-free card for global warming.

Click to expand...

That is a good point about the coal plants. maybe it should be changed so resources contribute to GW and then lower the impact so the buildings + resources would still have the same effect that it is now then move some of the from coal plants to the coal resource.

If you think about it, it makes more sense for recycling centres to negate from resources not buildings, there isn't enough on resources so that would require moving some around, and that's more of a mod than a patch.

Minor Annoyance said:

That is a good point about the coal plants. maybe it should be changed so resources contribute to GW and then lower the impact so the buildings + resources would still have the same effect that it is now then move some of the from coal plants to the coal resource.

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I wish I could claim credit for this insight, but it actually came from Blake (all hail Blake!) in one of the Polycasts from last year.

Interesting idea on having resources contributing to GW. (I confess ignorance on how it works now). So it's just the building unhealthiness, not the "power" unhealthiness contributing to GW now? Is that right?

DanF: basically, you ARE getting +4 unhealthiness from your coal plants: 2 for the plant itself, and 2 when it's hooked up to a coal resource.

I had some other thoughts on the subject after hearing people's complaints in various threads....I posted them in one of those other threads. For those who are interested, here they are:

jkp1187 said:

I believe that the steps taken in 3.17 were good, but are incomplete and there are several ideas that may be implemented to make it a little better. Note that my first instinct is to be very cautious in making any changes at all -- when in doubt, leave it as-is.

1.) AI, AI, AI. The AI must be able to plan for GW and not necessarily go crazy chopping trees...HOWEVER, aggressive leaders such as Genghis Khan, Stalin, Shaka and the like who may attempt to win by outright domination or conquest should be less inclined to worry about it. (At the same time, peace-loving folk like Gandhi should be more inclined to avoid chopping trees.) This is a tricky thing -- the AI should not necessarily be inclined to spend the whole game worrying about GW just to make the Human player's end game easier. But the AI needs to be aware of GW, if it is not already. I'm not quite convinced that it isn't yet, and I say that 3.17 needs more testing/results as is before this decision is made. A single game where GW goes crazy does not constitute evidence that the GW system is no good -- occasionally this SHOULD happen if it's going to be a feature in the game.

2.) Tiles should not immediately go to desert. The transition should be in stages. I envision something similar to what Seven05's World Piece mod does. A continuum of:

Glacier --> Tundra --> Grassland --> Plains --> Desert (lose forest)

and: Ice --> Water

If a colder square is hit with GW, may be improved. But currently productive grassland squares should get worse, and Plains will become useless.

3.) I like the idea of Events being used as a supplement to the GW system, but they shouldn't replace it. (Again, Seven05's system does something similar).

4.) The unhealthiness from buildings such as Factories, Coal Plants, Ironworks, Industrial Parks should be included in the GW calculations. Recycling plants should not negate this effect. However, unhealthiness from buildings such as Drydocks or Laboratories should not count for GW. (Population, of course, should not count at all, as it is now.)

5.) I am thinking about whether or not use of the Environmentalism civic should alleviate GW in any way. It would make sense on the one hand...but on the other, I don't want to create an incentive for everyone to just jump into Environmentalism at the end of the game. I'm inclined to NOT have Environmentalism play a role unless someone has an idea on how to keep it balanced.

6.) And for those who can't stand the idea of GW, an off-switch for global warming in the Customize Game menu. Yes, if you hate it (and clearly some do,) just shut it off. BUT there will be a trade-off: no nukes. Part of the purpose of the GW mechanism is to provide a price to players using nukes too much. So if you don't want global warming, you can't have nukes, either.

Thoughts?

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The GW code uses something like get_building_unhealth so it doesn't look like it factors other things in.

jkp1187 said:

DanF: basically, you ARE getting +4 unhealthiness from your coal plants: 2 for the plant itself, and 2 when it's hooked up to a coal resource.

Click to expand...

Yeah, I was wrong, but it seems you are too.
Because the fossil fuels burning, CO2 puffing Coal Plants do not contribute to Global Warming at all!

They just don't have native unhealthiness (in contrast to Forges, Labs, Drydocks, ...) which is the only unhealthiness considered in pCity->getBuildingBadHealth() during the calculation of a city's contribution to GW. All their unhealthiness comes from the dirty power provided by the Coal resource (2 from base power & another 2 from dirty power, which is omitted when the city has access to clean power).

