Feedback on the K-Mod global warming system

karadoc

AI programmer
Joined
Oct 3, 2005
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Australia
The new global warming system is one of the first things I added in K-Mod. There are a lot of different tunable aspects of it, but I haven't really changed it much since it was introduced because for me it seems to already work pretty well. But that's just me. I know that different people play on different game settings, with different map types, and different styles of play; and so global warming might be a bit different for different people. I'm interested in hearing any feedback about it.

Is the threshold crossed at around the right time in the game? Is the happiness effect too strong, or too weak, or too soon, or too late? How about the rate of global warming events: too many? Not enough? Maybe too few at first and then too many later on? Do they strike too often in the cold areas? Too often in the warm areas? Is the global warming an interesting part of the game? Or maybe it's a chore, or boring, or just insignificant?

I'm not just asking about those particular questions. Just give whatever feedback you like.

If you have any comments about the strength of the global warming effects, please state some of your game settings: map size, game speed, difficulty level, and perhaps even map type... Those things may affect how it all works.

(here's how GW may be affected by those settings)
Spoiler :
The GW threshold is based on the number of land plots in the world. So that's clearly affected by map size and map type. The number of land plots is meant to be a rough indicator of how much pollution there will be in the late game – more land means more cities and more population...

For game speed & map size, I've tried to scale the strength of the of global warming such that roughly the same proportion of the world will be 'warmed' at the end of the game regardless of the settings. For example, slower game speeds should have fewer events per turn, so that the total number of events at the end is roughly the same as for faster game speeds; and larger maps should have more events per turn, so that the events can cover the same proportion of the world as for smaller maps.

Difficulty level has no direct effect on global warming; but it does tend to affect the global tech-rate. On higher difficulty levels, the AI gets various bonuses which speed up their research; and since the human players are trading with these AI players, it effectively speeds up the research of the humans as well. Because of this, games on high difficulty levels may end sooner than on low difficulty levels. I'm not really sure if this will have a noticeable effect on the amount of global warming.
 
Hi karadoc,

My 2 cents:

As you know I play multiplayer K-Mod with friends and, well, to be honest, we never look at the GW screen nor consider this aspect of the game - random events are off, don't know if it affects it.

Intrinsically that's an interesting idea, it may need a more in depth implementation to play a more important role during games, depending of course on the role you want it to play. Anyway, maybe we never reach a point where we need to care about global warming.
 
I like the addition of the global warming system that you added. The unmodded global warming was just annoying, but yours is better than having none at all. Here's why:

-it forces some choices. Before Kmod I would usually just build coal plants, it was rare that I would use another source of power since hospitals/environmentalism/supermarkets can deal with the health problems. Now I know that if I pollute a lot there will be a cost, so there is an incentive to use nuclear plants or the TGD. i still use coal in the majority of my games, but now it feels more balanced.

-Kmod global warming makes the late game more interesting because sources of happiness are more important. Before Kmod I could go for a space win and skip broadcast towers or any of the late game wonders, and still have the culture slider at 0 or 10%. Many things in the late game just weren't that important, and I'd just be "building" gold, beakers, ship parts, or military units.
Now in Kmod when the game goes late (and I've spammed coal plants and industrial parks everywhere), GW can add a large happiness penalty. This means things like hit singles, hit movies, broadcast towers, the culture slider, are more important and have a noticeable impact on the game. I like that.
 
When GW really ramps up, I start losing the will to play the game...2 or 3 events per turn hitting your lands can feel pretty bad.

And if Im doing all I can to prevent global warming...then its just like a random punishment...

Stuff I'd like to see what would be planting trees (0 chop value) or increased forest/jungle spread, or a higher value "reducing" effect by jungle so jungle is better than forest for at least something, or ai reducing its offset before it reaches ultra toxic levels not after...

Giving the player more choices in dealing with things, always is a good idea imo.

But Karadoc's system, like always, is way better than what came before. My 2 cents.
 
I just finished a nuke throwing contest and I've got to say that the global warming effects were very much improved and realistic. Thanks a ton for your work! :thumbsup: Charles' suggestion about ways to possibly slow/reduce GW seem good ones - still though, going to Alpha Centauri works as well.
 
@Charles555nc, for a sense of scale - what game speed and map size are you talking about? As I mentioned in the first post, those settings can have a significant effect on the system. 3 events per turn might be a lot or it might be almost nothing depending on how big the map is and how late this it is happening. And since global warming is more likely to strike on cold terrain, it can actually be beneficial when it first starts happening...

--

Generally speaking, I'd like for global warming to play a significant role is most games that end late. As in, if the whole world is in the future era, then global warming should be something that players need to worry about. Most games will finish before that happens anyway. I don't want it to be really easy to avoid global warming. It shouldn't be as simple as just not chopping a few forests. If you want to have a planet full of cities all with factories and power plants, then I think should be hard to stay below the global warming threshold. "Hard", as in, every civ using the Environmentalism civ, with public transport and recycling centers and disconnected coal.

