How come pollution doesn't change tiles anymore?

[Suisami]

The civilopedia says pollution (the orange mess on the ground) will change the tiles if left too long, going from grasslands to plains, to desert. Yet that never happens.

Global warming only removes forests nothing else.

Yet its my understanding that it used to do more? Is there an update that changed this?

If so how could a revert back? I'd prefer to have personally.

 

[Puppeteer]

Pollution is an overloaded term in Civ3. There's the orange gunk that covers your tiles that workers can clean up, and then there is a pollution per city as shown in the city screen.

I don't think the orange gunk ever degraded the base tile, but forest goes away because it's an overlay and/or improvement that the gunk replaces. (I guess it also replaces jungle and marsh, but I've never had occasion to notice.)

The world total of pollution created by cities can lead to global warming, and that is what dries up some base tiles occasionally.

As far as I know, the orange junk does not contribute to global warming but is a resultant symptom of one of the following:

• Volcano eruption
• High-pollution city
• Nuclear weapon damage/fallout

From my defective memory, I think city population and shields produced per city contribute to pollution and most kinds of factories can increase pollution, and there are a couple of buildings you can build to reduce city pollution.

Oh and I think nuclear blasts contribute to global warning, too, so an all-out nuke war can start turning tiles in a hurry, but as a result of global warming not as a result of the orange gunk produced.

 

[CommandoBob]

Doesn't global warming cause terrain changes, like a plains tile becoming tundra or jungle or something else unwanted?

Really haven't seen it often enough to know...

 

[Civinator]

Pollution still changes tiles on the map, if this is set in the editor. In the terrain registry of the editor you can adjust if there is a change to a type of terrain by pollution and to what kind of terrain it will be changed. Some mods (per example CCM) have banned pollution as an "unfun element" of gameplay as far as it is possible, as it consumes tons of unnecessairy micromanagement for masses of workers. In CCM pollution in most cases is substituted by unhappieness. If you want to read more about the different sides of pollution and how to handle it, you can find some information about it in the CCM civilopedia.

A helpful thread about the transformation of terrain by pollution can be found here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=126505

 

[vmxa]

Civ 2 tiles were degraded, not seen that in III. The difference is that in II you could teraform it back, in III you could not. So as long as I have a way to deal with the consequences, I am fine.

 

[Furiey]

I've had tiles degraded (plains to desert) by global warming but not by pollution.

 

[Lanzelot]

I don't think the orange gunk ever degraded the base tile, but forest goes away because it's an overlay and/or improvement that the gunk replaces. (I guess it also replaces jungle and marsh, but I've never had occasion to notice.)

In a recent game I had orange gunk on forest and jungle tiles, and the overlay did not get "replaced", the tiles remained forest/jungle.

 

[Suisami]

But this never occurred. I created 2 scenario once, one that test just pollution on the ground everwhere, and the other with nukes and pollution at ridiuclous levels in cities (100 units of it per city that cover the entire map). Global warming only changed the forest and jungle tiles, and the pollution on the ground never changed any of the tiles.

Also, the default in the editor is for gasslands=>plains=>desert and it never occurs Civinator.

Mind you I'm playing civ complete.

 

[Suisami]

Update:

I did another round of tests. Turns out I get grasslands to turn into mountains, but not grasslands into plains. Desert grasslands and plains will not change into each other or coast. However grasslands can turn into mountains. WTH?

 

[Civinator]

Suisami, it seems you have seen now, that it "occurs". Your results are close to Supa´s list. May be you should have a look on it.

A civer called Warpstorm many years ago posted the following about pollution and global warming http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=832216&postcount=12:

Pollution on the ground does not effect global warming in the least. I know this because I've made test cases to test exactly this fact. I then asked Firaxis how it actually worked, and they said that it is the number of pollution 'triangles' along with the amount of nukage that cause both global warming and pollution tiles on the ground.

This means, for a proper test it is not enough to place tons of pollution on the map. You also need the "pollution triangles" in the city menue resulting from production and population pollution. This all together influences the degree of global warming.

Warpstorm also posted that he asked the main programmer at Firaxis, if pollution on the map can degrade the tile it is on if not cleaned up for a while. Firaxis confirmed it: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=1411608&postcount=4.

On the other side, these posts by Warpstorm were done long ago. May be this feature was changed in later versions of Civ 3. On the other side again, most civers (including me) are very happy when we can throw out pollution from the civ game as the way it was implented in Civ 3 is an "unfun" element and therefore I don´t care a lot about that question.

 

[Suisami]

Suisami, it seems you have seen now, that it "occurs". Your results are close to Supa´s list. May be you should have a look on it.

A civer called Warpstorm many years ago posted the following about pollution and global warming http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=832216&postcount=12:

Pollution on the ground does not effect global warming in the least. I know this because I've made test cases to test exactly this fact. I then asked Firaxis how it actually worked, and they said that it is the number of pollution 'triangles' along with the amount of nukage that cause both global warming and pollution tiles on the ground.

This means, for a proper test it is not enough to place tons of pollution on the map. You also need the "pollution triangles" in the city menue resulting from production and population pollution. This all together influences the degree of global warming.

Warpstorm also posted that he asked the main programmer at Firaxis, if pollution on the map can degrade the tile it is on if not cleaned up for a while. Firaxis confirmed it: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=1411608&postcount=4.

On the other side, these posts by Warpstorm were done long ago. May be this feature was changed in later versions of Civ 3. On the other side again, most civers (including me) are very happy when we can throw out pollution from the civ game as the way it was implented in Civ 3 is an "unfun" element and therefore I don´t care a lot about that question.

I had taken this into account. My cities all had over 100 'triangles' in them so as to have a massive effect. I also began by detonating 50 nukes to quickly max out the effect. My problem now is that grasslands, tundra, plains, and marsh will not decay into one another, they will only decay into mountains if I set it up that way.