Global warming - a suggestion

[Set]

Out of interest, what do you suggest?

I think the idea of rising sea levels (low lying land sinking into the sea) would be pretty cool, but I don't think the way the Civ maps work really lends itself to this. The way SMAC handled terrain heights would make something like that much easier, but the Civ style makes for a much prettier and more realistic world, but not really one that has any real "height above sea level" value for terrain.

I with chalks rising levels might even destroy a few of you cities this could really suck. and civics like enviromentalism could reduce this but suck in every other way. buildings like public transportation would also reduce global warming. and other buildings like coal plants would increase it

 

[chongli]

Dump global warming! It's unfun and cannot be realistically implemented!

 

[Chalks]

Dump global warming! It's unfun and cannot be realistically implemented!

I fail to see why either of these aspects should warrant the dumping of the mechanic.

If a mechanic is not fun, then it should be made to be fun. The idea of complaining about the realism of something that is still mostly theoretical at this point makes very little sense.

 

[whats a navy]

Dump global warming! It's unfun and cannot be realistically implemented!

If Firaxis does dump it, it would cause anger among others more than if it was implemented in the first place. I do belief though that it would take way to much resources and time to add it when the game is seemingly over by the time global warming is occurring so a more simplified version would be a better fit.

 

[Warlord Sam]

I repeat my original statement: if it is included, don't make it not fun.

It can be punishing, but only if there is some manner of control given to the player to prevent it from happening. A calculated risk that I lose? I don't love it, but I understand it. It doesn't strike me as arbitrary and "not fun".

Two civs on the other side of the world start lobbing nukes, and my core cities start having tiles turn to desert? Not fun.

 

[Chalks]

Just to be annoying, I do find the in game concept of global warming quite fun.

What I'd really love would be for there to be some sort of tipping point where the whole world falls apart and becomes utterly uninhabitable - the winner being the last civilisation alive.

Apocalypse victory condition. Dark, I know, but the idea of once magnificent civilisations fighting over the last few inhabitable parts of the world until only one remains would be a pretty cool take on a "sudden death" mode.

 

[chongli]

I fail to see why either of these aspects should warrant the dumping of the mechanic.

If a mechanic is not fun, then it should be made to be fun. The idea of complaining about the realism of something that is still mostly theoretical at this point makes very little sense.

Because the core Civ concept of discrete units of food, hammers, population etc. are very bad at modeling extremely smooth, gradual, global effects. Civ 4's "solution" of simulating this with a tile roulette is laughable at best and extremely annoying at worst.

How do you propose simulating global warming in a fair, enjoyable and strategically significant way?

If Firaxis does dump it, it would cause anger among others more than if it was implemented in the first place.

I doubt it.

 

[Kizor]

Oh for crying out loud, I had other things to do than learning modding just to implement the Apocalypse victory condition. There's no way we'll be seeing it in vanilla, yet someone has to make it.

 

[Chalks]

Because the core Civ concept of discrete units of food, hammers, population etc. are very bad at modeling extremely smooth, gradual, global effects. Civ 4's "solution" of simulating this with a tile roulette is laughable at best and extremely annoying at worst.

How do you propose simulating global warming in a fair, enjoyable and strategically significant way?

I don't think that's a particularly fair question, since the definition of "fair" and "enjoyable" are completely subjective. The idea is that it provides an additional challenge to the modern era - you may dislike "tile roulette" but it does provide this to some degree.

You can make it more fun without making it more realistic. How best to do this entirely depends on your definition of "fun". Do you want more challenge? More variety from the standard game? More interesting method to handle the issues?

Basically, what I'm getting at here is saying "DO NOT WANT" is not a terribly productive way to tackle about the issue.

And "It's not fun currently so get rid of it entirely" is not logical.

 

[Thormodr]

I don't think that's a particularly fair question, since the definition of "fair" and "enjoyable" are completely subjective. The idea is that it provides an additional challenge to the modern era - you may dislike "tile roulette" but it does provide this to some degree.

You can make it more fun without making it more realistic. How best to do this entirely depends on your definition of "fun". Do you want more challenge? More variety from the standard game? More interesting method to handle the issues?