In my personal experience the 'severity rating' almost never reaches "high" before the end of the game.

By the way, in K-Mod nukes have no effect on global warming whatsoever.

On Earth, in real life, we past the 'threshold' a quite some time ago. There would need to be some significant policy changes world-wide to completely halt global warming given that a lot of the world is still building the power plants and factories that they need to reach modern standards of living. But matching real-life isn't really the goal anyway. In real life, recycling has nothing to do with global warming. It's about conserving resource - not about reducing greenhouse emissions. The main goals for the global warming system in K-Mod are to add some interesting mechanics and strategy decisions to the late game, and to increase the need for late-game happiness. In order to fulfill those roles, countering global warming should not be trivial.
 
Hello,

I jumped from vanilla BTS to Better AI, and then to this mod. I have to say it is great, I am keen on the global warming system, I could not stand the old vanilla system.

I want to ask something. ¿Is the pollution produced by cities cumulative? I am asking if it grows from one turn to another or if it only takes all the contamination of all cities in a turn and then gives the total.

Thanks, regards.
 
By the way, in K-Mod nukes have no effect on global warming whatsoever.

Why not a separate nuclear winter effect, OOI (provided you can't geoengineer by careful letting-off of nukes)?

In real life, recycling has nothing to do with global warming. It's about conserving resource - not about reducing greenhouse emissions.

Except inasmuch as in theory (for example) if you recycle an aluminium can, you don't have to turn a can's worth of bauxite into aluminium. In practice, alas, it just tends to mean aluminium usage goes up and the bauxite gets turned into another can.

If you'll pardon me producing a stack of vapourware... it seems to me the primary effect of GW should be diplomatic if it's going to be an effective game mechanic, one that makes the player make choices. If it was also driven more by hammers than by unhealthiness, there could be a real choice between producing lots of hammers and staying in Free Market or SP (everyone hates you, but you have a substantial military and SS component production) or covering the map in windmills and cottages and switching to Environmentalism.
 
Gave K-mod a try today. I especially liked how Mehmed actually killed off the other AIs instead of just taking them as vassals. Overall k-mod felt like an improvement.

Global warming was one aspect I didn't like. I didn't know anything about what kmod does(other than "improve the AI"), but global warming happened *a lot* more than what I'm used to from BTS. I would actually prefer going desert directly but having it occur much less.

Anyways, shouldn't you just axe GW completely? There's never going to be any fun gameplay mechanic here and getting hit by GW just feels annoying.
 
GThere's never going to be any fun gameplay mechanic here

I outlined a suggested mechanic up above (albeit perhaps outside the scope of K-Mod). Diplomatic issues. When the player has real choices to make, then it'll be a fun gameplay mechanic.
 
I like the way GW works in K-Mod overall, certainly better than in default BTS.

As someone who usually leaves a forest somewhere for a National Park City and is pretty unhealthiness-conscious in general, I usually don't run into problems with it.

I like the mechanic because it's one of the few game mechanics that truly rewards the mild planet-conscious roleplaying I like to do in my games. xD
 
Helllo,

I have a suggestion for the global warming system. Since global warming in K-Mod isn't cumulative like in real life then this can be done: if global warming level arrives to a maxium point and then it decreases the global warming system could act as it is was actually bigger, reducing a bit every turn until reaching the real value.

Tell me what you think.
 
Helllo,

I have a suggestion for the global warming system. Since global warming in K-Mod isn't cumulative like in real life then this can be done: if global warming level arrives to a maxium point and then it decreases the global warming system could act as it is was actually bigger, reducing a bit every turn until reaching the real value.

Tell me what you think.
I really don't know what you mean by this. "if [...] it decreases the global warming system could act as it is was actually bigger..." -- Are you suggesting that if the number of global warming events per turn drops, then the game should soften the effects of the drop by... doing something? It's very unclear to me what you are suggesting.

The thing is, global warming in K-Mod is cumulative. Here's roughly how it works:
  • Anything that produces :yuck: in a city also produces pollution which contributes to global warming (GW). :yuck: from population has a smaller effect than from buildings, power, and resources.
  • Forests and jungles absorb some amount of pollution. (ie. they count as negative pollution.)
  • The GW threshold is essentially a measure of how much pollution the world can absorb without causing any global warming. In the current implementation, it's proportional to the number of land plots in the world.
  • The GW index is a measure of how much pollution has accumulated beyond the threshold. The rate of change of the GW index is equal to the total global pollution minus the GW threshold. The GW index can go up or down, depending on how much pollution there is, but it is not allowed to drop below zero.
  • The number of GW events per turn is proportional to the GW index. Therefore the rate of global warming will actually increase as long as the global pollution is above the GW threshold.

Global warming events cannot be be undone - and so, once past the threshold, the 'warmth' of the planet tends to increase super-quadratically. The pollution rate tends to grow, slowly; the global warming index is proportional to the (growing) pollution rate minus the threshold - so that's super-linear; the number of events per turn is proportional to the (super-linear) GW index - and so the total number of events will be growing super-quadratically.

