Pollution on offense doesn't work?

[krakedhalo]

So I came up with a tactic in the last GOTM that I was pretty sure would work, and I don't understand why it didn't. Here's the situation: I was playing for Histo, and had eliminated all but two civs. I had RoP with France, but wanted a way to slow them down w/o declaring war. I thought I had come up with a great tactic when they were hit with pollution outside of a major city. I figured if I parked a tank on the pollution, they wouldn't be able to clean it up, and the pollution would spread after a few turns, like normal. This should have been a great way to hurt their production without actively harming them - pollution as offense.

But the pollution never spread. After 20 or so turns I gave up on the idea, but I really don't understand why it didn't work. Does pollution not work how I think it works?

 

[Northen Wolf]

AFAIK Pollution does not "spread"(if it does, then I have not noticed). Pollution can be generated:

*Volcanoes - They pollute around 3 tiles around.

*City - Once things like factories come around, every city gets a small smoking chimney figure - more chimneys more chance of pollution, pollution then randomly appears around that city, if not cleaned up, another pollution might happen somewhere in city radios. - This might have caused disillusion that pollution 'spreads'.

*Missiles - Give man a nuke and he will ... ah well, we all know what happens.

 

[Turner]

*Missiles - Give man a nuke and he will ... ah well, we all know what happens.

Create nine tiles of pollution and destroy all improvements on said tiles for his 'favorite' neighbor?

No, pollution does not spread. But NW is right in that the city can produce another tile of pollution. So if you were patient, you could keep throwing units on their pollution until you started choking them.

Not a bad tactic, but I think it would need to be a very long range plan.

 

[capnvonbaron]

Barring missile and volcano pollution, a city has a random chance at creating a tile of pollution every turn, based on the factors NW and Turner mentioned. Basically, cities with more than population 12, cities with factories/mfctng plants, coal power plants, etc. have an increased likelyhood of creating pollution. Certain improvements help to counteract that chance, like mass transit and recycle facs. However, being random, its very hard to say how many you'll get over time. A city might experience three turns in a row where it produces a polluted tile, then go dozens of turns without producing any.

However, I must say your idea has merit. I think if you started doing that back in the early IA when pollution first starts showing up, and before those counter-pollution buildings become available, you'd have a lot more time for it to really affect that civ. If you have an RoP, you can also create moving unit walls and chokepoints, and herd all their workers onto one tile where they can then be surrounded and held hostage. Then they can't clean pollution, improve tiles, or do anything useful.

Now there is one downside... once all those pollution tiles show up, global warming is going to start earlier and it strikes everyone, even you, unilaterally.

 

[NickyH]

Not a bad tactic

Perhaps not "bad", but certainly evil.

 

[krakedhalo]

Perhaps not "bad", but certainly evil.

That's what I was going for

It seems I did misunderstand pollution a bit. I've been playing for years and years, and always assumed that having one pollution that didn't get cleaned up for a while made new pollution spread after a few turns. Obviously the city could produce more random pollution during that time, but it always seemed to me that the second pollution a city got (w/o cleaning up the first) appeared next to the first. I just assumed this was the old pollution spreading. Learn something new every day I guess.

 

[capnvonbaron]

There was a conversation about pollution not too long ago. Many people agree that it seems pollution has a propensity to strike the same tiles repeatedly. No scientific studies have been done that I know of, but I and many others have noticed that resource tiles seem to collect pollution more frequently than they should if it was truly random chance. So that may have helped to fool you too...

 

[NickyH]

I've definitely though "Oh no, not that tile once again!"

I wonder if pollution strikes a tile within a city's radius with some formula that's similar to when your governor always puts a new citizen to the same tile over and over again. Although the reasons behind it would be completely different, of course…

I think I've had this happen often, but I guess I tend to notice it more if the tile has a resource. But I believe it happens regardless if the tile has a resource, and the rest is cognitive bias. (Who remembers if the same tile with no bonus gets polluted two times in a row?)

 

[Northen Wolf]

Volcano pollution should always hit 'same' tiles.

 

[PaperBeetle]

(Who remembers if the same tile with no bonus gets polluted two times in a row?)

Quite. And you wouldn't normally exclaim to yourself "what, the pollution hit a different tile again?! How can that be?"

One could set up a test to see if pollution tile choice is weighted by shield or food output or some other factors, but I don't know if it would be worth the bother. Pollution is usually just a bother to the player, not any kind of strategic obstacle that requires planning to work around. One of those features that got left in the game because no one at Firaxis got around to reviewing whether it added anything to the game (until Civ4).

As for the original suggestion, it's an interesting thought, but aren't there plenty better things you could be doing with tanks?

 

[krakedhalo]

Well, if I'm stockpiling tanks in preparation to invade neighbor A, and I have RoP with B, what better place to store my tanks for a few turns than someplace it inconveniences B?

 

[Sweetchuck]

I have a game that I'm currently playing. England DOW'd me and they have a small strip of an island with 7 cities on. They have oil and coal and are building aircraft and warships - probably where I'm at now.

I kicked them off a smaller island to the northeast of their main settlement and have bombers on 3 cities adjacent them. So I'm hitting their coal and oil each turn and in turn they send whatever workers they have to re-road those tiles, then I bomb them again.

Meanwhile, London is amassed with pollution that they're ignoring. 6 tiles are soiled.

They have bombers and fighters, but they don't use them. Makes no sense to me.