Global warming threatens the rainforest!

[BvBPL]

Hi all,

Long time player, first time poster here. I just had a weird ecological change occur in my game that I have never seen before. Has anyone else seen global warming in SMAC result in the loss of the “jungle” tile feature or result in the loss of forests?

I am playing a game on the huge Planet preset map where I have a large number of bases in the Monsoon Jungle. I had seeded the jungle with forests; nearly every square of the jungle had a forest. Eventually, the game gave me a warning about global warming. No faction had the technology for launching the global shade, so I started sending my formers out to raise the altitude of a few key tiles that were in danger. Only a few titles in the jungle area needed to be raised.

Eventually the sea levels rose. In addition to the expected shifting of the coastline, something else weird happened. A number of jungle squares lost their forests and their jungle feature and became just rainy squares of terrain. Talk about climate change! Fewer than a dozen squares were affected and most came in a contiguous strip running northeast / southwest. It is possible, but I did not confirm, that the squares may have lost additional terraforming features, such as roads, sensor arrays, and boreholes.

I’ve played plenty of games where the globe has warmed, but I’ve never seen it affect the forest and jungle in this manner. Has anyone else ever seen this happen?

Basic SMAC, not SMAX playing at the second highest difficulty level (Thinker, I believe?).

 

[Kristian95]

I have consistently experienced that lowering the sea levels by using solar shades destroys the monsoon jungle.

 

[vyeh]

(1) Raising or lowering a jungle square destroys the jungle characteristics. You should see that for the jungle squares you raised.

(2) When a square is sunk below sea level, it loses all terraforming, including forests, roads, sensors and boreholes, and its jungle characteristics, all land units and any bases that don't have pressure domes.

(3) The game then checks to make sure that adjacent squares are in adjacent 1000 m categories. Suppose you start with a coastal square at 33 m and the inland square next to it is at 1800 m. The sea level rises by 100 m, making the former coastal square a ocean shelf square 67 m and the former inland square at 1700 m. You now have a situation where you go from a 1000-2000m square to an adjacent ocean shelf square.

The game then raises the ocean shelf square to a coastal square with attitude between 1 - 999 me, but does not restore the terraforming, the jungle status, the land units or a base that does not have a pressure dome.

I believe this is called a "wash" phenomenon. I learned about this at 'poly, but Petek may be able to find some CFC references for you if you asked him politely and to him.

 

[Lefty Scaevola]

Any time you change the the altitude bracket (in thousand of meters) on a hex it loses certain of its landmark special terrain features/bonuses, like Fossil Ridge, Monsoon Jungle, Manifold Nexus, etc. I do remember all the landmark special bonus feature are not subject to this. I suspect the Boreholes cluster does not disappear and I do not believe the the monoliths at the ruins or around the Manifold Nexus disappear.

 

[vyeh]

I used the scenario editor. Monoliths do not disappear, even if the square they are on becomes a sea square.

When a borehole in the borehole cluster is raised, it loses the special graphics (the circle with three prongs meeting in the center) and becomes a regular borehole. When it is lowered into the sea, it disappears and it does not reappear if the new sea square is later raised into land.

I also noted that when I sunk a unity supply pod from a land square to a sea square, it became a special resource sea square.

I also raised a special resource sea square and it became a unity supply pod on land!

I have attached Monsoon Jungle Raising, 2101, to show an interesting example of the things discussed in this thread.

If you use the last active super former and raise land ("]"), not only does the Monsoon Jungle under the super former disappear, but so do the surrounding squares. What happened is that the square being raised was between 1000 and 2000 meters. When it went to between 2000 and 3000, it dragged the surrounding squares from between 0 and 1000 to between 1000 and 2000.

To our esteemed senior moderator: Why slum, when there is so much to learn in the suburbs?

 

[Lefty Scaevola]

Lowering the bed next to a coastal monolith is a a popular technique to get morale upgrades for naval units.
I have observed the sea resource bonus change to land pod many times while during terraforming or solar shading, and the reverse a few times when editing maps.

As for roaming around fora, SMAC forum activity is limited enough, that I like to add to it at several viable communities.

 

[vyeh]

Thank you for contributing a bug at the university of CGN (we are proud to host the SMAC Academy) where we spend our time looking at esoteric bugs.

(I did find a save with a similar problem for the design workshop.)

Recently, Eawyne has visited us with a question more suited to CFC. Maybe an invitation from you is in order?

What might be some of the first basic steps in the first rounds of a game (I tend to play Gaians, their philosophy being close to mine ^^ helps getting into the game, innit ?), little things like that. I also saw a lot about crawlers, and indeed, I never used'em a lot before ; something I definitively try to change, but I really have to play a lot more to master all the little tricks about ressources and all ^^

 

[Lefty Scaevola]

The SMAC Academy is a very important resource to the SMAC gaming community.

 

[vyeh]

At the request of Lefty Scaevola, I posted more information about CGN and the SMAC Academy in the Other Civ-Related Sites subforum at CFC.