It is certainly possible for the global pollution to drop below the threshold again after global warming as already been occurring. If this happens, then the global warming index will start to drop, and so the rate of GW events will decrease until it eventually returns to zero. -- In my experience playing K-Mod, this rarely happens. (Usually either the threshold is just never reached, or once the threshold is reached the pollution continues to increase until it is well beyond the threshold.)

So, global warming in K-Mod is cumulative in the sense that the global warming index can continue to increase even if the pollution of the world is not increasing; and it is cumulative in the sense that the terrain changes caused by global warming accumulate.

[edit]
By the way, the GW index is meant to be analogous to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere of the real world, or something like that. The rough idea is that pollution increases the greenhouse gases, and the greenhouse gases cause the warming. Obviously things are a lot more complex in the real world, but I think the K-Mod system is at least a bit realistic.
 
I play on epic game speed and huge maps.

If we are talking about real life....so called "man made" global warming has pretty much been completely debunked. The temperature of the Earth rises and falls over its billions of years of existence, (not related to carbon at all) and as recently as medieval europe, Europe was much colder than it is now, often referred to as a mini or little ice age.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

The new phrase, used by those desperate to save the idea of global warming and "Carbon taxes" to tax people for living/breathing, is "global climate change" since over the last 30-40 years, the global temperature hasnt gone up.

(Doesnt mean people cant try to get rich by becoming billionaire "carbon barons" like Al Gore is trying to be). In fact, most of the coal plants in the US are "clean" coal plants so their carbon output couldnt be a huge factor. But people see the water vapor as smog...

Of course, sustainability and having a clean ecosystem are still issues. Animals are still going extinct and rivers in China regularly burst into flames because there are so many chemicals in them, and nuclear waste/meltdowns (fukashima) can hurt generations of people and animals.
 
In fact, most of the coal plants in the US are "clean" coal plants so their carbon output couldnt be a huge factor.

I think this is typical of this post. What do you think they do with coal in "clean" plants, pat it on the head and give it a lollipop? No. They set fire to it, producing just as much carbon dioxide as any other plant.
 
How about we keep karadoc's thread free of debate over the validity of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) and keep those discussions to the very lengthy threads on that matter in Off-Topic? (e.g. here)
 
I think this is typical of this post. What do you think they do with coal in "clean" plants, pat it on the head and give it a lollipop? No. They set fire to it, producing just as much carbon dioxide as any other plant.

Evil, evil carbon dioxide...too bad there arent things like trees that use carbon dioxide...o wait. And too bad the temperature hasnt actually gone up the last 40 years. Gotta come up with a new mantra: "global climate change". If it goes up or down, you are right!

China has no regulations on their pollution at all, yet we shut down clean coal plants in the U.S and power costs double or triple. Somebody is getting rich, in the name of the earth!

But yeah probably not the place to discuss real issues.
 
Evil, evil carbon dioxide...too bad there arent things like trees that use carbon dioxide...o wait.
Oh man... you should really try to stay away from that kind of super-weak, shallow-minded, strawmanesque rhetoric. That kind of nonsense argument strips big chunks away from the credibility that you need to put forward your real arguments.

The fact that carbon dioxide is used by trees doesn't mean its concentration is irrelevant. That's a bit like saying "trees use water, therefore rising sea levels isn't a problem".

In any case, as I've said before, K-Mod is not meant to be a reality simulator. In the civ world, there is no carbon dioxide anyway, so this discussion isn't really relevant. All I'm saying is that the K-Mod "global warming index" idea is roughly based on the concept of a green-house effect. The green-house effect is not the only thing relevant to the global climate of the real-world, but it is obviously a very real thing. Without it, the world would be very cold all the time (as one can calculate by simply balancing the energy hitting earth from the sun against the "black body radiation" of the earth).

[edit]
I felt a bit unsure about the black-body thing I wrote, so I've gone ahead and done the calculations using some numbers (for the intensity of sunlight and stuff like that) from wikipedia; and the answer I got was 258K (-15C). The actual measured temperature according to NASA is 15C. So there you go.

(* A few minutes ago I had posted that I got something a bit warmer, but on closer inspection I saw that I'd messed up the calculation of the earth's surface area facing the sun.)
 
I just think its interesting that when I make 4 or 5 points about the sillyness of man made global warming that people take one of the 4 or 5 points I made and say "no!" to one of them. No one commented on the mini ice age in Europe for example, or carbon taxes at all.

Just because trees use carbon dioxide doesnt mean carbon dioxide is meaningless. You are right.

Just saying that carbon dioxide has significant positive uses, and thats a legitimate point. I think its also werid people are more concerned with carbon dioxide than actual pollution: nuclear waste, industrial biproducts etc.

Carbon dioxide blames mostly people just being alive and the coal industry, whereas pollution might actually focus on corporations and big business in general.
 
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