Ecological Disaster Modelling in Civ 6

CloneDavid

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I have to start with a personal complaint on the directions of Civilization games took since Civ V, and thus the almost completely ignorance of large scale impact of any civilisation on the environment (be it good or bad). Perhaps the best game in Civ like games was Alpha Centauri, where one, with the technology, would be able to shape the lands, changing weather patterns, raise or lower sea levels, etc.

The dynamic maps of IV had long gone in V and VI, even Civ 1 had better and more interesting global changes in weather and environment.

But not all lost. I am not a modder, but I think there is a nice little way to create a mod centred around a decay, bad ecological impact - the setting is changeable, could be modern world, sci-fi, where Ice Age is coming, or Barsoom (Mars) with canal buildings, historical, like Greenland Viking settlers struggle to keep the food supply, or the collapse of Mayan civilisation.

The basic of the system is simple - Civ 6 has basically two technology tree, one is the hard science, the other one is society/social science. Now what if one of the science is replaced by "technologies" that gives negative impact on productions or costs of buildings, while the other is remaining a positive impact on the civilisation.

For example, let us talk about Barsoom now, with decadent city states trying to keep the canals intact, but in one technology tree there is something called Forgetting the Technology of creating Pumping Station (or any more fancy name), that basically reduces the amount of food sources on tiles as the water would not flow - and one has to - eventually - take this research (let us say you "research this techs with decay points, place anything else in this name, global warming, virus infection, etc). However with the positive research you could research techs that slows down your "yields" of "decay" points, slowing down your collapse, even counter some of that - for example - "Creating a Priesthood of Preserving Irrigation Technology" - which would raise cost in gold, or create unrest, but will keep the food yield the same. Perhaps it opens a "building" in city to counter this.

Now the nice thing you do have boosts in researches, so negative impacts could be modelled in the boosts. For example, we have a decaying setting where bio-research would go wrong and will take toll of the civilisations - now you can research biologically tailored viruses, but using them enough would gain a "boost" on "Creating the Ultimate Virus that Destroys the 99% of Population in Earth" technology, which would reduce drastically the populations in cities and perhaps give some negative yields too.

Not sure this is actually doable, but Civ V had something similar system in one of the official scenario of Rome's falling.
 
Not sure this is actually doable, but Civ V had something similar system in one of the official scenario of Rome's falling.
Ah, yes, the beloved "you must choose a social policy this turn" mechanic coupled with social policies like -10 happiness...

In the mechanics of 6, however, we find very little in the way of negatives balancing strong positives in favor of the mostly moderate positives approach.
I.E., instead of roads costing maintenance but yielding gold when cities are linked, they made roads free but weakened their movement bonus. The outcomes can be engineered to be the same, but the where Civ5 said "yield 4, but cost 3" Civ6 will do something like "yield 1." This is a departure from Civ4+5, to be sure. But it makes the game more accessible at the low skill levels, while still leaving an opening for optimization and strategy at high skill levels. This is probably a good thing.

Anyways, in light of this philosophical reality, I'll counter propose an ecological decay system. We already have a subsystem in place that makes industrial activity- mines, quarries, industrial zones- reduce the appeal of surrounding tiles. It stacks. Perhaps an easier solution would to take this and start adding conditions like- if there's too much industrial activity affecting a tile, it reduces its yield (like -1 food.) Perhaps forests and jungles can't survive such toxic conditions- they would have a chance of being removed. If things got bad enough, then the tile could become blighted with the "polluted" feature. Functioning as a less extreme version of nuclear fallout, it would remove base tile yields entirely. Pollution might block units from healing, too.

To keep things in check, eventually (at Ecology) you could unlock the ability to scrub out pollution.

Longtime fans might be getting a horrible flashback to Civ3, when we had to keep stacks of workers around to play whack-a-mole with the pollution that would spring up. I'm not proposing that. I'm proposing this as something that only occurs next to concentrated industrial activity- perhaps the process is controlled by limiting eligible tiles to those within 1-3 tiles of a Factory, and which also have further factors like a few nearby mines, etc. That way, it's contained to what the player decides to industrialize.

Not that I advocate for this becoming part of the base game, but using a few simple checks (for a nearby factory & negative tile appeal) is probably a bit cleaner for a modmaker than reworking the tech tree. Maybe one could throw in an "Environmentalism" or "Green Energy" economic policy card that removes/reduces the effect, but at the cost of creating extra gold maintenance for the IZ & it's buildings.

Just spitballing!
 
I think we'd need a more complicated government system if we were going to implement this sort of thing. Today, we deal with these things with regulations and policies, "you're not allowed to dump manufacturing biproducts into local waterways". If improvements or tiles were going to generate pollution, there'd have to be a mechanic to limit that, or else you'd reach a point where you'd have to pick between growing your city and giving it production. You'd HAVE to use all your trade routes internally just to support your cesspool cities which can't feed themselves.

We have the policy tree but that would be entirely insufficient for this sort of thing; you can count the number of social policy slots you have for most of the game on two hands and you certainly wouldn't want to waste one on something like this. A legal screen where you could manage more minute and detailed laws would make it easier to add something like this.
 
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