Feedback on the K-Mod global warming system

[PieceOfMind]

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.

Did you have a read of the thread I linked? It would be a better place to put your questions and/or arguments forward.

 

[Manujuanel]

Wow! Was this discussion started by my commentary? It would be better to discuss these things in the thread linked by PieceOfMind, let's return to normality.

Returning to K-Mod, well, I didn't explain me very well, but since Karadoc said GW effects are irreversible i have nothing more to say, I think the actual system is perfect. There's only one more thing I would like to say, I see that jungles still add +0.25 to cities. If there are 4 jungles in the city radius does this count to GW? If so, I think jungles should have a bigger offset, but well, maybe it doesn't make sense because at late game I (and surely everybody) have cut all the jungles near the cities.

Thanks for reading, bye.

 

[damerell]

Evil, evil carbon dioxide...too bad there arent things like trees that use carbon dioxide...o wait.

I'm impressed; you've forgotten your own point inside of two posts. It was:

In fact, most of the coal plants in the US are "clean" coal plants so their carbon output couldnt be a huge factor.

Of course their carbon output is just as high as any other plant.

 

[Charles555nc]

I like how i mis typed "carbon out put" when I meant "pollution output" for clean coal. And thats literally the only retort over what 5 or 6 posts? Sorry I mis typed guys lol. Cant declare a carbon victory off of that.

It makes no sense to tax the first world countries's people and shut down clean coal when most of the pollution AND carbon emissions comes from the 3rd world countries.
(especially China, probably the worst in the planet, but not sure what ranking that country it is).

Its just another reason to tax the bejesus out of people. The more you tax people the less they can even afford to protest anything, you'll notice the rise of police states all over western civilization. Look up NDAA for here in the United States- our government can literally kidnap people and never have to tell their family or a lawyer! China then passed their own version of NDAA, even the nazis never passed laws like this.

Al Gore wants to be a carbon billionaire. He already has mansions all over the world, privately owned planes, HIS carbon use is worse than 99% of people. Every single major leader of carbon taxes and global warming is mega rich and says we need to have less kids when they have 4 or 5 of their own kids (like Bill Gates, Ted Turner). Bill Gates and Ted Turner have said we need to get rid of BILLIONS of humans. And if they have their way they get to pick who lives and who dies, and who gets to have kids. Psychos.

Still no comments about how the Earth hasnt warmed and that the Europe had a mini ice age (Earth naturally heats and cools, not because of carbon). There is no clever come back to that.

We all care about the Earth and reducing pollution and keeping endangered species safe. Dont let rich sociopaths convince you that humanity is scum (remember Hitler/Stalin/Mao?).

 

[satrapper]

i suppose it generally forum protocol that these kind of off-topic discussions should be taken elsewhere but i couldn't help throwing my tuppence worth into the fray.

i did some of this stuff in college, admittedly a few years back now, but i think we (most of us laymen who lack expertise in the area) should probably go with the scientific consensus on this unless that changes with new data (as with any other scientific issue).

as far as im aware, unless its changed lately and i didnt hear, most meterologists/environmental scientists etc seem to go with the whole "earth is warming and mankind is contibuting a lot" thing or "AGW".


the "trend" since records began, is that global temp is rising.
some years may be cooler than the previous year(s) and local conditions may be variable but that doesnt alter the upward global curve.

carbon is carbon, clean coal or not. CO2 (and water vapour for that matter!) traps heat close to the earth.

as icecaps melt, less heat is radiated back out. which accelerates the melting and warming.

localized desertification and sea level rise will be a bummer in certain areas but youve also got a whole heap of other climate (locally: weather) issues. wind is caused by air pressure gradients, (gases expand when heated, pressure changes and vice versa obv.) air moves from areas of high pressure to low. the greater the diff, the faster the wind. global warming means very different weather systems to what we have been used to.

we and animals and plants have got used to a fairly stable climate in whatever region we inhabit. yes the worlds climate has swung all over the place in the past but its much more rapid now (relative term obv. as individuals, it may not seem that great or rapid).

roughly speaking surely we have to believe what the science tells us, regardless of self-serving individuals such as you mention. (not that i have a notion of what those guys have said or done btw).

It makes no sense to tax the first world countries

seems fair enough, the developed world can take any minimal tax pain much better. we did well enough out of fossil fuels, industrialism etc. anyway you do what you can, regardless of others. china is building plenty hydro stuff too btw.

