New eco system

[Taé Shala]

CIV 4 should have an eye on the ecological aspect of the game.

A normal game of CIV 3 has a lot of forests and jungle at the begining
and nearly no at the end of the game.
MAybe there could be something like a eco-check system.

Say a forest counts for one point and a jungle for two.
The game counts all forests and jungels and addes their worth.
This number counts for 100%.
Lets say you cut down a lot of jungle and forests the game still counts the worth. When you reached 80% the chances for an ecological disaster begins. If you cut down more wood it will increase.

You can replant your forests to avoid this desasters. (You cant replace jungle because it is a very unique eco-system.)

Any comments?

 

[Jake5555555]

I agree. The thing that I don't like about the Civ 3 pollution system is that you can't bring down the pollution level, you can only stop it from getting worse. Forests and jungles should slowly reduce the global pollution level.

 

[Terrinix]

I don't like the idea of points for forests and jungles, but the forests and jungles bringing down polution would be great!

 

[Shyrramar]

I think Civ would benefit from the concept of erosion. Hacking down all the forest and jungles could severely damage your habitat. This could be combined with your point-system. Say, if all the forests around a mountain are hacked, the erosion and the mudslides would cause the tiles next to the mountain to degenerate in time..

 

[CIVPhilzilla]

I would like forests and jungles to play more of a role, but not as you stated it. The point system seems to be a little to complicated and wouldn't be very effective, but their should be some pros/cons of planting/cutting down trees.

 

[Zenon_pt]

With the discovery of Medicine, Jungles should increase research and health.

 

[Suki]

the map should be a dynamic multi-variable cellular automation...
taking into account biodiversity, biomass of flaurs and fauna, terrain elevation, dificulty of the terrain, atmosphere, surface and subsurface water & folw, plate tectonics, and anything else you can think of.... then just have it setup to read those variables and from that decide what terrain type it is most similar too and show that graphic.

it would be the perfect middle ground between the terraforming in civ 2 and SMAC and the unchanging terrain, except for global warming, in civ 3. this way you can, you do change the terrain but since cellular automations are inheriently chaotic, you could try to change things but the actual long term effects, like in the real world, are complex and unpredictable...

 

[enigma2010]

I like this concept - perhaps it could be related to natural disasters. It'd be a nice touch and add extra depth to the game. It'd be interesting to combat forest fires, flooding, hurricanes, etc. We could also use that "evacuate" function people have been proposing in these situations.

 

[judgement]

Originally posted by Shyrramar
I think Civ would benefit from the concept of erosion. Hacking down all the forest and jungles could severely damage your habitat. This could be combined with your point-system. Say, if all the forests around a mountain are hacked, the erosion and the mudslides would cause the tiles next to the mountain to degenerate in time..

For one thing, all or most jungle tiles should be desert once cleared, since the soil underneath jungles is notoriously bad for farming. Thats why slash and burn agriculture is so terrible: after clearing a certain patch of jungle, the resulting terrain only supports farming for a few years, then the farmers need to move on and clear even more jungle. And if I recall correctly, rainforests don't necessarily get very much rain inherently, its just that the lush foliage traps moisture and keeps things very humid, altering the weather in the area.

If a large area of jungle couldn't be simply cleared by a horde of workers to result in nice fertile terrain, there'd be a lot less incentive to clear the entire jungle. It would only make sense to clear areas near coasts, rivers, and natural resources that you wanted.

 

[enigma2010]

Maybe we could build nature reserves as well - these should be areaas of forest or jungle taht are specially designated and can't be chopped down. They could generate extra income (eco-tourism).

 

[rcoutme]

I agree with Judgement. The result of hacking out jungles should be grassland for maybe a few turns followed by desert. However, this should depend on where in the jungle you have hacked. If you are clearing the middle of the jungle, then jungle creep could be introduced. I also would like to see two desert types: the standard type in Civ3 and Dune desert. Dune desert would be either nonproductive (food wise) or very difficult to change.

I also believe that terraforming should come back--along with engineer units. One of the cool aspects of Civ2 that I miss in changing mountains into mole hills (i.e. grassland) and glaciars into parks. This could offset the problems created by early deforestation and jungle elimination.

 

[Commander Bello]

One idea to add ecology to the game could be to make different terrain types being interdependant.
For instance, you won't find grassland if there is no forest or mountain or at least hills nearby, which would keep and canalize the water which is needed to irrigate the grassland.
There would be a certain probability for a given tile to change it's nature, if some pre-conditions are no longer met: Say if a grass tile needs at least 5 forests in the circumference of 4 tiles in each direction, the chopping of the fifth tile could make the grass tile become plains. The higher the number of plains, the higher the chance of grass tiles to become plains as well, and so on.
There could be a certain probability for forest to start growing on unworked tiles, so that the above effect could be reversed "by nature" - of course you could try to reverse it by manually planting forests as well.
You could even add atmospheric components to the system:
Say, the map is divided into 16 different parts, and for each one the system (randomly) creates a main wind direction, let's say west winds for a given part. Now, if there would be mountains at the west, and no or only one major river just at the east, there would be quite some chance that the western part of that division of the map would be rather arid. So, you would have the mountains, then maybe some desert, followed by plains and slowly becoming grassland at the eastern part (if you look from west to east).

 

[naf4ever]

There should be some aspect of the game to represent the fact that a large portion of the population now seeks rest and relaxation outside of the city once they have the means to do so. This could be done by say forests and jungles providing happy faces and increased commerce after you research Automobile.

I always thought a large city surrounded by nothing but grasslands that have mines on them would lead to a very depressed population, while ones with natural forests, jungles, mashes (think everglades) and rivers would lead to increased happiness and tourism revenue.

