is there a point to reducing pollution?

[naf4ever]

I thought something wouldve been added to make pollution more necessary to reduce in Conquests. As far i see it theres really no point to building mass transport and recycling centers. If you have enough workers to where you can simply just clean all your pollution in the same turn its created, what is the point of building the buildings to reduce it? Or am I missing another aspect of it? Also did anything change in the way pollution affects things in Conquests?

 

[ReZurrecti0n]

Alright, this is my last post for the night

I would not think anti-pollution improvements should be avoided and ignored, you might have enough workers at the time to keep the mess cleaned up, but to me that is just wasted units on the map which you could have as a part of your army instead... I say if a worker has nothing to do, send him to join a city and replace with a army unit or something. Changes in pollution for C3C? No, I can't say I know anything much about it, sorry... But I am not that much experienced especially since I haven't really made it to where pollution starts to become a problem, but that is what I suggest anyway... Don't waste workers like that

 

[naf4ever]

True, but considering that after you have democracy or facsism and replaceable parts, it only takes like 3 or 4 workers to clean up the pollution in 1 turn, unless its on a mountain,, even if you have a large empire you usually dont get more than 1 or 2 polluted squares every turn if even that. Its still simply cheaper to just have some workers standing around rather than paying the maintence costs for multiple pollution cleaning buildings, not to mention the time it takes to build them.

I guess it just bugs me that after all the patches and revisions there are still things in the game that you can build if you want to, but in terms of effectiveness really serve no purpose.

 

[pirke]

And what if you get more pollution? Say 30 cities each producing 1 pollution tile every 5 turns or so? And then you go to war and the enemy is throwing nukes on you, LOT's of pollution, you don't want city pollution being a problem then. Although the extra workers are always welcome, they should be doing usefull things in my opinion.

 

[warpstorm]

Global Warming can play havoc on you even if your workers clean up every tile as it isn't tied to the pollution on the ground.

 

[dreamvirus]

I agree with the poster, I don't bother building any of the pollution-reducing improvements or researching recyling, as I almost always have so many workers that it is not an issue. Also, my games never last long enough for global warming to become a major problem. The only circumstances I'd consider dealing with pollution with Mass Transit Systems, recycling centres, replacing coal plants with solar plants etc would be if I had very few workers available through having been mostly at peace for the whole game. And even then I would probably just build more workers.

As to the enemy throwing nukes, in that case the very least of my worries is going to be any extra pollution produced by my cities. In fact I would give the nuke-throwing example as a situation in which it is imperative for you to have a large army of workers available...

Workers!!

I do have a suggestion, however, to make pollution more realistic and pollution-reducing improvements more vital: have pollution reduce culture! Highly-polluting civs would take a culture hit for every turn they have pollution tiles present in their territory. That way if you're a warmonger and don't care about culture you can just use your army of workers and not worry about it. If you're going for a culture victory you would need to pay much more attention to keeping the pollution down. And it seems realistic too - industrial pollution DOES destroy local culture...

 

[pirke]

I like that idea of a culture hit, but how did you have it in mind? Civilization wide or also to the city which implies also civilization wide? And if it can affect a single city: can the borders shrink?

 

[naf4ever]

Ya i guess my original point was that there doesnt seem to be much strategy involved pollution. It would be nice if there were actually tough choices to be made say when deciding on building that coal powerplant. Maybe it would make people in a democracy unhappy, or i like the cultural hit idea. Im just surprised the idea of pollution has been around since civ1 and not changed at all, yet almost everything else has been tweaked somewhat. I thought they would do more with it for Conquests, but i guess not.

 

[Qpdaj]

Actually, IIRC, the calculation for global warming is based on the amount of polution created, not how many tiles are poluted.

Nonetheless, in my games I generally don't waste a lot of effort on polution-reducing improvements, either. By the time poluted tiles show up, I've got a bunch of extra workers (be they slaves or otherwise) to play wack-a-mole. I'm also generally in Communism, and under my unit limit, so even my workers are free.

So even though I get all the poluted tiles cleaned up every turn, I still get hit with global warming on occasion. Of course, when jungle or swamp turns into grassland or plains, who's complaining???

Oh, and I also heard a rumor that polution is going to be handled differently in Civ4 (there was a specific comment about no more "wack-a-mole").

 

[warpstorm]

Swamp turns to water last I checked. I mod jungle to go the swamp also and forest to jungle. You lose a lot of land if you don't deal with it.

 

[Turner]

@WS - how did you mod that? I don't recall seeing it in the editor. But then, if it's in the terrain tab, I don't look there often.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Does anyone know the actual formulas involved in Global Warming (or generating polluted squares for that matter).

 

[warpstorm]

Originally posted by Turner_727
@WS - how did you mod that? I don't recall seeing it in the editor. But then, if it's in the terrain tab, I don't look there often.

It is on the terrain tab. The Pollution Effect entry controls this.

 

[Turner]

Cool...I'll keep that in mind. Might be useful someday.

 

[ReZurrecti0n]

Pollution affecting culture... Yeah, thats a good idea, but still working on the medieval times and don't have to worry about pollution

 

[HellboundHeathcliff]

Originally posted by Krikkitone
Does anyone know the actual formulas involved in Global Warming (or generating polluted squares for that matter).

The # of pollution icons in the city display are that cities % chance of getting a polluted tile each turn.

AFAIK, global warming is affected by the AI as well as the human.

Probably something like: total pollution icons in the world / total # of cities = % chance of global warming

However that doesn't explain how many tiles get changed.

Using nukes increases global warming by some unknown (to me) factor. I once used about 40 nukes on a huge map and was getting 120+ tiles each turn suffering from global warming. This reduced each turn but lasted well beyond the point of having cleaned everything up. (most of the world was floodplain & desert, the seas had receded and the rivers dried up)

 

[unscratchedfoot]

I just shut off pollution in my game cause each time you get it, the city person working the tile gets booted off and has to be manually put back on it which his needless micromanagement. Also, why is pollution happening bigtime during the early eras when it was not an issue? No pollution is more fun in my opinion since I play to deliver beatdowns to evil nations, not for micromanagement.

 

[warpstorm]

WHat early eras are you talking about? The early Industrial Age was extremely polluted. Pittsburgh was often dark in the day from air pollution a hundred years ago. Many buildings were darken from soot till the steel industry tanked there and they scrubbed then off in the 1970s and '80s.

 

[microbe]

Originally posted by ReZurrecti0n
Pollution affecting culture... Yeah, thats a good idea

That's a strange idea, which doesn't map too perfectly into RL.

Pollution should act like decease - reduce population, not culture.

But it should be very carefully designed. I don't want to see my big cities losing one pop every few turns.

I think I have to agree pollution is pretty much pointless.

 

[Roland Johansen]

For the people who like to give some extra penalties to pollution:
in the editor, you can let factories and coal plants give a negative number of happy faces or culture. This can be offset by letting the recycling center and mass transit produce an equal number of positive happiness or culture.