A way of minimising polllution

[undertoad]

Here's what I've started doing to minimise pollution (which is a PITA) in recent games.

Cities only start producing "population" pollution (as opposed to "improvements/production" pollution from shields/factories/airports) when they go above pop 12.

So in the Industrial era, I completely miss out Sanitation (an optional tech). Result is my cities can't grow above 12, as I can't build Hospitals. I fine-tune all my size-12 cities for production and give them as many scientists as I can, rather than having them throw away extra food.

Then in the Modern era, I go for Ecology first of all, and already have the big size-12 cities I want to grow working on a Mass Transit System prebuild. (Many of them will already have Factories by this stage, making MTS less time-consuming to build). Ecology pops out of the think-tank, and I have Mass Transit Systems a few turns later. Only then do I go back, research Sanitation (or buy it, it's cheap by this stage) and build Hospitals. So metros never get a chance to produce pop-pollution - they get the MTS before they grow above 12.

Result is hardly any population pollution - I only have to deal with the minimal pollution from Factories, which is generally just two "poison-symbols" at this stage.

The only disadvantage I can see is that I miss out on Battlefield Medicine, for which you need 5 Hospitals. The disadvantage of not growing my cities into metros is minimal - with fine-tuning and scientists, I'm not wasting too much food. And at that stage of the game, when I'm usually in a warlike government, corruption means that the extra shields from growing 12-14 or 12-15 would be negligible.

What do you think?

 

[kulade]

To me, missing out on Metropolis size cities wouldn't quite be worth it especially if if I were in a government that lumps allot if free units to big cities. Typically at the beginning of the Industrial age, I have some of my biggest cities rush workers, and get rails down a quickly as possible. Once I have ubiquitous rails a lots of workers, pollution is hardly a problem to me. Factories and hospitals may make more polluting cities, but they are still some of the best buildings of the Industrial times, and I wouldn't want to miss out on either.

 

[Spoonwood]

What's your desired VC? Plenty of games don't even make it to Sanitation as a research option. If you're playing a spaceship/diplomatic game, I certainly don't see the point of taking citizens off of tiles in core towns to become scientists in the industrial age. You get more beakers with a library and a university in core towns than via scientists. If you have hospitals, you can irrigate all your non-hill/mountain tiles and have a bunch of scientists also for more beakers.

 

[timerover51]

You are overcompensating for pollution. It is overdone, but you are putting yourself into a hole by limiting your city size that way. Kulade has a pretty good approach, or you could modify the game in the editor. I got tired of trying to come up with creative solutions to the pollution headache and modified the game. The problem with modifying it is that I do not want to eliminate pollution as a problem for the AI. That forces me to get about as creative with modifying the game as playing the unmodified game.

Right now, the best way I have come up with to modify the game is to increase the number of citizens in a town and city. The AI always seems to go for the Metropolis, which does not really help it that much because of the settings that I use. So I stay pollution-free from population, and the AI has it from population and industry. Then simply pick carefully which cities to put hospitals in.

 

[undertoad]

My VC in this game was Conquest/Spaceship. For Spaceship, the extra citizens would have been useful as trade (=beaker)-generators. But for Conquest, at that stage of the game I like having my core cities just pumping out an Infantry/Cavalry/Tank or Arty every 4 turns or so.

Building them a Hospital just lets them breed more miserable people - and then they need all this attention, where I have to fiddle about building Cathedrals/Colosseums for them or muck about with the lux slider. Takes their attention away from building scary military hardware, and mine from putting it to use! I'm already tearing my hair out wondering what on earth to do with my conquered cities that take 40 turns just to build a cheap Greek Library to expand to the full fat-X.

(The "load of luxury resources + Marketplace" solution to unhappiness is my first recourse at this stage; or rather, that's what I've been plannin for throughout the game, fighting wars to gain luxuries as soon as possible. But a Marketplace only goes so far - a city needs more smily-things pretty soon after size 12).

And then my Workers have to be running up cleaning up the mess. What kinds of results have people had with setting a few teams of workers on Automate - Clear up Pollution? I've heard such bad things about automation (along with the Governor, I never use it), but maybe this particular command does work OK.

I think one reason I avoided Hospitals in this game is that it's the first time I've played with vanilla (well, C3C "vanilla") corruption parameters, rather than my own mini-mod with increased OCN. And it's scary how small the core is when corruption is like that. I probably only had 6 really good core cities - other well-established cities, just a quick stroll from the capital, were corrupt enough to make building anything big (Factory, Hospital etc) a major undertaking, taking the city off-line from military production for decades. Outside the 6 good cities, these long build times and pretty pathetic trade (due to corruption) made Universities an unattractive option.

I also like the "Hospital and Mass Transit after Factory" advantage of this approach. It's much more efficient in terms of lost time not building weapons. Especially because, once you build a hospital, you've opened up a can of worms where the city will now demand lots of other big improvements to keep it happy.