Basically, what I'm getting at here is saying "DO NOT WANT" is not a terribly productive way to tackle about the issue.

And "It's not fun currently so get rid of it entirely" is not logical.

Agreed. There has to be some drawback from building up massive amounts of industry. There should be checks and balances and interesting game play decisions.

 

[eireksten]

Agreed. There has to be some drawback from building up massive amounts of industry. There should be checks and balances and interesting game play decisions.

Don't you already get health problems? That must be considered a drawback, no?

Though to be fair, I find it strange that when a leader fail to do anything about health issues the population remains calm. If there is prolonged periods of sickness (or simply the amount of health issues get out of hand), one would assume that someone would start complaining. Same thing if all forests in the area disappears.

About global warming, the way it was implemented in Civ4 was pretty pointless. Both from a gameplay and realism perspective. I think everyone'd agree on that. If it reappears in Civ5, I'd like it to be more a diplomatic issue, as that's how it's mostly affecting the world right now. I can see how you can make AI dislike nations that don't do their share of pollution cutbacks, but I'm not sure how it could affect MP.

Unless they get any really bright ideas, I'm guessing we'll only see this in realism mods.

 

[Thormodr]

Don't you already get health problems? That must be considered a drawback, no?

Though to be fair, I find it strange that when a leader fail to do anything about health issues the population remains calm. If there is prolonged periods of sickness (or simply the amount of health issues get out of hand), one would assume that someone would start complaining. Same thing if all forests in the area disappears.

About global warming, the way it was implemented in Civ4 was pretty pointless. Both from a gameplay and realism perspective. I think everyone'd agree on that. If it reappears in Civ5, I'd like it to be more a diplomatic issue, as that's how it's mostly affecting the world right now. I can see how you can make AI dislike nations that don't do their share of pollution cutbacks, but I'm not sure how it could affect MP.

Unless they get any really bright ideas, I'm guessing we'll only see this in realism mods.

Agreed. The thing is, no one really cares about unhealthiness. Leaving unhappiness around was playing with fire and things started happening soon.

With unhealthiness, all it meant is that your city grew a little slower and it couldn't reach its maximum population as soon.

I personally loved the plague system in Rhye's of Civ. It really punished you for being unhealthy.

That or decrease the effectiveness of certain buildings when you get unhealthiness. Maybe your courthouses, banks or libraries won't function quite as well. Perhaps factories might suffer a production hit.

General unhealthiness costs the Canadian economy tens of billions of dollars a year.

Sort of off topic but what is the highest life expectancy anyone has achieved in their demographics? Even when I've played environmentally conscious games where I load up on health and don't cut down a single forest I still can't seem to get above 75 years.

 

[702]

It seems to me in Civ 4 global warming was simply a way of trying to stop players getting too "nuke-happy".
If something similar is in Civ 5, well I probably won't think much of it...
I'd also like to see a bigger role for the environment in general, but not sure how it would be done... in Civ 4 the closest thing was the bonuses forests gave under Environmentalism.
Something like that but... more? Maybe once a certain tech/development level forests automatically provide some kind of health and/or happiness bonus (or whatever is the equivalent).

 

[chongli]

I don't think that's a particularly fair question, since the definition of "fair" and "enjoyable" are completely subjective. The idea is that it provides an additional challenge to the modern era - you may dislike "tile roulette" but it does provide this to some degree.

Tile roulette does not provide a challenge at all. It's utterly arbitrary and beyond the player's control. Might as well add random earthquakes and meteors that annihilate your cities from time to time.

 

[Warlord Sam]

"If there is prolonged periods of sickness (or simply the amount of health issues get out of hand), one would assume that someone would start complaining. Same thing if all forests in the area disappears."
In Europe from the Middle Ages up to relatively recently, urban environments were terribly unhealthy and there was such a short life expectancy that constant immigration from rural communities was necessary or else cities would die out.

