Pollution is killing me!

[sonorakitch]

Hi,

I created a map with some fine resource-laden regions for every civ. Pollution has hit hard in 1600 and every turn I am bombarded by10 or 12 pollution squares. This has made the game a boring chore. Any way to disable it?

Thanks,

~Chris

 

[Zachriel]

There is no way to disable pollution. If every neighborhood has its own oil wells, coal mines, refineries, and coal-burning power plants, then every neighborhood will probably be polluted.

Workers <shift-P>

 

[Alc0p0pz]

The problem with shift-P-ing workers is that once there's no pollution left to clear, they stop and you have to press fortify billions of times.

If you actually want to disable pollution, well, you can't.
But what you can do is use the editor to radically reduce it's effects. Some of the things you can do ...

• Make Mass Transit System and Recycling Centre available earlier on in the tech tree
• Reduce, or set to zero, the number of 'pollutions' introduced by a Factory (2), Coal Plant (2), Airport (1), Research Lab (1), Offshore Platform (2)
• Reduce the base number of turns for a Worker to clear pollution. (By default, clearing pollution is the longest Worker tast)

Hope this helps.
As quick aside, I don't think pollution is very well modelled in Civ3. IMO it's one of the things the CTP games did better. (Heretic!)
Generally, pollution does not cause a certain area to become unworkable. In the short term, the only real immediate effect is the destruction of natural habitat and associated species, which of course, isn't modelled in Civ3 at all. And of course, the other significant short term effect is to make people unhappy. Yep, that's right, if I were designing the game, I would have pollution cause unhappiness, I would not have it produce piles of sick on the board tiles but I would keep the global warming effect of Forest->Grassland->Plains->Desert.

Anyway ...

 

[napoleon526]

Build Hoover Dam. It will replace all your dirty coal plants with hydro plants for free, and it produces no pollution. This isn't very true to life, though, cause building a dam is VERY harmful to a river's ecosystem.

 

[Park Ranger]

Originally posted by Alc0p0pz
Generally, pollution does not cause a certain area to become unworkable. In the short term, the only real immediate effect is the destruction of natural habitat and associated species, which of course, isn't modelled in Civ3 at all. And of course, the other significant short term effect is to make people unhappy. Yep, that's right, if I were designing the game, I would have pollution cause unhappiness, I would not have it produce piles of sick on the board tiles but I would keep the global warming effect of Forest->Grassland->Plains->Desert.

Anyway ...

I agree that pollution is not well modelled - what precedents are there for actually cleaning it up? The unhapiness idea is a good one, though I would suggest throwing in a gold-per-turn penalty whenever you try to work polluted tiles.

Another idea i had was to have a LOT more forest and jungle at the start. And regardless of shield producion, irrigated tiles should slowly, over a period of turns, lose productivity. This would represent the desertification we've seen in areas like the US dust bowl, the Sahel, Mesopotamia, Greece, etc. Only in the modern era would you find techs that could mitigate this process.

As for finding grassland under a jungle, well, that's also a crock. Plains at best, most likely desert, if the Amazon experience teaches us anything.

And global warming? - I have trouble with this one, just because we're only now starting to see what I prefer to call global climate change actually means, and it's not limited to a random tile here and there, is it?

Sorry to rant so - I do still like civ3, really i do....

 

[Willem]

Originally posted by Zachriel
There is no way to disable pollution. If every neighborhood has its own oil wells, coal mines, refineries, and coal-burning power plants, then every neighborhood will probably be polluted.

Workers <shift-P>

You can if you fiddle with the editor. Or at least reduce it to almost nothing.

 

[Willem]

Originally posted by Alc0p0pz
The problem with shift-P-ing workers is that once there's no pollution left to clear, they stop and you have to press fortify billions of times.

With 1.17f, all you have to do is Shift-A your Workers. If there's nothing better for them to do, they will sleep in the nearest city until pollution pops up somewhere, then go out and clean it up.

PS I believe also that Ctrl-Shift-P will put them on perpetual clean up duty. I could be wrong about that though.