Look up NDAA...even the nazis never passed laws like this.

im not american so you obv. know better than me. but from afar, i dont think the US is approaching a police state. sure, militarism (isnt the NDAA basically about the defence budget?) will always be part of american gov policy, but surely for sound (selfish) reasons. employment, securing resources, maintaining superpower status in the world's eyes and so on.

Earth naturally heats and cools, not because of carbon

the sun provides the energy. earth warms. the atmosphere helps trap heat. at night and during winter you'd be a lot colder without it.
nitrogen (N2) especially and oxygen (O2) are the major gases up there but diatomic gases dont absorb and release thermal energy like....say, CO2!!!! or water vapour (H2O).

anyway, there's good scientific reasoning behind all the global warming stuff. honestly

 

[PieceOfMind]

Moderator Action: Back to the topic please. This thread is about the K-Mod Global Warming system. Posts not about that will be moved or deleted.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[karadoc]

I like how i mis typed "carbon out put" when I meant "pollution output" for clean coal. And thats literally the only retort over what 5 or 6 posts? Sorry I mis typed guys lol. Cant declare a carbon victory off of that.

[...] tax [...] shut down clean coal [...] 3rd world countries [...] China, probably the worst in the planet [...] tax [...] tax [...] rise of police states [...] nazis [...] Psychos.

Still no comments about how the Earth hasnt warmed and that the Europe had a mini ice age (Earth naturally heats and cools, not because of carbon). There is no clever come back to that.

Look man, we're not hear to argue about global politics or government policy. So just because someone doesn't explicitly rebut one of your points doesn't mean they have nothing to rebut it with. And just because you've repeated some of your claims a couple of times with no rebuttals doesn't mean they are true.

This stuff isn't relevant to the balance of the mod. But really, I wish you wouldn't speak with such an air of authority about things you clearly are not an expert on.

The USA don't have "clean coal" power stations. But they may have 'black coal' power stations (as opposed to "brown coal", which has more immunities in it than black coal, and thus burns "dirtier"). Burning any kind of coal must, by the definition of 'burning', produce carbon dioxide regardless of the type of coal. That's what burning coal means. It turns carbon and oxygen into carbon dioxide. True clean coal power stations require some kind of carbon capture and storage technology, and although there are people working on such technologies, they have not come into fruition. You can read about it on wikipedia.

As for your repeated claim that "Earth hasnt warmed". I'm not sure where you heard that, but here's a recent article from nasa that I found with 30 seconds on DuckDuckGo. It seems to suggest that the earth has in fact warmed. And here is a site which has a lot of graphs and data about Arctic sea ice - I can tell you it certainly isn't growing. It is in fact shrinking noticeably. So I don't know why you're talking about a "mini ice age". Some cold months in Europe does not imply an ice age. We're talking about global climate.

As for this "Earth naturally heats and cools, not because of carbon". It's absolutely true that the earth naturally warms and cools. There are lots and lots of things that affect the earth's temperature, and many of them are completely outside human control. But carbon dioxide certainly does play a role in the earth climate, and humans are responsible for a great deal of it. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas (along with many other things, including water vapour), and as I pointed out in my previous post the greenhouse effect plays a huge role in temperature of earth. There are other things which also have significant effects the earth's climate, and some of those things may be out of human control, but that doesn't mean we should simply ignore the things that are in human control.

Rather than simply throwing our hands in the air and say "it happens naturally", clearly it would be better to try to calculate the extent to which different factors will affect the climate and then use those calculations to make predictions and recommendations about the future. Explaining, describing, and predicting "natural" phenomena is what science is all about - and that's exactly what climate scientists and related experts are doing right now. If you want to argue about whether or not carbon dioxide has a significant effect on global temperate, then I suggest you learn some science and then discuss the topic with other scientists.

I'm not hear to argue about the magnitude to which human effect the earth's climate. I don't particularly want to discuss that. But I strongly dislike when people make hyperbolic arguments about scientific and political topics. Science is something that I know quite a lot about, and I don't like to see it undercut with emotive arguments rather than factual arguments.

[edit]
@PieceOfMind, sorry, I was writing this when you posted. I didn't see your message until now.

