Pollution Observations ?

[Spawnbob]

yesterday i was playing a game where most of my cities had Hydro plants some Recycling centres etc. anyway i do expect pollution as a general result of the cities but anyway i thought id aggressively attack this pollution which being on a rail network and tons of workers i would put 5 to a spot, indeed they would clear up in that turn totally and i could move them to the next.
Usually i would put 1 worker per site and just let them clear them over x amount of turns.

The result was i cleared the pollution up quicker but it also seemed that pollution came back quicker and i had to frantically race around the map to clear it all up.
What it looked like to me was that it say ok your gonna have x amount of spots of pollution , if you clear them up more pollution will be created to equal x, so it's just say x =10 and it takes you say 5 turns to clear it up that’s 10 spots of pollution per 5 turns. If you clear them up in 1 turn , over 5 turns it would be more like 50 spots , not at the same time but each clear spot being replaced by a new spot of pollution somewhere else, hopes this makes sense , it most probably wrong but it just seems the quicker you clear it up the quicker it comes back.

 

[Bamspeedy]

My theory is that there is a certain chance set for pollution to occur (based on how much your polluting), and the more 'unpolluted' squares you have, the more of a chance you'll get it back on the next turn. Just like the strategic resources, the more of a particular terrain you have, the more likely it will appear in your territory. Never gave it too much thought though, just hit shift-P and they clean it automatically. And I usually have enough workers so they can clean up all of it within 1 or 2 turns, no matter where it is (when I have railroads).

I have noticed it always seems to be the same squares (usually one of the more valuable tiles) .

 

[Psychlone]

It had always seemed to me that if you let pollution go, more tiles become polluted faster. All I know is that the whole pollution thing is sort of ridiculous when factored in with corruption and waste. Pollution is little more than a nuisance as far as gameplay effects but IMO it's a HUGE damper of the fun of playing. Not sure about everybody else, but I don't play games to get annoyed, but that's 99.9% of what Civ3 pollution is: annoyance. Love the game, but not that part.

Not meaning to go off on a rant! It does seem to me that the pollution chance is randomized. One turn I'll get none and the next turn I'll get twelve spots, etc.

 

[royfurr]

How about this idea?

Do to pollution something analogous to what was done to Civ II's trade and caravans. Abstract it. Let the computer compute pollution generation as it does now, but rather then make the player move workers around to clean it up, let us simply "assign to pollution cleanup" a number of workers we wish. We could get a report each turn that "X tiles have become polluted, you have Y workers cleaning up, and you have an "effective" (ie polluting) level of pollution of Z". This could be done in the city display in a fashion similiar to displaying the other variables (bushels, shields etc) or it might be easier to simply due it on a gloabal (per player) basis, or possibly on a per continent basis (that might be to hard to implement). X would go up or down based on your population, factories or other pollution generating improvements and down based on "cleaning" improvements like Recycling centers etc. The player would assign (or remove from this) workers to generate Y, and the workers involved would of course not be available for other tasks. The computer would calculate Z and display it so the player has feedback to know it they are using enough workers and need more (or can release some workers from this duty for normal taskes). Although this will take some computional time between turns, personally not having to deal with pushing workers around for pollution cleanup would MORE then make up for a few extra seconds between turns. Certainly the computer should be able to calculate this a lot faster then we can manually move workers and stacks of workers around!

It would also be neat to see a report of what other civs are doing in this regard. It could even be a reason to go to war, to take out a super nasty pollutor ... you might even be able to get civs to ally for this purpose. After all, generating global warming would effect everyone, and the AI could/should be programeed to see that it is to their advantage in preventing that. To those of you who do not believe in global warming, think of it as simply preventing pollution from reaching a magnitude that plant and animal life in areas die off due to the envirnomental toxins level. If you doubt that chemical pollution can reach that level, I suggest that you study the matter some ... I am an industrial chemist and I will certify that chemical emissions controls IS A GOOD THING for ALL LIVING THINGS! "Global warming" as implemented in CIV II is simply an easy way on a big scale to show the negative effects of all this in the game.

Whatta think?
:mutant:

 

[Venge]

I just went into the Editor and reduced pollution.
I found I was spending too much time just running workers around cleaning up pollution. Took up most of my turn time.

 

[Pragmatic]

There are two places pollution appears. One, from different improvements. For example, research hospitals produce a 1% chance of pollution (if I recall correctly). This can be fixed in the editor.

The other place pollution appears from is from population. In spite of what the editor states, mass transit does NOT completely eliminate pollution from populations above 12. I've added the "eliminate pollution from population" to a half-dozen improvements, and I can't completely eliminate pollution.

I think the best thing is to keep population as low as possible. Shoot for a population of 20 (using every available square), as the population above that is barely worth it.

 

[Karlsen]

Why not just fix the bugs to deal with pollution?

i.e. The automagic clean pollution shift-P doesn't stop after sending two workers, it keeps sending them until the pollution is cleaned up?

Also make the Automated workers move first so they go and clean up pollution (or make sure they do) before you get a chance to manually clean it. It should be made as easy as possible to automate this process, currently it is not.

Also, why Shift-P, it gets used a lot, what's the matter with P? (I won't even talk about the Control-Shift-G for Goto - User Interface guidelines, make common commands easier to access, not harder!)