 

[Zouave]

Originally posted by napoleon526
Build Hoover Dam. It will replace all your dirty coal plants with hydro plants for free, and it produces no pollution. This isn't very true to life, though, cause building a dam is VERY harmful to a river's ecosystem.

That's a good point. But that would occur in the long run to the river and not so much harm people with cancer and the like.

As for pollution, what about Civ III's STUPID insistence on clearing every forest on the planet?!

 

[sumthinelse]

Originally posted by Park Ranger
And global warming? - I have trouble with this one, just because we're only now starting to see what I prefer to call global climate change actually means, and it's not limited to a random tile here and there, is it?

Sorry to rant so - I do still like civ3, really i do....

Here is another problem with global warming. On a huge world, the game makes tech advances about twice as slow as on a standard world, and since other civs are father away and navigation takes a long time to research (and you don't make contact early), early trading of advances is lessened. This causes global warming very early in the game because you have population increases without the technology to deal with the resultant pollution!

 

[sonorakitch]

Hi all,

Thanks for the info. I did build the Hoover Dam shortly before I introduced the thread, and it didn't do much for some cities. I have a city that hit 28 by 1650 and the pollution is killing it. I have two dozen workers and can't clean it up fast enough.

I tried modifying the parameters in CIVMOD, but they haven't seemed to take effect. I suppose I will start a new game with these changes in place.

I think pollution adds so much realism, but it would be nice to disable it when you build your own maps. I mean, the temptation to give iron works to every starting point is too hard to overcome!

~Chris

 

[etj4Eagle]

Originally posted by sumthinelse


Here is another problem with global warming. On a huge world, the game makes tech advances about twice as slow as on a standard world, and since other civs are father away and navigation takes a long time to research (and you don't make contact early), early trading of advances is lessened. This causes global warming very early in the game because you have population increases without the technology to deal with the resultant pollution!

I don't quite follow how the slow early game tech advance in huge maps causes global warming. As population pollution only occurs above size 12 right? And by that time you should have already contacted every other civilization and have built you cities. The tech modifier for huge is 2x that of standard, which is exactly offset by the 2x increases in the number of optimal cities.

So while the early game tech advancement rate will be slower, the late game tech should advance at the same rate. And since population pollution only is a problem after you get hospitals, a late game tech advance, I don't see what the problem is.

 

[Tassadar]

Hospital is learn much earlier than mass transit, so i only built hospital in my capital and i increase production with railroad, until i get mass transit and recycling. a city size14-15 hav 2-3 pollution icone. built hover dam yes, but i wait until i got recycling before buiding factory. I keep a bunch of 12 worker which can clean up a hill in 1 turn under democraty, so my way is reverse, built mass transit, built hospital, built recl.center, built factory.

 

[Carbon_Copy]

Tassadar, no offense, but you're playing that one all wrong.

For starters, hydro plants will not do ANYTHING for you unless you have a factory. So you're wasting about half an age's worth of Hooverized production to save yourself pollution cleanup time.

Second, the extra pollution from Metros is a small price to pay for the higher production and science rate that you can get from having all of your cities being metropolises. I wouldn't be in a real big hurry to build hospitals in every city, though, only the core ones around your capitals.

As for Hoover not helping pollution...did you guys make sure to sell all of your coal plants after getting Hoover? Unlike all the other "Free in every city" wonders, Hoover does not negate the maitenance (and possibly not the pollution) of the current coal plants. You'll have to go and manually sell all of your coal plants, but it's worth it as every one you sell saves you 3 gpt in maitenanc plus the pollution they produce (maybe. I'm not sure about that), as well as a small lump sum per sale.