 

[satrapper]

sorry PieceOfMind!

on topic: the sytem in k-mod is perfect as-is. adds an extra element to gameplay without being a pain. threshold is hit around the right time (on marathon anyway). number of events is about right. ive never had a game last long enough for major global warming though. i only just noticed in the changelog that you disabled land turning into coast (many many versions ago). damn pity, i always vaguely looked forward to mass events of such. in a masochistic sort of way

(edit) actually reading back the thread, i like damerell's sugggestion of diplomatic consequences. a small negative modifier for being a major contributor to global warming would be a cool addition. seems intuitive and introduces another strategic element to consider.

 

[Charles555nc]

(Its not even called global warming anymore, its called global climate "change"...and thats from the UN- center of global warming carbon taxes proponents)


But getting back on topic...how about adding to a tech that it unlocks at +2-3 beakers (and removes the negative health effects) for rainforest? To reflect the medicines/research that is often found in the rainforest diverse lifeforms? Or just more pollution reduction for rainforst?

This would help encourage players and the ai to not just bulldoze the rainforest. So there will be more rainforest, so there will be less global warming (in game) for those of us who dont like our land being destroyed, after taking all possible steps.

I dont think civ4 really has any value for rainforest, whereas in real life it does, especially in the modern era.

I also like the idea of a small negative diplomatic value on the biggest offenders of pollution.

 

[Marguerite Ming]

@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.

I like to do the one more turn thing once I've won; I've played games past year 3000. I've come to HATE two civ4 game mechanics: global warming and inflation. They make the game unplayable past a certain point.

Global warming in vanilla is nothing more than Random Land Destruction. In older versions of civ (civ2 I think) You had engineers that could actually terraform land, changing between plains/grassland/hills/desert/mountains/forest, if you spent enough time. One time I levelled ALL the mountains on a huge map, just for fun, it was nothing but farmed grassland, as far as the eye could see .

Anyway. Open-ended systems like GW and inflation really tick me off, and it doesn't help any that the mechanics are total nonsense.

Take inflation: the value of a currency is based on a ratio: what you can buy with it/total currency available. The more currency in circulation, with a fixed product base, means the currency becomes worth less. This should be used for determining the effects of inflation, not a mindless game mechanic that just adds a higher and higher percentage to expenses, until the game becomes unplayable.

As for global warming: pop culture has a certain prevailing view of GW: it is happening and we're at fault, and the result is going to be bad, and we're all bad people for eventually destroying our beautiful planet. Anybody who questions any of this is an apologist for the oil companies and wants to chop down all the forests and wreck the world and doesn't care about other people.

Like many things in pop culture, this viewpoint has almost no relation to reality. But, it requires a science background and some serious critical thinking to winkle through to reality.

Maybe if I'm bored tomorrow, I'll give a 25 cent tour of the actual science.

 

[Marguerite Ming]

An additional thought on inflation:

Inflation doesn't increase the value of what your trade routes and city squares produce, but it does affect your costs. That is nonsensical, and leads to eventual unplayability.

 

[lunfa_reo]

I also like K-Mod's GW system. It's definitely better than BtS' one, because this one is more predictable and you get an info screen to monitor it and some options to do something about it.

I would actually like GW removed completely from Civ4 or at least be made optional, but...

I have only played 1 K-Mod game, in which GW threshold and events have hit about the right point in game time. But there are some things I'm not comfortable with:

- It hit when I wasn't even industrialized. Other Civs were. I had little options to help reduce GW in that situation, one of which was choose to remain without industrialization (e.g. State Property without factories and power). I wonder if the AI is aware of GW issues and actively tries to keep it under control or even reduce it at least to offset its unhappiness penalties.
- As was mentioned above, jungles are dismissed by Civ players because they only cause trouble. With your GW system they now are more useful, but just a little bit IMO. Not enough to justify avoiding bulldozing them. Maybe removing the unhealthiness jungles produce in Civ4 (I don't know why they produce , maybe there is RL-based reason).
- It's been said that GW effects on terrain are irreversible. I don't want to stir an argument about RL GW and whether this features is based on RL, just want to state gameplay-wise: it would be great if we players could do something about terrain hit by GW. It would give us more options to deal with GW (we can't always switch to building public transportation in all our cities, we can be under a serious invasion for example). So this might involve terraforming, which maybe would be a disproportionate addition given the minimalist approach to this mod (which I agree to), but perhaps a new worker action like "repair GW damage" or something similar, kind of like "clean fallout" (you can fully repair damage to terrain with workers in that case).

