I like the idea of petroleum as a depletable resource that has a more direct impact on the economy, but I think you should take it a step further and treat coal and uranium this way. If uranium was depletable then you could have meaningful breeder reactors. I think it would also be interesting to allow coal and oil power plants as well; make power plants effectively necessary for a modern economy and then allow the player to decide which technologies to use. That makes for an interesting modern age.
- Nuclear plants have a risk of an incident / accident of some percents per round depending on game speed. In such a case, there is a 10% chance of a total nuclear meltdown with massive fall out around the city. Otherwise 1 - 3 tiles will be contaminated.
- Uranium mines will pollute their environment occasionally. Pillaging mines will triple chances.
What is the probability of a nuclear accident? Your statement is unclear, but it sounds like there is some risk per turn of a minor accident with a 10% chance that the minor accident becomes a major accident. That would make sense if the minor accident destroyed the plant but had no real environmental impact (e.g. Three Mile Island) while a major accident has significant environmental impact expressed as fallout (e.g. Chernobyl). Of course if you went that route, there really ought to be other facilities that can have accidents that destroy the building: hydro plants, factories, research labs, coal-to-liquids, oil refinery, and basically anything industrial. CivIV did this (and meltdowns) via generalized random events, and they seemed to get the about probabilities right.
Also, uranium mines are not uniquely polluting. Speaking from experience, the environmental community is (justifiably) more concerned with coal mining, hydro fracking, and oil pipelines. I'm not sure that pillaging mines should increase the likelihood of pollution, but pillaging oil wells definitely should have some pollution. Maybe you could add something similar to "fallout" that represents general pollution? This pollution could be generated randomly by various buildings and some mines.
As it is now, it looks like you're singling out nuclear.
Amylion said:
There are some suspicious facts, some previous frauds Sig. Rossi was involved in, he admits to not knowing the exact theory of its own device, and he showed some lack of knowledge when demonstrating his work to scientists of the university of Bologna. Nonetheless from my understanding of nuclear physics this device could work (that's the reason I put this technology in my mod after all).
Rossi is either a fraud or deluded. People have been making similar claims for over a hundred years (i.e. devices that produce free energy or otherwise defy known physics), and Rossi's project has all the hallmarks of a scam. The US Patent Office gets hundreds of patent applications for perpetual motion, free energy, and cold fusion devices every year, and it automatically denies anything that is inconsistent with known physics. The reactions that Rossi claims have occurred are energetically impossible, and there are many ways that Rossi could demonstrate that they were occurring, the most straightforward of which is directly measuring the reaction products. This would be Nobel Prize material, but somehow Rossi can't get any peer-reviewed scientific journal to publish the research.
I don't want to derail your thread, but I think that you shouldn't even entertain this idea until it shows that it can stand up to scientific scrutiny. That said, it's probably not much worse than the Giant Death Robot.
It really seems like it would bring in a concept of greed to the later eras, where a civ might use up their oil quickly and use their gains to invade other civs for their oil. But if they can't invade quickly enough, the tap runs dry and they're in trouble. Definitely going to try it out after my current game.
