Ahriman, I tried several games with improvements on polar sink enabled. It added nothing to the game and just created a cluttered polar cap, and most certainly didn't make those cities more worthwhile.
I played many games with improvements in the polar zone enabled, because every game was like this until just recently.
Being able to build improvements there would make polar cities massively more worthwhile. I can't understand the argument that says "it wouldn't make them much better, so lets not do it". If it wouldn't make much difference, then what is the harm in enabling it?
It wouldn't create clutter, anymore than enabling improvements in sink tiles on non-polar zones makes clutter. This is Civ; yields come from improvements on tiles.
The commerce for ice (which is and should be the big attraction there) on the other hand makes polar cities one of the biggest money makers you can get. Period.
Nonsesnse. They give barely more commerce than a cottage, and they give less than you'd get from a non-polar city that let you access a handful of spice tiles.
We are observing in many people's experience that the polar cities aren't worth getting because they don't provide enough of a boost to make it worth the hassle.
Enabling improvements so that those cities can actually get the hammers to build stuff or the commerce to contribute seems like a no-brainer to me on both gameplay and realism terms. I genuinely can't understand why anyone could oppose this, particularly when the failure to have them was a bug introduced by mistake.
I don't see the pressing issue.
It is a huge pressing issue because the polar zone is not worth prioritizing to settle or seriously contesting, given its downsides (hard to reinforce, high distance maintenance costs, no health/happy resources, no mesa, no spice, etc.). Enabling improvements would be a significant boost. I strongly disagree that there is a significant graphical downside (which seems to be your only argument here?) anymore than there is a downside of enabling improvements to be built elsewhere on the map.
This is a big deal for me. I thought we had a compromise worked out, but you implemented the penalties for polar cities there (removing ice shipper availability, reducing terraform speed) without implementing the benefits.