Apart from those points, something I really like is Environmentalism is much more attractive now and less crippling to corporations

 

[Marguerite Ming]

Yes, when a grassland square (that was previously irrigated) that lies between two rivers is suddenly turned into desert, my reaction is WTF???

If the israelis can make the desert bloom, then why can't we do so in civ?

Also, when a city builds an aquaduct to distant hills, the city should then be able to serve as a source of fresh water for irrigation.

Also, we should be able to plant forests. Some people are concerned that this could be exploited for chop value. How about this: if the city works the newly planted forest, it grows in chop value, the way cottages grow in value?

 

[plastiqe]

@Marguerite Ming, nice plant forest idea.

I like how Karadoc started a thread on global warming in the game that quickly turned into global warming in the real world, which is a highly politicized issue even though it shouldn't be. Delicious Irony. : P In ancient times, the F2 Environmental Advisor should just say "go take enemy environments and make them our environments" and advise you which enemy to attack up until the modern era when he gets serious.
(j/k)

I have been steadily working up from small to big maps and Global Warming scales well on all sizes so far for me.

Anyways, the other reason I wanted to post here was two and a half changes I think would benefit the system. A) moving Lumbermills much earlier in the tech tree and B) a bigger benefit in F2 Advisor from saving jungles than you get from saving forests, like double for jungles. Forest Preserve improvements on a tile could also boost your offsets; unlike a lumbermill there forest/jungle isn't getting used for production.

 

[RyanTheGreat]

Hi i use your mod an was wondering how do i decrease the chance of glabal warming in the xml file. I basicly want the same system but much less severe and have slower warming than default. Also is it possible to add that sea ice is a defence bonus like trees? Thanks

 

[MqsTout]

I ask the same. While I'm generally positive about the new GW system over the original [I'd always mod it out entirely in original], I'd like to tweak the numbers myself a bit. Are any of them XML or Py accessible?

 

[karadoc]

The parameters used by the global warming system are in the xml files, so it is possible to change them, but not in an easy game-by-game kind of way.

Most of the numbers are in assets\xml\GlobalDefinesAlt.xml. The effect of terrain features is set in assets\xml\Terrain\Civ4FeatureInfos.xml.

Civ4FeatureInfos.xml is where you should go if you want to make ice have some effect, but keep in mind that if you make sea ice have a defensive effect without changing anything else, it might effectively disable global warming (because the total defence would be higher). Also, if you do rebalance the numbers to include sea ice, you might end up having too much global warming on maps which don't have any ice (eg. highlands). So it might be a bit tricky to get it right. (I actually did quite a lot of pen-and-paper calculations and in-game testing to try to come up with good formulas and parameters. I wanted a system that was easy enough to present in the in-game adviser screen, but which also produced fair/balanced/reasonable gameplay results for as many different types of maps as possible. I'm sure it could still be improved, but I'm kind of reluctant to change it now.)

If you want global warming to start happening later into the game, you can do this by increasing GLOBAL_WARMING_RESISTANCE, or decreasing the weights on power, population etc.

If you are already generally happy with the balance of the world at which global warming starts, but want to change the severity of it, you can do this by changing GLOBAL_WARMING_INDEX_PER_CHANCE to change the effect on the land, or GLOBAL_WARMING_BASE_ANGER_PERCENT to change the effect on happiness. (Reducing 'index per chance' would increase the number of global warming events.)

Changing GLOBAL_WARMING_PROB affects both anger and land events.

There isn't a parameter to turn global warming off completely, but it can be effectively disabled by setting the pollution weights to zero, or by setting GLOBAL_WARMING_PROB to zero.

 

[Archid]

I am getting a CTD in my mod that I believe is related to a bug in the GW system in CvGame on line 6608.

CvGame::doGlobalWarming()
{
  .
  .
  .
  /*
  ** Apply the effects of GW
  */
  int iGlobalWarmingRolls = getGlobalWarmingChances();

  .
  .
  .