 

[Loaf Warden]

Wow, there's a lot of great ideas here. There are too many proposed models that I like to throw my full support behind any one of them--maybe a combination of all of them could be worked out--but you all have thoroughly convinced me that they need to pay more attention to ecosystems.

 

[Ryth]

These are some seriously good ideas. I really agree that say, in the modern age, forests/jungles (mountains??) should provide happy faces. Perhaps this could be adjusted so that its the ones ouside the cites' needed cultural area (those first two squares around) are the ones for this, though. Like corruption there could be a radius effect for each 'virgin' square. Better if not developed at all, or just road instaed of rail? More happiness effect in cities which have a higher excess income (that which gets sent to the treasury)?
Just bouncing some ideas out there.

 

[Jake5555555]

When you cut down a rain forest it should be a flood plain for 5 turns, and then turn into desert

 

[eddie_verdde]

DIFFERENT TERRAIN TYPES, DIFFERENT FARMING
Unlike what happens in previous CIV games, you just can’t clear out a piece of jungle and cultivate the land for eternity. Farming depends mostly on the type of soil. Jungle or rain-forests soils are very sensitive to the changes introduced by INTENSIVE farming and will be able to support large farms for only a couple of years. After that the soil becomes exhausted and the land dries permanently.

It is believed that many meso-american kingdoms disappeared due to the consequences of the overuse of jungles for farming.

Furthermore, the complete clearance of jungle areas as you see in CIV would have a tremendous impact on global ecology.

Therefore, farming in equatorial regions should be different from farming in other regions. The food yields from jungle squares should be lower than other squares, since horticulture (a “lesser” type of agriculture) is the major way of obtaining food in jungle human communities.

 

[Synergy67]

Hey Eddie, good going, "dredging" up this old thread in line with some current interests.

I rather like the simplicity Tae's initial suggestion might introduce to keeping some percentage of forests around. If the game employs some kind of simulation of climate (as it already does by at least putting jungles near the equator and tundra near the poles), then it could generate an oxygen factor (if nothing else) relating to forests and jungles. If you cut down all your trees, you are going to have oxygen depletion. Realistically, it should also cause soil degradation, erosion, and other more far-reaching climate changes as many here are pointing out. But at the very least, a simple count of forest tiles could be maintained. As forest levels go down, global warnings could be issued about eco threats to the atmosphere and climate change. Other areas next to forests completely removed should degrade as has been pointed out.

In the early world, most land should be forested as so much of the early world was. Most farmland would have to be created by clearing forest, and would happen along rivers and coasts first. For a long time, farmland would mostly need to be right next to fresh water and not in the middle of a forest or jungle. Later on, as tech improves, farmland with irrigation would creep further away from water sources. The balance would be to not create too much farmland and keep enough forest around, both locally to support your farming tile ecosystem, but also globally for climate and atmosphere maintenance.

Also, I love the idea of national parkland being established around and in cities as well as regions in the countryside with happiness/immigration/culture benefits to encourage civilizations to keep some wilderness around. The current Civ model encourages the horrible raping of every last tile on the earth which is like some grim sci-fi futuristic movie where everything is stripped, ugly, railroaded, and industrial in the end...a world no one would enjoy living in, if they even could live in such an ecology. A game like Civ should encourage good ecology and civics and not permit or encourage such an outcome for the planet.

 

[Synergy67]

To further the thought a little more, I like the idea of overfarming causing tile or region degradation. Let’s say I cut down a regional forest of ten tree tiles along a river and turn it all into farmland. In a few hundred years, this land begins to degrade into plains and then into wasteland or even desert (depending on latitutde) due to soil erosion and no wind buffer, etc. Tiles immediately along the river might be resistant, as they tend to replenish soils with natural flooding. If dams were part of a tile improvements in the future, then their effects on soil erosion and other environmental factors might have to be considered too.

In order to hope to restore my overfarmed wasteland, I’d have to replant some forests. I probably couldn’t grow forests on wasteland, so I’d have to plant them on my remaining lingering good farmland tiles. After another 100 or more years, my wasteland might return to plains or even grassland. Then I could plant/keep forests in appropriate areas around some farming regions to maintain a balance. It would demonstrate that you can’t just exploit land to do what you want indefinitely, but all changes have consequences. A

I think hills should be able to grow forests, as well as mountains of lower elevation. Mountains could be of different heights. Also, in higher latitudes, mountains wouuld have more snow and less trees. In lower latitudes, mountains would be forested or even jungled. Mountains in jungle regions could be cleared and terrace farmed. So many fun and intriguing possibilities how to make it more complex and like the real world and to make us better stewards of land and resources.

In America right now, due to our overfarming of much farmland and a lack of crop rotation and letting the land rest for a year now and then, we have essentially stripped much of the minerals out of our soils and resulting produce. Those FDA labels on how much Vitamin X and mineral Y a tomato or piece of fruit is supposed to contain are based on studies from decades ago when our soils were in much better shape. We don’t get the same nutrients out of our foods anymore. We might face a future where we are forced to change how we are using our farmlands to keep them producing if we want to remain healthy as a nation.

 

[eddie_verdde]

I'm not sure if I understand Tae's idea 100%...I think what he's suggesting is that preserving forests and jungle could be encouraged by granting score bonus for "ecological civs"

If that's it I don't like the idea...first because players would find other ways of increasing the score to compensate deforestation...second because certain ecological problems should have immediate consequences and those consequences should by itself encourage the player to exploit the natural resources wisely...i guess that's more realistic...in ancient times people didn't know what global warming was, but they probably knew that if they cut too many forests the land would dry up and farming would only be allowed for a couple of years...