The best pollution cleanup strategy that I've developed is to have 50 or more workers built up or captured over the course of the game. Somewhere in the middle of your empire, build a fortress (to mark the spot, no other reason for it), and fortify all your idle workers in that fortress. When pollution strikes, wake up a few and shift-p them until you run out of pollution to clean, then stack-move them back to the fortress on the next turn and re-fortify unless more pollution strikes (in which case they'll continue to clean pollution). Don't disband or join workers back except under exceptional circumstances, the AI counts them as military units when it reckons its total miltary force vs. yours, and you can prevent the AI from picking on you to some extent just by having 50 "military" workers parked around doing nothing in a fortress in the middle of the empire.

 

[BigBirdZ28]

Originally posted by Zouave

As for pollution, what about Civ III's STUPID insistence on clearing every forest on the planet?!

This is not the case. Only squares within a city radius are cleared.

 

[Park Ranger]

Okay, so from the posts here I can see that I'm not the only one to have significant numbers of workers on Pollution Patrol. At times, when they've caught up with pollution and are just waiting for more to appear, what to do with them? Some mentioned fortifying in an easy to locate place, but I have another suggestion:

PLANT TREES!

Look for unused tiles of grassland, plains, or tundra. You know, the tiles that are in your empire but not within the 21-tile radius of any cities....I always find a few.

I started doing this last game, more out of boredom than out of any real hope the FIRAXIS put some positive benefit in the act of large-scale reforestation. Over 50 turns, while everyone else was at war razing each others' cities, I must have forested a coupla dozen tiles.

So now, in addition to a thriving economy and inspiring culture, my civ now also has an elaborate system of national parks!!

 

[Alc0p0pz]

Regarding the must-clear-forest-at-all-cost thing ... I kinda figured there must be some reason to have forest.

In Civ3, there isn't.
Lets quickly consider the base yield in terrian type as the sum of food and shields.

Grass - 2, can be improved to 4
Bonus Grass - 3, can be improved to 5
Plains - 2, can be improved to 4
Tundra - 1, can be improved to 3
Forest - 3, can't be improved

So you can see, there is no reason to keep forest as all the four terrian types which can have forest planted on them can ultimately yield more with mine/irrigation/RR.

So what I did was, use the editor to make Forest yield 2 food and 2 shields. I started a game with this in place, but it proved to be way too unbalancing in the early game.

I might try 1 food and 3 shields and see how that plays.
It shouldn't unbalance the early game as Despotism will reduce the 3 shields to 2.

What do you think?

 

[Zachriel]

Originally posted by Park Ranger
So now, in addition to a thriving economy and inspiring culture, my civ now also has an elaborate system of national parks!!

That's my kind of Civ!

 

[Park Ranger]

Originally posted by Alc0p0pz

I might try 1 food and 3 shields and see how that plays.
It shouldn't unbalance the early game as Despotism will reduce the 3 shields to 2.

What do you think?

I think you're on to something...is there any way to allow rail improvements to increase shields from forest? This matches my RL experience, where a lot of timber is shipped by rail (though this is disappearing). I think the problem is that rail improvement only increases benefits of other improvments (mine & irrigation), has no effect on the "natural" yield of tiles.

Sadly, though, I think the AI's deforesting behaviour is fairly realistic...

 

[Tassadar]

Carbon copy i understand your solution and it look it work well, but maybe i am too lazy and i ddont want to move 50 worker .
Usually in this age i am very scientific with the german and i got science advence each 4 or 5 turn so when i get the hover dam and lots of railroad i produce wealth and invest every peny on science. 50 worker cost 50 penny a turn me i got 12 around capital and another 12 near forbiden palace which mean 24 worker for about 12-15 city. i am able to reach modern era with size 12 city execpt my capital. so i hav never more than 2 pollution skull per city, and in 1 turn i can clean when it happen.Good discusion

 

[Willem]

Originally posted by sonorakitch
Hi all,

Thanks for the info. I did build the Hoover Dam shortly before I introduced the thread, and it didn't do much for some cities. I have a city that hit 28 by 1650 and the pollution is killing it. I have two dozen workers and can't clean it up fast enough.

~Chris

Hoover Dam doesn't reduce pollution, it just gives you more production without causing more. You have to build the Recycling Center and Mass transit in order to actually reduce it.