  //Global Warming
  for (int iI = 0; iI < iGlobalWarmingRolls; iI++)
  {
    .
    .
    .
    if (GC.getGameINLINE().isOption(GAMEOPTION_ADVANCED_DIPLOMACY))
    {
      if (pPlot->getOwnerINLINE() != NO_PLAYER)
      {
        GET_PLAYER((PlayerTypes)iI).AI_changeMemoryCount(pPlot->getOwnerINLINE(), MEMORY_YOU_POLLUTE, 1);
      }
    }
    .
    .
    .
  }
}

The iI loop variable is used as a player index which can cause a CTD as it eventually results in a call to CvLeaderHeadInfo::getMemoryAttitudePercent(int i) with in invalid index so we get a memory error when accessing CvLeaderHeadInfo::m_piMemoryAttitudePercent. Looking at the code I suspect that the offending line should be in its own nested loop of all the players that are alive.

if (pPlot->getOwnerINLINE() != NO_PLAYER)
{
  for (int iJ = 0; iJ < MAX_CIV_PLAYERS; iJ++)
  {
    if (iJ != pPlot->getOwnerINLINE())
    {
      if (GET_PLAYER((PlayerTypes)iJ).isAlive())
        GET_PLAYER((PlayerTypes)iJ).AI_changeMemoryCount(pPlot->getOwnerINLINE(), MEMORY_YOU_POLLUTE, 1);
    }
  }
}

Making this changes resolves the CTD for me and my save game continues normally.

 

[Zholef]

I only play Standard/Normal, but on various map types. My first few K-Mod games were on Monarch. Most were on Emperor. Recently, I've moved up to Immortal. In my experience, GW sets in at about the right time, but it's far too mild. Typically, by the time I launch my space ship, my territory has suffered around three events and GW anger is practically non-existent.

I like your changes to the mechanic, but it has an inconsiderable effect on my games. Especially as far as keeping forests around, it's just not worth it. When there's an army in my territory that just needs to be chopped out, why should I care what happens two hundred turns after I've already won a domination victory? Here some suggestions:

• Allow lumber mills with Machinery, as makes sense historically.
• Give lumber mills +1 with State Property.
• While you're at it, give water mills +1 from the start, but only +1 from Electricity. That would make them at least occasionally worth building before Replaceable Parts.
• GW should be more likely to hit coastal tiles.
• GW should turn fresh water lakes to deserts.
• GW should shorten rivers.
• Complement GW with erosion: On every turn of the game, there should be a chance, for every grassland or plains tile not covered by a forest or jungle, that it warms up. That chance should be lowered by nearby tundra, ice, forest or jungle, but increased by nearby deserts.
• It should be possible for jungles and forests to grow spontaneously on any eligible tile. The chance of that happening could be increased by placing a preserve on that tile (providing no happiness until a forest or jungle springs ups).
• Take a page out of Colonization's book: Reduce the defensive bonus from forests and jungles in enemy territory.
• Have forests provide +0.7 to nearby cities. (For extra credit, make that bonus distance dependent with +0.7, +0.5, and +0.3 for forests one, two, and three tiles away respectively.)

One more thing, since it's my first post in this sub-forum, at least as far as I recall: Great mod! I love it!

 

[karadoc]

@Archid, that does sounds like a bug -- but as far as I can tell it is not a bug from K-Mod itself. K-Mod doesn't have GAMEOPTION_ADVANCED_DIPLOMACY, or MEMORY_YOU_POLLUTE. The section of code that you're referring to must have been added by someone else.

@Zholef. Thanks for the input. I agree that in most games GW doesn't end up having much of an effect. I do sometimes consider speeding it up a little bit; or at least rebalancing the formula so that the effects are noticeable a little bit sooner. Maybe will make some changes like that one day; but there are some gameplay / balance reasons why I'm a bit reluctant.

The thing about degrading land is that there no 'counter-play'. i.e., there's nothing the player can do to combat the effects that GW has on land. So when global warming turns your good land into poor land, it can produce a sense of unfairness in the player.

Originally GW allowed coastal deserts to become ocean, but I removed that because it sometimes produced very painful effects (such as losing an important resource, or splitting a continent into two). Shortening a river or removing a lake could be interesting and realistic, but I worry that it could be a bit un-fun, because it might completely ruin someone's carefully planned irrigation chain and there's nothing they can do about it. (If the player could know in advance that GW will definitely shorten a particular river then that might be different, because they could plan for it and focus more on reducing pollution etc. But adding that kind of information and complexity to the game has other negative gameplay effects.)

I do think it's important that there be noticeable unpleasant effects across the globe. But I'd like to avoid effects where one random roll of the dice has a major gameplay impact.