Global warming; does it matter?
- Thread starter shannontreacy
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r_rolo1
King of myself
That is where we disagree. The mechanism that is in the game it is NOT global warming and has little to none relation with the real issue... It has the same relation with the RL GW than if the game had a mechanism that made flying dragons appear if you chopped 10 jungles or banana resources start popping if you made enough mines. The problem is that the idea of firaxis seems less "the idea of global warming as a game mechanism is based off a scientific consensus" than "We have a nuke punishing mechanism and we need a nifty name for it.... and if we call it "Mad Max event" we would have to pay to the Aussies that made the film " 
Again, I agree that it is a flawed mechanism with little relation to reality, but the basic fact is that they attempted to put something in the game labelled as 'global warming' (and I'm assuming they thought to put in global warming, and then decided what it would be and how it would be caused, rather than coming up with a cause and effect, and then calling it global warming), due to the perceived need to put 'global warming' in the game. And they can't be faulted for that decision. What they can be faulted for is the next step in the process; creating the flawed causes and effects for what they would put under the umbrella of global warming.
r_rolo1
King of myself
Ok, let me rephrase it : IMHO the coders did not thinked "We need global warming in the game " and then code something completely unrelated, they thinked " We need to make a nuke punishing mechanism", made the code and then thinked "How are we going to call it? " Good ol'Occam razor ....
jwez11007
Warlord
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I'm sorry if I was unclear about the point I was making about the politics of global warming. While the media at large would suggest that global warming has enough empirical evidence behind it to be considered a firm scientific theory, it is in fact much farther from being accepted as such. The facts are: temperatures are globally increasing and there is a small increase in the percentage of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. To immediately jump to an occam's razor causality solution is scientifically unfounded. More data and experimentation is needed to create a scientifically sound theory to work off of. Unfortunately alternative theories that would challenge this paradigm that has been created are unable to receive even close to the amount of grants that global warming enthusiasts draw in, inherently giving the GW proponents an advantage.
Spoiler :
As to Firaxis inclusion of this charged topic as a broken game mechanic:
It seems the designers of a historically based game that puts a large effort in historical accuracy, would have to be pretty darn thick-headed not to realize the political innuendo within this mechanic. Even assuming an innocent, non-political inclusion of GW, game-play tests should have shown that GW is not something that makes the game more enjoyable, more emotional, or more balanced. It does not punish individuals for using nukes, it does not come close to simulating historical projections, and it just unreasonably slows game-play while spouting political rhetoric every other turn, with no way to reasonably control or influence its effects, (other than to raze every enemy city so as to keep total population down).
In all fairness though Firaxis did make a great game in most other aspects, its just unfortunate that the end of any future era games will inevitably result in this annoyance popping many times.
TheMeInTeam
If A implies B...
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You're stating something false. They absolutely can and should be faulted for putting this trash in the game despite whatever twisted logic lead to its inclusion. In fact, their decision to include it indicates a fundamental flaw in their design mentality in the phase it was made.
The extent of human impact on GW remains unknown, but we do know it sure as hell isn't as drastic as in civ. But this goes beyond poor implementation. Let's illustrate:
1. No meteors hit the planet and cause massive dust issues, killing large #'s
2. The tsunami event was pulled
3. Hurricanes don't kill off over 1/2 of the population in a city at given periods of history
4. Massive earthquakes don't drop population, either.
5. Your government is not forcibly changed w/o outside influence due to ignorance in your population (or intelligence, depending on how you're playing).
See the pattern? Each of the above was not included for a reason, and yet in each case they'd be equal or BETTER than GW in civ IV. Why were these features not selected for inclusion in the default game? Well, they're based on random chance and have devastating effects that are outside the player's control. Forcing GW into the game AND using a bad mechanic to do it when so many other things could have been included in similar crappy was is one of the MAJOR reasons people interpret its inclusion as political ----> because that fact tells us it *was* political to someone making the game, at least to an extent. I don't buy for a second that this was placed in the game w/o knowing it was a poor mechanic with limited control.
So basically the logic of "they decided to put GW into the game and then assigned it a mechanic" is making an excuse for bull
. Why put anything into the game, or avoid putting in all the other possible garbage? If they can't come up with a good mechanic to implement something, that is a very, very good reason not to implement it. Especially when the mechanic is based on something that doesn't have clear causality.No it is not.
Not only is the "consensus" not a consensus, the mechanism in the game assumes that the ONLY effect of global warmingh will be that all those green and brown square turn into desert, which is FAR from the various scenarious put out even by the pro-warming crowd.
One of the major predictions is that many areas would get more rain (or too much), yet there is no mechanism in the game to turn desert into anything better. Yet nukes in the game also cause warming, whereas in fact if that many nukes were launched you would probably see global cooling, just like a volcano eruption.
Personally, I wish there was an easy mod to just take the stupid effect out of the game.
TheMeInTeam
If A implies B...
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There is. Set the probability to 0 in the globaldefines XML and you can't get GW.
Scoottr
Prince
Do I change this in the Core Civ IV folder or in every mod that I play?
Never change the contents of the core civ folders. You will break mp compatibility and if you mess something up you could have to reinstall the game.
Copy the file/s into CustomAssets so that it is in the same subfolders as it would be in the Assets folder. Then make modifications in the CustomAssets folder. (In the case of GlobalDefines.xml, I think it should be CustomAssets\XML\GlobalDefines.xml.)
If you play mods, you will have to change it in those mods too (some might not have that xml file anyway), as mod files take priority over customassets to my knowledge.
Scoottr
Prince
Well I changed it in my Custom BTS folder first and opened it with Wordpad to do that. Clicked the save button. Now the game won't launch.
Tried changing it back to the same 20 it was before and still no go. The game gets to the .XML portion of launching and fails.
Any thoughts?
Cancel all the above.....I completely screwed up my game tryng to change this. Now I can't reinstall CivIV because my PC thinks the game is loaded somewhere and the disk won't give me the option of installing again. I had to wipe my hard drive last time this happened cause could figure out how to fix this.
CRAP!
Tried changing it back to the same 20 it was before and still no go. The game gets to the .XML portion of launching and fails.
Any thoughts?
Cancel all the above.....I completely screwed up my game tryng to change this. Now I can't reinstall CivIV because my PC thinks the game is loaded somewhere and the disk won't give me the option of installing again. I had to wipe my hard drive last time this happened cause could figure out how to fix this.
CRAP!
Wiping your hard drive really shouldn't be necessary.
If you have your BtS disc with you, can you tell me what happens if you put the disc in, and let the autorun menu pop up, and then choose "install"? Does it pop up an error?
If autorun doesn't happen, you might have to manually find it at D:\autorun.exe on the disc.
Or an alternative is to make a copy of the original file first so you have it when things go horribly wrong. Either rename it to something like GlobalDefines.original, or copy it to a safe place.
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