So as it is implemented now, building Coal Plants everywhere (as usual) does not increase GW.

Should definitely be changed.

DanF5771 said:

Yeah, I was wrong, but it seems you are too.
Because the fossil fuels burning, CO2 puffing Coal Plants do not contribute to Global Warming at all!

They just don't have native unhealthiness (in contrast to Forges, Labs, Drydocks, ...) which is the only unhealthiness considered in pCity->getBuildingBadHealth() during the calculation of a city's contribution to GW. All their unhealthiness comes from the dirty power provided by the Coal resource (2 from base power & another 2 from dirty power, which is omitted when the city has access to clean power).

Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure Coal Plants have a permanent +2 unhealthiness attached to them regardless of power supply.

Although it would make more sense for unhealthiness from power to have more of an impact on GW calculations than just the building's base unhealthiness.

Here is an overview of the industrial buildings and their health effects (from buildings XML):


Only the Factory and the Industrial Park have permanent unhealthiness.

So a city with a Forge, a Factory and Coal Plant but without Coal (no power) has just +2 from Forge/Factory:


Same city with Coal +4 from dirty power +2 Coal-unhealthiness from Factory:


Same city with Coal but also a Hydro Plant (clean power):

Well, I gladly stand corrected.

So the power unhealthiness doesn't count at all for GW? If so, that definitely needs to be changed.

It's interesting and strange to me that some buildings irreversibly contribute to global warming, but coal plants and the use of coal and oil resources do not.

For what it's worth, I did some testing on this (BTS 3.17 with Solver's 0.19 patch) and I suspect that if one wanted to make recycling centers counteract the global warming effects of building pollution, it would actually be pretty easy. The getBuildingBadHealth() function results don't change with the building of a recycling center, but the totalBadBuildingHealth() function does reflect the recycling center's effect.

See the following image comparing the results of the calls to the Python versions of those two functions before and after a recycling center is built:



Note that following the building of a Recycling Center, the value of getBuildingBadHealth() (highlighted with a yellow box) does not change from -4; however, the value of totalBadBuildingHealth() (highlighted with a green box) does become zero and the overall sum of building-related health values improves from +2 to +6.

So I assume that having the global warming function call pCity->totalBadBuildingHealth() instead of the current getBuildingBadHealth() should allow recycling centers to counteract building pollution in the global warming calculation too. However, I do understand the point brought up by jkp1187 that recycling centers shouldn't provide a "get out of jail free" card and the changelog as posted in http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=6939035&postcount=2 doesn't specifically mention any positive benefit from Recycling Centers so this is probably the intended behavior even if it might be confusing.

Anyhow, some random fairly simple ideas which occurred to me regarding the chances for Global Warming:

Making Recycling Centers Effective
Have the global warming function use the average of getBuildingBadHealth() and totalBadBuildingHealth(). Prior to Ecology the global warming chances would be the same as they are now since both values would be the same, but Recycling Centers could then cut the global-warming impact of unhealthy buildings in half; you don't get a free pass but you do get a bit of a break. And you can tweak the calculation and the weighting factor to balance it out if that's too good of an impact.

Putting Power into the Equation
Instead of (or in addition to) building-related unhealthiness, link global warming to power. If the global warming function used getPowerBadHealth() instead then you'd get -4 with dirty power (the same number as a city with forge, factory, & industrial park with the current mechanics) and -2 with clean power; this makes more sense to me from a "reality" standpoint. And, similar to the above, you can reduce, but not eliminate, the global-warming impact with "greener" infrastructure.

Giving Environmentalism an Impact
I think that Environmentalism as a civic really should have some positive effect regarding GW since it's supposed to represent a national commitment to ecologically sound choices. One way to do this is to get a ratio such as total population (or number) of cities in environmental civs / total world population (or number of cities) and then use that ratio as part of a weighting factor to reduce GW chances. As a rough example, with a global Enviro weight of 40%, then the chance of GW could be cut by 40% if the entire world was environmental but only by 20% if half the world was environmental. Obviously those numbers are just for illustration.

If you are retooling and you dont mind takeing requests, a method to reverse the damage would be nice. (i dont particularly like the end of the world ideaology behind the GW feature)

Thank you for takeing the time to read my request.

That would be more than an unofficial patch could do. That would make it a mod.