"It seems to me in Civ 4 global warming was simply a way of trying to stop players getting too "nuke-happy"."
I don't think so, because it had no correlation whatsoever to the amount of nukes being used. It was simply an event that is triggered from the very first bomb dropped, unless I'm mistaken. Frequency of nukes had no correlation to global warming "strikes", right?

 

[Shaihulud]

I think we could have a new kind of terrain called flooded, at onset of global warming, we could have certain areas pinned as being in danger of being flooded so that actions by players could be taken(remove pop from affected area before they drown, reduce global warming counter etc). As global warming increases, flooded areas becomes sea terrain. Nukes doesn't directly cause global warming although they are bad for the enviroment, they could create an effect on the enviroment called "irradiated" this reduces the amount of resources from the enviroment and have a chance to kill the pop directly on the hex.

 

[Chalks]

Tile roulette does not provide a challenge at all. It's utterly arbitrary and beyond the player's control. Might as well add random earthquakes and meteors that annihilate your cities from time to time.

Your phrasing is very confusing. For it to be challenging, it would need to make the game harder - it doesn't have to be something the player can control. Random earthquakes and meteors annihilating parts of your civilization would make the game harder.

It sounds like you'd prefer players to have more control over the system - which isn't an aspect of how challenging it is.

So, to make it more within the player's control, what about the ability for workers to "clean up" polluted as in previous versions, with the ability to explicitly put on diplomatic pressure to replace polluting facilities with more "green" ones. Have such efforts able to reverse the effects - coupled with the ability to manually teraform global warming created desert tiles..?

Maybe that's not what you mean by "player control", but really, you're being utterly unproductive by just whining about it rather than discussing how it could be improved. What would make it better?

 

[Ahriman]

I actually agree with Chongli here.

Mechanics that permanently destroy your stuff in a completely random way, and in a way where there is *nothing* you can do about it, is intrinsically not fun. The mechanic is intrinsically broken.
Trying to make it reversible through worker action just makes a MM mess; please lets not go back to workers playing whack-a-mole with pollution.

Model industrial pollution through unhealth.

The argument that pollution would cause unrest is somewhat absurd to me. Industrial revolution Britain or 1930s Pittsburgh had far worse pollution than anything we see in an era of global warming (even in China), and did not cause any significant unrest. And most people in China would say they think economic growth is far more important than the environment, People are weird like that. Any kind of environmental activism is a very modern thing, and mostly only in a handful of rich countries.

People dying from poor health is something that has always happened, and people accept it. It happens *less* in the modern/industrial era than it does in previous eras.

 

[eireksten]

The argument that pollution would cause unrest is somewhat absurd to me.

I don't find it more absurd than unhappiness from "It's too crowded!", which has a pretty huge impact on the game right now.

And about the forests; You don't think anyone would speak out if their leaders suddenly decided to chop down all forests in the surrounding area (which for a city in civ, I consider to be pretty large)?

 

[Chalks]

Mechanics that permanently destroy your stuff in a completely random way, and in a way where there is *nothing* you can do about it, is intrinsically not fun. The mechanic is intrinsically broken.
Trying to make it reversible through worker action just makes a MM mess; please lets not go back to workers playing whack-a-mole with pollution.

Well, if you dislike not being able to do anything about it, and you dislike explicitly dealing with individual tiles to reduce pollution, how would you want to be able to do something about it?

I feel that you're missing the point. The affects of global warming are meant to be a bad thing. You're not meant to be thinking "wow, dealing with global warming is really fun, lets create a bunch of pollution so that I can experience the awesomeness of this feature".

Global warming is meant to be something you intentionally avoid because it messes with your stuff. If the issue here is that it's not a big enough problem to actually avoid, making it just a mere irritating in the modern era, then the obvious solution would be to make it worse so that you avoid it more actively.

It's like complaining that the process of dying in an FPS isn't fun. Sure it isn't, that's why you're meant to avoid it.

Perhaps there should be more active ways to avoid GW in the modern era if they were to make it worse. If it's an unavoidable pain in the ass then that would be bad for gameplay - but I don't think it's something that can be completely ignored in the modern era because it really is one of the biggest problems for the modern world. Acting like we can just burn the world to produce a perfect utopia is the least realistic of all options.