Environmental choices

[Akka]

A good way to represent pollution would be that a city, depending on :
- Population (the higher the pop, the higher the pollution)
- Buildings (some reduce pollution, like recycling center, some augment it, like airport)
- Tiles improvement (if you mine and use pesticides everywhere, you pollute more, obviously)
- Production (higher production : more pollution)
produce a certain amount of pollution points. Technologies affects the factors (automobiles drastically augment population pollution, ecology greatly reduce production pollution, etc...).

All in all, after all is taken into account, pollution is produced by the city. Each turn, a certain amount of PP (pollution points) is dumped into the city radius (either randomly, either in a spreading circle around the city, either according to which tiles are used by the population, it doesn't really matter). Each tile, hence, absorb a certain number of pollution points.
When they accumulate more and more pollution points, the tiles starts to have bad effects :
- for A pollution points, they loose 1 food production (terrain polluted makes some crops polluted and not edible ; wildlife dies ; streams polluted and not drinkable, etc...).
- for B pollution points, they have the risk of rendering the population working on it diseased each turn (self-explanatory).
- for C pollution points, they have the risk of rendering the population working on it unhappy (soiled scenery).
- for D pollution points, the health of the city decrease.
- for E pollution points, the hammer is reduced by one (some place is so polluted that it's unsafe working inside, some of the production is diverted to clean some other place so that it can be worked, etc...)

Each turn, the tiles will recover from a certain number of PP. Workers untis can clean for another amount of PP on top of that.

As such, controlling the output of pollution for each city, would be important.

 

[HourlyDaily]

That seems like a pretty convincing base model. We can't have too many dis-incentives to building factories or else no one would do it - but unless the costs of polluting buildings and improvements were offset - the health and tile penalty would kick in.

 

[Che Guava]

...We can't have too many dis-incentives to building factories or else no one would do it - but unless the costs of polluting buildings and improvements were offset - the health and tile penalty would kick in.

Yes, not too many disincenties, but just enough to be able to consider alternative paths. I think one of the great strengths of civ4 will be the alternate paths you can tacke on the tech tree. I'd like to see this exapnded into general gameplay and into environmental choice in particular.

As it stands, there is no way, for instance, to avoid industrilizations completely. Not building factories, then manufacturing plants, nuclear plants, etc just ends up putting you far behind any other civ's that do. Maybe this is more true to history, but I would still like to see viable alternate paths to things like factories. Sure, you can build up your factories and manufacturing sectors and up your production, probably leading to greater military might and a better chance of taking over the world, but the penalties for such a path should be great enough to at least consider taking another environmentally-friendly path and still being able to survive, if not thrive, given the right amount of skill.